In today's turbulent world, the issue isn't if crisis will occur, but when. Do you know how to prepare for, navigate through and recover from crisis? Can you turn adversity into advantage? This book holds the key. In his decades on the core executive teams of the Baltimore Police Department, U.S. Department of Justice and for Hall of Famer Cal Ripken Jr., Rob Weinhold learned a basic truism: the strengths and shortcomings of leaders are never more magnified than during life's most difficult times. Weinhold flourishes in this space. Now, as chief executive of the highly-respected Fallston Group, a Baltimore-based crisis management & communications firm that guides leaders at every level, Weinhold shares the secrets of how to survive, then thrive, when the stakes are at their highest. A recognized crisis leadership expert who has appeared regularly on CNN, Fox, MSNBC and other national news outlets, Weinhold narrates the stories of real people and companies beset by social media attacks, sex scandals, financial distress, civic riots, active shooter situations, data breaches, natural disasters and other calamities. With each authentic story, he offers unique, yet proven, advice designed to help leaders remain steadfast, focused and resilient.
Over his fourteen years of age, Alex McGregor’s world has thrived inside the borders of his rural Pennsylvania town; to an outsider, his life is as picturesque as the rolling hills and peaceful farms surrounding his home. His father, Michael, and mother, Lauren, attempt to correct the mistakes of their pasts through the auspiciousness of their son. The family’s pristine appearance is shattered, however, when Michael falls ill to a strange lung infection. The internal tension of the family, building for years, explodes as Michael and Lauren separate, heading for a divorce. Alex can only watch as Michael’s health fades, Lauren becomes estranged, and his entire world collapses around him. What none of them could’ve expected is that a more sinister illness might be hiding underneath Michael’s ailments, one which threatens to take the life the family built and shatter it into a million pieces. Through resilience, love, maturity, and the undying perseverance of the human spirit, The Hard Way Back to Heaven serves as a testament to the power of hope.
Jerry’s Vegan Women is a fun, poignant, and occasionally steamy collection of fictional stories that follows the adventures of Jerry Zuckerman as he makes his way through the shelters, sanctuaries, and bedrooms of an eclectic assortment of vegan women. The book begins with Jerry as a sixth grader who has never given any thought about the welfare of animals or the food he eats. But his chance encounters with vegan women – friends, lovers, acquaintances, and colleagues – change all that. The book is by no means a vegan manifesto. Rather, it reveals the virtues, imperfections, and idiosyncrasies of those who choose the meat-free lifestyle. And, it explores universal themes such as love, work, and most of all, the search for identity and meaning. It’s a journey that both herbivores and omnivores will enjoy.
In the summer of 1944, Edwina, known as Eddie, a young high school teacher of English and German travels to Washington to work for the war effort unaware a killer is there, targeting government girls. And he's closer than she could ever imagine. Eddie finds Washington crowded and exciting, a city at war, where folks act as if each day is their last. She rushes at life, longing to live her own version of Casablanca, believing the only enemies are Over There, the Nazis, Hitler, Hirohito. And that every man in uniform is a hero.
The Last Government Girl, filled with heart-pounding tension, is peopled with extraordinarily alive characters, a mulatto crime photographer battling Jim Crow laws, a bootlegger's niece enjoying stolen moonshine money, and a beautiful Jewish department store heiress hiding a terrible secret.
"If you love the World War II era and mysteries, Ellen Herbert's The Last Government Girl is going to be one you will want to read. The story takes place in DC during World War II when the city is flooded with young women going to work for the first time to help the war effort. And someone is killing those «government girls» once a month. This story took me back to a time I never lived and made me feel as if I was there. I literally could not stop reading." – Rebecca McFarland Kyle, Author of Fanny and Dice, Editor of Tails from the Front Line, and Amazon Vine reviewer
When seven-year-old Anthony Little Eagle is found dead on the concrete patio beneath the balcony of a foster home, police and child welfare officials determine that it was a tragic accident. Sylvia Jensen, the foster care supervisor, comes to suspect that the boy's death may have involved foul play and she is launched on a journey to find the truth no matter what the cost. She forms an unlikely alliance with J.B. Harrell, an investigative reporter, to search for the killer, defying her superiors and risking her career-even her own life-to ensure that justice is done. In the process both Sylvia and J.B. are forced to face their own pasts and learn to live with them. At The Center is about the danger of secrets, the power of belonging and how much bravery it takes to finally close the distance between who we pretend to be and who we really are.
Fans of the HBO Series Boardwalk Empire will find Venable Park an engaging journey to the same era, with the struggles of the times viewed through the eyes of a vastly different central character. **** 1920s Prohibition Baltimore is a place apart from the bright, gilded world of Gatsby; a place where ash and smoke darken midday skies. Millworker Henry Dawson is a returned WWI vet, finding his tenuous path back to civilian life after a harrowing tour of duty in France's Argonne Forest. Just as Dawson gradually gains his bearings, events at the football stadium rising from the grounds of the city's Venable Park threaten to send him spiraling back to the despair of the war. Told from the perspective of Henry, Venable Park is a rare look at the Twenties as they were, weighted by the toils and lifted by the triumphs of common men. «An excellent book…heartbreaking, but ultimately satisfying.» – WYPR – Baltimore's NPR Station
Matthew Brown is a rising star in the “New South” political machine. He’s also, he knows, a complete fraud.
Riding a wave of accomplishments by colleagues and subordinates through various government agencies, Matthew has ascended to associate director of the Department of Corrections, and his potential has caught the eye of the party power brokers, who are priming him for even grander political office.
But suddenly tasked with organizing the state’s first execution in a decade, Matthew’s carefully constructed charade begins to crumble. At the same time, a sprawling investigation that is roiling all of government, led by a mysterious special prosecutor, threatens to sweep Matthew up in its wake when he discovers a potentially deadly ecological scandal that he himself may have unwittingly set in motion. In the midst of this storm arrives Hero, the 12-year-old daughter Matthew never knew existed. Possessing a bruising wit and new emotional wounds, she relentlessly batters Matthew, who comes to believe that this relationship with his newfound daughter may be his only chance for personal redemption.
The Late Matthew Brown is a satire of race and bureaucracy and the struggle to build meaningful relationships while living within two worlds at once, the Old South and the New.
Cherished only child of Charley and Emma Beck, she is the unlikely issue of an improbable union. Beloved wife of Ferd Voith, she is the happy mother of a tribe of nine, and newly expecting her tenth. It is the family of her earliest dreams.
Seven forty-one, the house that Charley built on his little plot of farmland just outside of Washington City in the District of Columbia, is the only home she’s ever known. So vast before, the house seems to shrink with each new child, until Charley wonders that they’re not all tumbling out of windows.
In a ritual established over so many babies, Lillie celebrates by having Ferd bring down her memory box, a carefully collected treasure of the lives of those she loves. She knows by heart every word of the letters, every entry of the diaries, every detail of the photographs, and she traces them again with the start of each new life, to instill a sense of place, of family, of history.
Emma’s miracle, Ferd’s universe, the beating heart of the household: When Lillie is stricken in a fall, her memories tug at threads woven through a century as the fabric of the family frays around her.
Charming, lyrical, and evocative, by turns funny and heartbreaking, Up the Hill to Home sketches an enduring portrait of four generations of the Miller/Beck/Voith clan against the backdrop of Washington, D.C., as the city itself grows from a dusty pre-Civil War cowtown to a national capital in the throes of the Great Depression.
Ripped from today’s headlines, Capitol Crimes is a gripping tale of political intrigue, espionage and personal destruction. Callie Wheeler always seemed destined for great things. She landed the job of her dreams straight out of Law School and rose to prominence as the top lobbyist in Washington, D.C. Mike Ferguson is Callie’s fiancé and a CIA operative. He is in pursuit of terrorists who threaten to destroy America and in the process, discovers information that hits a little too close to home. Kacey Mercer is Callie’s best friend and a reporter at the Washington Post. She uncovers a story of political corruption that has Callie’s fingerprints all over it. As Callie’s charmed life begins to unravel, her enemies in Congress who have plenty of their own secrets to hide, pounce on her misfortune. It is only after Callie discovers how deep the corruption actually goes, that she is forced to choose between America’s demise or her own.
From the ruins of ocean liners and model cities, to the dark impulses of Greek myths and biblical narratives, poet Megan Gannon casts a wide thematic net in tracing the legacy of desire in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. With the lyric compression of Emily Dickinson, the syntactical momentum and surrealist imagery of Sylvia Plath, the poems in White Nightgown examine how desire serves as both a creative and a destructive force, drawing loved ones near to us and pushing them away, destroying nations as well as shaping them. In Gannon's poems, the vestiges of desire are as encompassing as water, as enduring and semi-visible as ghosts.