Blog Archives
God Is Good: Simply the Gospel of Jesus Christ
God Is Good: Simply the Gospel of Jesus Christ by Ivon Hartness is a heartfelt, chapter-by-chapter walk through the Gospel of Matthew, written as both a teaching guide and a personal testimony. Hartness begins with Jesus’ genealogy and birth, lingers over Joseph’s quiet righteousness, follows the wise men, John the Baptist, the Sermon on the Mount, the temptations in the wilderness, the parables, the cross, and finally the resurrection and Great Commission. The book’s central conviction is steady and unmistakable: God is good, Jesus is the promised Savior, and the Gospel is not merely information to study but truth meant to remake the heart.
What moved me most was the book’s sincerity. Hartness writes like someone who isn’t trying to impress a classroom but to sit beside a reader with an open Bible between them. I felt that especially in the early chapters, when Joseph’s choice to protect Mary becomes more than a familiar Christmas detail. It becomes a picture of restraint, mercy, and obedience under pressure. The same warmth appears in the discussion of the wise men, where Hartness gently corrects popular nativity assumptions without sounding smug, and in the resurrection chapter, where the stone rolled away is treated not as a theatrical flourish but as an invitation to look inside the empty tomb. That kind of devotional imagination gives the book its pulse.
Hartness is passionate, direct, and deeply personal. The book explores themes of grace, repentance, obedience, spiritual warfare, and the new heart, with a preacher’s urgency. For me, that made the book feel wonderfully earnest in places. When he writes about the Beatitudes as a progression of the soul, or about Jesus resisting temptation through Scripture, the theology feels authentic. I didn’t always find the style polished in a literary sense, but I found it honest, emotionally present, and anchored by a genuine desire to help readers encounter Christ rather than merely analyze Him.
I found God Is Good to be an affectionate, plainspoken, and conviction-filled guide to Matthew, one that values clarity over complexity and devotion. Its concluding emphasis on the risen Christ gives the whole book a fitting sense of arrival, like a long walk ending in morning light. I’d recommend it especially to newer believers, small-group readers, or Christians who want a warm devotional companion through Matthew.
Pages: 199
Nurse Dorothea® Presents Distress Tolerance and Contentment, and Why We Need to Develop Those Skills
Distress Tolerance and Contentment and Why We Need to Develop Those Skills, by Michael Dow, frames itself as an after-school class led by Nurse Dorothea, who speaks directly to children about how big feelings work, what unhealthy coping can look like, and which practical tools can help. The first half focuses on distress tolerance, naming triggers, noticing distorted thoughts, and practicing strategies like “emotional surfing,” STOP, TIPP, ACCEPTS, and radical acceptance, while the second half turns toward problem-solving and contentment, urging kids to tell needs from wants, protect their time, and build steadier inner ground.
As a parent, I admired the book’s seriousness. It doesn’t speak to children as if they are decorative little optimists; it assumes they can confront anxiety, avoidance, shame, impulsivity, and loneliness with honesty. I found that bracing and, in places, genuinely heartening. There is a humane impulse underneath the instruction, the repeated insistence that mental health can be discussed openly, that distress is survivable, and that skills can be learned even when feelings arrive like weather fronts. This is much more didactic than lyrical. It reads less like a conventional picture book and more like a classroom script or guided workbook.
I liked the book’s practical texture. It asks children to journal, reflect, pause, observe, compare choices, and rehearse healthier responses rather than merely absorb a moral and move on. As a parent, I can see real value in that. I could imagine reading sections of it with a child who is old enough to discuss them, then stopping to talk rather than hurrying to the next page. I also think some families will need to mediate the material carefully: the examples of self-harm, binge eating, smoking, vaping, and drug use are frank, and the vocabulary lands closer to social-emotional curriculum than bedtime fare.
I would recommend Dow’s guide most strongly for older children, tweens, middle-grade readers, counselors, classrooms, and families looking for children’s mental health nonfiction, social-emotional learning, psychology for kids, or therapeutic read-alouds rather than a snug narrative picture book. In spirit, it sits closer to an educational companion than to the emotional parable of The Rabbit Listened, where that book comforts through quiet metaphor, this one teaches through direct instruction. This book is useful and earnest, less a lullaby than a toolkit, and sometimes that is exactly what a child needs.
Pages: 99
Nurse Dorothea® Presents Bullying and How to Create a Culture to Prevent It
Bullying and How to Create a Culture to Prevent It, by Michael Dow, feels less like a conventional storybook than a guided classroom session turned into a book. Nurse Dorothea leads an after-school mental health club and walks a group of children through what bullying is, the forms it can take, and the damage it can do, from insults and exclusion to cyberbullying, humiliation, extortion, and workplace cruelty. Along the way, different kids speak up with examples from school, work, and daily life, and the book keeps returning to the same core conviction: bullying shrinks a person’s sense of self, but communities can answer it with courage, candor, and mutual protection.
The book doesn’t treat bullying as a minor social hiccup or a rite of passage. It treats it as something corrosive, something that stains a whole environment. I found that persuasive, especially in the moments where the children’s comments give the lesson a human pulse, like Frida describing insults as social pollution, or Azamat recalling the humiliation of being shamed by a teacher in front of classmates. Those moments give the book a bruised, lived-in feeling. Even when the language is direct and didactic, there’s an unmistakable sincerity underneath it, a real desire to protect children and to name harms that adults often dismiss too quickly.
The writing is earnest and clear, and it often speaks in declarations, so it can feel more instructional. This isn’t a book driven by plot so much as by accumulation. Example after example, consequence after consequence. Yet I didn’t mind that because the ideas are unusually expansive for a children’s book. It isn’t content to say bullying hurts feelings. It follows the damage outward into anxiety, isolation, sleep problems, burnout, lower performance, family strain, even housing instability, and fear of deportation. That reach gives the book a grave, almost civic imagination. It wants children to understand not only that bullying is cruel, but that it distorts whole cultures if nobody interrupts it. I respected that ambition because the book is trying to build conscience, not just deliver a tidy lesson.
This book is blunt, compassionate, and deeply invested in the idea that young readers can handle serious conversations about power, shame, and self-worth. I would absolutely recommend it for classrooms, counselors, parents, and older children who are ready to talk openly about bullying in a structured, reflective way. It’s a children’s book for readers who need language for what they’ve lived through, and for communities trying to become braver on purpose.
Pages: 123
A Life Manual-Finally!
Gerry O’Reilly’s A Life Manual (Finally) is less a conventional self-help book and more of a sprawling personal handbook for everyday living. It presents itself as an eighteen-month course in becoming more cultured, capable, and self-possessed, beginning with cleanliness, posture, manners, and presentation, then widening into cooking, writing, finances, religion, languages, flags, politics, nature, survival, psychology, the arts, and even antiques. The book openly announces that range and ambition from the start, with O’Reilly calling it “a life encyclopaedia after all,” and that description fits. It’s a manual in the old-fashioned sense: part guidebook, part reference work, part encouragement from someone who wants to pass along everything he’s gathered.
What gives the book its identity is O’Reilly’s voice. He writes like someone talking across a kitchen table, excited to share a stack of notes, hard-won habits, and odd bits of trivia that he genuinely thinks might improve your life. That tone is there in lines like, “You are about to commence your own journey,” which captures the book’s basic spirit: he’s not lecturing from a distance, he’s trying to accompany the reader through a long process of self-education. Even when the material gets dense or idiosyncratic, the voice keeps it personal. You always know there’s a specific person behind the advice, and that makes the book feel more human than polished.
The book is at its most distinctive when it embraces its huge scope. O’Reilly doesn’t stop at etiquette or grooming. He wants to teach the reader how to move through the world with more awareness, from table manners and bar behavior to cultural literacy and practical resilience. That’s why the same volume can move from “proper presentation” and restaurant conduct to tolerance, spirituality, and detailed pandemic and terrain survival planning. Read as a whole, the book becomes a portrait of the life O’Reilly admires: disciplined, curious, courteous, informed, and ready for almost anything. It’s not just about refinement. It’s about building a broad base of knowledge that he believes can steady a person in daily life.
What I found most interesting is that A Life Manual is really a map of one man’s idea of self-formation. O’Reilly tells the reader that this grew out of his own effort to become “more cultured and refined,” and that sense of private project turned public book gives it a memorable character. The result is a book full of instructions, opinions, encouragement, and personal conviction, all arranged into a long curriculum of improvement. It can feel eccentric because it reflects one person’s worldview so directly, but that’s also why it holds attention. You’re not reading bland advice assembled by committee. You’re reading a deeply individual attempt to answer a big question: what should a person know to live well and carry themselves with dignity?
A Life Manual is a big, earnest, wide-ranging compendium that wants to be useful, motivating, and memorable all at once. This book is a conversation starter, a personal syllabus, and a running attempt to make everyday life more intentional. Even when it wanders, it stays committed to that central mission, and that commitment gives the book its real charm.
Pages: 3054 | ASIN : B0GNR9J4NF
Cats are Good at Hiding Illness
The Cat Owner’s Guide to Health Emergencies provides cat owners with concrete methods for coping with the most difficult feline crises, including solid answers on when to wait and watch and when to act quickly. Why was this an important book for you to write?
As an emergency veterinarian, I frequently witness the impact of the knowledge gap among cat owners, particularly when it comes to emergencies. Cats are notorious for hiding illness, making it challenging for owners to recognize when something is wrong. While we do see cats brought into the emergency room for minor issues that likely could have waited, we also encounter many cases where subtle, yet crucial, signs were overlooked, leading to unnecessary and often unsafe delays in care. Cats are not small dogs— they will conceal illness for as long as possible. That’s why it’s so important for owners to be prepared and knowledgeable about which symptoms may indicate a serious problem.
My goal with this book is to equip cat owners with the education and tools they need to confidently assess their cat’s health. This book offers vital insight into common emergencies and toxicities, while teaching practical methods for evaluating a cat at home. While no one wants to think about emergencies, especially when their cat is healthy, I strongly encourage a degree of advanced preparation to reduce stress when emergencies do arise.
I believe this book can be a valuable resource for all cat owners, but its greatest benefit may be for newer cat owners, adopters, and fosters.
What gap were you hoping to fill that other pet care books don’t address?
It’s no surprise that I love books, and I deeply respect and admire all those out there aimed at improving pet lives by supporting their owners. That being said, I noticed a few patterns in some of the existing books that I wanted to approach differently. Many books on this topic offer valuable and accurate information but can be visually overwhelming, often feeling like reading long articles or textbooks. Personally, I find those types of books challenging to get through, and I’m sure many pet owners feel the same. My goal with this book was to present information in manageable, digestible chunks that are easy on the eyes. To further enhance usability, I color-coded the chapters for quick reference, so owners can easily identify sections even when the book is closed.
Additionally, I’ve seen pet care books that are more story-based, using anecdotes to illustrate key lessons. While these books are excellent for teaching, I believe they’re not ideal for quick reference. My book is designed to serve as a practical guide, both to prepare owners before emergencies happen and to provide clear reference points if a concern arises.
What sets my book apart is my background as an emergency veterinarian. The scenarios highlighted in the book are ones I encounter regularly in my practice and conversations I have with pet owners often. The knowledge and expertise I bring to the table offer pet owners practical tools and a deeper understanding of their pets’ health, all presented in a way that is friendly to non-medical individuals and designed for quick, easy reference when it’s needed most.
You highlight specific dangers like urinary obstruction and open-mouth breathing. Why are these so frequently misunderstood?
Urinary obstructions and open-mouth breathing are two excellent examples in the book where misconceptions and lack of knowledge can result in missing vital signs. Let me explain why these issues are often misunderstood.
Urinary concerns, particularly in male cats, are extremely dangerous. Male cats can develop urinary blockages that, if not addressed quickly, can be fatal. Unfortunately, many people are unaware of this. A common misconception is that urinary changes in cats are always due to a urinary tract infection, which is more common in female cats. In fact, it’s really quite uncommon in males. This misunderstanding can lead to delays in seeking care, allowing the condition to worsen. Another factor is that cat owners don’t always pay close attention to their cat’s use of the litter box. Unlike dogs, whose bathroom habits are more noticeable during walks, cats’ litter boxes are often hidden from view, making it easy to miss important signs. While urinary obstructions can’t always be prevented, I believe that greater awareness could lead to earlier recognition and, ultimately, better outcomes.
Open-mouth breathing in cats is another issue where education can make a significant difference. Cats are not small dogs, and this distinction is crucial when it comes to respiratory issues. Many people mistake open-mouth breathing in cats for normal panting behavior seen in dogs. However, cats are obligate nasal breathers—meaning they breathe only through their nose. Since they do not breathe through their mouths effectively, open-mouth breathing (panting) is a sign of respiratory distress that should never be ignored. Note that overheating and pain can sometimes lead to short bursts of open-mouth breathing—which should resolve quickly.
Because cats are so adept at hiding symptoms, it’s important for owners to know how to assess their cat’s health. In the book, I not only highlight key warning signs like these but also provide practical tools for owners to evaluate their cat’s hydration, posture, gum color, behavior, and more. The goal is to help owners answer the critical question: Is this behavior normal or abnormal?
If a reader remembers just one thing from your book in a crisis, what do you want it to be?
There are a few key points I hope readers take away, but the most important is this: cats are incredibly good at hiding illness, often masking problems until they become serious. Even small changes in behavior or health can signal a bigger concern underneath. If you notice something concerning, it’s crucial to have a veterinarian assess the cat.
When preparing to transport the cat, safety is key. Make sure the cat is secured in a carrier, and if necessary, gently wrap them in a towel to get them safely into the carrier. Also, remember that the veterinary team is also invested in your cat’s wellbeing. Effective communication is essential, so share what you’ve observed at home in a clear, chronological order if possible. We’re always most successful when we work together—pet families and veterinary teams.
How Not to Up and Die from Lack of Sleep: A Doctor’s Guide to Better Sleep That Boosts Your Energy, Reverses Exhaustion & Restores Your Health
How Not to Up and Die from Lack of Sleep is a broad and practical guide to sleep that blends memoir, popular science, and self-help in a way that feels authentic. Author Jerome Puryear structures it in four parts, moving from the biology of sleep and the mechanics of common disorders into the punishing realities of shift work, then out toward treatment options, wind-down practices, supplements, sleep tech, and even AI-assisted care. The central argument is simple but forceful: sleep isn’t a decorative wellness habit, it’s foundational, and modern life has made casualties of far more people than we like to admit. That idea lands because he keeps returning to concrete human scenes, from his own season of new-parent exhaustion and predawn drives while fighting microsleeps, to later discussions of insomnia, apnea, caffeine, burnout, and the stubborn fantasy that we can “catch up later.”
Puryear writes like someone who has both treated exhaustion and been humiliated by it, and that gives the book a warmth a more clinical manual might never earn. I especially liked the way he threads a humane idea through the whole thing: that many of us are, in effect, “circadian shift workers” now, even if we don’t clock in at midnight. That reframing is smart, and it opens the book up beyond nurses, residents, and first responders to the ordinary overextended reader staring into a phone at 12:47 a.m. Some of his best passages arrive when he steps back from raw advice and notices the culture around sleep, like the historical section on segmented sleep and the sharp observations about hustle culture teaching people to wear deprivation like a medal. Those moments give the book texture and keep it from becoming just another optimization handbook.
Its great strength is range. That range makes it read more like an all-in compendium. The transitions from deeply personal material to reference-style sections on medications, cannabis compounds, supplements, devices, and AI can be quick. Still, I liked that he doesn’t romanticize “natural” solutions or demonize technology outright. A body scan, progressive muscle relaxation, and a quieter bedroom sit beside CPAP data, virtual assessments, and AI tools such as predictive sleep-stage models, which gives the book a welcome intellectual balance. I appreciated that the governing instinct is practical rather than trendy. He wants readers to build a durable life around sleep, not chase one magical fix.
I found this an earnest, useful, and surprisingly friendly book, one that is at its best when its science is lit from within by fatigue, humility, and hard-earned conviction. I’d recommend it especially to people who are exhausted enough to feel slightly estranged from themselves, along with shift workers, new parents, busy professionals, and readers who want a sleep book that acknowledges both physiology and the emotional loneliness of being worn thin. This is a book for people who don’t need sleep romanticized. They need it restored to its rightful dignity.
Pages: 350
The Cat Owner’s Guide to Health Emergencies: Essential Tips to Recognize, Respond, and Prepare for Cat Emergencies
The Cat Owner’s Guide to Health Emergencies is a practical, veterinarian-written manual that tries to do something genuinely difficult: give anxious cat owners enough clarity to act fast without pretending they can replace a clinic. It moves from preparation into crisis, covering emergency planning, the ten most common feline emergencies, the ten toxicities Dr. Gal Chivvis sees as especially important, the signs that distinguish “watch closely” from “go now,” and a final toolkit of checklists and flowcharts meant to steady people when their nerves are likely to fail them. What stayed with me most was how concrete it is. This is a book that doesn’t just say “be prepared.” It asks you to know your nearest ER, keep a carrier ready, think through CPR decisions before panic takes over, and learn what a dangerous breathing pattern or an abnormal bladder actually looks like.
The book is calm without being bland, and authoritative without sliding into that chilly, overconfident tone that a lot of medical guides fall into. Chivvis writes like someone who has seen frightened people arrive at the worst possible hour and understands that information is only useful if it can still be absorbed under stress. The best sections have a sobering vividness. Her explanation of a linear foreign body, where swallowed string can make the intestines “accordion,” is memorable in exactly the right way. So is the repeated insistence not to pull visible string, not to dismiss open-mouth breathing, not to confuse urinary obstruction with constipation, and not to wait for toxicity symptoms before acting. I also appreciated the small humane details, like the note that visitation may sometimes be discouraged while a cat is in oxygen because seeing their owner can worsen distress. Moments like that give the book emotional credibility. It knows the medicine, but it also knows the strange helplessness of loving an animal you can’t fully question or comfort.
The prose is clear and serviceable, and the repetition built into the format can make the middle stretch feel instructional. Each section follows a familiar sequence of signs, causes, what to do, common interventions, and prevention, which is excellent for reference. I found that structure more helpful than limiting. It mirrors the thinking the book wants to teach. Notice. Assess. Don’t improvise recklessly. Call. Go. The ideas themselves are sensible and grounded in lived emergency practice. I especially liked the way the book pairs high-stakes warnings with prevention that feels doable: keeping cats indoors to reduce abscess risk, treating panting as abnormal, managing litter box stress, recognizing the danger of lilies and ibuprofen, and using simple observational tools like resting respiratory rate, hydration checks, and pain scoring. That practical intelligence gives the book its real force.
I found this to be a useful, reassuring, and refreshingly unsentimental guide. It offers preparedness, lucidity, and a steadier hand when things go sideways. I’d recommend it especially for first-time cat owners, multi-cat households, and anyone whose instinct in a crisis is to freeze, second-guess, or start doom-scrolling. It’s a caring and trustworthy book, and in a book about emergencies, that matters most.
Pages: 195 | ISBN : 978-1967320004
You’re Not Too Old, and It’s Not Too Late: Weekly Practices for Meaning, Mindfulness, and New Possibilities at Midlife and Beyond
You’re Not Too Old, and It’s Not Too Late is a warm, research-informed companion for midlife and later adulthood, structured as fifty-two short chapters of reflection and practice rather than a single linear argument. Author Ilene Berns-Zare writes out of positive psychology, mindfulness, and lived experience, urging readers to rethink aging not as a narrowing corridor but as a season still open to meaning, creativity, resilience, and renewal. The book moves easily between scientific findings and intimate personal images: a chain link fence that comes to stand for fear of what lies beyond retirement, the Japanese idea of wabi-sabi as a way of honoring cracks rather than hiding them, and a red maple tree whose stubborn growth becomes a tender emblem of endurance. What emerges is less a manifesto than a weekly invitation to ask better questions of one’s life and to answer them with attention, gentleness, and action.
Berns-Zare is earnest, but not brittle. She writes like someone who has had to coax herself, morning by morning, toward steadier ground. I felt that especially in the passages where she admits to feeling unsettled by aging, by loss, by transition, and then slowly turns those anxieties into inquiry instead of denial. The chapter built around the gratitude letter to her high school music teacher gave the book an unexpected depth of feeling. It reminded me that her central subject isn’t really optimization. It’s reverence. Reverence for teachers, for family, for inner life, for the possibility that even now, after disappointment or fatigue or grief, something unfinished in us may still want to bloom.
I also admired the way the book keeps trying to braid ideas with practice. Berns-Zare returns to a familiar constellation of themes: growth mindset, gratitude, mindfulness, purpose, supportive relationships, self-compassion, and flow. I think these are sturdy and worthwhile ideas, and she presents them with clarity and conviction. Because the chapters are designed as weekly meditations, a few insights arrive in slightly different clothing. Even so, the writing has a sincere luminosity that carried me through those repetitions. I was especially moved by her refusal to make aging sound glamorous. She makes it relatable. Bodies falter, identities shift, energy changes, grief enters the room, and yet she keeps pressing toward a broader, kinder language for what a later life can be.
I found this to be a generous and thoughtful book. It offers companionship, perspective, and a believable faith that a person can still grow wiser, more open, more alive. I’d recommend it most to readers in midlife and beyond who want reflective, research-aware encouragement rather than hard-edged self-help, and also to anyone standing at a threshold, wondering whether change still belongs to them. This book’s answer is yes.
Pages: 252 | ISBN : 978-1957354958
