Blog Archives
The Best Attorney Never Wins
The Best Attorney Never Wins, by Angelo Perone, is a blunt, story-driven business book for personal injury attorneys who are skilled at practicing law but underprepared for the machinery of growth: marketing, intake, systems, hiring, scale, and eventual exit. Perone argues that legal talent alone doesn’t build an empire, and he frames that argument through a series of vivid cautionary and aspirational stories, from Jim waiting too long until his firm collapses, to Tyler’s failed “GOT WILK?” ad turning into a rawer, client-centered campaign, to Joey building a firm valuable enough to sell for a life-changing sum.
I found the book most persuasive when it stopped sounding like a manual and started feeling like a confession. Perone writes with the urgency of someone who has watched good people lose because they mistook professional competence for business infrastructure. The image of Jim calling from a porch instead of an office stayed with me, not because it’s subtle, but because it’s painfully clear. The book’s central idea, that the “best” attorney can still lose to the better operator, is uncomfortable in the right way. It challenges the romance of individual brilliance and replaces it with something colder but more useful: numbers, process, speed, follow-up, and accountability.
The writing is cinematic and emotionally charged, sometimes almost breathless in its insistence. At its best, that intensity gives the book real pulse. Sandy in the gym office, Maria on the intake call, the firm that spends $100,000 to sign only five cases before one operational change transforms the outcome, these moments have texture and consequence. I could feel Perone trying to make business systems visceral, not abstract, and I admired that. There are times when the prose leans into fear and conquest language, especially around the “sharks” entering personal injury law. Still, the emotional heat mostly serves the argument. This isn’t a neutral textbook. It’s a field report from someone who believes delay is deadly.
What gives the book its human center is that Perone doesn’t let himself stand entirely outside the machine he praises. The epilogue, with his daughters imitating him walking in circles with an imaginary phone, cuts through the bravado beautifully. It reminds the reader that scale has a cost and that building a business worth owning also means building a life you’re present enough to inhabit. I’d recommend The Best Attorney Never Wins to personal injury attorneys, law firm owners, and entrepreneurial professionals who are tired of vague advice and willing to look honestly at the gap between being excellent at the craft and being disciplined enough to build the company around it.
Pages: 119 | ASIN : B0H2K6YBBX
Cruelty & Redemption
Cruelty and Redemption is a memoir about Douglas Van Tassell’s long passage from childhood terror to hard-won purpose. The book begins in a house ruled by violence, silence, and abandonment, then follows him through homelessness, street survival, drugs, fighting, juvenile detention, the Marines, San Quentin, a shattered marriage, fatherhood, powerlifting, coaching, and ultimately the creation of a life centered on protecting young people who remind him of who he once was. What gives the memoir its shape is not simply the extremity of what Van Tassell survives, but the way he keeps returning to one central question: how does a person who was taught to become a weapon learn to become shelter instead?
I found the book most affecting when it refuses to soften the damage. The early scenes are almost unbearable, especially the closet, the broken feet, and the terrible realization of a child deciding that no one is coming. Yet the memoir doesn’t wallow in pain. It has an unusually clear moral memory, one that allows tenderness to appear without sentimentality. Grandma D, with her sandwiches, hard candies, and quiet willingness to play along when a lonely boy invents a grandmother for himself, moved me because the scene understands how small kindness can become enormous when a child has been starved of gentleness. I also appreciated how the book treats brotherhood with complexity. DJ and the crew give Van Tassell belonging and confidence, but that belonging exists beside drugs, violence, and danger. The memoir is at its strongest when it lets those contradictions breathe.
The writing has a blunt, rhythmic force that suits the material. Van Tassell often writes in short, hammering sentences, and that cadence mirrors the mind of someone trained by fear to assess, endure, and keep moving. At times, the repetition becomes almost incantatory, especially around ideas of worthlessness, survival, and not quitting. I did occasionally feel the book could benefit from more restraint in places, since some reflections are repeated after the reader has already absorbed them emotionally. Still, the directness is part of its power. The ideas are not tidy, and I respected that. Redemption here isn’t presented as a clean absolution or an inspirational slogan. The memoir carries real shame, especially around the boy who dies after the hallway assault, the video store robbery, prison, and the harm Van Tassell knows he caused. That honesty makes the later chapters feel earned rather than convenient. When powerlifting, coaching Robin, helping Marcus, and building a charity enter the story, they don’t erase the past. They answer it.
By the end, I felt I had read a memoir less about triumph than about responsibility. Van Tassell’s move into family, business, coaching, youth advocacy, and public service feels powerful by the end because the book never lets us forget the boy in the closet or the man in the cage. The concluding image of the worn chair in the quiet gym is simple, but it lands with real weight: here is a survivor who has built a place where other wounded young people can sit, breathe, and perhaps begin again. Cruelty and Redemption is a painful, candid, and ultimately humane memoir, and I’d recommend it to readers drawn to stories of trauma recovery, criminal justice, mentorship, masculinity, addiction, second chances, and the difficult, unfinished work of becoming better than what happened to you.
Pages: 180 | ASIN : B0FRXHC9Q2
Literary Titan Gold Book Award: Nonfiction
The Literary Titan Book Award recognizes outstanding nonfiction books that demonstrate exceptional quality in writing, research, and presentation. This award is dedicated to authors who excel in creating informative, enlightening, and engaging works that offer valuable insights. Recipients of this award are commended for their ability to transform complex topics into accessible and compelling narratives that captivate readers and enhance our understanding.
Award Recipients
Visit the Literary Titan Book Awards page to see award information.
Resilience and Authenticity
Wake-Up Calls follows your journey from grieving daughter to funeral home owner, mentor, and advocate as you transform loss and leadership lessons into a call for humane and compassionate deathcare. Why was this an important book for you to write?
Wake-Up Calls is about much more than my own story. It’s about the moments in life that challenge us, change us, and ultimately call us to become better leaders and better people. When I unexpectedly lost my father, I was suddenly faced with leading our family funeral, cremation, and cemetery business before I felt ready. That experience, along with the many personal and professional challenges that followed, taught me lessons that I couldn’t have learned any other way.
After more than 40 years in funeral service, I realized those experiences could help others, particularly women entering a profession that’s evolving rapidly. Today, women make up a growing majority of funeral and deathcare professionals, yet many still face obstacles in acceptance, mentorship, and long-term career growth. I wanted to offer the kind of guidance I wish I’d had early in my career through honest storytelling, practical leadership lessons, and encouragement.
I’m especially proud that every dollar of proceeds from Wake-Up Calls supports non-profit organizations dedicated to advancing leadership education for both men and women in the profession. That’s an extension of the book’s purpose: investing in the future of our profession and the compassionate leaders who will shape it.
What was the most difficult personal memory to revisit while writing Wake-Up Calls?
That’s not a question I answer lightly, because writing it meant living it all over again.
The most difficult memory was the day my dad died. He died suddenly and at a young age of 53, without warning, and I was eight years into my career at Baue’s when the call came.
But the moment that truly undid me was when I stood alone in his office afterward. The room still smelled like him, pipe tobacco, and his cologne. I found the letter in his desk drawer, the one addressed to my brothers and me that said, “Open if your mother and I are gone.”
And I looked at his chair. I thought, do I dare sit in it? I sat down. And I fell apart.
Through my tears, I actually asked out loud, “Dad, what am I supposed to do now? I don’t know how to run a business. Who will help me now that you are gone?”
Writing that scene meant going back to the girl I was in that moment. A young woman, a new mother, a funeral director who could help other families navigate grief, but had no idea how to navigate her own. I had been raised to be tough. Baues didn’t cry; we plowed through, no matter what.
And there I was, crying in my father’s chair, talking to a man who could no longer answer me.
That was the hardest page of the book to write. And it’s the one I’m most grateful I didn’t skip.
What do you hope young women entering the deathcare profession take away from your story?
More than anything, I hope they see that they belong here and that their voices matter. This profession needs leaders who bring empathy, innovation, resilience and authenticity.
I hope they learn to trust their instincts and embrace opportunities even when they feel unprepared. Some of the most important growth in my own career came from difficult experiences.
I also want them to know they don’t have to do it alone. That’s a big reason I founded the Funeral Women Lead Foundation: to help women “unleash their greatness” and create opportunities for mentorship, leadership development and long-term support for them across every stage of their careers. When we invest in each other, everyone benefits.
Looking back, what leadership lesson did grief teach you that success alone never could?
Grief taught me that leadership begins with compassion. Success often focuses on achievements and outcomes, but grief reminds you that every decision ultimately affects people. Experiencing profound personal loss gave me a much deeper understanding of what the families we serve go through, and it changed how I led my team as well.
It also taught me resilience. Leadership isn’t about avoiding hardship; it’s about learning how to move through it with integrity, courage and grace.
I hope readers come away understanding that our greatest challenges often become our greatest teachers and that compassionate leadership can transform not only businesses but also the lives of others.
Author Links: GoodReads | Amazon
In Wake-Up Calls, Lisa Baue shares the pivotal moments that shaped her into one of the most influential voices in the funeral and deathcare profession. She invites you into the heart of her leadership journey by sharing deeply personal stories and hard-won business lessons, helping you expand your knowledge, develop your grit, and embrace your heart for serving others.
Wake-Up Calls is both a rallying cry and a road map. While women are the future of the profession, they continue to face challenges that cause them to leave in large numbers. Lisa’s mission is to change that. Blending memoir with mentorship, she guides women to become the confident, compassionate leaders the industry needs.
From unexpected challenges to defining breakthroughs, Lisa reveals how each “wake-up call” became a catalyst for growth. Her story is a powerful reminder that women can not only succeed but also transform the profession from the inside out.
Mind The Gap: Scaling Businesses Across Cultures
Mind the Gap, by Vincent Lauria and Stefano Pellegrino, is a thoughtful, experience-rich guide to the human complexity of global expansion. Drawing on venture capital, law, entrepreneurship, and lived cross-cultural experience, the book explores what happens when companies try to grow across borders and discover that contracts, products, hiring plans, leadership habits, and even the meaning of “yes” don’t travel as cleanly as expected. From the failed Vietnamese deal over a last-minute $20,000 request to the lessons of Golden Gate Ventures, Carro, MoneySmart, Tata and Docomo, livestreamed commerce in Asia, and the dangers of an overbroad “Africa strategy,” the book argues that scaling internationally is never just a market-entry problem. It’s a test of humility, presence, adaptation, trust, and cultural imagination.
What I enjoyed most was the book’s insistence that business is not abstract. Deals are human, the authors remind us, and I felt that idea gathering emotional weight as the chapters moved from strategy into listening, code-switching, hiring, team management, and social responsibility. The early story in Hanoi could have been treated as a simple cautionary tale about trust, but the book does something more interesting with it. It lets the discomfort linger. That moment of bafflement becomes a doorway into a larger truth: what looks irrational from one cultural vantage point may be operating by a different logic entirely. I found that both sobering and oddly hopeful. The book doesn’t romanticize cultural difference, nor does it flatten it into tidy business-school categories. Instead, it asks the reader to become more observant, more patient, and less intoxicated by their own assumptions.
The writing is clear, practical, and at its best when it lets stories carry the weight of the lesson. I especially appreciated the chapters on transcreation and cultural code-switching because they move beyond the thin idea of “localization” into something more alive. A product cannot simply be translated into another market. It may need to be reimagined through local habits, values, infrastructure, and desires. That distinction feels vital. The book is strongest when it blends framework and anecdote, as in its discussion of why remote launches can mislead companies, why an on-the-ground presence reveals truths no spreadsheet can, or why the phrase “yes” might signal acknowledgment, hesitation, politeness, or refusal depending on context. The steadiness of the advice gives the book its usefulness, while the stories keep it from becoming sterile.
I came away from Mind the Gap with the sense that global business, done well, requires a rare combination of ambition and reverence. The authors believe in expansion, but not in conquest. They believe in growth, but not in arrogance. That balance gives the book its quiet authority. It’s a smart, generous, and unusually grounded read for founders, investors, executives, operators, and anyone preparing to build across cultures, especially those who already know that success abroad will demand more than confidence and capital. I’d recommend it to readers who want a practical business book with a human pulse, one that treats cross-border growth not as a formula to master, but as a discipline of attention.
Pages: 310 | ISBN : 978-1394381487
Wake-Up Calls: A Journey of Learning to Lead and Succeed in the Funeral and Deathcare Profession
In Wake-Up Calls, Lisa Baue reflects on a lifetime in funeral service, beginning with the shattering 2 a.m. phone call announcing her father’s sudden death and moving through her transformation from grieving daughter and uncertain young funeral director into owner, mentor, coach, and advocate for women in deathcare. The book is both memoir and leadership meditation, shaped around the hard-earned triad of “head, heart, and grit.” Baue writes about inheriting responsibility before she felt ready, learning from mentors, failing in painful ways, changing the culture at Baue Funeral Homes, and finally widening her mission to support a profession that, in her view, must learn to care for its own people as tenderly as it cares for grieving families.
What struck me most was the honesty of Baue’s self-portrait. She doesn’t polish herself into an emblem of effortless resilience. She lets us see the woman sitting in her father’s office, overwhelmed by the smell of his pipe tobacco and cologne, asking aloud what she’s supposed to do now. She lets us see the absurd human details too, such as the roll of toilet paper trailing behind her as she collapses into the arms of her managers. The writing is plainspoken rather than ornate, but it often lands with quiet force because Baue trusts lived experience over performance. I found her strongest when she stays close to memory: her grandfather teaching grit through the bucking ponies Thunder and Lightning, the letter from her father urging the family to sell the business, the professional gatherings where she learned to hold her place in a man’s world, and the aching recognition that leadership can cost a family more than anyone admits in the moment.
I also appreciated the complexity of the ideas. Baue’s insistence on “head, heart, and grit” could have become a slogan, but the best chapters deepen it into something sturdier. Grit is not merely endurance. Heart is not softness. Head is not cold calculation. Together, they become a philosophy of humane leadership, one tested through grief, staffing challenges, business mistakes, work-life imbalance, and the painful 360-degree evaluation that forced her to confront how her own team felt unseen. I was especially moved by the later material on burnout and emotional boundaries, including her distinction between sympathy and empathy while serving the family of a boy whose face so closely resembled her son’s. That scene unsettled me in the best way. It reminded me that funeral service asks people to stand at the edge of other people’s devastation and remain both present and intact. Baue’s larger argument, that the deathcare profession must offer mentorship, fairer conditions, and real leadership development, especially for women entering the field, feels not abstract but embodied.
Wake-Up Calls felt to me like a book born from bruises, not theory. I closed the book with respect for Baue’s candor, her grief, her stubborn tenderness, and her refusal to separate business excellence from emotional responsibility. This is a thoughtful and affecting read for funeral directors, deathcare professionals, women in leadership, family business owners, mentors, and anyone trying to lead with both competence and a living, listening heart.
Pages: 199 | ASIN: B0FMH2SS7B
How to Succeed in Your Professional Service Business
Larry Easto’s How to Succeed in Your Professional Service Business is a practical and reflective guide for self-employed professionals who are skilled at serving clients but less comfortable with the business of finding them. Moving from mindset to marketing, Easto argues that sustainable success begins with the professional’s inner life: passion, purpose, beliefs, values, calm decision-making, and authenticity. From there, he turns toward the visible work of building relationships, clarifying an ideal client, developing a personal brand, networking, creating compelling offers, using online tools, and sustaining trust through credible authority and continuous improvement.
What I appreciated most is the book’s insistence that marketing professional services doesn’t have to feel like a costume. Easto’s best idea is that the provider and the business are deeply intertwined, which makes authenticity not a decorative virtue, but a practical necessity. I found that especially persuasive in moments like his story of setting up a law office around a pine dining table rather than an intimidating desk. That image stayed with me. It quietly expresses the whole book’s philosophy: clients are not abstractions to be captured, but people to be met with clarity, usefulness, and care. The recurring “Life Lessons” also give the book warmth. Marg’s second thought before buying a troubled business, Ben’s shift from financial planning to life coaching, and Eva’s discovery of purpose through music and seniors’ care all make the advice feel lived rather than merely assembled.
The writing has an easy, mentoring cadence. Easto can be conversational, even folksy, and that makes the material accessible without draining it of seriousness. I liked the way he folds in memorable images, from the Field of Dreams opening to the lodgepole pine after a wildfire, because those metaphors give the business advice an emotional weight. I found the stronger current to be pragmatic. Easto keeps returning to action: SWOT analysis, relationship-building, a 30-, 60-, and 90-day plan, added value, communication, and trust. The ideas are at their best when they join hope to responsibility.
I came away from the book feeling that Easto is less interested in teaching professionals how to sell themselves than in helping them become more fully themselves in the marketplace. This is a thoughtful guide for consultants, coaches, advisors, trainers, solo practitioners, and small professional service providers who want practical marketing direction without sacrificing their integrity, personality, or sense of purpose. It would be especially useful for professionals in transition, people who know they’re good at their work but need a steadier, more authentic way to invite the right clients toward it.
Pages: 262 | ASIN : B0DGNK4PXC
Beginning Is The Key Step
Numeral M: Volume II is a practical guide to saving, emphasizing that discipline, structure, and repetition lead to meaningful savings within a year. Who did you have in mind as your ideal reader while writing this book?
My ideal reader is anyone who has a goal or a need to begin saving and requires an avenue or guidance on how to do so. This could be from a young adult, parent begining a savings account for their child, parent starting a college savings account, those saving to purchase a home, seniors saving to add to to their retirement income, someone saving for a wedding, purchase of a car, etc.
Do you personally favor one of the methods, or does it depend entirely on the individual?
I use the weekly technique this is actually how I began savings journey and continue to use it to this day. The techniques in this book will vary based on the individual goal and amount to save.
Many readers face emergencies, fluctuating income, or unexpected expenses. How should they adapt your methods when life doesn’t go according to plan?
When life doesn’t go according to plan start. It doesn’t matter how much you start saving as long as you begin. Beginning is the key step to achievement of your goal.
What does financial stability mean to you personally?
Financial stability in my eyes is having little to no debt and being able to use my funds to bless/help others.
Author Links: Amazon | Facebook
A little about me … I was born and raised in St. Thomas, US Virgin Islands. I have worked in the mortgage compliance industry for over seventeen years, the last two as a Regulatory Analyst and Advisor. I am also certified as a CFCP and a MCPC. Throughout my entire career, I have come to understand that there is such a tremendous need for simplified educational materials as reflected in this book. My readers have requested that I create a simple, easy to understand way to save. This book gives you just that, using actual techniques and numbers. I leave it up to you, my readers, to choose which ones will work for you and go for it.
Remember to discipline oneself and don’t give up!
If this book is able to help just one person, it was worth it!
See you on the next read and many blessings on your savings goal journey!
