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Rise & Climb: Finding Purpose Through Pain
Rise and Climb is a candid memoir about rebuilding a life through discipline, creativity, family, and a willingness to confront the past. Ben Barbic begins with a childhood shaped by dramatic upheaval, including the destruction of his family home in a wildfire, years of instability, and the loss of their rebuilt home after the Loma Prieta earthquake. From there, he traces the anxiety, rebellion, addiction, arrests, ambition, relationships, and hard-earned turning points that followed. The book’s real subject is transformation as a daily practice. Barbic doesn’t present change as one grand breakthrough. He shows it happening through small decisions repeated until they become a different way of living.
Music gives the story its pulse. Each chapter is connected to a song, an artist, or a period in Barbic’s creative development, making the book feel like a memoir with its own soundtrack. Willie Nelson, punk, hip-hop, reggae, home recordings, basement studios, and live performances become markers of where he was emotionally at different stages of his life. Music is more than a career goal here. It’s where he goes to process fear, preserve memories, test his voice, and turn disorder into something he can shape. Weightlifting plays a similar role, giving physical form to the book’s central belief that strength can be developed through steady resistance.
Barbic’s conversational voice makes even the darkest material approachable. He writes openly about panic attacks, substance abuse, destructive behavior, jail, grief, fatherhood, marriage, business, and the complicated distance between having potential and using it well. The honesty carries weight because he doesn’t separate his progress from the people who helped make it possible. His parents, grandparents, wife, children, friends, mentors, and musical collaborators form an important part of the climb. At the end of each chapter, the “Finding Purpose Through Pain” reflections turn personal episodes into direct, practical observations about identity, resilience, reinvention, loss, and responsibility.
What emerges is both a life story and a working philosophy. Barbic makes a persuasive case for protecting the pursuits that keep us grounded, showing up before conditions feel perfect, telling the truth about our mistakes, and treating purpose as something built through action. The book’s cumulative rhythm matters: setback, reflection, adjustment, repetition, growth. By the end, success feels less like a destination than a way of moving through the world with greater clarity, gratitude, and care for others. Rise and Climb turns a life marked by fire, fear, music, and second chances into a powerful reminder that purpose isn’t found after the pain; it’s built from it.
Pages: 264 | ASIN : B0FKLFRYGJ
Love of the Community
Run traces the extraordinary story of Wilmot Collins, whose life carried him from the devastation of Liberia’s civil war to the mayor’s office in Helena, Montana. As both a writer and filmmaker, how did your background influence your approach to the book?
I came to this project without any direct connections to an extraordinary life such as Wilmot’s. But I DO have an abiding interest in stories about courage, resilience, and survival. And Wilmot’s is chock full of all those things. (I explored some of these themes in my feature documentary work, FEBRUARY ONE: THE STORY OF THE GREENSBORO FOUR, about the 4 young men who took on the entire racial order in the U.S. when they sat down for service at the Greensboro Woolworth Store on Feb 1, 1960, thus unleashing much of the youthful driving force behind the civil rights movement of the 1960s. So Wilmot’s treacherous journey from the Liberian civil war (which killed over 250k of his fellow countrymen, including two of his own brothers, one of whom was beheaded) was a powerful attraction to me: how could someone take on that much danger and not only survive an ocean way (in Helena, MT) but thrive, indeed LEAD an entire community? Incredible.
A recurring theme throughout the book is that leadership begins with service. How did you see that idea reflected in Wilmot Collins’s life? Why do you think so many people connected with his message?
People were attracted to him because over the course of more than 20 years living in Helena, they had come to know and respect, even admire, him. He demonstrated his love of the community and commitment to being an American citizen–by joining the US military; serving as a youth counselor, coaching youth soccer, even singing karaoke at local bars. To him, it was all about being a public servant–listening and learning what the community needed and wanted, and then serving those needs. NOT styling himself as some ideologue or professional politician. We could learn a lot today about his ‘politics of decency’, far healthier than our current polarized, hyper-partisan politics of destruction.
The book devotes considerable attention to the long process of immigration and family reunification. Why was that aspect of the story so important to include?
Family was and is a pivotal feature of Wilmot’s life–and that goes for his wife, Maddie, and their two kids (now grown), Jaymie and Bliss. Everything was done by majority vote in their household. The difficulty and long wait he had to endure (his own daughter, born two months after arriving with her mother, Maddie, was two years old before a patient, but long-suffering Wilmot, could join them in America for the first time. But being resilient, persistent, and pursuing education (which got Maddie over to the US in the first place–to pursue a nursing program at Carroll College in Helena, MT) were binding threads in their family tradition.
What do you hope readers will remember most about Wilmot Collins and his family?
I hope readers remember how love takes courage and resilience, and the Collins family epitomized those traits. Also, I hope people will see in their remarkable journey the essence of the American Dream at work – a fast-fading goal for many native born Americans, but on vivid and compelling display with Wilmot Collins!
Author Links: GoodReads | X (Twitter) | Facebook | Website | Amazon
Run tells the inspiring story of Wilmot Collins, who fled the brutal and bloody Liberian Civil War in the early 1990s—where over 250,000 Liberians were killed, including two of Collins’s brothers—and managed to make it to Helena, Montana, one of the whitest places on the planet. Enduring and overcoming racism and xenophobia, he joined the Montana National Guard, became an active member of the Helena community, and in 2017 rose to become mayor of the capital city and the first Black mayor in Montana’s history.
Collins garnered a national reputation not only as a beloved Democratic politician in a ruby red state but also as a shining example of how being a racial and political outsider in a highly partisan society can be transformed into an effective and engaging form of political leadership.
Wilmot’s story highlights the tragic decision to abandon one’s homeland when it turns on its people. Collins came from a highly educated family and, when civil war erupted, he was fresh out of college working as a middle school teacher at Monrovia’s SOS Children’s Village School. He had recently found a great companion, Maddie Muna, whom he met after college graduation. They became fast friends and soon life partners in marriage. But they first had to negotiate forces threatening their very lives.
Through extensive interviews and his masterful command of storytelling, award-winning author and filmmaker Daniel Blake Smith tells how Wilmot and Maddie, through great perseverance, plenty of ingenuity, and inspiring displays of generosity, journeyed to the United States and have made their new home a better place for everyone. Run offers an emotional, inspiring, and deeply personal story of survival, racial injustice, political hope, and the challenges one family faced to realize the American dream.
Historical Service
Lying in a Tomb shares your story that begins with scientific curiosity and gradually unfolds into something far more personal. At what point did you realize that the book would become as much a memoir as a work of historical investigation?
During medical school, other students and I were given the opportunity to take electives. One such class was “Creative Writing in Medicine.” As I learned more about the course, I realized that I might have a space in which to share some of my journal entries. The feedback I received from the professor and my classmates was especially positive after I shared the story about the curse. The professor, Dr. Scott Frank, advised, “If you ever decide to publish any of this, I imagine a collection of short stories…” Some forty years later, I took his advice and somewhat begrudgingly acknowledged that this had become a memoir.
You began by asking a scientific question: how were these bodies naturally preserved, and ended your memoir with an ethical one: who has the right to display, rename, photograph, and profit from them? How did that shift happen, and when did you first feel it coming?
I am embarrassed to admit that I was rather immune to these concerns when I was younger. I also suspect I was behaving clinically long before I learned this term while training to become a physician. It was a rather long process, but the initial sense of injustice occurred during those early years of research when I learned that a mother could not have her child removed from the museum even though she and her family may have paid the perpetuity rights. Shortly thereafter, when I discovered the photo of debutantes posing with the mummies (circa 1930’s), I was again discomfited by the idea of juxtaposing the daughters of the town’s elite beside the naked bodies of poor souls whose families could not afford to pay the perpetuity rights. Revisiting Guanajuato in 2024 and 2025, while reading the latest protocols for museology and the handling of human remains, I felt a more profound guilt over my lack of activism. It was especially troubling to learn about the “Traveling Mummies.”
You include photographs, journal excerpts, historical research, and chapter soundtracks. What does each of those elements do that prose alone couldn’t, and how did you decide what earned a place in the book?
I am a visual person: a visual learner and a visual communicator. I also hear a soundtrack in my mind that accompanies my daily activities as well as memories. (I do not think I am unique in this way.) As I put the book together, I remembered one of Laura Esquivel’s books, which I had read over 20 years ago. In “The Law of Love,” Esquivel creates a multimedia novel, with paintings and instructions in the text to pause and play a piece of music from the included CD. It was so charming… the author would announce that it was time for a danzón, and I’d play the CD and dance before resuming the story. I think this book gave me permission to do something similar.
The memoir ends with you choosing to put yourself on display; deliberately, honestly, on your own terms. What does that choice feel like now that the book exists, and what do you hope the mummies’ families find in it?
Well, it was easier to expose myself now than it would have been a few years ago. However, the most uncomfortable part of this story is not me. It’s the fact that I am re-exposing the mummified remains to a larger audience. While I am providing an educational and historical service, the exposure is still at their expense. I struggle with this, rationalizing that I must share my experience while trying to inspire more respect and better solutions. I hope the families might perceive me as a compassionate witness. While I fear potential criticism or backlash for this publication, I can understand it.
Author Links: GoodReads | Amazon
Mummies like…
“La Bruja” (the witch), who was an herbalist and healer in life, but in death, the museum imprisoned her mummified remains behind iron bars, with a thick chain and a padlock sealing the cage.
“San Martincito” (little Saint Martin), an infant displayed with a black rosary hanging from his frozen, tiny fingers and draped across his body. His mother says, “I’ve tried to get him out, tried to get him properly sepulchered…But I am nobody.”
“World’s Tiniest Mummy,” a six-month-old fetus with a rusty thread of metal snaked around its neck, securing it to the mother’s wrist.
These mummies became movie stars. In 1979, the same year Jeannette first encountered them, Werner Herzog opened his film Nosferatu with a slow, visual progression across these naturally mummified corpses, propped against the stone wall of the catacomb.
In 1983, as a Fulbright Fellow, Jeannette returned to study these accidental mummies. Granted unprecedented access, she spent nights alone among the mummies, touching, learning, and sketching them in the quiet darkness.
The men in the Mexican patriarchy praised Jeannette’s brilliance and then tried to pose her, too, as a submissive exhibit. After her fairytale romance and engagement to a 53-year-old businessman turned brutal, she fled what had become a gilded prison, a place steeped in alcoholism and violence. She left Mexico for her Ohio home, and rebuilt her life as a medical student, mother, and—eventually—a physician.
In 2024, Jeannette’s passion for the mummies endured. She returned to Mexico to revisit the Guanajuato mummies and complete the work she started.
Lying in a Tomb is her story, and she welcomes you inside.
False Realities
A Grand Façade is a compelling collection of personal essays, short stories, and an extended memoir centered on music. Why was this an important book for you to write?
I suppose posterity would be a partial answer, but I’ve had many people suggest that I write about our experience pursuing our band. I then realized that other essays I’ve written about my life before and after those pivotal events helped to put it (and me) in context. Finally, I felt I could add some short stories I was most proud of, each which explored what became the overarching theme of the collection—the illusions or false realities we may believe or pursue, and those we think we are or pretend to be.
Were there moments where your memories surprised you as you wrote them down?
Not so much surprised, but rather clarified or further decoded who I was at the time, and why I reacted certain ways. The memoir certainly dives deep into my insecurities, but traveling back to that time in my head made me realize more clearly what drove some of my anxieties. I think, if anything, the one thing that surprised me the most was how condensed that period of our lives actually was. It was an amazing realization that one of the most significant and dramatic parts of my life—from quitting our careers and selling our house to the day to our last performance—was less than three years.
Looking back, do you think success means something different now than it did during those years of performing and recording?
I think the very concept of success is, perhaps, the biggest façade of all. Those who have never taken a big risk or pursued a dream consider me a successful writer simply for doing it. I look at any author who can make it a career and I call that successful. They probably look at mass-market authors and see that as true success. There are probably mass market authors looking at a Pulitzer prize-winning author and seeing that as true success. We equate success with happiness or fulfillment, but success has no clear metric. When we pursued our band, I had been fixated on an illusion I called “success.” After writing this, I realize that what matters has very little to do with any preconceived notion of success, and everything to do with lived experience. In that respect, I’ve grown to understand that I have been successful in filling my life with worthwhile pursuits. That said, one also has to resolve and accept the disappointment that will most often come with that.
If readers take away just one idea from A Grand Façade, what would you hope it is?
Don’t pursue the dream, pursue the experience, and embrace each moment while you live it.
Author Links: GoodReads | Facebook | Website
A Grand Façade: Stories of Truth and Fiction
James L. Peters’s A Grand Façade is a wide-ranging collection of personal essays, short stories, and an extended musical memoir. Peters brings the pieces together through a recurring interest in the fronts people build around their ambitions, fears, relationships, and failures. The nonfiction moves from childhood rebellion and family memories to cancer, grief, creativity, travel, and mortality, while the fiction gives those same concerns more symbolic and unsettling forms. The centerpiece is the lengthy title memoir, which follows Peters, his wife Melanie, and his friend Tim through years of writing, recording, performing, and trying to turn a deeply personal band into something sustainable. The book’s introduction openly frames the collection as an attempt to use both fact and invention to reach emotional truth, and that idea gives the varied material a clear center.
Peters is at his best when he’s examining his younger self with equal parts fondness, embarrassment, and honesty. Essays about stealing school silverware, giving a friend the cold shoulder over a teenage party, or misunderstanding his father’s disapproval are funny at first, then gradually reveal regret, compassion, or a changed perspective. That same self-scrutiny makes the musical memoir engaging even for readers who’ve never played in a band. It’s full of shabby studios, awkward gigs, creative breakthroughs, bruised egos, financial strain, and friendships tested by competing ideas of success. Peters doesn’t turn the adventure into a simple victory or cautionary tale. He treats it as a worthwhile, damaging, exhilarating choice that helped shape his marriage, career, art, and understanding of himself.
The short fiction broadens the collection’s emotional range. “Dirty Vowels” uses an overheard couple’s noisy sex life to expose the frustrations inside another marriage, while “Rabbits in the Mouths of Wolves” turns mysterious bags of garbage into a tense parable about status, fairness, and social conformity. “Twinkle” approaches cosmic catastrophe through an intimate human relationship, and “The Muse on Your Back” captures the loneliness, addiction, and manufactured persona surrounding a rising musician. Some of the older stories show their age through heavier exposition or symbolism, and the memoir’s extensive chronology occasionally slows the pace. Still, Peters’s directness and wry humor keep the book personable. He’s willing to be the fool, the wounded son, the difficult bandmate, and the frightened patient, which gives the collection warmth without sanding away its harsher edges.
I’d recommend A Grand Façade most strongly to readers who enjoy memoirs about ordinary Midwestern lives, creative ambition, aging, family, and the complicated afterlife of youthful dreams. Musicians and other artists who’ve spent years pursuing recognition will especially appreciate its account of the work, compromise, friendship, and stubborn hope behind an independent creative life. It’ll also suit readers who like collections that move between candid autobiography and speculative or literary fiction while returning to a shared set of questions. Peters’s central insight is persuasive: a failed dream can still produce a meaningful life, and looking honestly at the façade may reveal something more valuable than the success once imagined.
The Last Revision: A Novel
Patrick Smith’s The Last Revision is a reflective, deeply personal novel about memory, aging, love, grief, creativity, and the uncertain future waiting for humanity. The narrator, Bill, looks back over a century of life from a care residence, moving between his present-day physical limitations and vivid memories of childhood, family, romance, work, art, Buddhist practice, and life in New York City. Smith describes the book as a “memoir hypothesis,” and that’s an apt label. This book blends autobiographical fiction, LGBTQ+ fiction, and climate fiction into an intimate portrait of one person trying to understand what his life has added up to.
The novel unfolds through thirty-three themed chapters. A wheelchair, a photograph, a song, a visitor, or a physical sensation can send Bill into a memory spanning decades. His recollections include childhood accidents, boarding school, running the New York City Marathon, training as a massage therapist, returning to acting later in life, and building a marriage with Andres. These transitions give the story the loose, associative rhythm of an actual mind looking backward. Bill’s voice is conversational, opinionated, funny, and occasionally irritable, which keeps the book from becoming overly solemn.
The novel is at its strongest when Bill considers the people who encouraged him and the small decisions that gave his life meaning. Teachers, friends, family members, artistic mentors, and Buddhist leaders continue to shape him long after they’re gone. His relationship with Andres provides the emotional center, particularly as Bill remembers learning to express affection openly after years of fear and internalized shame. One sentence captures the philosophy running through the book: “Take care of the person right in front of you.” Smith returns repeatedly to the idea that a worthwhile life is built through attention, encouragement, dialogue, and the willingness to keep participating in the world.
Readers who enjoyed Mitch Albom’s Tuesdays with Morrie will recognize a similar interest in aging, mortality, relationships, and the lessons that become clearer near the end of life. Smith’s novel, however, covers a broader and more idiosyncratic landscape. It mixes personal recollection with an imagined future shaped by climate disaster, political instability, technological change, and war. The result feels like a memoir viewed through a speculative lens. Its ideal audience includes readers of character-driven literary fiction, autobiographical novels, LGBTQ+ historical fiction, Buddhist fiction, novels about aging, and near-future climate fiction. It will especially appeal to people who enjoy reflective storytelling more than fast-moving suspense.
The Last Revision is ultimately a warm, candid examination of what remains when careers end, bodies weaken, loved ones die, and memory begins rearranging the past. Smith finds meaning in creative work, hard conversations, enduring love, and moments of physical freedom, including the simple pleasure of swinging through the air on Bill’s hundredth birthday. The novel’s episodic structure asks readers to settle into Bill’s company and listen as one memory opens into another. By the final pages, his life feels neither polished nor reduced to a tidy lesson. It feels fully inhabited, filled with regret, humor, affection, conviction, and a stubborn readiness to greet one more day.
Pages: 210 | ASIN : B0GZJH4M7R
Two Hearts, One Man: God’s Story Within
Andrew J. Trueblood’s Two Hearts, One Man: God’s Story Within is a deeply personal Christian testimony centered on the life of James, a man whose catastrophic motorcycle accident becomes the dividing line between two radically different versions of himself. Before the crash, James is described as angry, materialistic, demanding, and openly hostile toward religion. After surviving injuries that should have killed him, he awakens with an intense awareness of God and a capacity for love that surprises everyone around him. The title captures this transformation well. James still has the same physical heart, but spiritually, he’s living with an entirely new one.
The account of the accident and recovery gives the book its emotional foundation. Trueblood doesn’t gloss over the severity of James’s injuries, his loss of independence, or the depression that follows. Some of the most affecting scenes are also the simplest, such as James begging his wife, Shannon, not to leave for work or practicing alone until he can take a few steps. Shannon’s loyalty adds another kind of love to the story. Her care for James is steady, practical, and often painful, which gives the spiritual elements of the book a strong human anchor.
As the book continues, it expands beyond memoir into a wide-ranging meditation on faith, Scripture, salvation, suffering, money, church culture, marriage, politics, the environment, and personal responsibility. Its structure follows James’s post-injury thought patterns, moving between memories, biblical interpretation, present-day reflections, and stories he understands as evidence of God’s involvement in his life. The book openly describes his mind as a bridge that carries him from one subject to another, and that wandering quality becomes part of its personality. Reading it can feel like sitting across from someone who has spent years thinking about God and now feels an urgent need to share everything he has learned.
James’s voice is strongest when he examines his own weaknesses rather than speaking only in general terms. He admits that cars, money, comfort, and personal ambition continued to compete for his attention even after his spiritual awakening. His observation that “God’s timing is perfect, and it was obvious mine is as flawed as my thoughts” captures the book’s mixture of humility, conviction, and dry humor. Another memorable line, “Your relationship with God will only be as good as you are willing to make it,” summarizes the challenge James places before the reader. For him, faith isn’t a label or occasional habit. It’s a demanding relationship that requires surrender, service, discipline, and daily attention.
Two Hearts, One Man is ultimately a testimony about spiritual rebirth and the long, uneven process of learning to live according to that rebirth. James’s transformation doesn’t end when he wakes from the coma. It continues through pain, doubt, temptation, volunteer work, biblical study, medical setbacks, and repeated moments when he believes God is redirecting him. Trueblood presents these experiences with complete sincerity, creating a book that feels less like a polished theological argument and more like an earnest conversation about what faith has required from one particular man. Readers drawn to Christian testimonies, stories of survival, and reflections on total commitment will find plenty here to consider.
Pages: 172 | ASIN : B0G54CXTP8
Shadows, Roads, & Redemption: A Memoir
In Shadows, Roads, & Redemption, Jac Winters opens the long-locked rooms of memory and traces a life shaped by childhood trauma, silence, trucking, emotional exile, and the difficult grace of survival. The memoir moves from early images of safety, like the jingle of a stepfather’s keys and the strange wonder of being lifted by Johnny Cash, into the devastating shadow cast by Jane, then onward through years on the road and the eventual healing presence of Joanna. It’s a book about harm, yes, but more deeply it’s about naming what happened, reclaiming the child who was silenced, and finding a way to keep driving toward the open air.
Winters doesn’t write about trauma as something tidy or easily converted into wisdom. He lets it remain jagged. The recurring images of roads, engines, perfume, hay, silence, and weathered memory give the memoir a visceral pull, and at its strongest, the prose has the rumbling cadence of a rig moving through the dark. I found the early scenes especially affecting because they understand how childhood can hold wonder and danger in the same hand. Dougie, the neighborhood outcast, becomes a gentle counterpoint to Jane, whose warmth slowly curdles into control. That contrast gives the book its ache. It reminded me that safety is not always where the world tells us to look for it, and danger is sometimes dressed in familiarity.
I also appreciated the book’s insistence that ideas matter as much as confession. Winters is not only recounting pain; he is trying to understand the machinery of it. His reflections on grooming, complicity, trauma bonding, and silence are blunt, sometimes raw, and often deeply clarifying. The meteor and asteroid metaphor lingers because it captures the cruel mismatch between what others may see and what the survivor is left to live with. The writing can become emphatic, especially when it circles the same language of fire, poison, and redemption, but even that repetition feels emotionally true to the subject. The mind returns to the site of impact until it can finally name the crater. The chapters about trucking bring needed breath and texture, giving the memoir muscle, grit, and a broader sense of identity beyond injury.
The book’s conclusion, with Joanna as an anchor and the final poem “Firestorm” as a kind of earned ascent, doesn’t erase the darkness, but it does offer a hard-won tenderness that feels sincere. Shadows, Roads, & Redemption is best suited for readers drawn to survivor memoirs, trauma recovery narratives, and personal stories rooted in working-class life, especially those who appreciate candid reflection, emotional intensity, and writing that wears its scars without apology.
Pages: 94 | ASIN : B0H31LPCHT
