Welcome to Issue 87 of the SUPERIOR BOOK PRODUCTIONS newsletter!
Hello, Everyone!
Are you ready for summer? I have some great books below for your reading at the beach, in a hammock, or inside in a pleasant air-conditioned room.
But first, I’m pleased to announce this year’s winner of the Tyler R. Tichelaar Historical Fiction Award in the Reader Views Literary Awards. The winner is EO-N by Dave Mason, an engaging and surprising World War II novel. EO-N is the eleventh novel to win the award. You can view the full list of award winners by clicking on the link above and learn more about EO-N below.
And now, on to some great books you’ll want to check out this summer!
Tyler Tichelaar
This Month’s Great Book Quote:
“Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of a painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.”
— George Orwell
Dave Mason’s new novel EO-N has won the Tyler R. Tichelaar Award for Best Historical Fiction in this year’s Reader Views Literary Awards. It also won the Gold Prize for Historical Fiction and the Silver Prize in the Mystery/Thriller category. With that kind of attention, you know it has to be good, and I’m happy to say it does not disappoint.
The novel begins when a young boy and his dog discover a strange piece of metal in a glacier in Norway. This discovery soon leads to questions about how it ended up in such an unlikely place.
Here Alison Wiley enters the story. A thirty-four year old biotech CEO, Alison was my favorite character in the book, probably because she, like so many of us, is searching for that deeper purpose that will make her life meaningful. She started her career wanting to help people, but now finds her time dedicated less to life-changing research and more to board meetings and attempts to please shareholders, and this, along with a series of personal losses, has left her with many questions about life’s meaning and her own purpose.
When Alison is informed that the remains of the plane flown by her late grandfather, Jack Barton, who never returned from the war, have been found in Norway, she finds herself traveling back into her family’s past as well as physically to Norway to seek answers.
To read more, visit EO-N.
Jenni Viken’s new book Choosing Healthy Relationships explores an area many women struggle with. Most people are not given much guidance on how to find their significant other in life, and that choice is even more difficult if you come from an abusive home or have a legacy of generational abuse in your family. Children learn what their parents model for them, and if no one models how to find a healthy partner or how to deal with issues in a relationship, then a dysfunctional relationship will usually occur, and often, it can be marked by abuse—physical, emotional, and verbal.
Jenni Viken understands that. She’s been there. She spent eighteen years, sixteen of them married, in an abusive relationship. In this book, she tells her story of how she met the husband who would become her abuser. She honestly speaks about her own unwitting role in the abuse, and she shares how she found the courage to protect her children and get them out of that situation. But the book is more than just Jenni’s story. She uses her experiences as a means to explore hard truths about relationships and open a path to the reader to make better choices for their own relationships.
To read more, visit Choosing Healthy Relationships.
The Genius Who Saved Baseball is the feel-good novel America has been waiting for. Robert E. Ingram has created a rollicking story in these pages that will have baseball fans and book lovers completely feeling he has hit a home run with his engaging tale of how young Charlie Collier teams up with a country music superstar, Big T McCraw, to bring Nashville’s first baseball team, the Knights, to the World Series.
The story begins when Charlie’s father, Rex, is hired by Big T McCraw to be part of his team of executives for his newly formed baseball team. Big T wants his team to win, so he has his executives meet and discuss various strategies that might help the team surpass the competition. While many ideas are offered, none of them seems like the winning formula the Knights need.
Enter Charlie. At one of the executive meetings, Rex mentions that his son Charlie is a teenage genius. Although only fourteen, Charlie is already in college, and he has written a paper arguing that modern-day baseball analytics are not only ruining the game for the fans, but affecting the quality of the players’ performance.
To read more, visit The Genius Who Saved Baseball.
Tom Teague’s new book Online Business Success for Thought Leaders: Create Visibility for Positive Impact is a comprehensive, easy-to-understand exploration of what is needed for a business to have an online presence that includes but extends beyond a website. Teague has written this book after seven years of building his own and other people’s online businesses and learning as he went. He has made it the kind of book he wishes he’d had at the beginning of his entrepreneurial career, which he affectionately terms Internet Marketing Grad School.
Before Teague began to build online platforms, he spent thirty-five years as a high-performing, innovative contributor and leader of software development and information systems teams at Exxon and NASA. He wanted to build an online presence to promote his first book, Awaken to Choice, and decided to learn how to do it himself. Online Business Success for Thought Leaders walks us through his learning process: what advice he was given when he began, and what was right and wrong about that advice. He is honest about mistakes he made, his own shortcomings, and the strengths and weaknesses of the various tools he used to build his online platform.
To read more, visit Online Business Success for Thought Leaders.
If you’ve never heard of James Donaldson, you should have. Not only is he an NBA All-Star, having played with the Seattle Supersonics, San Diego/L.A. Clippers, Dallas Mavericks, New York Knicks, and Utah Jazz, but he also operated The Donaldson Clinic in Seattle, providing physical therapy services, for nearly thirty years, and he’s been involved in Seattle politics.
But all his fame and fortune aside, Donaldson has recently had some severe struggles in his life. Now he has written a new book Celebrating Your Gift of Life: From the Verge of Suicide to a Life of Purpose and Joy to raise awareness about mental health issues like depression and suicidal thoughts that can affect anyone in our hectic, stressful world. In recent years, Donaldson has experienced life-threatening health problems, a stressful divorce, the loss of his business and home due to bankruptcy, disagreements with former friends and colleagues, and ultimately, near suicide.
Understandably, Donaldson had difficulty coping with his world turning upside down. In this book, he shares his personal story as well as details on how many professional athletes struggle when their athletic careers are over.
To read more, visit Celebrating Your Gift of Life.
Mariel Maloney’s new book Shifting into 9th Gear: Heal Your Life, Seek Your Passions, Find Your Soul Purpose is a fun, sometimes tad scary, but always heartfelt journey into how the determination to create a better life can lead to amazing results.
Mariel’s story begins like that of many young people. She found herself floundering after her parents divorced. As a teenager, she experienced much of the angst and depression many experience, to the point where she became clinically depressed and needed psychiatric help. However, she refused to dope herself up with medication. Instead, she bought a bicycle, and that decision ultimately changed her life.
With her bicycle, Mariel found freedom and purpose. In her effort to try to find herself, she began riding her bicycle every day to Chicago’s lakeshore. It was a journey of many miles both ways, and through some dangerous neighborhoods and high traffic areas. At one point, she was threatened in a bad neighborhood. At another point, she had a serious accident precipitated by a sixteen-wheeler. But Mariel also had her angels looking out for her—she believes that literally.
To read more, visit Shifting into Ninth Gear.
Ann Allen’s new book Authenticity at Your Best is a practical and inspirational guide to learning how to be your true self. Ann believes being your authentic self is the solution to coping and succeeding in our current chaotic world. It is easy to be dissuaded from following what is best for us when bombarded by the media telling us what we should do, think, and be. Being your authentic self means standing up for what you believe in and refusing to go along with the crowd, even when that may be the easier thing to do.
In the book’s foreword, Jack Stucki, a pioneer in Ann’s field of biofeedback, talks about how this book is a gift because it encourages us to be our true selves, free from distraction. When we live authentically, with honesty and integrity, we also inspire others to do the same.
Ann defines authenticity as not only being honest but finding congruency between our inside and outside worlds. She states, “Your inside world is your beliefs and values, your feelings, your gifts and talents, your passions and dreams, and your challenges and experiences. Your outside world is work, home, community, play, and life.”
To read more, visit Authenticity at Its Best.
