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Voyagers: Homeland to Heartland

D. L. Norris (Outskirts Press)

Reviewed by Mitchell Grumby

Every immigrant story begins with a goodbye, and D. L. Norris turns that goodbye into an unforgettable hymn of hope in her latest book, Voyagers: Homeland to Heartland. The tender, multi-generational saga is inspired by the author’s family history and follows Kittil and Marte Dyrebu, who leave the picturesque community of Svene, nestled within Buskerud County, Norway, in the late 1860s to chase the promise of land and freedom in America. After a...

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ActualizationOS: A System of Inner Architecture

Sanjay Sabnani (Causal Wisdom)

Reviewed by Mariela M. Olsen

What if change fails not because you lack willpower, but because your inner system is working against itself? That is the bracing premise of Sanjay Sabnani's ActualizationOS, a field manual for deliberate transformation inspired by the author’s own breakdown. After losing his marriage and business in 2015, Sabnani rebuilt his mind through a simple chanting practice, then spent a decade putting together what actually worked. Stillness is the platf...

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White Coat Leadership: Empowering the Next Generation of Healthcare Leaders from Bedside to Boardroom

Timothy N. Liesching (Advantage Books)

Reviewed by John Grossman

In White Coat Leadership: Empowering the Next Generation of Healthcare Leaders from Bedside to Boardroom, Dr. Timothy N. Liesching, a former banker, an ICU physician, and past chief medical officer, argues that American healthcare's compounding crises (workforce burnout, soaring costs, technological disruption, and fragmented care) demand a new kind of leader: the clinician who can “heal, lead, and inspire.” The book is part manual, part manifest...

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Descending Darkness

Martyn Rhys Vaughan (Martyn Rhys Vaughan)

Reviewed by Lisa Schwartz

Martyn Rhys Vaughan’s Descending Darkness is a gorgeous collection that blends horror, black comedy, and science fiction. A captured fighter struggles to escape a cell while the ceiling slowly descends on him, armed only with desperation and bedsheets in “A Room with No View.” A smug con man plunges into a haunted manor overnight, wins his bet but loses his sanity in “Alone.” In “Dia de los Muertos,” a walking skeleton named Ralph comes after a h...

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Pitch Black: The Best Black Ads of the Past 50+ Years

Mark S. Robinson (BookBaby)

Reviewed by Julie Winters

Mark S. Robinson’s Pitch Black: The Best Black Ads of the Past 50+ Years is part curated gallery, part history lesson, a book that traces the evolution of advertising created for, and by, Black Americans from the civil rights era to the present day. The author brings 45 years of industry experience to the book and examines how brands moved from ignoring Black consumers to recognizing them as indispensable clients, and how “community relations” ad...

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Forgiveness: A Contemporary Women’s Fiction Novel

Susen Edwards (Susen Edwards)

Reviewed by Meg McKinnon

Susen Edwards's Forgiveness opens on New Year's Eve 2020, as seventy-year-old artist Fiona Goldberg marks the fiftieth anniversary of the drunk-driving crash that killed her best friend Melissa, a tragedy punished with a mere two-hundred-dollar fine. Fiona realizes she has lived with undiagnosed PTSD for five decades. In 1969, she met Reuben Goldberg, an anti-war activist whose Vietnam draft notice led the couple to Toronto in 1971. There, Fiona...

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Semi-Pro

Clay M. Grayson (Advantage Books)

Reviewed by Mitchell Grumby

College athletics is stuck in the in-between, no longer amateur, not yet fully professional, and Clay M. Grayson's Semi-Pro is the definitive, timely guide to address that uneasy middle ground. If you love college sports—the fight songs, the tailgates, the Saturdays that feel like family reunions—this book will speak straight to your heart. Clay M. Grayson has spent over twenty years helping universities manage change, and in Semi-Pro he tackles...

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The Path of Least Regret: Decide with Clarity. Move Forward with Confidence.

Parul Somani (Forbes Books)

Reviewed by Joanne Higbee

Parul Somani's The Path of Least Regret asks a question that will change your life: What if the secret to the hardest choices life throws at you isn’t finding the right answer, but finding the answer you can live with? That question is at the heart of this book and discussed in the author’s decision-making framework created in the most unforgiving of classrooms: days after giving birth to her second daughter, Somani, an MIT- and Harvard-trained B...

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MSP to MVP: Building Unbreakable Partnerships in the Customer Success Era

Chris Day (Forbes Books)

Reviewed by Louise Garten

In MSP to MVP, Chris Day convinces his readers that uptime is no longer a value proposition, but the price of admission. He confronts the uncomfortable truth that continuously haunts managed service providers, where clients renew year after year, yet relationships suffer, expansion stalls, and growth refuses to compound. Backed by two decades spent building Fully Managed into Canada’s largest MSP, founding IT Glue, and scaling ScalePad, Day shows...

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Emergence: How Our Twenty-Watt Brains Unlocked Intelligence Beyond Biology

Bob Burgin (Forbes Books)

Reviewed by Elena Enger

We did not so much build artificial intelligence as teach it to learn, and then stand back in astonishment at what we have achieved. This startling premise introduces Bob Burgin’s Emergence: How Our Twenty-Watt Brains Unlocked Intelligence Beyond Biology. The book takes readers on an odyssey from Eric Kandel’s sea slugs and Henry Molaison’s memoryless brain to Geoffrey Hinton’s neural networks. It then explores AlphaGo’s unimagined brilliance and...

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