Reviews
G.A.L.E. Force: Navigating Strategy, Culture, and Value Creation in Modern M&A
J. Michael Coffey (Entrepreneur Books)
Executive and strategist J. Michael Coffey (former CEO, Manitex and H-E Parts International) delivers a clever examination of the factors behind the success or failure of acquisitions and mergers in an era marked by local fragmentation and global ambition. Drawing from decades of industrial turnarounds, multinational deal-making, and a fourteen-company buildup across seven countries, Coffrey organizes the book around the G.A.L.E. Force framework—Global Aim, Local Execution—and the four market forces now reshaping the lower-middle market. Each s...
Unbroken: Life Outside the Lines
Adriene Cat ()
Adriene Caldwell’s memoir, Unbroken: Life Outside the Lines, chronicles a childhood characterized by trauma. Born to a schizophrenic mother who beat her, neglected her, and eventually surrendered her to the state, Caldwell endures sexual assault, the drowning death of a friend, homelessness, extreme poverty, and a sadistic foster mother she dubs “The Bitch from Hell.” She claws toward stability through academic excellence and a transformative year in Germany. Yet adulthood brings new devastation: stripping, cocaine addiction, a predatory a...
Into the Eye
James Houston Turner (Regis Books (an imprint of Ruby Rock Films))
James Houston Turner’s Into the Eye is a geopolitical thriller that introduces former KGB colonel Aleksandr Talanov, who is thrust into the heart of a diabolical human-trafficking network in central Africa. Tasked with the covert KTAC team, Talanov must locate and rescue Dr. Shawni Juma, a virologist who has uncovered evidence linking the brutal warlord Ojo Mutebi to the wealthy communist ideologue Istvan Szabo. When a rescue helicopter is betrayed from within, and Talanov is stranded in a rebel camp, the mission explodes into a high-stakes, gl...
No Truce With The Vampires - Those Who Endure
Martyn Rhys Vaughan (Martyn Rhys Vaughan)
Martyn Rhys Vaughan’s No Truce with the Vampires: Those Who Endure transplants gothic horror into the sun-scorched Australian outback to conclude its trilogy. In a future where vampires have conquered Earth after humanity nearly destroyed it, the surviving human race is exiled to “Stralia” and infantilized into docile farmers. The story follows Greg Ferguson, a hardy sheepherder in the Red Centre, who discovers from his dying mother’s hidden documents that their world is a prison. Alongside the mysterious Allira, he uncovers the truth about vam...
Turning the Giant: Disrupting Your Industry with Persistent Innovation
John Berra (Forbes Books)
Automation industry veteran and former president of Fisher-Rosemount Systems and executive vice president of Emerson, John Berra, delivers a spirited manual for facing adversity in professional life. He draws on his personal experience turning corporate obstacles into opportunities and his four-decade ascent from Monsanto control engineer to the leader of a $6.7 billion automation division to contend that the giants professionals face—self-doubt, competition, innovation, corporate bureaucracy, skepticism, and success—are not enemies to be slain...
Made for This: Lessons in Leadership, Legacy, and Living Unapologetically
DeAngela Burns-Wallace (Advantage Books)
In a leadership landscape often dominated by detached, formulaic frameworks, DeAngela Burns-Wallace’s Made for This becomes an important statement that blends her personal story with leadership principles to assert that the most durable leadership is built at the intersection of service, identity, and community. Burns-Wallace’s argument that leaders should be the catalysts for systemic change, and not merely individual heroes, forms the main thesis of her book. She cleverly shows readers that true influence can only be measured by the access we...
Foster Freddy Wants a Family
Christina J Donato (Left-handed Author Publishing)
Christina J Donato’s Foster Freddy Wants a Family is the heartfelt true story of a comically mismatched beagle-basset stray who spends nearly three years navigating foster care before finding his forever home. Author Christina J. Donato brings Freddy into her life as her first foster dog, expecting an easy companion and instead receiving a headstrong, medically fragile “bagel” with a dislocated knee, Cushing’s disease, recurrent mast cell tumors, and a penchant for territorial growling, indoor marking, and garbage raids. Through Donato’s devote...
In the Wake of Evil
Stephanie Dean (Page Publishing)
In Stephanie Dean’s In the Wake of Evil, the once-vibrant town of Snickerdoodle—home to dandelion-born fairies, leaf-born pixies, unicorns, and humans—collapses into ruin after a forbidden friendship blossoms between the benevolent fairy Amethyst and the gentle pixie Bartholomew Jahosephat. After Bartholomew accidentally brews a transporting potion that sends him to Alabama, where he guards the human infant Chloe from her greedy uncle Winston, he returns to Snickerdoodle only to be betrayed by the envious fairy Onyx. Stripped of her gemstone na...
Flash 100: New Quick Fiction
Don Tassone (Independently Published)
is a collection of one hundred ultra-short stories, organized into “Yesterday,” “Today,” and “Tomorrow,” that distills human experience into potent, bite-sized narratives. In “Whole,” a man amputates a dead branch from a cherished cherry tree to save it, then applies that lesson to his own life. “Changing Fortunes” finds a millionaire and a dishwasher swapping bodies through a ghost’s wish-grant, discovering that youth and wealth both carry hidden costs. “The Man on TV” shocks an overindulgent executive into choosing health and family over exce...
Tyranny of the Mind: Self-Rule and the Common American Uprising
Julie A. Fragoules (Xaos Publishing)
Julie A. Fragoules’s Tyranny of the Mind: Self-Rule & The Common American Uprising is a sweeping, heavily documented treatise arguing that the United States is surrendering its founding ethos of individual liberty to a new, secular authoritarianism. Interweaving her immigrant family’s story with millennia of Western history, Fragoules traces how religious and state tyrannies—from the Roman Inquisition to feudal Europe—were rejected by the Enlightenment and America’s founders, who built a constitutional republic on liberty of conscience and...