Love of the Community
Run traces the extraordinary story of Wilmot Collins, whose life carried him from the devastation of Liberia’s civil war to the mayor’s office in Helena, Montana. As both a writer and filmmaker, how did your background influence your approach to the book?
I came to this project without any direct connections to an extraordinary life such as Wilmot’s. But I DO have an abiding interest in stories about courage, resilience, and survival. And Wilmot’s is chock full of all those things. (I explored some of these themes in my feature documentary work, FEBRUARY ONE: THE STORY OF THE GREENSBORO FOUR, about the 4 young men who took on the entire racial order in the U.S. when they sat down for service at the Greensboro Woolworth Store on Feb 1, 1960, thus unleashing much of the youthful driving force behind the civil rights movement of the 1960s. So Wilmot’s treacherous journey from the Liberian civil war (which killed over 250k of his fellow countrymen, including two of his own brothers, one of whom was beheaded) was a powerful attraction to me: how could someone take on that much danger and not only survive an ocean way (in Helena, MT) but thrive, indeed LEAD an entire community? Incredible.
A recurring theme throughout the book is that leadership begins with service. How did you see that idea reflected in Wilmot Collins’s life? Why do you think so many people connected with his message?
People were attracted to him because over the course of more than 20 years living in Helena, they had come to know and respect, even admire, him. He demonstrated his love of the community and commitment to being an American citizen–by joining the US military; serving as a youth counselor, coaching youth soccer, even singing karaoke at local bars. To him, it was all about being a public servant–listening and learning what the community needed and wanted, and then serving those needs. NOT styling himself as some ideologue or professional politician. We could learn a lot today about his ‘politics of decency’, far healthier than our current polarized, hyper-partisan politics of destruction.
The book devotes considerable attention to the long process of immigration and family reunification. Why was that aspect of the story so important to include?
Family was and is a pivotal feature of Wilmot’s life–and that goes for his wife, Maddie, and their two kids (now grown), Jaymie and Bliss. Everything was done by majority vote in their household. The difficulty and long wait he had to endure (his own daughter, born two months after arriving with her mother, Maddie, was two years old before a patient, but long-suffering Wilmot, could join them in America for the first time. But being resilient, persistent, and pursuing education (which got Maddie over to the US in the first place–to pursue a nursing program at Carroll College in Helena, MT) were binding threads in their family tradition.
What do you hope readers will remember most about Wilmot Collins and his family?
I hope readers remember how love takes courage and resilience, and the Collins family epitomized those traits. Also, I hope people will see in their remarkable journey the essence of the American Dream at work – a fast-fading goal for many native born Americans, but on vivid and compelling display with Wilmot Collins!
Author Links: GoodReads | X (Twitter) | Facebook | Website | Amazon
Run tells the inspiring story of Wilmot Collins, who fled the brutal and bloody Liberian Civil War in the early 1990s—where over 250,000 Liberians were killed, including two of Collins’s brothers—and managed to make it to Helena, Montana, one of the whitest places on the planet. Enduring and overcoming racism and xenophobia, he joined the Montana National Guard, became an active member of the Helena community, and in 2017 rose to become mayor of the capital city and the first Black mayor in Montana’s history.
Collins garnered a national reputation not only as a beloved Democratic politician in a ruby red state but also as a shining example of how being a racial and political outsider in a highly partisan society can be transformed into an effective and engaging form of political leadership.
Wilmot’s story highlights the tragic decision to abandon one’s homeland when it turns on its people. Collins came from a highly educated family and, when civil war erupted, he was fresh out of college working as a middle school teacher at Monrovia’s SOS Children’s Village School. He had recently found a great companion, Maddie Muna, whom he met after college graduation. They became fast friends and soon life partners in marriage. But they first had to negotiate forces threatening their very lives.
Through extensive interviews and his masterful command of storytelling, award-winning author and filmmaker Daniel Blake Smith tells how Wilmot and Maddie, through great perseverance, plenty of ingenuity, and inspiring displays of generosity, journeyed to the United States and have made their new home a better place for everyone. Run offers an emotional, inspiring, and deeply personal story of survival, racial injustice, political hope, and the challenges one family faced to realize the American dream.
Resilience of a Nation
In Sheltered, you share experiences following the sudden death of your husband and a trip to Israel that turned into a dangerous and transformative journey. What inspired you to share your story with readers?
I was so grief-stricken when I left for Israel and didn’t believe it was possible to recover from so much loss. The loss of my husband, my home, my community, my caretaker, my friends, and our church, which had welcomed John and me with love and joy. The resilience of a nation healing from the October 7, 2023 nightmare, together with the love of family and strangers I encountered, demonstrated that healing is possible. I want readers to know that if healing can begin in a war zone, healing is possible anytime, anywhere.
Some of the memoir’s most moving moments are its quietest, particularly the scenes surrounding John’s final days. How difficult were those chapters to write?
As a writer, the only way I could process John’s passing and all the subsequent losses was to write about them. I wrote about John’s death in a gentle, perhaps detached way that conveys the deep shock I was in. In The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion writes about her husband’s death using a similar detached style that conveyed her shock and inability to absorb her new reality. The voice and tone Didion employed in The Year of Magical Thinking resonated strongly with me. Someone in grief needs to feel less alone, and Didion’s book accomplished that for me. I hope Sheltered will do the same.
How did you decide when to include historical and political context without losing sight of the personal story?
My superb editor, Melanie Martin, was indispensable in determining how much background was needed and where it would be most effective.
What do you hope someone who is grieving will find in your memoir?
Recovery and purpose. Recovery came gently in whispered moments of grace. The message to find purpose was repeated and reinforced so many times that even my thick-headed noggin finally got the message!
Author Links: GoodReads | Facebook | Website | Amazon
Five months after losing her husband to a sudden heart attack, Elisa Hertzan Schetrompf boarded a plane on an unexpected healing journey. She was a widow still numb with her loss, in danger of losing her eyesight, and utterly unsure of what came next, definitely not expecting to find herself stranded in the middle of war.
In this raw, vivid memoir, you will find:An unflinching portrait of grief: The isolation, the shock, and the slow, nonlinear work of healing
A firsthand account of modern war: Sirens at 3 am, the Iron Dome overhead, and the remarkable calm of a people who have learned to live inside uncertainty
The healing power of unexpected community: Strangers turned friends and distant relatives demonstrating what family really means
If you have lost someone and are wondering whether you will ever feel hopeful and happy again, Sheltered is an achingly honest account of what healing actually looks like, where grief and joy work together, and resilience and grace show up when you least expect them.
Greenhorn: Episodes in an Immigrant’s Life
Alex Krieger’s Greenhorn: Episodes in an Immigrant’s Life is an expansive memoir about migration, belonging, professional purpose, and civic responsibility. It begins with Krieger’s arrival in New York Harbor in 1960, after a childhood journey through Lithuania, Poland, Italy, and Israel, and follows his development from a nine-year-old immigrant who spoke no English into an architect, urban planner, educator, and public servant. The family story carries the lasting weight of the Holocaust: Krieger’s parents and grandmother survived camps, forced labor, separation, and devastating loss before rebuilding their lives. His account treats immigration as both a personal experience and a defining element of American history, grounded in the hopes of people seeking “a decent life, personal freedoms, and associated happiness.”
The book’s episodic structure suits the breadth of Krieger’s life. Chapters on Chicago’s Albany Park neighborhood, Lane Tech, Cornell, Harvard, architectural practice, historic maps, the New England Holocaust Memorial, public commissions, and Shanghai’s Bund show how education and design became his means of entering American life and contributing to it. Krieger writes with an urbanist’s attentiveness to place, explaining how neighborhoods, schools, buildings, memorials, and public spaces influence identity. Historical context is woven throughout the narrative, connecting individual memories to immigration policy, racial inequality, antisemitism, war, political change, and patterns of urban growth. These passages give the memoir the scope of a civic autobiography, in which a life is understood through the institutions and cities that helped shape it.
Krieger’s voice is informed, candid, and frequently humorous. He’s willing to examine family mysteries, early social awkwardness, professional ambition, and the personal costs of maintaining simultaneous careers in teaching and practice. His admiration for mentors, colleagues, students, and family members gives the book an unusually generous tone, while his discussions of architectural education and public service reveal a sustained belief that expertise carries obligations beyond professional advancement. That conviction becomes clearest in his invocation of Tikkun Olam, the responsibility to help repair the world, and in his reflection that architecture’s lasting satisfaction comes from improving something “for someone, for a family, a group, or for an entire community.”
The later chapters bring the memoir toward a thoughtful reckoning with age, gratitude, and the meaning of accomplishment. Krieger’s transition from urban “greenhorn” to devoted gardener reflects a broader shift from constant productivity toward family, reflection, and attentiveness to everyday life. Yet the book’s outlook remains public-facing. Its epilogue turns personal gratitude into an argument for renewing American ideals and recognizing immigrants as active participants in addressing social and environmental challenges. Greenhorn ultimately presents a life built through adaptation, teaching, design, and service. It’s a substantial, humane record of how one immigrant’s desire to belong matured into a lifelong commitment to improving the places and communities around him.
Pages: 244 | ASIN : B0H8RWRZDP
Held in the Vanishing
Ti Mougne’s Held in the Vanishing is an intimate memoir about caring for two parents whose lives are being altered by different forms of dementia. Her father has Alzheimer’s disease, while her mother has Primary Progressive Aphasia, which gradually takes away her ability to understand and use language. Mougne writes from the complicated middle of this experience, where caregiving, marriage, parenting, work, and grief all occupy the same crowded space. Early in the book, she explains its purpose with striking simplicity: “Stories don’t offer maps. They offer companionship.” That idea shapes everything that follows.
The memoir begins with the lively multigenerational home Mougne created with her husband, son, and parents. Holiday dinners, elaborate parties, piano lessons, bad jokes, pets, and familiar household sounds give the reader a clear sense of what the family shared before dementia began changing its rhythms. This attention to ordinary life matters because it gives every later loss a history. Her parents aren’t presented only through their diagnoses. They’re a devoted couple who dance at their fiftieth-anniversary celebration, a mother who loves Halloween, and a father whose trusting nature becomes dangerous when Alzheimer’s damages his judgment. The warmth of these memories keeps the story grounded in people rather than conditions.
Mougne is especially perceptive about the work of caregiving that happens beyond public view. She describes the constant calculations involving medications, finances, safety, housing, dignity, and medical care, along with the guilt that seems to attach itself to every decision. She also examines how that responsibility affects her husband and son, and she’s candid about the anger, numbness, resentment, and exhaustion she carries. One of the book’s most honest insights is that “Sometimes love is nothing more than showing up again tomorrow.” Here, love often takes the form of gluten-free toast, a corrected television setting, a difficult phone call, or another visit after an emotionally bruising day.
The book’s short chapters and spacious, line-broken prose give it the feel of a memoir written partly through poetry. That style suits Mougne’s subject because dementia rarely unfolds as a smooth narrative. It arrives through fragments, repetitions, silences, brief recoveries, and sudden recognitions. Concrete images, including vanished ducklings, clouds admired from a car window, weekly margaritas, lightning bugs in a jar, and an empty road across the prairie, carry much of the emotional meaning. The later chapters turn inward as Mougne considers the identity she built around being a “good daughter” and begins finding a version of care that allows her to remain present without erasing herself.
Held in the Vanishing is a memoir about how love changes when memory, language, independence, and familiar family roles begin slipping away. It holds tenderness and frustration together without forcing either into a comforting conclusion. Mougne’s parents continue to decline, difficult choices continue to surface, and her understanding of herself continues to evolve. What gives the book its power is its close attention to what remains: humor, ritual, touch, shared meals, flashes of recognition, and the decision to stay connected even when connection has to take a new form. It’s a deeply personal account, but its emotional clarity makes the experience feel shared.
Pages: 151 | ASIN : B0H6N8CGHC
Six Weeks: A Literary Memoir
Six Weeks is a deeply personal family memoir centered on the final six weeks of his sister Nancy’s life in hospice. Ledbetter reaches beyond those last days to examine the family history, financial strain, illness, faith, and inherited patterns that shaped their bond. The book identifies itself as a memoir based on real events, with some details altered or reconstructed for privacy and narrative flow. Its emotional center is a promise made years earlier: when Nancy could no longer care for herself, her brother would step in and stay with her through the end.
As a caregiving memoir, the book pays close attention to the practical work surrounding death. Ledbetter writes about medical decisions, legal forms, money, household arrangements, funeral planning, and the constant effort required to keep Nancy comfortable. His background as a business executive shapes the narration, giving it an organized, problem-solving rhythm even when the situation can’t be solved. That tension is one of the book’s most affecting qualities. He can complete a checklist, arrange a bed, or manage a financial crisis, but he also has to learn how to be present when action is no longer enough.
The memoir’s structure follows the movement of a day, from dawn through afternoon and into night, while the story moves back and forth across generations. Family homes, old keys, a German clock, rice pudding, church rituals, and handwritten records become carriers of memory. Ledbetter’s prose is reflective and direct, often circling back to the idea that people inherit decisions as surely as they inherit possessions. The repeated images give this memoir a strong sense of continuity, while the dry humor shared by Bill and Nancy keeps their personalities alive on the page. Their jokes don’t interrupt the grief. They show how the two of them continued to recognize each other inside it.
At its heart, Six Weeks is a memoir about loss, sibling love, cancer, caregiving, and family reconciliation. Nancy emerges as a proud, funny, faithful woman whose instinct is to protect other people, even while her own world is narrowing. Ledbetter presents devotion as something physical and sustained: making the call, paying the bill, sitting beside the bed, and returning the next morning. The final chapters bring the book’s themes together with restraint, particularly through Nancy’s last letter to her brother. What stays with you is the memoir’s understanding that love often looks less like a declaration and more like a long series of ordinary tasks, completed because someone has to do them and because this particular person matters.
Pages: 283 | ASIN: B0H3VHJ84V
Can Anything Good Come Out of Jim Crow?
Jacqueline Smith’s Can Anything Good Come Out of Jim Crow? is a faith-centered memoir built from family stories, historical reflection, practical wisdom, and photographs. Smith traces her upbringing in segregated Port Arthur, Texas, where her parents ran several small businesses and raised her within a demanding culture of work, discipline, service, and Christian belief. Rather than treating Jim Crow only as a historical backdrop, she shows how it shaped the family’s ambitions, fears, responsibilities, and ideas about survival. Her central question receives a deeply personal answer: goodness appears in what people build, preserve, teach, and pass along despite oppressive circumstances.
The strongest presence in the book is Smith’s family. Her father, Jack, is a tireless entrepreneur and forceful storyteller whose repeated instructions teach her to prepare early, work harder, and never surrender her sense of possibility. Her mother, affectionately called Muh, embodies patient, sacrificial care, especially in tending to Smith’s two profoundly disabled siblings when support services were largely inaccessible to Black families. Their household feels vivid and lived-in, filled with customers, taxi calls, music, business lessons, church teachings, and constant activity. Smith’s affection for her parents gives the memoir warmth, while her willingness to describe disappointment, anger, pressure, and family sacrifice keeps that affection grounded.
Smith writes much as she seems to speak: directly, energetically, and with a teacher’s instinct for drawing a lesson from every experience. Biblical passages frame the chapters, and personal episodes often develop into reflections on marriage, patience, responsibility, loneliness, education, perseverance, and trusting God’s timing. Faith isn’t a decorative theme here. It’s the lens through which Smith interprets childhood segregation, a devastating surgical injury to her vocal cords, professional changes, her long wait for marriage, motherhood, and the life she eventually built with her husband and children. The final photographic chapter brings the argument into focus by presenting later generations, college graduates, an expanding family, and interracial friendships as visible continuations of a life that began under Jim Crow.
This book will resonate most with Christian readers who enjoy testimony-driven memoirs, as well as families interested in preserving stories across generations. It should also appeal to readers who want an intimate account of Black family life during segregation, particularly one centered on entrepreneurship, caregiving, education, and spiritual inheritance. Smith’s frequent repetition gives the book the feeling of sitting with an elder who wants to make absolutely certain the lesson stays with you. That conversational persistence is part of its character. The result is a sincere family record and devotional memoir that invites readers to examine not only what they’ve endured, but what their lives may allow them to give the next generation.
Pages: 132 | ASIN : B0H72LCQ52
The Clock In My Head Never Stops
Daniel Rush’s The Clock in My Head Never Stops is a young adult psychological fiction novel that places readers directly inside the racing mind of Billy Thompson, a sixteen-year-old high school student living with severe academic and social anxiety. Although it’s presented as fiction, the story draws on the author’s personal experience, giving Billy’s internal struggle an intimate, lived-in quality. Rather than building its plot around a string of dramatic outside events, this mental health fiction novel follows Billy through one painfully ordinary day. Getting dressed, walking through crowded hallways, reading aloud, taking notes, completing assignments, talking to classmates, and attending football practice all become sources of escalating pressure.
The novel’s strongest feature is its close first-person voice. Billy’s thoughts loop, interrupt one another, leap toward worst-case outcomes, and turn minor decisions into exhausting negotiations. A shirt choice becomes a judgment on his appearance. An unfinished outline becomes proof that he’ll fail school and disappoint his family. A few minutes on a classroom clock can feel endless, while an evening disappears before he’s completed any homework. Rush uses these distortions of time to make the title more than a metaphor. The clock is a constant presence, measuring Billy’s lack of sleep, the approach of each class, the homework waiting at home, and the arrival of another day he doesn’t feel prepared to face.
As a coming-of-age novel about teenage anxiety, the book is unusually committed to the physical and mental texture of distress. Billy sweats, loses focus, struggles to speak, feels trapped in small spaces, and watches other students perform ordinary tasks with an ease that seems unreachable. His frustration can come out as anger, sarcasm, jealousy, or crude observation, which gives him the messy perspective of an actual teenager. The repeated spirals make the reading experience deliberately claustrophobic. That repetition can feel intense, but it also shows how anxiety rarely offers Billy a clean break between one worry and the next.
The epilogue gives the day a larger meaning by revealing that Billy reaches a breaking point a week later, leaves school, enters a homebound program, and begins treatment through medication, therapy, and family support. His eventual return to school turns the book into a compassionate YA mental health story about collapse, treatment, and gradual recovery. The Clock in My Head Never Stops is especially relevant for teens, parents, educators, and readers seeking realistic anxiety fiction. It captures how a life that looks comfortable from the outside can still feel unbearable from within, while leaving readers with the grounded reassurance that asking for help can become the first step toward moving forward.
Pages: 124 | ASIN: B0DMK9XDJV
Apostolic Technologies – Supernatural Algorithms
David Stafford’s Apostolic Technologies: Supernatural Algorithms is a bold, scripture-rich exploration of how divine knowledge becomes spiritual practice. Stafford takes familiar language from technology, including coding, operating systems, DNA, input values, and algorithms, and uses it to explain the orderly ways God works through revelation, obedience, prayer, unity, and apostolic ministry. The concept gives the book a distinctive vocabulary and makes its central message clear: spiritual power isn’t random, and biblical principles are meant to be understood, applied, and lived.
The book begins by building a theological foundation around the first and last Adam, the apostolic seed, spiritual rebirth, and the believer’s new identity in Christ. From there, Stafford develops his vision of the church as a living body carrying divine truth, nurturing relationships, and an apostolic mission. His teaching is energetic and direct, moving between close readings of Scripture, word studies, scientific comparisons, church history, and personal ministry experience. It feels less like a quiet devotional and more like sitting in an intensive training session with a teacher who expects readers to engage, think, and act.
As the book progresses, its focus widens from personal identity to corporate reformation. Stafford calls for an active, Spirit-led church marked by apostolic and prophetic partnership, spiritual unity, courageous leadership, and practical obedience. His chapters on ancient Israel’s technologies, laying on of hands, spiritual confrontation, and the dangers of controlling leadership all serve this larger vision. The language of systems and processes helps connect subjects that might otherwise seem unrelated, showing them as parts of one spiritual framework designed to equip believers for service.
The final chapters on fasting bring the book’s ideas into their most practical form. Stafford presents fasting as consecration, spiritual warfare, disciplined desire, corporate agreement, and persistent prayer, with Daniel’s twenty-one-day fast serving as a powerful closing model. Throughout the book, his conviction is unmistakable: believers have been given more than a place in the pew, they’ve been given an identity, an assignment, and spiritual tools for carrying it out. Apostolic Technologies turns biblical revelation into a working blueprint for believers who are ready to move from spiritual potential to kingdom action.
Pages: 182 | ASIN : B0BKTMKDP7
