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One Door at a Time: How Putting Students at the Center of Education Works
One Door at a Time is a powerful memoir-manifesto hybrid, co-written by Michael Gary Jr., David L. Heiber Sr., and Ivory A. Toldson, that tells the story of Concentric Educational Solutions, a student-first initiative grounded in Afrocentric values and real-world experience. Through a mix of lived narratives, reflective critique, and practical frameworks, the book charts the failures of the traditional education system, especially in underserved Black communities, and the grassroots, door-knocking, relationship-centered model that Concentric has pioneered. With stories from Baltimore to D.C. to Detroit, the authors show how putting students and their families at the core of the education process can transform not just academic performance, but lives.
The writing is earnest and clear, but it never hides from the hard stuff. I appreciated how the authors peeled back layers of bureaucracy and systemic dysfunction without sugarcoating anything. They didn’t shy away from naming how some systems are built not to serve but to survive themselves. What hit hardest were the sections about chronic absenteeism and the real lives behind those data points. They didn’t just throw around big ideas, they brought in stories of missed kids, misunderstood families, and teachers caught in the crossfire of outdated models. It felt deeply personal. You can tell these folks have walked the walk.
What stood out most to me was their relentless commitment to human connection. It sounds simple, just go to a student’s house and ask why they’re not in school, but the bravery and humility in that act is huge. This isn’t some theoretical overhaul. It’s a day-to-day grind rooted in trust and compassion. The Afrocentric lens added a depth I didn’t realize was missing in a lot of education reform writing. They’re not just advocating for more “diverse” classrooms. They’re rethinking what school means altogether, from the ground up, through culture, family, and identity. At times, it read like a love letter to forgotten students and a challenge to every adult who ever said, “We did our best.”
I would recommend One Door at a Time to anyone who works in education, or who has ever wondered why school isn’t working for so many kids. It’s especially important for policymakers, school leaders, and those in teacher prep programs. But I think it would move anyone who believes education should be about more than test scores. This book isn’t a silver bullet, but it’s a flashlight and a set of tools, and a reminder that sometimes, real change starts with just knocking on one door.
Pages: 260 | ISBN : 978-9004735989
Car Trouble
Car Trouble follows Jim Crack, a down-and-out young man whose misadventures across the freeways and backstreets of Southern California form a gritty, chaotic odyssey of personal implosion. What begins with his Volkswagen catching fire on the 5 Freeway spirals into a bleak but strangely comic day filled with existential spirals, weed smoke, porn, broken relationships, and failed attempts to find meaning in a world so dependent on cars, status, and surface-level happiness. Through vivid flashbacks and derailed digressions, Jim’s day of misfortune exposes a lifelong grappling with abandonment, identity, trauma, and a simmering, unshakeable rage toward the machinery of life, both mechanical and societal.
Reading this book was like crawling inside someone’s unfiltered stream of consciousness. Zorn’s writing is raw and intense, often hilarious, sometimes painful, and always fully immersed in Jim’s spiraling, disillusioned psyche. There were moments I laughed, like the pure absurdity of a landscaping crew rescuing Jim from a flaming car, only to feel a gut punch pages later as he sinks into total emotional paralysis on a crusty couch with nothing but a bong and old porn for comfort. Zorn captures the erratic rhythm of thought with a ferocity that reminded me of Bukowski meets Vonnegut, but with more exhaust fumes and burnt-out brake lights. The prose veers wildly. Sharp, punchy lines land like jabs to the ribs, then unravel into stoner-poetic rants or tragic internal monologues that drip with disillusionment.
But what really hit me hard was how real it all felt. Jim’s pain, his failures, the weird moments of tenderness or sudden clarity linger. This book doesn’t follow a clean arc. It doesn’t tie up neatly. That felt true to life. At times, I was frustrated by the sheer amount of dysfunction, the digressions, the lack of redemption. But maybe that’s the point. This isn’t a story about fixing things. It’s about someone living in the fallout of a life already shattered, trying, failing, and trying again in ways that are small, stupid, human. The way Zorn writes about cars as both literal death traps and symbols of modern isolation stuck with me after I closed the book.
I wouldn’t recommend Car Trouble to everyone. It’s harsh. It’s crude. It’s uncomfortable. But if you’ve ever been young, broke, high, angry, and unsure what you’re supposed to be doing with your life, this book will feel painfully familiar. It’s for readers who crave something raw and don’t mind wandering through the smog of existential burnout.
Pages: 273 | ASIN : B07CP4R132
A Shared Gift
Death and His Brother follows a group of musicians, an inspector, and his reporter wife who discover that no one is manning their train, and it is a race to stop the runaway train. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
When I was a boy, we lived in a house on the edge of a small town. We were surrounded by meadows and beyond those, fields of corn and barley. Beyond that, there was a railway line. On it, three times a day on round trips, ran a Buddliner coach – a single-carriage commuter train – with no locomotive. Self-propelled. It travelled about eighty miles on each round trip, with a small two-person crew. It ran between Stratford, Ontario – the home of the Stratford Shakespeare Festival – and a town on the shores of Lake Huron.
Theatre, music, train travel, water.
I think the train, the theatre, and the lake have been rolling around together in my head for a long time. That little Buddliner didn’t have the look or romance of a big passenger train, but it must have taken interesting people to places that some of them really wanted to visit.
A year ago, I happened upon a poem, “The Clattering Train,” in which a sleeping two-man railway crew could not prevent a fatal accident. Not a great poem, but it was based on a real accident in England in the 1890s. The image of a sleeping crew brought to mind the two-person Buddliner. And so, a mystery began to take shape.
Why were they asleep?
I found the interaction between the characters that meet on the train to be one of the highlights of your book. What was your approach to writing the interactions between characters?
I was an actor for years and a director and playwright. Handling dialogue becomes second nature after a while, but it’s a learned skill. It’s all about exploring.
Each character enters a scene – whether on stage or in a book – from somewhere. They are in a state of mind; they already are someone, whether we know them or not. The important thing in developing sound interactions between and amongst characters is staying true to who they are.
That’s not to say my characters can’t surprise me. They do all the time.
As a director, I used to advise actors who were having a hard time incorporating a particular line into their performance that they needed to go back and rethink their characterization.
The line that has been so difficult is almost always important – it usually represents something in the character that you’ve overlooked.
The same thing happens when I write conversations in my novels. Characters often say things I do not expect them to say. When it happens, I have to rethink the character. Who are they really? What is it that they really want out of the conversation? The characters are sometimes more articulate than I am.
I go back and revise what I’ve written to reflect these new dimensions of a character. When people are talking, they are exploring each other. Learning, telling, hiding, showing off.
But here’s the really important thing: it’s not who says what that makes dialogue work. It’s how the next person reacts. And that’s always down to the same thing. Who’s listening?
What were some themes that were important for you to explore in this book?
Kindness and generosity, especially in the face of difficulty.
Listening – and there’s no better example of that than a jazz player.
The pain of the outsider and how it’s so often hidden and hard to reach.
Humour in the bleak moments. Humour is a shared gift; it’s how we all get through things together.
Will there be another Urquhart & MacDonald mystery in the future? If so, what can your fans expect in the next installment?
Absolutely.
I plan on at least one new Urquhart & MacDonald mystery each year, maybe two – along with a new historical adventure novel in my General Torrance Series.
The next book, The Price of Peril, will be the seventh in the Urquhart and MacDonald series. This book will concentrate more on the women in the community, four in particular: Sandy Urquhart, Connie Del Barba, Florrie MacDonald, and an old friend of Sandy’s we haven’t met before – an aviator raising money to fund a dangerous flight that has never before been accomplished, neither by man nor woman.
It will be set in Cape Breton, as always. It’s an island of determined folk with a lively appreciation of life’s absurdities. That’s how they get through a life that’s not always easy. But here’s the thing — they also have a long history of invention and daring, including up in the skies.
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What If?
Go Back follows a tech journalist whose life is upended when she finds herself involved in a web of corruption and underground resistance. Where did the idea for this novel come from?
I thought about tech addiction and how reliant society has become on it, especially digital natives. Then I asked myself, what would happen if that technology was taken away suddenly? How would people contact anyone? Not many people memorize phone numbers. Also, many people are reliant on GPS to get around. Go Back is a sort of extreme luddite group that appeals to people’s fears of tech addiction and wanting to “detox” from it. The movement’s propaganda convinces even the president that the Centers are the only way to rid society of this horrible addiction that leads to family separation and mental health issues. Of course the movement also has other, more sinister plans as well.
What draws you to the dystopian fiction genre?
I often ask myself “what if?” or “what would people do if X happened?” I like to explore the future and what people would do if their world turned upside down. I’d like to think that my dystopia has a bit of hope in it as well.
What was the inspiration for Sarah Grimes’ traits and dialogue?
Sarah is based on some real people in my life. I was a young journalist at one time wanting to get that BIG story. That’s what she wants too. She wants to make a name for herself. Be careful what you wish for! Her character arc is compelling because, even though she is unsure of herself, her ambition and circumstances propels her to become a leader.
What is the next book you are working on, and when will it be available?
Right now I’m wrapping up a short story. My next book is a far future dystopia. It’s about the aftermath of a cataclysmic event that happens in the U.S. and how people cope with the aftermath. It is still a work in progress.
After journalist Sarah Grimes finally lands the lead story, her life turns upside down. Sure, she exposed the Go Back movement’s evil plan to take everyone’s tech and pocket all the profit, but that also landed her in a digital detox center, otherwise known as the Center for Behavioral Recognition.
Inside, she finds a man named Chris she met before the roundup. She wants to escape with him, but he disappears and she keeps getting drugged. Thankfully, she teams up with an unlikely ally to escape.
As they all make their way to the headquarters of the resistance, they have to decide how much they’re willing to sacrifice for their tech.
LITERARY TITAN 