Books
Notes From a Dead Planet: Please Prove Me Wrong : Paul Brown
Notes from a Dead Planet has a premise and a challenge.
The premise: Humans, like all living things, have a built-in drive to reproduce and consume resources beyond the ability of nature to support them. Unfortunately, we’ve evolved the ability to override the natural controls that keep other species from destroying their habitats, so that now we’ve caused a global collapse of Earth’s life support system. Our drive to consume is too powerful for us to overcome, and we are dooming all life on the planet to extinction. Our culture, built around this urge, keeps us from changing our ways. Corporations, a natural result of our drive to consume, own our governments, and they fight all attempts to rein in our self-destruction. As long as we are controlled by corporations, our own creation, we can’t survive. That’s why international efforts to address climate change and mass extinction have failed utterly.
The challenge: Please prove me wrong by taking decisive action today, to stop global collapse. If the world makes the necessary commitment to a single-minded effort to rescue the web of life we depend on, we just might survive. Notes from a Dead Planet offers the solutions; it’s up to you to apply them.
People deserve to know that humans are hard-wired to consume resources until the biosphere collapses, very soon. Although we have the capacity for reason, science, and morality to prevail over our basic instincts, our culture suppresses this. Notes from a Dead Planet explains what people deserve to know, namely, the juggernaut of overpopulation, mass extinction, and global warming; the few remaining solutions that just might reverse it; and the obstacles to recovery. This is the only honest presentation of the full picture, backed up by hundreds of hyperlinks.
Time isn’t on our side, but enough people are suffering from the ongoing collapse that maybe, just maybe, they’ll commit to evolutionary change and we can reverse it.
Book Links
Website
Facebook
Twitter
Linkedin
Amazon Author Page
On Amazon
The Complete Works of a Lost Girl : Kelleen Goerlitz
The Complete Works of a Lost Girl is a collection of playlets and poems which capture the beauty, tragedy, tension and freedom that is the human experience.
This work contains seven playlets ranging from a Greek tragedy to dystopian fiction and sixteen poems of different styles.
Over a decade ago the words which make up this body of work were given a voice and encouraged to find their way out of a tumultuous mind and flow out into the world through the tip of a pen.
They may be imperfect, but in their imperfection, they are true to the mind which created them and the heart which gave them life.
Book Links
Goodreads
Amazon Author Page
On Amazon
Yiayia’s Kitchen Family Traditions : Brianna Koucos Midgley
“When I spent time in Yiayia’s kitchen, she taught me about ingredients and recipes. I also learned about my heritage and many Greek traditions. While I learned to cook and bake, Yiayia also taught me important lessons about life.”
In Yiayia’s Kitchen, the most important thing is family. Koukla worries because her cookies don’t look as good as those Yiayia (Grandmother) and Theia (Aunt) are making. Her cookies are different. They don’t look as pretty, and it makes her sad. She longs to make the same beautiful shapes as her aunt and grandmother. Yiayia sees she is upset and explains she didn’t always know how to make such perfect cookies. She, too, had to learn. Yiayia tells Koukla the cookies will be delicious because they all made them together, and even if they look different on the outside, they came from the same ingredients.
A heartwarming story about tradition, family and unconditional love, Yiayia’s Kitchen, Family Traditions will be a favorite for readers of all ages.
More Work or More Free Time: The Crucial Political Issue that No One Is Talking About : Charles Siegel
Do you know that American work hours went down steadily from 1840 until the Great Depression but have not gone down at all since then? Do you know that European work hours have continued to go down and that Dutch workers have the right to choose part-time work, so they can work as much as they want rather than having to work full time?
No one is talking about these facts, but this book shows that they are crucial to building a future that is environmentally sustainable and that works for people.
Americans believe we need rapid economic growth to create jobs and avoid unemployment, but that is because we do not have the choice of working shorter hours. Because the Dutch can choose part-time work, they can avoid unemployment by creating the amount of work people actually want.
We have reached the point where economic growth no longer brings significant benefits. International comparisons show that higher-income no longer improves a nation’s happiness, health, or educational achievement significantly after it reaches about two-thirds of the current American level. And postwar America’s push to promote automobile use to stimulate the economy actually made our cities less livable.
American and Dutch employees produce about the same amount per hour, but the average American employee works 25% more than the average Dutch employee. The available measures of well-being show that all the extra work doesn’t do us any good.
In the course of this century, most nations of the world could emerge from poverty and have a comfortable middle-class standard of living if we can avoid ecological crisis. But that is a big “if.”
To create a sustainable economy with a high quality of life, it is essential for the world to follow the Dutch model of lower inequality, shorter work hours and slower growth rather than the current American model of high inequality, long work hours and rapid growth.
But no mainstream politician is talking about the crucial issue of work time.
The ABCs of Global Warming by Charles Siegel is also on Whizbuzz Books.
Vuel: Perception is Everything : Kregt Cadizan
Three friends met for margaritas one evening. Ranger had graduated from business school. Suzann had become a code writing manager. Alecia had completed a management systems degree.
They all remembered leaving the Cactus Bar that night and walking across the parking lot. They are all sure that was their last memory of Earth.
Their next memory was of walking out of a spaceship onto the meadows of Vul. They will not forget the first time they looked up to see a planet filling the sky.
Ranger walked out of that spaceship with the first group of Humans, then watched as other groups were loaded into vehicles and taken away. Alecia and Suzann were difficult to distinguish from other girls, but he thought he recognized them by their movements. He wasn’t sure of anything, really, except that there was another planet filling the sky, and this place was definitely not Earth.
Alecia and Suzann are taken to a mountain village and trained to be the charismatic vuelessas that guide vuel. Suzann will initially reject the training and learn hard lessons about vuel.
Ranger fares no better as he is abducted from Vul and sent to the twin planet, Govul, where work crews do not survive for long.
The Vuelans of Vul believe that Earth Humans are primitive beings, brought from a faraway land where they lived in the wild, and must be taught the Vuelan lengua as well as basic cleanliness.
These stories are received on Earth telepathically from each character. Occasionally, their stories converge.
Soft erotic occurrences are part of Vuel, you may not want to return to Earth.
In Vuel, perception is everything.
The first book of the “Vuel” series.
Vuel: Gang Fighters and Vuel: Vuelessa of Centium by Kregt Cadizan are also on Whizbuzz Books.
Book Links
Website
Facebook
Buy the book
The Danger of Safety : Jules Coventry
After fighting bravely in World War 2 the nation is tired but the Cold War is at its terrifying peak.
The government is pursuing a nuclear deterrent at breakneck speed and pinning its faith in that to prevent another conflict. They push the project too hard and there is a catastrophic reactor fire. This must never be public knowledge so a cover-up starts that must last for years and keep the scores of people who know what happened silent.
Those charged with the cover-up go too far; they have instilled fear but now they have to cover up their own actions. One man knows way too much and is suspected of having hard evidence. How far will they go to keep him silent and protect their careers?
Book Links
Website
Books2Read
On Amazon
50 States : Richard R Becker
An Idaho farmer who aches for absolution after a tragedy is given one more chance at redemption. Two runaways cross paths in a Tennessee bus station with only one ticket between them. A family sees looters racing toward their home as they escape an Oregon wildfire. A young couple takes a reckless turn off a state highway in Utah and find themselves in a nightmarish government biohazard area.
These and 46 more shorts make up an anthology that will surprise readers with each new thought-provoking story as they skip across different genres, moods, and states of mind. Together, they provide a character-driven collection of short stories that captures the human condition across the American landscape over the last 60 years — the kind and the cruel, the heroic and criminal — in unpredictable and exciting ways.
Book Links
Website
Facebook
Twitter
Instagram
Amazon Author Page
On Amazon
The Vow: A Love Story and the Holocaust : Michael Ruskin
As the son and last surviving member of his family, my book is based on the lives of my late parents, David and Dora Ruskin, who were Holocaust Survivors in Lithuania from 1941-1945. Beginning from the couples’ early childhood in the 1930s, the book depicts their special bond amidst the death and destruction of the Holocaust; and their lives after liberation and coming to America.
Being forced into a Lithuanian ghetto early in their marriage, they were separated and then deported into separate concentration camps where they went through unimaginable brutality and abuse at the hands of the German SS under horrific living conditions.
After David was liberated in May 1945 from the Dachau concentration camp, he began his “mission” to find his beloved wife nearly a year after their separation. Searching through the rugged and treacherous terrain of central Europe, he finally found her, nearly two months into his search.
They eventually immigrated to the United States along with their 3-year son. My intention in writing the book was to keep their legacy alive and to contrast their remarkable journey against the backdrop of one of the darkest periods in human history… the Holocaust.
The book is more than writing about the unimaginable horrors of the Holocaust, it is also a tribute to my parents’ love, faith and courage and their will to survive. Their relationship truly exemplifies the strength of their love and the human spirit, which is in all of us. A poignant message they wanted to leave for humanity but never did. Now, this book will be their “voice.”
Book Links
Website
Facebook
Buy the book
The Mirror’s Touch : Jackie Notter
This 2019’s IPPY Award winner’s new novel is a monster hunter’s tale, wrapped up in a sizzling Romeo and Juliet scenario that doesn’t end tragically.
Sleeping with the enemy has never been more risqué.
Pop Secrets by Jackie Notter is also on Whizbuzz Books.
Book Links
Website
Amazon Author Page
On Amazon
All Mine : Davy D
Coal is ingrained deep in Dave Doran’s DNA. Mining is a family matter, his grandfather, great-grandfather and a great-uncle, who was killed in a pit disaster at the age of 18, were miners all their working lives. A childhood spent in the shadow of the local pit wheel, and being brought up in a close-knit mining community, provided him with lifelong values.
All Mine is part memoir, part natural history, part social commentary, told through the medium of poetry: a collection of writing from boyhood to retirement. The poems take us on a journey from the coal fields of West Cumbria, through the complex underbelly of a metropolis, to the bucolic landscapes of Buckinghamshire.
All Mine has been a lifetime in the making, a series of flirtations with writing, art, and a thirty-year career policing the streets of London.
The poetic gaze moves from the Irish Sea to the River Thames, the miner’s strike of 1984 to the pandemic, and a view of the capital through the eyes of a street copper; each poem questions again the things that make a man.
There are many events which shape and fracture an identity. The writing contained in this collection reflects a life of love, loss, bewilderment and belonging. Coal haunts the bones. Ghosts darken walls of black stone, catch upon a common air, shadowing and highlighting those things that lift a life from the pit to the surface. History and chance layer each other like geological eras in this debut collection.
Book Links
Website
Instagram
Mardibooks
On Amazon UK
On Amazon