Welcome to Issue 91 of the SUPERIOR BOOK PRODUCTIONS newsletter!
Hello, Everyone!
We have a jam-packed issue of great books to start off our first newsletter of 2022. I hope you will check out all the wonderful books below and find one or several that will help you in your life or career or just give you some entertaining moments.
But first, I’m pleased to announce that I was asked to contribute an introductory essay to the first-time publication of the Swedish version of Dracula titled Powers of Darkness. It was recently discovered that the 1899 translation made into Swedish of Bram Stoker’s classic novel is vastly different from Dracula in many ways. Possibly, it reflects an earlier version of the novel that has been lost until now. How it got to Sweden is the great literary mystery of our time. Not only is the Swedish version drastically different from Dracula, but it is longer and in many ways better, so any lover of Gothic literature will want to read it. I am thrilled to be involved in bringing this incredible novel to English-speaking audiences. It is one of the greatest discoveries ever made in the field of literature, and I guarantee it will make you see Dracula in a new light.
You can learn more about the Swedish Powers of Darkness and how to get your own copy at my Gothic Wanderer blog.
Tyler Tichelaar
This Month’s Great Book Quote:
“Books are the plane, and the train, and the road.
They are the destination, and the journey. They are home.”
— Anna Quindlen
DeLinda Forsythe’s new book, Inspiring Generational Leadership: Your Guide to Design a Conscious Culture, begins with a powerful opening statement: “Doing well and doing good need not and should not be mutually exclusive.”
Forsythe is the founder of Innovative Commercial Environments (ICE), a furniture contract company she began from a spare bedroom in 2006. It now has more than two-dozen employees and has enjoyed unprecedented success in its industry. Forsythe was herself surprised by how successful the company has been, so she set out to understand what has caused that success. She came to realize she was unconsciously employing the ideas of conscious capitalism as well as intuitively adopting certain principles that resonated with her largely Millennial staff. In Inspiring Generational Leadership, she shares the story of how ICE has successfully built its business using these principles and concepts, as well as its role in the community, and interviews she conducted with other business leaders who share her mindset.
In the beginning, Forsythe simply set out to create a work environment that did not “hijack your soul.” She had been in bad work environments herself and did not want that for her own company and employees. Instead, she wanted her business to be a force for good in the world and of inspiration for her employees.
To read more, visit Inspiring Generational Leadership.
Brian Harding’s Service Industry Success: Develop Your Team, Empower Your People, Attain Your Freedom is a book every business owner needs to read, especially those who run smaller companies and find themselves so busy working in the company that they never have time to step back and see the big picture, much less take a vacation. Harding, who has years of experience as a business owner and business consultant, knows that this problem happens because business owners either try to control their businesses too much and fail to relinquish control to their employees, or they feel they can’t trust employees to take care of the business without constantly overseeing them.
Harding explains the real issue here is that employees do not follow processes, and that issue often exists because employees have not been properly trained or proper processes and procedures have not been put in place. If business owners want freedom to step away from their business for more than a day or two, they must help their teams learn to work autonomously. As a consultant, Harding often has business owners complain to him that employees are not “getting it.” When that happens, he asks them to list the top three things employees do that cause problems. Then he asks them to write down how many hours they spend per month or year training employees on those things. The response he usually gets is, “Oh, yeah. I guess that would explain our poor performance, huh?”
To read more, visit Service Industry Success.
In Woman of Worth: If I Can Recover, Anyone Can, Winonna Saari shares her personal story of addiction, alcoholism, and bad decisions, then how she hit rock bottom and turned her life around. Today, Winonna has a college degree, has been sober for fourteen years, and is a certified recovery coach who helps others, one-on-one, set goals to change their lives for the better. Now she shares her story to give hope to others.
Early in the book, Winonna describes the difficulties she faced, and how she overcame addiction to find a better way. She states:
“If a girl like me, who is from the ghetto streets of Detroit, can escape the demons of addiction and shift her life from the hellish depths of alcoholism to being a middle-aged, African American woman who enjoys the fruits of life in recovery, then anyone can. I was once a woman whose face was always scraping the bottom of someone else’s shoe, who was frowned upon by society and her family and friends, but I became a woman who reclaimed her dignity through the principles of integrity, hard work, not giving up before the miracle happened, and having a mustard seed of faith.”
To read more, visit Woman of Worth.
Brenda Cook’s new book The Entrepreneur’s Family: Seeking Balance, Recovery, and Growth is a groundbreaking look at how an entrepreneur’s passion and drive can have both positive and detrimental effects upon a family. Cook reveals that while the media is full of praise for entrepreneurship and the belief that the entrepreneur can have it all, both wealth and free time, thus benefiting their family—that belief is frequently a myth or at least distorted. Entrepreneurs often spend little quality time with their spouse, children, and grandchildren; may be more passionate about their business than family time; and must make decisions about whether and to what degree to involve their family in the business. All these factors lead to family dynamics that have long-reaching effects on the entrepreneur’s children and even successive generations.
Cook, as an entrepreneur’s daughter, has witnessed these effects firsthand, and she skillfully and honestly shares how her father’s entrepreneurial drive affected her family in different ways, from her mother, who had almost no say in the family-owned businesses except when it was convenient to list properties in her name, to her older brothers who ended up taking prominent roles as successors to their father, and to Cook herself, who was marginalized and nearly edged out by her brothers once her father was no longer able to run the business, despite his intention for all three of his children to have equal roles in the businesses’ operations.
To read more, visit The Entrepreneur’s Family.
Ann Van Eron’s new book Open Stance: Thriving Amid Differences and Uncertainty convincingly shows us that the best way we can improve our relationships and cope with life’s changes and obstacles is to be open-minded, or adopt an open stance.
The book opens with a powerful quote by Jim Collins, which perfectly sums up why this open stance is necessary: “If the first two decades of the twenty-first century have taught us anything, it is that uncertainty is chronic, instability is permanent, disruption is common, and we can neither predict nor govern events. There will be no new normal. There will only be a continuous series of not normal episodes defying prediction and unforeseen by most of us until they happen.” The response many of us might feel to the tumultuous change all around us is to run and hide. Ann Van Eron understands that. She describes a vacation she took to Santorini, Greece, which she thinks of as her oasis because there she learned to relax, quit stressing, and be open to what was around her.
Since being on a perpetual vacation is not an option for most of us, Ann encourages us to find our own oases or pleasant memories of times when we felt open and relaxed and apply them to situations in our lives that may be more difficult.
To read more, visit Open Stance.
DREAMERS DO: Walt Disney’s 10 Steps to Making Your Dreams Come True is a new book by Dr. Gene Ano and Genesis Ano, a father and daughter who love everything Disney, but more importantly, found Disneyland to be an invaluable resource to help them cope during times of crisis in their lives.
Early in the book, Dr. Gene tells how he regularly took his daughter to Disneyland when she was just a toddler to ensure she experienced happiness even when he was in a miserable state while going through a divorce. That first visit to Disneyland was magical in different ways for both of them, and it cemented their love for all things Disney. Since then, both have been students of Walt Disney, learning lessons from him based on the difficulties he overcame in his own life. This book is designed to teach readers how they can make their own dreams come true by following ten steps that Walt Disney used to become the icon we all know today.
To read more, visit Dreamers Do.
Brandie Allen’s The Power of Self-Mastery: Changing Your Life Through Discovery, Exploration, and Transformation is for anyone who wants to make positive changes. She offers processes for people to break their bad habits or get out of their ruts, no matter their circumstances, so they can make positive decisions to enhance their lives. Brandie shares her own powerful story of how she went through her own “dark night of the soul” and made the changes she needed, and she shares practical steps for how others can do the same.
The journey to self-mastery, to taking back control of your life and improving it, begins with learning to recognize where we are and what we might be doing to impede our progress, as well as what or who else might be standing in our way. Brandie encourages us to realize the process will not be easy, and shows us how to embrace the discomfort while avoiding pitfalls to make the journey smoother.
One major factor that may be holding us back is that we have created personas for ourselves that we have come to believe reflect our true identity. We do this in many ways, taking on labels like wife, mom, good son, boss, or perhaps more negative identities such as idiot, loser, incompetent, etc.
To read more, visit The Power of Self-Mastery.
Luis Rojas has spent his life on a journey through both pain and success to an understanding of the power of love. Now in his new book The Answer Is Love: A Simple Conversation About Discovering Your True Self, he shares what he has learned during his fifty-plus years on this planet.
Luis takes readers on a rollercoaster-ride of the ups and downs he has experienced, from being a childhood bedwetter and enduring childhood abuse, to finding love, becoming a successful criminal lawyer and prosecuting attorney, and then losing it all and starting over. This last experience led him to a heightened understanding of love and to insights he labels “Messages from the Universe” that he shares throughout the book.
One of my favorite passages in The Answer Is Love is when Luis describes himself as a hummingbird that flies around all sides of a situation and above it to fully understand it. In the process, he gets to the depths of a situation. This ability helped him greatly in his career to bring about true justice. As he once told a judge who asked why the DA’s office had agreed to a plea deal and lighter sentence for a defendant, “Your Honor, justice is supposed to be just, and sometimes showing love and compassion during a criminal proceeding is the right thing to do.”
To read more, visit The Answer Is Love.
In Power Up Your Dreams: Moving from Self-Defeat to Self-Belief, singer, performer, and life coach Gloria Carpenter shares what it takes to make dreams come true. However, she is no Pollyanna. She knows that most of us are filled with self-doubt, have self-defeating behaviors, and are often too negative or fearful to think we can achieve our goals.
Before showing us how to move forward, Gloria shares that she can relate to where we may be right now. She understands what it is to feel powerless. She first felt that way when her father left her family. She was crushed when her mother told her, “Your father isn’t coming back home, honey.” She states, “That statement had an immense impact on my inner journey of not feeling lovable, worthy, or good enough because the first man I loved decided not to stick around.” What then developed was a life of subconscious false stories about herself and how she wasn’t loveable or worthy of happiness. What she didn’t realize until later was that these stories were false and the only one stopping her from living her best life was herself.
To read more, visit Power Up Your Dreams.
Lynn Weimar’s new book Be Free Beyond Fifty: Stop Hiding, Unlock Your Dream, and Step into a Vibrant Life opens with the powerful words the author was told by a counselor: “You are enough.” It’s a message too many women need to hear, as Lynn knows well. Lynn works as a coach who helps women who struggle with emotional eating, food addiction, obesity, feeling stuck, and feeling unfilled. Often that feeling of being stuck is tied to a sense of low self-esteem or hopelessness, a sense that they can do nothing to make their situation better.
Because Lynn has learned how to get unstuck herself, she has now written this book to assist other women in stepping into the vibrant life she has found and knows they deserve. Be Free Beyond Fifty is not a book about weight loss, but as Lynn states, for many women, being stuck takes on the form of extra pounds, spurred on by emotional eating to cope with the issues in their lives. Sometimes the weight then becomes part of why they are stuck, making them more stuck. Other times, they are stuck due to shame, guilt, regret, maybe a failure to forgive a past wrong, or just simply believing they are not good enough to succeed.
To read more, visit Be Free Beyond Fifty.
