WHAT IF ANGER IS THE ANSWER?

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FULL BOOK TITLE: The Firefly Season 

AUTHOR NAME: Benjamin Z. Etzioni 

PUBLISHER NAME: Benjamin Z. Etzioni

LINK: https://www.benjaminetzioni.com/

Benjamin Z. Etzioni’s The Firefly Season is a tender, quietly propulsive novel about grief, atonement, and the peculiar ways fate nudges us back toward the people and moments that define us. The book opens with a summer tableau—fireflies skimming a lakeshore—that doubles as the narrator’s thesis: in the story of your life, someone else often seems to hold the starring role. From there, Etzioni steers us into a visceral present: a turtle rescue on the Pacific Coast Highway, horns blaring, a bite that literally marks the hand of a man who can’t stop trying to do the right thing—and the cascading tragedy that follows.

Barnaby Fox, journalist and chronic over-giver, narrates with a mix of rueful humor and unguarded sincerity, aided (and heckled) by “Ceviche,” the sardonic inner voice that turns his self-reckonings into smart, memorable dialogue. Etzioni balances sharp scene work (a wedding-planner’s office as blindingly white as a hospital, a Viking funeral at Big Sur, a newsroom humming after hours) with essayistic asides on smog, palm trees, ties, and pinball—miniatures that refract the book’s larger concerns: how memory edits us; how love, guilt, and chance braid into destiny; how pain can be both burden and compass.

Structurally, the novel moves like recovery itself—two steps forward, one step back—yet the pacing never drags. A recurring image, “the drawer in the corner,” becomes a resonant emblem for the secrets we try (and fail) to compartmentalize, while the book’s title motif casts a steady glow over Barnaby’s search for meaning in the wake of loss.

Etzioni writes with empathy, wit, and an eye for the small detail that unlocks a life. The result is an affecting, deeply human story that lingers—like a lone firefly over still water at dusk.

Author Bio: 

Benjamin Z. Etzioni is a writer of literary fiction. He models his style after that of John Irving. He blends humor with pathos and keeps his readers entertained and engrossed. His Barnaby Atlas Fox series features a protagonist that makes a tragic mistake during his childhood and spends the rest of life trying to atone. Through his loves and losses, he learns many of life’s fundamental lessons. His story will make you laugh and make you cry, but more than anything, it will make you think.

FULL BOOK TITLE: Transcend: Unlocking Humanity in the Age of AI

AUTHOR NAME: Faisal Hoque

PUBLISHER NAME: Post Hill Press

LINK: https://www.amazon.com/Transcend-Unlocking-Humanity-Age-AI/dp/B0DGF7T8QG/

Transcend by Faisal Hoque provides a roadmap for understanding and leveraging AI across various domains, structured into clear sections that guide readers from theory to practice. The work stands out for its meticulous organization, with a focus on individuals, businesses, and governments, framed by an emphasis on the human-AI dynamic.

The initial chapters, "How to Think about Humans" and "How to Think about AI," lay a strong foundation, delving into the nuances of human intelligence and the transformative potential of AI. The text emphasizes not only the cutting-edge capabilities of AI but also its limitations, presenting a balanced view that resonates with both tech enthusiasts and skeptics.

One standout section is Chapter 6, "OPEN for Business," which presents a wealth of actionable insights. Here, the author intertwines concrete examples — from the development of mRNA vaccines to adaptive cobots in supply chain roles — demonstrating the profound impact of AI on real-world industries. The text does not shy away from addressing challenges like AI "hallucinations" and the rough edges of emerging technologies, which are refreshingly acknowledged rather than ignored.

Further, the book’s later chapters bring a fresh perspective on "Humanity in the Age of AI," shifting the lens toward long-term implications and urging organizations to prioritize human-centered approaches in their AI strategies. This combination of forward-thinking vision and immediate practicality ensures the book's relevance for a wide audience, from industry leaders to policymakers and individual tech enthusiasts.

Stylistically, the writing strikes a balance between informative and accessible, with key points highlighted through case studies and thought-provoking scenarios. While some sections, such as the "OPEN" and "CARE" frameworks for business and government, lean toward an academic tone, the clarity and practical takeaways ensure the content remains engaging.

In essence, this book is a timely and authoritative guide that captures both the promise and pitfalls of AI. For those keen to embrace the current wave of technological advancement while preparing for future developments, this work is both a roadmap and a source of inspiration.

Author Bio: 

Faisal Hoque is recognized as one of the world's leading management thinkers and technologists. He is an award-winning entrepreneur and innovator, and a #1 Wall Street Journal and USA Today best-selling author. A three-time Deloitte Technology Fast 50™ and Fast 500™ winner for his work as a founder and a CEO, Faisal has also earned numerous honors for his books, including two Axiom Gold awards, a Nautilus award, and a place on the 2023 Thinkers50 Shortlist. His work has been featured in The Wall Street Journal, The Financial Times, Inc., Fast Company, Fortune, and more. He has also been recognized as one of the Top 100 Most Influential People in Technology. Faisal's life and work are shaped by a unique blend of Eastern philosophy and American entrepreneurial spirit. He volunteers with MIT's IDEAS Social Innovation program and contributes to Thinkers50, the Swiss business school IMD, and other academic institutions. Driven by his personal experiences, Faisal is a passionate advocate for cancer research, actively raising awareness and supporting efforts to combat the disease.

FULL BOOK TITLE: Signs of the Fall

AUTHOR NAME: Sean M. Price

PUBLISHER NAME: Koehler Books

A gritty, unfiltered look at modern adolescence, Signs of the Fall leans into discomfort to explore how young people piece together identity in a culture saturated with conflicting messages about sex, relationships, and self-worth.

Rather than following a tightly plotted arc, the novel unfolds as a series of moments—awkward, charged, and often messy—that reflect both the inner and outer life of its protagonists. Moving through everyday settings—bookstores, conversations, late-night reflections. A flirtatious scuffle or casual exchange can quickly deepen into tension, isolation, or questions of performative identity. Across ten linked stories, figures like the searching Hogarth Hughes, the increasingly prominent Peter Merritt, and a range of rebels and wounded souls shape narratives that feel both personal and philosophical.

What makes the collection compelling is how each story stands alone while contributing to a broader emotional arc. From Hogarth’s coming-of-age struggles, the narrative expands to encompass fractured relationships, shifting moral landscapes, and female protagonists grappling with authenticity and belonging. As Peter Merritt’s role expands, the anthology develops into a meditation on truth and transformation.

What I really liked about the book was its willingness to sit with discomfort. The character’s thoughts are often repetitive, even obsessive—especially around rejection and desire—but the narrative lets them linger, capturing how consuming that stage of life can be. Their attempts to understand attraction also hint at a broader critique of how young people learn about relationships.

Stylistically, the prose is direct and unembellished, with dialogue that feels natural and sometimes awkward in a way that rings true. While this can lead to uneven pacing, the lack of neat structure mirrors the uncertainty the book aims to capture.

This isn’t a traditional coming-of-age story. There are no clear resolutions—just a gradual, uneasy shift in awareness. Signs of the Fall offers a raw portrait of a young person trying to make sense of himself in a world that provides little guidance.

An unvarnished, sometimes challenging read that prioritizes emotional realism over narrative comfort.

Author Bio: 

Sean M. Price is an Air Force veteran with 30 years of cybersecurity experience that enabled him to produce more than 20 professional publications. He began studying the craft of fiction upon entering the Air Force at the age of 19. His personal and professional experiences are infused within the stories he has been writing for more than 15 years. As an avid life-long learner, he earned his Bachelor’s degrees in Business and Accounting and Master’s Degrees in Information Systems, Information Assurance, as well as a Masters of Fine Arts in Creative Writing. Currently, Sean is working on a Master’s of Theological Studies. He writes speculative fiction that examines relationship issues at the intersections of reality and fantasy. Attributes of mythology, mysticism, and the lyrical imbues the stories he enjoys to tell.

FULL BOOK TITLE: World of Worlds: Stories from Four Continents

AUTHOR NAME: Richard Scott Sacks

PUBLISHER NAME: Koehler Books

LINK: https://www.amazon.com/World-Worlds-Richard-Scott-Sacks/dp/B0GX2Z6MJV/

Richard Scott Sacks’ World of Worlds: Stories from Four Continents is an ambitious and wide-ranging collection of fiction shaped by years of travel and immersion in cultures undergoing political and social upheaval. Spanning Africa, Europe, India, and the United States, the fifteen stories explore displacement, moral ambiguity, idealism, and survival in a world marked by postcolonial instability, Cold War anxieties, and restless personal searching.

Sacks writes with the authority of lived experience. As he notes in the collection’s author’s note, many of the stories emerged from the “culture shock” and emotional dislocation of years spent on the road, recreating in fictional form “the characters, complexities, landscapes, situations, tastes, smells, psychologies, dramas, insights, pleasures, and terrors” he encountered abroad. The result is fiction that feels grounded not in abstract observation, but in direct sensory and emotional engagement with unfamiliar places and cultures.

The collection opens strongly with “The Bribe,” one of the book’s finest stories. Set in Central Africa, it follows Roland Everman, a young American agricultural volunteer attempting to launch a farming cooperative while confronting corruption, exhaustion, loneliness, and the limits of Western idealism. What could have become a simplistic political story instead develops into a nuanced examination of power, friendship, and cultural misunderstanding. Roland’s evolving relationship with his assistant Nakondo gives the story its emotional force, revealing both the possibility and fragility of connection across cultural divides.

“In the Mountains Above Chamonix” offers a very different but equally compelling form of alienation. A solitary traveler climbing in the Alps confronts not only physical danger but his own emotional detachment and desire for radical independence. The story captures the exhilaration and terror of isolation with vivid immediacy, while also reflecting the existential restlessness that runs through the collection.

Importantly, the emotional power of World of Worlds extends well beyond its opening stories. “The Coast Holiday” presents a subtle portrait of shifting relationships and emotional uncertainty against the backdrop of travel abroad. “The Foreign Correspondent” evokes the pressures and moral compromises facing journalists pursuing dangerous stories in politically unstable environments. “Detroit Is For Dreamers” stands out as one of the collection’s most affecting stories, capturing disillusionment and longing within an American setting while maintaining the collection’s larger themes of estrangement and aspiration. “On the Road to Cape Town” and “At the Border” both convey the violence and volatility of race relations in apartheid-era southern Africa.

Throughout the collection, Sacks excels at evoking place. Jungles, border towns, mountain ranges, crowded roads, and isolated villages become more than settings; they mirror the emotional states of the characters moving through them. His prose is direct and often cinematic, shaped perhaps by his background in journalism. At times, some reflective passages become overly explicit, but even then, the stories retain an immediacy and honesty that make them compelling. Sacks resists easy judgments or sentimental resolutions. His characters are frequently uncertain, flawed, impulsive, or emotionally adrift, yet deeply human. The world these stories inhabit may belong largely to the late 1960s through early 1980s, but the questions they raise about identity, belonging, power, and cultural encounter remain strikingly relevant.

World of Worlds is a thoughtful and vividly observed collection whose best stories resonate long after they are read.

Author Bio:

RICHARD SCOTT SACKS is an accomplished writer, US diplomat, and world traveler, whose career placed him in the crosshairs of diplomacy, conflict, and political consequence— crisscrossing Africa, Europe, and the Middle East in his youth, then in Foreign Service postings in Pakistan, Panama, Korea, Vietnam, Morocco, Mexico, Congo-Zaïre, and Washington, DC. Mr. Sacks’s debut novel, the critically acclaimed Drinking from the Stream, has won more than a dozen accolades. His academic study with SAIS professor Riordan Roett, Paraguay: The Personalist Legacy, was named Outstanding Academic Book by Choice Magazine. A former newspaper and wire service reporter, Mr. Sacks wrote for The Miami Herald from Asunción, Paraguay, the Associated Press (Detroit, Michigan), and The Middlesex News (Framingham, Massachusetts). Mr. Sacks holds master’s degrees from National War College and Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). He, his wife, Aida, and their children live near Washington, DC.

FULL BOOK TITLE: Hawaiian Flames

AUTHOR NAME: Sheri Lynne

PUBLISHER NAME: Dorrance Publishing Co.

LINK: https://www.amazon.com/Hawaiian-Flames-Sheri-Lynne/dp/B0BLG119V2/

Sheri Lynne’s Hawaiian Flames wastes little time plunging readers into danger. The novel opens in flood-ravaged Afghanistan, where Captain Peyton TreVaine leads a desperate rescue mission through rising waters and collapsing buildings. The sequence immediately establishes both the novel’s cinematic style and Peyton’s deeply ingrained sense of duty. Here, “impossible odds” are not abstract concepts—they are the daily reality of soldiers and rescuers struggling to save lives amid chaos.

The rescue mission also introduces one of the novel’s strongest emotional anchors: Peyton’s military dog, Justice. When Justice dives into floodwaters to save a drowning child, the moment carries genuine weight. “He means more to me than life itself,” Peyton later says of the dog, and Lynne convincingly builds much of the character’s emotional world around that bond.

Returning home to Hawaii after years of military service, Peyton finds himself caught between trauma, longing, and the possibility of a new life. Lynne handles his transition from war zone to civilian life with sincerity and warmth. His reunion with his brothers at the Hawaiian Lanai restaurant provides some of the novel’s most heartfelt scenes. 

Throughout the story, family serves as a sanctuary against violence and corruption. Peyton’s arrival feels less like a simple homecoming and more like a resurrection:

“I am home for good!”

Lynne clearly enjoys writing relationships—siblings teasing one another, couples flirting, coworkers exchanging glances across crowded rooms—and that warmth gives the novel much of its charm. The restaurant itself becomes a central emotional setting where food, friendship, and romance counterbalance the darker criminal underworld operating beneath Honolulu’s tropical beauty.

The novel shifts gears effectively once the organized crime storyline takes hold. Loan sharking, drug trafficking, undercover operations, and contract killings begin intersecting with Peyton’s personal life in increasingly dangerous ways. Marco Manchez, the businessman-crime boss at the center of the conspiracy, may not be an especially layered villain, but he radiates enough menace to sustain the tension. Lynne understands the appeal of classic romantic-thriller structure and keeps the story moving at a brisk pace.

Much of the suspense derives from undercover officer Stacy Rayland, operating under the alias Helen Gray. Stacy’s dual identity—as glamorous detective by night and deliberately invisible office worker by day—is one of the novel’s most entertaining elements. Lynne plays cleverly with perception and attraction, especially during the near-misses between Stacy and Peyton before either fully understands who the other truly is.

The romance between the two is written with old-school sincerity. Lynne embraces directness, giving the book an earnest tone. Her characters fall hard and speak openly about love and sacrifice. At times, the dialogue can feel overly explanatory, but the emotional intentions always remain clear.

Lynne also succeeds in portraying Hawaii as more than postcard scenery. Beneath the beaches and restaurants lies a network of crime, corruption, trauma, and hidden identities. Yet the islands never lose their romantic allure. The contrast between paradise and danger gives the novel much of its appeal.

Fans of Catherine Coulter, Nora Roberts’ romantic thrillers, and military romance fiction will find familiar pleasures here.

A heartfelt romantic thriller filled with military camaraderie, undercover intrigue, family loyalty, and island danger, Hawaiian Flames delivers exactly what it promises: action, suspense, romance, and emotional escape beneath the beauty of Hawaii’s shores.

Author Bio:

Sheri Lynne, 2025 International Impact Book Award Winner for her third book in her Hawaiian trilogy, Hawaiian Embers, is also a small business owner, serving southern Michigan for over thirty years. Lynne, a devoted mother of her special needs son, Bryan, is very passionate in helping him through nutrition and various treatments to free him from pain and to live a more independent life.

Lynne started her writing career during the Covid-19 lockdowns in 2020, when she found herself wondering what she was going to do with her life when she retired, when suddenly her late husband’s dream of owning a Hawaiian restaurant came into her mind and her first novel, Hawaiian Dreams, was born. Her desire to write romance suspense thrillers continued and Lynne has written four novels thus far and looking forward to writing more novels in the future.

Lynne’s fourth book, a historical romance suspense novel, Two Hearts, One Quest for Freedom, was a finalist in the American Writing Awards competition.

Lynne has been involved with Compassion International, where they aid children in third world countries, supplying them with food, education, medical assistance, and teaching them the love of Christ. In her spare time, she enjoys spending time with her daughter Wendy, her husband Joe, and her darling little granddaughter, Madilynne. You can learn more about Lynne’s works at www.swlynnebooks.com.