The Cardiff Giant, set in Cooperstown, New York, has up its novelistic sleeve Puck's profound declaration, "Lord, what fools these mortals be!" Jess Freeman, investigative reporter, arrives on the scene to look into the weird disappearance from the Farmers' Museum of a huge human figure. He had been unearthed in the late nineteenth century near Cardiff, New York. Jess confronts locals and outsiders who all have a theory, including that the giant has been reanimated and is lurching throughout the community. They are enmeshed in self-punishing belief systems such as alien abduction, astrology, kabbalistic numerology, New Age rebirthing, and religious dogmas reduced to literal absurdities. The fast-paced action centers around episodes where they pay a sorry price for their beliefs. But skeptics don't fare much better, susceptible as they are to mental disorders that show the faculty of reason is fragile indeed. These characters group and regroup, with romance always on their minds, and finally come to recognitions at once surprising and moving.
Currently playing:
Deb
Lewis
speaking about “Why Is Pono not Pono Today? Bring out the best when someone is stressed”
Set in Hawaii, this heartwarming book and its lovable characters offer adults and children helpful ways to discuss and handle stress."Why is Pono not Pono Today?" is a book where kids of all ages easily identify with the normally happy Pono the Bull. Pono snaps after others are mean to him. His friend Kuleana notices what happens and helps to quickly bring back the best in Pono.
Here, tough situations end well through love, creativity, and working closely together. When we learn how to work through the toughest situations together, STRESS becomes our SUPERPOWER.
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Kitty
May
Gruchelska
speaking about “Steven F Seagull & The Missing Chips”
In Chips We Trust
In the seaside town of Fry Cove, the seagull inhabitants enjoy plentiful chips, especially in the high season when the delightful bay is full of tourists. Steven Fitzgerald, a lowly member of the chip reconnaissance team, wishes he wasn't so useless at his job, but he dreams of becoming an entrepreneur. However, one day, the chips mysteriously disappear, and no one knows the answer to this chipocalypse.
Who committed this heinous crime? Was it the Deny the Fry colony, who want all seagulls to quit chips and revert to eating fish? Or was it the seagull mafia boss, Stefano Giacomo, who has concocted a dastardly plot to convert all seagulls to pizza and pasta?
As part of the newly formed CIA (Chips Investigation Agency), whose motto is 'In Chips We Trust,' Fitzy, Charlie, Steven Colton, the karate chopping Bart, and Steven Rhys pit their wits to solve the mystery. Along the way, they make enemies and forge alliances with a range of quirky characters.
Join Fitzy in this feel good tale about self-belief and teamwork, while he embarks on the adventure of a lifetime.
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Mike
F
Elliott
speaking about “Escaping Limbo”
ESCAPING LIMBO is a 71,000 coming-of-age story set in St. Paul MN during the turbulent 1960's. Two young Catholic teenage boys, Francis Paulson (narrator) and his unsteady friend Izzy, experience the big issues of the times first-hand, 3 assassinations, Vietnam War, Apollo Moon Race, British Music Invasion, Race Riots, Counter Culture Movement & Mohammad Ali Arrest, all while struggling with the fierce morality pushed on them by their families, church and Catholic School.
Francis' family also struggles trying to keep their 2nd generation candy factory going after tragedies and losses in their family.
The boy's relationship is also threatened when Izzy's arch-enemy, Suck-Up Sue, a cute rambunctious girl, sets her sights on Francis.
Francis continues his attempts to help Izzy recover from the death of his older brother and protect Izzy from his abusive old man by trying to earn funds for a secret and taboo dangerous summer canoe trip with the belief it will help Izzy heal and Francis face his own doubts about his strict upbringing.
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Tom
Strelich
speaking about “Dog Logic”
Synopsis
Hertell Daggett is not what he used to be: he’d once been married, he’d once been a physicist, and he’d once been shot in the head in a New Year’s Eve accident. Or possibly the 4th of July, he could never quite remember. The doctors got most of the bullet out, but a few microscopic specks of copper remained floating inside his brain, connecting parts that are no longer connected in the rest of us, filaments of species memory going back to the beginning of time. He knew how animals thought and remembered the singing of dinosaurs, and the dry humor of mastodons, and the rubbery smell of trilobites. He’d once had a future, but he lived now on the outskirts of Bakersfield, California, a damaged caretaker of a run down, failing pet cemetery. And he’s been hearing something.
While Hertell seeks the source of the mysterious sound, a deputy sheriff visiting the grave of his police dog suspects that the pet cemetery is a front for a large-scale meth lab and begins surveillance. The sounds he’s been hearing lead Hertell to an epic discovery when he unearths a time-capsule, actually more of a vast, sprawling time-cavern full of people, many hundreds of them. They’ve been living beneath the pet cemetery since 1963 as part of a long-forgotten Government program to preserve Western civilization in the charred aftermath of a massive nuclear war, presumably triggered by the assassination of President Kennedy – at least that’s what their computer simulation predicted. Hertell informs the time-capsule population that the world did not end in 1963 but in fact had been wobbling on ever since and leads them to the surface where they are immediately descended upon by helicopters, SWAT teams, and drug-sniffing dogs as part of a massive (but mistaken) drug bust. The embarrassing mistake is televised, YouTubed, and streamed for the world to see.
Hertell’s duck-and-cover civilization is initially embraced and celebrated by the modern world – their music, their innocence, their purpose, the miracle of their very existence. And Hertell takes it upon himself to be their protector and shepherd, to lead them gently and lovingly (in stylish casual attire of the early ‘60s) into the astounding, mystifying, and often dismaying modern world. They are his children. They are like one of those lost tribes that stumble out of the Amazonian jungle into civilization, only this time it isn’t the primitives who are overwhelmed by civilization, but very much the other way around, and they will pay for it. Not only do the technologies that allowed them to live happily beneath the surface disrupt the global economy, they also reveal themselves to be unimpressed and indifferent to the machinery of contemporary Government. They’d lived for the past 50 years in complete isolation, and had absolutely no need for it, and specifically no dependency on it. It is simply not part of their lives and they are totally outside its control and the control of basically everybody, everybody but themselves, and that cannot be tolerated. They are denounced as a dangerous, extremist cult and attacked with the full force of the benevolent state. Hertell saves his duck-and-cover civilization, and in the process finds a love he never quite lost and a future he never quite imagined.
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Randy
Rolfe
speaking about “The Single Ingredient Diet”
In The Single Ingredient Diet, Randy Rolfe takes an up-to-date look at the gaslighting which is going on by food processors, chemical companies, and regulators to rob us of our health. And she shows us how to liberate ourselves from its numbing effects and actively prevent the debilitating chronic diseases which are caused by the ultraprocessed food in the typical modern Western diet. In her twenties she developed a revolutionary and amazingly simple eating pattern which has kept her healthy well into her seventies. And in this book she shows us how it works to ensure that we are doing the best we can to support a long, healthy life.
The Single Ingredient Diet invites us to transform our relationship with food in just 21 days. We seem obsessed today with conflicts between low-fat and low-carb, meat-eating and vegan, raw and cooked. But these conflicts are just a smoke screen hiding the most important conflict, which is between real foods, which nourish and heal, and non-foods, which sicken and kill. By learning how to use only instantly recognizable foods which require no labels and foods which list only one ingredient, we can enjoy every meal from now on, free of confusion, doubt, worry, and regret. When we take up this 21 day challenge, we can look forward to happier meals, happier health, and a happier life.
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Victoria
Gail
Oltarsh
speaking about “The Boy and the Secret of the Stars”
Eight-year-old Eli makes a wish on a twilight star and is whisked away on an outer space adventure. Guided by Cygnus, a star boy from the Swan Constellation, they meet the captivating Princess of Glitterland, who tells him to direct all his questions to the Star Maker. But the sinister Glizzards capture them enroute, leaving Eli to wonder if he will ever learn the secret of the stars and find his way back to his home on Earth.
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Norman
Brewer
speaking about “January 6: A Novel”
The day democracy was assaulted...Protesters at the President’s rally morph into a mob that storms the Capitol, right-wing extremists in their midst.
In halls the author walked for decades as a reporter, hostages are taken, the House Speaker among them. A horrific standoff gives extremist militias time to unleash deadly terrorism across the nation.
The President, in election denial, weighs declaring martial law to quell the violence – and justify refusing to leave office.
Will we again face insurrection?
"Brewer gets inside the violent insurrectionists' heads as the revolution spreads. It didn't happen... but it could have!" - John Dinges, author of The Condor Wars
The prestigious Midwest Book Review "unreservedly" recommends January 6: A Novel "to community and college/university library collections" and calls it "essential reading for those with interest, in politics, terrorism, freedom..."
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Donna
Louis
speaking about “The Rain Falls On The Just & The Unjust”
As much as Christians or believers of God would like to believe that, just because we acknowledge God in our lives, we should never have any sorrow. That is untrue. Just believing this makes us commit sin because then we are not humble, but haughty. We will all have challenges, disappointments, and unfair situations arise in our lives, but as believers of God, we are to handle ourselves so that unbelievers will want to become like us. We are to TRUST, HAVE FAITH, and BELIEVE that GOD has our back and will keep us lifted above, fight our battles, and always cause us to Triumph!
Currently playing:
Kass
Ghayouri
speaking about “An Era of Error”
Kass Ghayouri's An Era of Error sheds light on an Indian girl growing up in a period of racial segregation enforced through the legislation of the Apartheid government, in South Africa during the period of 1960 to 2000. During the time of the Apartheid regime, Kay found it a liability being an Indian. The Immorality Act was a strict code of conduct, which prevented interracial affairs and marriages. It is a story of jaw-dropping dehumanization, torture and verbal intimidation, conducted in total violation of the Apartheid laws. The major characters suffered gross violation of civil rights and human rights, unleashed by the Apartheid era. Amidst the brutality, emerges the most beautiful love story that transports the major characters into a new dimension.