Blog Archives
Ingrained Preconceptions
When Songs of Children Filled the Air follows six lives on a collision course in an America consumed by post-9/11 fear, where one frightened teenager’s choice could either deepen the cycle of violence or interrupt it. What inspired you to imagine this particular alternate path for America after September 11?
I have honestly been surprised, pleasantly, that the fallout from 9/11 wasn’t more severe. Watching the towers fall, I expected something closer to the alternate history I created. Twenty-five years later, I wonder how we have grown, if we have grown, beyond learned and ingrained divisiveness. Beyond the high-level political and social impacts, I wanted to focus on the individual level and how the choices we make as a people are felt by the actual people.
How did you balance making Allison’s fear understandable while also showing how easily it hardens into prejudice?
When I write, I reach deep into myself and try to understand the human condition. Even the best of us are not immune to the societal “norms” surrounding us. I believe Allison’s blend of emotions and mixed reactions are completely human. It’s what she does with them that counts.
What research shaped your portrayal of Farid as both a Muslim American and an NYPD officer during a period of escalating distrust?
I have friends from Muslim backgrounds, some from countries of extremely limited freedoms. Being from Brooklyn myself, but not in New York on 9/11, I could relate to his situation. I have seen division between adjacent neighborhoods segregated by race and religion, and had friends involved in attacks for nothing more than walking down a street where they “didn’t belong.” I tried to make Farid somewhat sympathetic to the hatred he received, realizing that not everyone who is motivated by such powerfully ingrained preconceptions is themselves “evil.”
What do you hope readers take from the 2026 epilogue about the power and limits of individual acts of compassion?
Some readers might come away from Songs of Children feeling they are not powerless. We do not simply have to accept the world as it is, but even small acts can have impactful results. While these will not change the world, they can change a life, even if the only life affected is our own.
Author Links: GoodReads | Amazon
On September 11, 2001, Allison’s husband dies in the North Tower. She survives only because a sleepless night made her late to her own office in the same complex. That accident of timing is the first of many that will bind her to a cable installer named Jake and a Muslim NYPD officer named Farid, as an America unrecognizable to any of them takes shape around them.
In this alternate history, the government’s response to the attacks does not stop at Afghanistan. It reaches into American cities, rounds up Muslim citizens into detainment camps, and eventually drops a nuclear bomb on a city called Bayt-al-Salam. Allison, Jake, and Farid form an unlikely household of survivors, hiding in a cemetery mansion and trying to protect two children from a country that has turned on itself.
A sixteen-year-old jihadist named Musa, smuggled from a training camp into the United States against his will, is moving toward them. He does not want to die. He does not want to kill. But the men who sent him are counting on him to do both.
Songs of Children opens at the moment of detonation and then steps back a full year to show how ordinary people on every side of an impossible conflict arrive at a single atrium in Philadelphia where one girl’s handwritten note may be the only thing that matters.
Order your copy today to experience this year that could have been.
Fundamental Pillars of Life
A Poetic Wandering is a reflective collection spanning four decades in which you explore memory, family, Kansas history, travel, nature, faith, humor, and the experiences that shape a life. What role has poetry played in helping you process emotions, develop self-awareness, and make sense of your experiences?
Growing up as an only child, I wasn’t able to compare life experiences or receive guidance from a sibling. There were times I felt lonely, times I felt life was unfair, times when anger reared its ugly head. Writing became a means to document and work through some of life’s instabilities. The process eventually created opportunities for stronger self-confidence and self-esteem.
How has becoming a parent—and later reflecting on family across generations—influenced your poetry?
As one ages, we realize more and more the true importance of faith, family, and friends. I was truly blessed to grow up with parents who believed in these tenets. As parents, my wife and I tried to instill these beliefs in our own children. Sharing these fundamental pillars of life through family generations only makes sense.
Your collection moves comfortably between serious subjects and humorous poems about aging, grilling, toilet paper, and everyday life. Why is humor important to the overall balance of the book?
Poetry should be reflective at times, entertaining at times. I want readers to understand what I am sharing without having to dissect obscure, remote, or hidden meanings. Regarding humor…didn’t Ficino say “Humor Is the Spice of Life.”
What do you hope readers—especially parents, grandparents, travelers, and people reflecting on their own lives—take away from A Poetic Wandering?
I hope that by sharing my thoughts and experiences, it may help others to BE POETIC themselves.
Author Links: Website
The Crisis of Ignorance: The Battle to Teach the Indifferent Mind
Brandon C. Pelsmaeker’s The Crisis of Ignorance is an expansive work of social criticism, memoir, educational philosophy, and civic argument. The first volume of The War Against Ignorance Series is organized around a central conviction that intellectual passivity carries consequences far beyond the classroom. Pelsmaeker states his thesis plainly: “Ignorance is a disease.” He develops that idea by connecting ignorance to apathy, indifference, misinformation, conformity, and the gradual erosion of individual liberty. Education therefore becomes the book’s primary battleground. For Pelsmaeker, reading, historical knowledge, sustained inquiry, and the willingness to question authority are habits of citizenship as much as academic skills. His subject expands accordingly, moving through education, religion, politics, media, entertainment, health care, economic inequality, surveillance, and corporate power. That breadth reflects the book’s underlying premise that these institutions can’t be understood in isolation because each influences what people know, what they value, and how willing they are to examine the systems around them.
The book gains much of its character from Pelsmaeker’s decision to place his own life inside the argument. He recounts his development from an indifferent, procrastinating student who struggled with reading into an avid researcher and history teacher, using that transformation as evidence for his belief in education’s capacity to alter a person’s trajectory. He also writes at length about his years in the International Churches of Christ, his increasingly persistent questions about authority and doctrine, the discussion group he organized, and his eventual removal from the fellowship after twelve years. These experiences give the book a personal foundation that keeps its larger arguments connected to recognizable conflicts involving belonging, obedience, conscience, and fear. The same pattern emerges in his accounts of teaching. Classroom incidents, administrative investigations, conversations with students, and memories of the teachers who shaped him become case studies in what education should accomplish. His most concise expression of that philosophy is, “Learning, in essence, is discussion.” That sentence captures the educational ideal running through the volume: knowledge becomes meaningful when people can examine it, articulate their reasoning, encounter disagreement, and revise their understanding.
Pelsmaeker’s method is deliberately cumulative. Personal recollections sit beside biblical passages, historical episodes, statistics, political theory, court cases, journalism, literary references, and quotations from an unusually wide range of thinkers. The book moves freely among figures such as Aristotle, John Stuart Mill, Hannah Arendt, Thomas Paine, Martin Luther King Jr., Walter Lippmann, Friedrich Nietzsche, and many others. That range gives the work the feel of an extended classroom discussion led by a teacher who wants readers to follow connections across disciplines. His chapters on media and entertainment examine distraction and desensitization; his chapters on religion explore the tension between faith and institutional obedience; his treatment of education stresses trust, intellectual rigor, reading, debate, and historical consciousness; and the final chapters broaden the argument toward poverty, teacher compensation, economic inequality, monopoly, surveillance, and concentrated power. The abundance of material gives the book intellectual energy, although its cumulative style sometimes compresses distinctions between different institutions, historical circumstances, and forms of authority that would benefit from longer individual treatment. Its repeated comparisons with totalitarian systems are intentionally provocative, and they make the strongest impression when they function as warnings about habits of conformity.
The Crisis of Ignorance is a teacher’s appeal for intellectual vigilance. Its deepest concern is less the possession of information than the cultivation of a mind capable of judging information responsibly. The epilogue returns to the classroom and makes explicit what the preceding chapters have been building toward: Pelsmaeker regards teachers, particularly social studies teachers, as crucial defenders of a society in which citizens can think independently, challenge institutions, and speak without surrendering their conscience. His final pages also reveal the personal stakes of that conviction, as he reflects on the difficulty of teaching controversial material while remaining accountable to students, administrators, and the profession itself. He closes by insisting on the lasting influence teachers can have on individual lives and pledging, in capital letters, “NEVER AGAIN ANYWHERE.” I think the book’s most significant achievement is the consistency with which it connects curiosity to responsibility. Pelsmaeker presents reading, questioning, discussion, historical study, and resistance to indifference as disciplines that have to be practiced. The result is a passionate, heavily researched, and unmistakably personal argument that asks readers to regard education not simply as preparation for employment, but as preparation for the responsibilities of freedom.
Pages: 373 | ASIN : B0FQQCS9WV
Life in Woke America – A Family’s Story of Trust and Betrayal Under Fire
Life in Woke America begins with a young man who has already learned that survival depends on paying attention. Xavier King grew up in foster care, where adults changed, rules mattered, and reading the room could be as important as following the rules. By the time we meet him as an adult, that childhood vigilance has become something more useful and more complicated: he notices patterns, studies people, anticipates consequences, and tries to make deliberate choices about the man he wants to become. That makes him an engaging narrator because his confidence never completely erases the abandoned boy underneath it. I found myself drawn less to the question of what Xavier would uncover than to the question of what he would make of himself. The story has a restless, conversational quality, moving between danger, work, romance, family, memory, and Xavier’s running effort to understand the world around him. His voice can be funny, stubborn, tender, self-conscious, and occasionally exasperating, but it rarely feels anonymous. You spend enough time inside his head that encountering the world through Xavier becomes the book’s central experience.
What gives the novel its emotional pull is Xavier’s hunger for an ordinary kind of happiness that has never felt ordinary to him. He doesn’t simply want success. He wants a home, a family, useful work, people he can trust, and some assurance that he won’t repeat the instability of his childhood. That longing comes into sharper focus when he meets Audrey, an older, self-possessed woman whose competence and warmth immediately fascinate him. Their relationship gives the book many of its most appealing scenes because Xavier approaches intimacy much the way he approaches everything else: earnestly, analytically, and with an almost comic determination to establish the right boundaries. Yet the analysis is clearly a survival habit. He learned early that understanding people could keep him safe, and as an adult he tries to use the same skill to become trustworthy, loving, and dependable. The result is a protagonist who can overthink a conversation and still be genuinely moved by a gesture of affection. That tension makes him more human than his self-assurance initially suggests.
The wider America Xavier moves through is equally important to the story. Institutions, schools, the military, media, technology, social expectations, identity categories, and workplace hierarchies aren’t presented as subjects he studies from a distance. They’re the weather of his life. He has to move through them, adapt to them, decide when to accommodate them, and decide when doing so would cost him too much of himself. The novel’s concern with the Constitution grows out of that larger interest in the rules that govern relationships between individuals and institutions, and Xavier keeps returning to questions of authority, fairness, truth, competence, and personal responsibility. Because the book is autofiction, it also deliberately brushes fictional experience against recognizable public controversies, but the most interesting effect isn’t the opportunity to sort those controversies into political categories. It’s watching a character with Xavier’s history react to environments that once again ask him to accept somebody else’s account of who he is. At its best, the novel makes those pressures personal.
Reading Life in Woke America can feel like spending a long afternoon with someone who has a story for everything and a strong opinion about most of it. Xavier sometimes circles an idea after the reader has already understood it, and the novel’s willingness to follow his thinking wherever it goes can slow the pace. But that expansiveness is also part of its charm. There are stretches of genuine suspense, unexpectedly gentle passages about care and belonging, and moments when Xavier’s longing to be loved lands with more force because he works so hard to appear self-sufficient. I think the book will be appreciated most by readers who enjoy character-driven contemporary fiction with a talkative narrator, a strong sense of place, and an interest in how public culture enters private life. Readers who like protagonists who think aloud, wrestle openly with values, and try to turn difficult beginnings into purposeful lives will probably find Xavier good company.
Pages: 487 | ASIN : B0H5NQKHXZ
A Poetic Wandering
Kevin R. Peterson’s A Poetic Wandering feels much like its title suggests: a long, personal walk through memory, family, Kansas history, travel, nature, faith, humor, and the ordinary experiences that accumulate into a life. The collection reaches back to poems from Peterson’s 1980s chapbooks and then moves into work written across the following four decades, so the reader gets something close to a poetic autobiography. Peterson explains that poetry became a way for him to work through emotions, develop self-awareness, reflect on experience, and share what he’d learned, and that purpose remains visible throughout the book. The result is a collection that’s interested less in maintaining a single mood than in recording the things a person notices and carries with him over many years.
The most affecting section is the group of poems drawn from Kendra: A Father’s Feelings. Here Peterson writes about his young daughter’s grave illness, survival, deafness, and the family’s adjustment to a frightening new reality. The poems are plainspoken and emotionally immediate. In “Hospital Paradox,” the birth of one child and the medical crisis of another exist almost side by side, while “Can It Be” captures the complicated mixture of gratitude and sorrow after his daughter survives but loses her hearing. “Roller Skates” then turns a Christmas gift into something far larger, because having their daughter home and alive has changed what the family values. These poems are strong because Peterson trusts the events themselves to carry the emotion. That directness gives the family material an intimacy that stays with you.
Elsewhere, the book widens considerably. Kansas appears again and again through prairie landscapes, pioneers, bison, Dust Bowl memories, sunflowers, local history, and Peterson’s sense of generational connection to the land. Travel adds another dimension, with poems about Yellowstone, Florida, wilderness hiking, canoe country, sunsets, campsites, and the decades-long project of visiting all fifty states with his wife. Nature often becomes a doorway into something spiritual. Peterson says explicitly that it’s where he feels most comfortable and where he most strongly connects with God. There’s also a welcome streak of playfulness, including poems about toilet paper, aging, grilling, and other subjects that keep the collection from becoming uniformly meditative. Near the end, Peterson brings poetry and photography together in what he calls a “poetograph,” combining his own images with brief poetic responses. That makes the closing pages feel like a natural culmination of two lifelong interests.
I’d recommend A Poetic Wandering to readers who enjoy accessible, personal poetry rooted in recognizable experiences rather than poetry that needs to be decoded before it can be felt. It should have particular appeal for Midwestern readers, nature lovers, travelers, parents and grandparents, people interested in family or regional history, and readers who’ve reached an age when looking backward and looking forward begin to happen at the same time. Peterson writes with the perspective of someone interested in preserving memories while he still has the chance to name them, whether those memories involve a hospital room, a Kansas field, a campsite, a marriage, a family tragedy, or a ridiculous question about which way the toilet-paper roll should face. That range is the book’s real character. It reads like one man opening several decades of notebooks and photographs and inviting you to wander through them with him.
Military History
The 20th PID Book combines original photographs, reports, maps, and memories with modern context to illuminate the vital work of WWII photo interpreters. What did the original 1945 volume mean to your father, Lt. William J. Snodden, and to your family?
I can’t remember my dad ever talking about his experiences during the war when I was growing up. It was only when he was in his late 80s, and I asked him specifically about those years, that he pulled out his military papers and this commemorative album. That day was the first time I heard about his work as a photo interpreter. Dad was never one to show his feelings, but as I watched him reverently page through the book, I could tell how meaningful that time was for him. My mom was a master declutterer, and as they moved from their family home to increasingly smaller senior apartments, she was ruthless. The fact that the album and his military records survived those repeated purges testifies to how important they were to him.
In 2019, a few months before he died, we donated the album to the Arizona Commemorative Air Force Museum in Mesa, Arizona. It was hard for him to give it up, but he was clearly glad to see it in a place where it would be preserved for future generations. I know he’d be pleased that I’m now making its contents available to people outside the museum.
What was the role of the 20th Photo Intelligence Detachment during World War II, and why do you think the work of photo interpreters remained relatively unfamiliar compared with other forms of wartime intelligence?
When I’d mention the book to friends as I was working on it, their first question was always, “Oh, was your dad a pilot?” The pilots who took the aerial photos have received a lot of well-deserved attention in history, but without the men developing and interpreting those photos, all of that information would have been for naught.
With each sortie, the reconnaissance pilots came back with hundreds of images. The PIs often worked throughout the night, first developing the photos and then, hunched over tables and peering through stereoscopes at minute images, identifying potential bombing targets, assessing whether attacks had successfully destroyed those targets, and annotating photographs before summarizing their findings in typed reports. As many as a hundred copies of a report could then be produced for distribution to commanders. During the height of the war, all of this was accomplished in less than twelve hours!
On the surface, the work of the PIs might appear dull and isn’t likely to attract the attention of a major motion picture studio. Their success wasn’t dramatic or especially visible—their product was intelligence. Pilots flew dangerous missions in recognizable aircraft; PIs worked behind tables with stereoscopes, pencils, photographs, and typewriters. One photographs beautifully. The other doesn’t. Yet both were part of the same intelligence chain. Accurate and timely tactical intelligence allowed commanders to make the best use of their resources, disrupt German activity, and ultimately save resources and lives.
The original book contains humor, cartoons, personal memories, and photographs alongside technical intelligence. Why was preserving their personalities and everyday experiences as important as documenting their military work?
This album was created just before the men were released from duty. It was created by the men of the unit, for the men of the unit. It shows us how they chose to remember that time in their lives and could also serve as a way to share their wartime experiences with family and friends. By adding humor and cartoons, they turned their work into stories.
The route map, in particular, contains more than 30 vignettes of locations and events throughout Europe. Some pertain to large-scale wartime events, like the liberation of Paris, while others show experiences specific to the 20th PID, like their crossing of the English Channel in a small boat stuffed to the gills with soldiers, a jeep precariously balanced on the bow, and a nearby periscope watching from the deep.
An ex-soldier could use that tiny drawing as a prompt: “Oh, let me tell you about THAT day!”
Eighty years after the original book was created, what do you hope publishing this restored edition preserves for the next eighty years?
Most, if not all, of the men in the 20th PID are now gone. This book is a uniquely creative artifact documenting firsthand their work and experiences during the war. I would like future generations to know of their contributions through the men of the unit themselves.
The book also has a place in military history. Although aerial photo interpretation had been used before WWII, during the war it became increasingly sophisticated and systematic and was integrated into fast-moving tactical operations.
What makes this book unusual is that we don’t have to reconstruct that process eighty years later. The men themselves left us the photographs they examined, the reports they produced, the maps they used, the cartoons they drew, and their own explanation of what they did.
My hope is that eighty years from now, another reader can open this book and still hear their voices.
Author Links: Website | Facebook
The 20th PID Book: A Rare Look at a WWII Photo Intelligence Detachment
Nancy Finston’s The 20th PID Book is both a restored wartime artifact and an accessible account of a specialized intelligence unit whose work helped guide Allied air operations in Europe. The volume is based on a commemorative book created in 1945 by members of the U.S. Army Air Forces’ 20th Photo Intelligence Detachment, then expanded by Finston with explanatory notes, enlargements, historical context, and material from the military archive of her father, Lt. William J. Snodden. The result has an unusual immediacy. Readers encounter the original photographs, cartoons, reports, maps, and recollections while also receiving enough explanation to understand the technical language and procedures behind them. As the introduction puts it, the book functions as “both a historical artifact and a working record,” a description that accurately captures its distinctive character.
The book is strongest when it shows photo intelligence as a process. Its detailed “Life Story of a Sortie” follows reconnaissance photographs from the aircraft through film processing, mapping, stereoscopic interpretation, reporting, bombing, damage assessment, and archival preservation. That structure makes the work of the detachment tangible. Aerial images were compared with earlier photographs, matched to coordinates, examined for minute physical changes, and annotated so that commanders could act on the findings. In some cases, the entire process from receiving developed photographs and a pilot’s trace report to distributing intelligence to headquarters took “LESS THAN 12 HOURS!” Later chapters reinforce that sense of precision by showing bomb damage reports, target studies, pre-strike and post-strike photographs, and ground photographs that confirmed the interpreters’ assessments. The accumulated evidence gives the reader a clear understanding of how observation became actionable military intelligence.
Finston also succeeds in preserving the human character of the original keepsake. The technical material is balanced by cartoons, personal recollections, photographs, a humorous route map, commendations, and the commanding officer’s farewell letter. These elements show the detachment as a community of young servicemen as well as an intelligence organization. The route map is particularly effective because it transforms the unit’s movements from England through France, Belgium, and Germany into a visual diary filled with mud, restricted cities, makeshift quarters, danger, and moments of relief. The closing material deepens that personal dimension. Major Frederick Ahlson’s 1945 letter recalls the men who had “lived, worked, wined and dined together” and expresses the hope that their wartime friendships would survive their dispersal. Because these voices and images come from the unit itself, the book conveys memory at a scale that conventional operational histories rarely capture.
The 20th PID Book is a carefully assembled archival history of the people, methods, and wartime responsibilities of the 20th Photo Intelligence Detachment. Its value lies in the way it connects technical intelligence work to specific military consequences, from identifying hidden landing grounds and supply dumps to assessing damaged bridges and transportation networks during the Allied advance. At the same time, the restored keepsake preserves how the men chose to remember their own service after the fighting ended. Finston’s editorial additions generally serve that original material well by explaining unfamiliar practices without overwhelming the firsthand record. The book should appeal to readers interested in World War II, military intelligence, aerial reconnaissance, archival history, and the less visible forms of expertise that shaped battlefield decisions. It preserves a specialized chapter of the war with clarity, documentary richness, and a strong sense of the individuals behind the reports.
Pages: 140
A Man of Significance
Life in Woke America follows an Army private who discovers a secret Chinese bioweapon, leading him to question the institutions he trusted. You described your book as autofiction inspired by true events. What inspired you to combine personal experience with fictional storytelling?
My work as a Court Appointed Special Advocate connects me with high school-age boys who have avoided run-ins with law enforcement and tell me that they think about thinking. These boys I enjoy and who have the ability to move from the margins of society to the upper levels of America’s middle class and higher. Very few do, and most don’t. This novel is inspired by what it takes for any of these boys to make this kind of success happen.
What did you want Xavier’s development from someone without a stable family to someone actively creating one to reveal about him?
My work with these boys has taken place during a specific “age” in America. This age is uniquely defined by the COVID pandemic, a focus on marginalized groups, and billion-dollar sports franchises, among other things. Similar novels have told stories of the Industrial Revolution, the Civil War, and more. The story I tell reveals how this era presented a certain set of challenges and opportunities for Xavier and how he responded. His choices reveal much about the society in which he found himself, and the boy who becomes a man of significance.
Considering the political focus suggested by the title, the novel devotes substantial attention to romance and family. Why was that personal side of Xavier’s life so important to the larger story?
I like to remind people that you cannot tell a book by its cover. I could just as easily have titled the book Life in a Sports-Crazed America, and told the same story. My point is this isn’t a political story, nor a polemic. I describe real events of this era and let the character develop as he matures. It isn’t that the personal side is so important to the larger story; it is the larger story. And sometimes I am amused by how often people assume it is otherwise.
The final image of life as a mosaic brings together many different pieces of Xavier’s experience. What does that metaphor mean to you?
I really enjoyed writing that poem. It turned out so much better than the same message in prose. Much like the comment about being fooled by the title, he tells Mrs. Pearson that she has been deceived into viewing people as stereotyped members of a group defined by physical attributes. Xavier is reminding her that by referring to the beauty of his mosaic derives from many individual tiles. This metaphor flows from the U.S. Constitution’s deliberate claim that all human rights belong to the individual–America’s greatness is its plurality of individuals, not the state of one group or another.
Author Links: GoodReads | X (Twitter) | Facebook | Website | Amazon
When Army Private Xavier King, a foster child who grew up without a family, joins the military in search of purpose, he discovers that the greatest battles aren’t always fought overseas. After uncovering a secret Chinese bioweapon lab operating on U.S. soil, Xavier expects the system to act. Instead, he finds himself facing powerful institutions, political pressure, and moral choices that threaten everything he has worked to build.
As he fights to protect the life and love he has found with Audrey, Xavier must navigate institutional betrayal while remaining true to his principles. Blending high-stakes suspense, a tender slow-burn romance, and timely political conflict, this novel explores what happens when ordinary people are forced to defend extraordinary truths.
At its heart, Life in Woke America is a story about personal responsibility, the strength of family, the search for truth, and the courage to stand firm when convictions are tested. It captures the enduring “Great American Fight Back Spirit” through a story of redemption, patriotism, resilience, and hope.
Perfect for readers who enjoy thought-provoking political thrillers, emotionally rich character-driven fiction, and stories that challenge them to think critically, question assumptions, and draw their own conclusions.
