All Book Reviews
Browse our complete library of expert book reviews
Another Chance
Stu Moss (Stu Moss)
Stu Moss’ Another Chance follows Jesse Landon, born in a Depression-era Bronx apartment to a mother who meets his dreams with silence. He has one sanctuary: baseball. When a Yankees scout offers him a contract at seventeen, his mother tears it to pieces with the verdict: “No ball player is ever guaranteed a future.” Jesse builds a beautiful life anyway, serving in Korea, joining the NYPD, marrying Joyce, and raising Zach, teaching him that “every...
Read Full Review
Together We Climb: A Community-Driven Approach to Break the Cycle of Poverty and Build Prosperity
Steven C. Taylor & Jason Janz (Advantage Books)
This book illustrates that poverty in America is not a waiting room but a mountain to scale, and no one reaches the summit alone. In Together We Climb, policy leader Steven C. Taylor and CrossPurpose founder Jason Janz, both shaped by childhoods on the economic edge, confront a staggering paradox: the wealthiest country in the world cannot pull its people out of poverty. How can one understand that the country spends $1.75 trillion a year making...
Read Full Review
The Impolite Canadian: Why Playing Nice Is Costing Us the Future
Kumaran Nadesan (Forbes Books)
Canada’s greatest weakness may be the very trait the world admires most— its politeness. In The Impolite Canadian, Kumaran Nadesan, an entrepreneur and former public servant, argues that a national identity built on quiet deference has cost the country its talent, its influence, and its voice on the world stage. He reflects on his journey from war-torn Sri Lanka to a Scarborough apartment block to Team Canada trade missions abroad, and he dismant...
Read Full Review
Super Players
Verne Harnish (Forbes Books)
What separates the employee who merely shows up from the one who becomes indispensable? In Super Players, Verne Harnish and Kevin Daum, with Anne Mary Ciminelli, argue that the difference between the two is not talent. It is habit. Drawing on decades of coaching companies through scaling, they map twelve high-impact habits across the four capacities every organization wants to win at: Will, Values, Results, and Skills. Each chapter opens with a d...
Read Full Review
Tuesday in Trussville: How One Small Town's Lift Up Culture Is Shaping the Future of Business
Robert L. Mason (Forbes Books)
What if the most disruptive business strategy of the century is not artificial intelligence but love? That's the wager behind Robert L. Mason's account of SPOC Energy, the hybrid-power company he built in Trussville, Alabama. The book opens on a Tuesday in Trussville, Alabama, when Mason gathers the entire SPOC Energy workforce beneath the red steel beams of Building Eight to announce a company-wide drug test. He watches a veteran police officer...
Read Full Review
Carry the Weight
Joshua Teixidor (Curtis Publishing)
Most leadership books open with a hero’s story, but Carry the Weight opens with a manager who became the boss he used to hate. Joshua Teixidor is a top sales rep promoted for hitting numbers, but he nearly loses his best people by confusing pressure with leadership. That is, until a rep named Melissa tells him he is not coaching anyone. That moment becomes an epiphany for him: you don't become a leader when you get the title. You become one when...
Read Full Review
The Cursed
Costi Gurgu (Kult Books)
Costi Gurgu’s The Cursed is a rollicking blend of sci-fi horror and space opera. When headstrong young archaeologist and the heiress of Warwick Galactic Enterprises, Jo Warwick, leads a dig in the Carpathian Mountains on a quarantined Earth, she accidentally awakens an ancient curse: a bio-weapon engineered millennia ago to destroy a godlike alien civilization. Her crew mutates into insectile monsters, and Jo survives only as the curse’s unwillin...
Read Full Review
Homes
Hayden Thompson (Amazon Kindle KDP)
Hayden Thompson’s Homes is a globe-trotting novel that follows Dr. George Harrington, a British physician and single father who, in 1995, leaves Paris with his twelve-year-old son, Hugo, for a public-health posting in Asia. Spanning twenty-two years, the story moves from the motorbike-clogged streets of Sagen to a regional role in Pitani, conferences in Geneva, a bureaucratic post in Brussels, and finally retirement in Italy and England. Along th...
Read Full Review
Grace Notes
John Cheyenne Wilbur (Atmosphere Press)
John Cheyenne Wilbur’s Grace Notes is autobiographical fiction following Jerry Cradleman, a sensitive New Jersey kid who never quite feels at home anywhere. A soul-crushing week at Bobby Knight’s basketball camp awakens a mysterious dread, and getting cut from his high school team deepens his isolation—until a young minister and his wife offer him refuge, setting him on an unlikely path: Oberlin, Princeton Seminary, ordination, and a hunger minis...
Read Full Review
The Sands Shall Witness
Walter Hurst Williamson (BookBaby)
Walter Hurst Williamson’s The Sands Shall Witness is set in German South West Africa from 1903 to 1905. The story follows Conrad Huber, a penniless, shy young German who accepts a job as aide to the colony's commissioner. He hopes to lift his mother out of poverty. Instead, he tumbles into a tinderbox of scheming soldiers, resentful tribes, and the genocidal General von Trotha. The Herero and Nama genocide is in full swing. Then there is Sybille,...
Read Full Review