All Told
All Told is a big, loose, lived-in gathering of poems that tracks a whole life, not in a straight line, but in loops of memory, travel, politics, love, and aging. Kenne starts by greeting the reader in a plain kitchen where “the beans are simmering in the pot” and cornbread is in the pan, then moves through childhood on the Gulf Coast, work on farms and in gins, long nights in bars, years in Mexico and Turkey, and into late-life classrooms and quiet rooms where the poet waits for the phone to ring. Sections like “South,” “The Scene Today,” “In a Country of Cars,” “The Art of Facing Oneself as a Ghost,” “The Way of the Fool,” “All Told,” and “I’m in Your Hands” give the book a loose arc from place and family toward wider public life and finally back to intimate friendships and love. The whole thing feels like a story told over many long evenings.
I enjoyed how sturdy and grounded the writing feels. Kenne likes real rooms, real weather, real work. In “This House” he watches the “gray ghost” of his father ride a lawnmower past mesquite and blue norther wind, then lets time jump so the same house lifts and settles in summer heat. The language stays simple. The images do the heavy lifting. A poem about a timing chain in a car, a night shift, or a mechanic’s bad news turns into a little parable about fear and delay without any fuss. His long piece “Smitty, Wallace and Me” circles around a neighbor rewiring his stereo and Wallace Stevens on the bookshelf, and somehow it becomes a quiet essay on communication, performance, and the way our “systems” of living barely touch each other. I liked the relaxed, talky tone. It never felt like the poems were trying to impress me. They just kept showing me things until I started to care.
I also liked how wide the book opens out into the world. Kenne writes beautifully about Istanbul, standing at his window over the Bosporus while birds spin like white confetti and traffic roars across the bridge, and he slides from that scene into music, Turkish poets, and the weird parade of late-century life. The poems in “The Scene Today” and “In a Country of Cars” keep running this line between wonder and annoyance, affection and disgust, as he watches consumer culture, car culture, war memorials, and election years roll past. There is real bite in titles like “America, You Son-of-a-Bitch,” “Election Year,” and “Against Monotheism,” yet the poems almost always come back to one human voice, tired and worried, trying to stay honest inside all that noise. The long sequence about “The Fool” lets him poke fun at himself and at power in mythic language, but underneath the jokes I heard real loneliness, a man who says his main power now is to sit, wait, and be “an empty room / waiting for you to walk in,” and I felt that in my gut.
Under the craft and the travel and the politics, the book feels tender. The early section “South” holds family ghosts, drought, letters from his mother, and awkward boyhood memories. Later on, in “I’m in Your Hands,” he turns toward teaching, old students, old friends, love poems, and a cat named Kestane who becomes a way to think about God. The tone softens without losing edge. I felt a steady ache running through these later poems, but also a kind of rough gratitude. The book accepts confusion and keeps talking anyway. I found that comforting.
All Told is better taken in sections, like a long road trip with stops in little towns, diners, and old neighborhoods. I would recommend it to readers who like narrative, place-rich poetry, to people who grew up in or around the American South, to anyone who has lived abroad and still feels torn between worlds, and to teachers and writers thinking about their own long haul. If you want clear, humane, often funny, often bruised poems that let you sit in the room with a working poet and see what a whole life looks like from the inside, this book is worth your time.
Pages: 193 | ASIN : B0FRB1W1WD
Gloria: A Love Story
David Navarria’s Gloria: A Love Story drops me into a split-screen timeline: in 2026, an instrument that can view the past (and, newly, the future) convinces the U.S. government that goodness is about to be wiped out; their answer is to send Captain Augustine “Gus” Tadlock more than two centuries forward into a collapsed world to locate Manhig, the “Leader,” and help him hold a thin line against depravity. Gus lands in a layover market of slavery and public carnality, claws his way toward Manhig’s people, and, almost despite himself, becomes tethered to a traumatized teenage slave girl he frees: Gloria.
What surprised me first wasn’t the bleakness; it was the book’s appetite for contrast. One moment I’m watching Gus move through a carnival of moral rot, the next I’m in the warmth of found-order: councils formed, laws debated, a stronghold engineered, a leader learning how not to become a tyrant. That oscillation gives the romance an odd, bright voltage, tenderness as a kind of insurgency. Still, the prose doesn’t tiptoe; it likes to look directly at ugliness, and it wants my stomach to tighten before it lets my chest loosen.
Then comes the book’s promised pivot, “a totally unexpected and shocking event,” and it earns that warning with a swerve into betrayal that is both operatic and vicious. The scene where Gloria’s mask drops (and she weaponizes intimacy with almost giddy cruelty) is written to wound Gus and the reader at once, turning the love story into something more like a moral stress-test: how much can devotion survive when it’s been fed lies? Sometimes the heat of the erotic material and the seriousness of the good-vs-evil cosmology collide, but I couldn’t deny the narrative momentum. Even the battles (mutated ogres framed as “demons of Satan”) feel less like set pieces than like externalizations of the same question: what, exactly, is a person made of when the world stops pretending?
This is for readers who want their dystopian romance, post-apocalyptic time travel, military sci-fi, and erotic thriller elements braided together, especially “mature readers” who don’t flinch at explicit sex, brutality, or blunt moral language. If you like the time-tossed devotion of Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander but wish it lived in a harsher, more theologically charged wasteland, Gloria will feel similar. Love, here, is either a rescue mission or a weapon, and you don’t get to choose which without paying for it.
Pages: 330 | ASIN: B0GK15JB7R
Rational Defiance: A Guide to Clear Thinking, Bold Action, and Living on Your Own Terms
Rational Defiance is a guide to spotting how much of your life runs on autopilot and then picking deliberate fights with the status quo. Henk Pretorius lays out the idea of the “Conformity Coma,” where we drift along with our past choices, social pressure, and the habits of the world around us, and he breaks this into three traps. Consistency, compliance, and complacency. He then argues for “rational defiance,” a mindset where you challenge those defaults only when there is a realistic path to something better, and he spends the second and third parts of the book giving tools like seeing more clearly, seeking radical input, trying small experiments, and then setting a course and staying with it.
The stories and studies he uses on status quo bias, habits, and social influence hit close to home. It’s hard not to see yourself in the person who keeps the job, the relationship, or the project just because it is already there. Pretorius writes from the “climb” not the summit, and he is open about his own conformity, from toothpaste research to his reluctance to leave a successful company. That tone made the book feel like a conversation with someone who is in the same mess, not a guru selling purity. I liked how he connects big ideas from philosophy and psychology to plain, modern examples like Google paying to stay the default search engine or auto-renewing subscriptions. I wanted him to push harder on where conformity is actually wise, but overall, the blend of research, history, and everyday life kept me engaged and a bit on edge, in a good way.
What I liked most was the shift from vague “be a rebel” slogans to something that feels both braver and calmer. Rational defiance is not about being quirky for its own sake, and he repeats that often. It is about choosing very specific places to stand apart because you have done the thinking, and you see a better option. I liked the structure here. Part I wakes you up to how deep conformity runs, Part II works on your head and heart so you can see your own life more honestly, and Part III turns that into actions like “stand for something,” “set your course,” and “silence distractions.” The advice is high-level on purpose, and I appreciated that restraint. It forced me to think about my own situations instead of plugging numbers into a formula.
The story of Kathrine Switzer fighting to run the Boston Marathon pulls the whole book together. You see the three conformity traps in the officials who cling to rules, and you see rational defiance in Switzer’s clear-eyed, stubborn push for something obviously better. That left me fired up and a little sad about places I have drifted. I would recommend Rational Defiance to people who feel stuck in a comfortable life, mid-career professionals and managers who sense they are just executing someone else’s script, and anyone who is drawn to change but nervous about burning everything down. If you want a thoughtful nudge to stop floating and start swimming, and you are willing to do your own thinking, this book is a strong pick.
Pages: 194 | ASIN : B0GJG8CX7Z
The Making of a Warrior of Light: Conquering Pain to Claim Your Power
Theresa Rubi Garcia’s The Making of a Warrior of Light is a memoir that refuses to stay in one lane: it’s a childhood survival story, spiritual manifesto, and practical “keep going” manual braided into one voice. Garcia opens with the blunt architecture of her life, racism inside her own family, neglect, violence, early exposure to sex and substances, and the way hunger for love can shapeshift into self-sabotage, then tracks her evolution into a mother, a relentless self-rebuilder, and eventually the founder of Rubi’s Positive Empowerment. The book is explicit about its intent: don’t pity her; use the story as a roadmap for turning pain into power.
Garcia doesn’t narrate from a safe distance. She brings you into the room with the kid-version of herself who is trying to compute the uncomputable, then shows you how those early equations (fear = safety, pain = love) keep solving for the same misery. What hit me hardest wasn’t just the severity of what happened; it was the candor about the coping: the people-pleasing, the volatility, the chase for intensity, the way “survival mode” can look like personality from the outside.
The second half shifts from bleeding to healing. I liked that Garcia doesn’t sell healing as a scented candle. She frames it as discipline, choice, repetition, and sometimes sheer refusal. Her “Beast Mode” section is essentially a field guide for forward motion, adaptability, resiliency, fearlessness, a “thirst for truth,” and the insistence that even overwhelm can be met with surrender and embodied practices (she talks about going into nature, running, hiking, and re-centering so she can show up as a steadier presence). It’s motivational, yes, but with bite marks: she keeps reminding you that growth is incremental, that habits are built in “micro-shifts,” and that the point isn’t perfection, it’s traction.
This is for readers who want memoir, trauma recovery, and spiritual self-help in the same mouthful: survivors who are tired of being handled with velvet gloves, faith-adjacent seekers who like their mysticism practical, and scrappy strivers who need proof that a past can be an origin story, not a sentence. In spirit, it reminded me of Tara Westover’s Educated, but with more direct coaching energy and a metaphysical vocabulary that aims at empowerment rather than academia. If you’re ready, this book is a match struck in a dark room, and it leaves you wanting to see.
Pages: 188 | ASIN : B0G6VF4DD6
Turn Words Into Wealth: 7 Ways to Make 7 Figures as a Thought Leader
Turn Words Into Wealth is a playbook for experts who want to turn their ideas into a seven-figure thought-leadership business in the age of AI. Author Aurora Winter blends her own stories from yacht sales, film, and grief coaching with frameworks on messaging, branding, book writing, media, and AI tools. She walks through how to craft a “Million-Dollar Message,” build a luxury-level personal brand, design a media ecosystem of books, podcasts, and video, and then plug that into seven different revenue paths, from high-ticket consulting to speaking and licensing. The later chapters shift into mindset, coaching, and purpose, so the book ends less like a tech manual and more like a call to build a legacy.
The writing is clear, upbeat, and often quite personal. The scene where she and her husband are broke in a tiny office, then stumble into the “Five weeks of sun, fun and tax shelter” line, has real energy and makes her main point about messaging land in a very concrete way. Her grief story and the birth of the Grief Coach Academy also give the book emotional weight, so it does not feel like a cold business manual. I liked the way each chapter ends with questions and simple actions, since that nudged me to pause, think, and scribble in the margins instead of just skimming.
The ideas themselves line up with what I see happening in the market right now, and that made the book feel current. Her split between “luxury” and “commodity” work, and the push to build even a small amount of “star power,” is a helpful way to think about expertise in a noisy world. I also liked her framing of AI as an amplifier, not a ghostwriter, and her insistence that your stories, your judgment, and your presence are the real assets. The sections on the Hell-to-Heaven transformation, myth-busting, and the simple hero’s-journey template give very usable tools for anyone who needs to talk or write about their work. The steady stream of big success stories gives the book a really upbeat and aspirational feel, with a strong focus on seven-figure outcomes, deal flow, and media empires that will really appeal to readers who are excited by bold positioning and high-ticket offers.
I would recommend Turn Words Into Wealth to coaches, consultants, founders, and senior professionals who already have solid expertise and now want to package it, write a serious book, and use AI and media more strategically. If you enjoy case studies, checklists, and clear “do this next” prompts, you will probably have fun with it and get a lot of ideas to test. It’s a motivating and practical guide that can easily spark a fresh plan and maybe a new business chapter for you.
Pages: 246 | ASIN : B08VNMZDBN
Creating A Safe Space
Sista, Can You Feel a Brother’s Pain? is a compassionate, faith-centered exploration of the silent wounds men carry, revealing how childhood trauma shapes identity, relationships, and faith, while offering a biblical path toward healing, accountability, and restoration.
The phrase “Men hurt. Men hide. Men hope.” feels central. What do you think most people misunderstand about men’s emotional lives?
I believe one of the greatest misunderstandings about men’s emotional lives is the assumption that silence means absence of feeling. Many people interpret a man’s quietness as strength, indifference, or emotional unavailability, when in reality it is often protection learned behavior shaped by expectation, culture, and survival.
Men are often taught early that vulnerability is risky. So instead of expressing pain openly, they internalize it. They carry disappointment, fear, rejection, and pressure privately, believing their role is to endure rather than reveal. When men hide, it is rarely because they do not feel it is because they feel deeply and may not feel safe enough to express it.
The phrase “Men hurt. Men hide. Men hope.” captures a truth that is often overlooked: beneath guarded emotions is hope. The hope to be understood without judgment, respected without performance, and loved without conditions tied to strength alone.
What many misunderstand is that men are not emotionless; they are often emotionally unpracticed in environments that welcome honesty. When given permission to be human instead of merely strong, many men show remarkable depth, tenderness, and resilience.
Understanding men emotionally begins not by asking them to feel more, but by creating spaces where they no longer have to hide what they already feel.
Were there particular stories or patterns that stayed with you?
Yes, many stories stayed with me over the years they are, in fact, what prompted me to write the book. While the circumstances differed, the patterns were often the same. The actions that caused the trauma were similar, even though the faces of the victims changed. And in many cases, the outcomes were heartbreakingly alike.
Many men carried unspoken pain, living under the pressure to appear strong while quietly struggling within. Their hurt often revealed itself not through words, but through distance, anger, overworking, or withdrawal rather than open conversation. Beneath those behaviors, however, was a deep desire to be seen, respected, and truly understood.
One pattern I noticed repeatedly was silence not because men lacked words, but because they lacked safe spaces to speak them. Creating an environment where men felt heard and valued made all the difference. That safe space is exactly what the MITE (Men in Transformation Education) Program provided: a place where men could begin to release what they had long carried in silence and start the journey toward healing and transformation.
How can women better support the men in their lives after reading it?
Understand the power of being present without pressure; love him without trying to manage the process. Here are 5 ways women can walk alongside a man in silence and still genuinely support him, with wisdom, compassion, and strength.
1. Offer Presence, Not Pressure – recognize that sometimes the most healing words are unspoken.
- Sit with him.
- Stay emotionally available.
- Let him know you’re there without asking him to perform vulnerability.
Biblical wisdom:
“The Lord is near to the brokenhearted…” Psalm 34:18
Support looks like: “You don’t have to talk for me to stay.”
2. Create Safety Through Consistency – His silence is rooted in pain and he’s waiting to see if your love is temporary.
- Be steady, not reactive.
- Don’t withdraw just because he’s quiet.
- Let your consistency preach louder than questions.
Biblical wisdom:
“Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.” — 1 Corinthians 13:7
Safety says: “I’m not leaving because this is uncomfortable.”
3. Affirm His Worth Without Demanding Disclosure – Many men fear being seen as “less than” if they speak.
- Speak life into who he is not what he shares.
- Affirm his strength, character, and value apart from his story.
Biblical wisdom:
“Death and life are in the power of the tongue…” Proverbs 18:21
Support sounds like: “You matter even in your quietness.”
4. Respect His Timing While Holding Healthy Boundaries Walking alongside doesn’t mean disappearing yourself.
- You can honor his silence and still be honest about your needs. “Me Time” some say self care is important for you
- Support does not require self-neglect.
Biblical wisdom:
“To everything there is a season” Ecclesiastes 3:1
Wisdom balance: Compassion without self-abandonment.
5. Cover Him in Prayer, Not Control – Prayer reaches places conversation cannot.
- Pray for healing, not forced revelation.
- Ask God to do what only God can do.
Biblical wisdom:
“Cast all your anxiety on Him because He cares for you.” 1 Peter 5:7
Spiritual support says: “God is working even when I can’t see it.”
Pearls of Wisdom for Women supporting or walking along with someone in silence is not passive, it’s active trust.
But remember: You are a companion, not a counselor; a supporter, not a savior.
And for men: Be Silent No More. Silence may have kept you alive but love, safety, and God’s grace can lead you toward healing. Give yourself permission to be healed.
We Have More To Do
Pocket Watch Portals: The Timekeeper’s Revenge follows four siblings into an enchanted realm, who need to fix the time rift they accidentally created before the vengeful Timekeeper destroys every world. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
When I received the 1st book in the series, Pocket Watch Portal Adventure, my 3-year-old grandson Artie came to me with alligator tears, telling me, “I wasn’t done with us, we have more to do!” He started telling me about the fairy princess named Misty, and how she needs them to come back and save not only their realm but all realms. He described it as needing a “white Dragon,” later becoming the snow dragon, Erithon. and a unicorn, later named Ethel. The King & Queen, with the people of that realm, needed help to bind up the timekeeper due to the kids breaking the rules of time travel.
This book explores the consequences of time travel. Why was that important to include?
Thought about the fact that time travel would affect anything after that point and change things. So I kept this in line with the first story to show that if you don’t follow the rules, whether it be time travel or any rule, it has consequences.
Kindness plays a big role in solving problems. Was that a core theme from the beginning?
Kindness and all the core values are a part of Christian living, even though the mythical creatures and the time travel, I wanted to continue to show those values to my grandkids and the readers.
Will we see more adventures with these characters?
Absolutely, We are working on the 3rd & 4th story in the series.
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Thaddeus and the Daemon
Thaddeus and the Daemon drops readers back into the Collegium Sorcerorum with Thaddeus and his tight little crew, right when everything starts to wobble. A love letter hits like a gut punch, complete with prophecy, a secret child, and a farewell that sends Thaddeus sprinting into danger on pure emotion. The story then widens fast. There’s a creeping plot tied to Master Perditus and a Daemon named Morag, a hunt for a guilty middleman, and a slow reveal that someone inside the school is playing for the other team. It all barrels toward curses, portals, and a showdown where belief itself becomes a weapon and a weakness, and the Daemon’s plans start falling apart in a very strange, very satisfying way.
I liked the writing most when it lets feelings lead. Thaddeus breaking down after the letter felt raw and real, no fancy posing, just pain. The voice also has this cozy old-tale vibe. It can be dramatic, then weirdly funny a beat later, like the book knows when to wink. Some scenes run long, though. I caught myself thinking, okay, we get it. Move it along. Still, when it hits, it hits. I felt that tight chest feeling. The kind you get when a character makes a bad choice for a good reason.
The ideas under the adventure worked for me, even when they got big and mystical. The book keeps poking at belief, fate, and how much choice any of these kids really have. There’s prophecy pressure everywhere, and it messes with how they love, how they fight, and how they trust. I’m a sucker for that theme, and this one leans into it hard. Sometimes it feels a little too neat, like the universe is doing tge heavy lifting. Even so, I enjoyed the tug of war between “I choose this” and “this was chosen for me.” And the whole traitor thread added a nice paranoid edge.
This one gave me some strong J.K. Rowling vibes, mostly in the way the school setting turns into a pressure cooker where secrets and loyalty tests keep piling up. Like Harry Potter, it starts with that familiar comfort of lessons and rivalries, then it swings hard into darker stakes and bigger magic. The difference is the tone. Thaddeus and the Daemon feels more intimate and emotionally direct, less puzzle-box, more heart-first, and it leans into destiny and belief in a way Rowling usually keeps in the background.
I walked away feeling wrung out, in a good way, and also kind of hyped to see what comes next. I’d hand this to readers who like earnest fantasy with heart on its sleeve, teen heroes under massive stakes, and magic that runs on faith and feelings more than math. If you want a sweeping, emotional ride with prophecies, creatures, and school politics turning dangerous, then definitely pick this book up.
Pages: 482 | ASIN : B0C958PRC1
