A Sociologist’s Case for Human Rights Awareness in America

NY Weekly Staff on July 18, 2026

In her new book, Quality of Life and Human Rights Policies in the U.S.: How Can the U.S. Reduce Its Human Rights Violations?, now in its second edition, sociologist Ilsa S. Lottes turns four decades of research on rights and measurement toward her own country, and arrives at a call for greater civic awareness of internationally recognized human rights frameworks.

The premise is deceptively simple: most Americans, Lottes argues, have never read the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 1948, and fewer still could name the rights it ensures. Citing human rights scholar Wronka, she notes that only about 10% of U.S. citizens have ever heard of the document, despite a national self-image largely built on the idea that the country was founded on human rights principles. That gap in knowledge, Lottes contends, is not incidental but structural: a civic blind spot that allows certain social challenges to persist without being examined through a human rights lens.

The data she draws on spans a range of international indices. The U.S. ranks 23rd out of 87 nations on a recent global quality-of-life index measuring access to food, education, employment, and a clean environment, and 61st out of 180 on a governance efficiency index assessing corruption, infrastructure, and financial stability. For Lottes, these figures are not verdicts but starting points, evidence that the country’s domestic record is more complex than its international reputation might suggest, and that a human rights framework offers a useful lens for examining that complexity.

Lottes writes as an admirer and a constructive critic of Richard Haass’s 2023 book The Bill of Obligations, which calls for a new model of citizenship built around ten civic duties. She agrees with much of his diagnosis of civic disengagement but argues it doesn’t go far enough. Where Haass calls for renewed attention to citizenship obligations, Lottes insists the country also needs a genuine education in human rights themselves, the specific protections outlined in the 1948 Declaration, most of which have no equivalent presence in American civic curricula.

Structurally, the book builds its case in stages. Lottes opens by defining human rights and their guiding principles as outlined in United Nations documents and the work of human rights scholars, arguing that such rights function as a universal ethical framework independent of any single religion or tradition. From there, she turns to comparison, examining how other nations approach the protection of their citizens, before spending the bulk of the book examining ten specific domestic social challenges through a human rights lens, from food insecurity to health care access, and proposing responses grounded in human rights principles. A closing section addresses how human rights education might be incorporated into civics and citizenship curricula from kindergarten through university.

Lottes does not claim to expect utopia. No country, she writes, will ever achieve full realization of human rights, and cynicism, greed, and apathy are permanent features of human societies. But she maintains that the progressive realization of rights by more people remains genuinely possible, and that an informed public, one that knows what the Universal Declaration says, is the precondition for any of it.

Part scholarly analysis, part civics primer, the book is written for general readers as much as for students of public policy, law, sociology, and public health. Lottes suggests it could supplement coursework in Social Problems classes alongside other perspectives. Each chapter opens with quotations from figures ranging from Ruth Bader Ginsburg to Desmond Tutu, an invitation, she says, to revisit familiar words in light of new evidence.

The book is available now.

Dorothy Smith Brings a Rare Kind of Honesty to Contemporary Romance

NY Weekly Staff on July 18, 2026

In a romance market often crowded with young love, fast attraction, and neatly packaged emotion, Dorothy Smith’s Late Life Romance enters with a quieter and more resonant force. The book does not chase the usual fantasy of perfect timing. Instead, it turns toward a truth many readers know but do not often see explored with care: love can arrive after years of waiting, healing, questioning, and living. That alone gives Smith’s work a distinct place.

Late Life Romance is not simply a story about affection. It is a meditation on timing, self-worth, emotional courage, and the surprise of being seen when one no longer expects it. Smith writes from a deeply personal space, yet the feeling behind the book reaches far beyond one woman’s experience. Her work speaks to readers who understand disappointment, faith, aging, longing, and the strange bravery it takes to open the heart again.

What makes Smith noteworthy as an author is her refusal to treat later-life romance as a sentimental novelty. She gives it weight. She allows it to be uncertain, charged, tender, and complicated. In her hands, romance is not a youthful accident. It is a human event, one that can disrupt routine, awaken buried desire, and force a person to reconsider what they still believe about themselves.

The book’s emotional landscape is built through small, intimate observations. Smith notices glances, pauses, changes in tone, and the uneasy silence that can follow a moment too charged to ignore. These details give her work an unusual closeness. The reader is not held at a polished distance. Instead, the book feels like a confidence shared across the table.

Photo Courtesy: Dorothy J. Smith

That quality matters. Readers today are often looking for stories that feel less manufactured and more lived-in. Late Life Romance answers those needs. It presents love not as a flawless escape, but as something that must pass through memory, caution, old wounds, and personal belief. That makes the emotional stakes feel real.

Smith also brings forward an important conversation about women, age, and visibility. Her book quietly challenges the idea that desire belongs only to youth. It reminds readers that a woman’s inner life does not become smaller with age. Her longing does not become less meaningful. Her beauty does not lose its power simply because time has passed.

This is where the book finds its cultural relevance. It makes space for readers who rarely see themselves centered in romantic narratives. It honors maturity without making it feel heavy. It treats later chapters of life not as decline, but as territory where surprise can still live.

Dorothy Smith’s voice is warm, direct, and spiritually aware. She writes with a sincerity that cannot be faked. There is faith in the work, but also humor, doubt, vulnerability, and emotional alertness. These elements give the book its personality and help establish Smith as an author with something sincere to say.

Late Life Romance deserves attention because it broadens the conversation around what romance can be. It is not about rushing toward fantasy. It is about recognizing the power of unexpected connection at a stage of life too often ignored by mainstream love stories.

For readers who want romance with maturity, tenderness, and emotional truth, Dorothy Smith offers a story that feels both personal and widely familiar.

With Late Life Romance, Smith reminds readers that love does not need youth to matter. Sometimes it only needs the courage to arrive late.

New Novel Vietnam, Port Townsend Bay Traces a Dying Man’s Journey Home

NY Weekly Staff on July 17, 2026

Seattle, WA — Author Calmar Austin McCune has released Vietnam, Port Townsend Bay, a novel that follows the wealthiest man in Vietnam on a final, unforgettable flight back to the small Washington town where he grew up.

The story opens at a Hanoi airport, where a Vietnamese-American surgeon named Dr. Thu is unexpectedly recruited to serve as an in-flight physician aboard a private Boeing 747. Her patient is Dexter Rowell, an elderly, ailing businessman who owns the plane, and who has just been given two weeks to live. Rather than spend his final days in comfort at home, Rowell has decided to fly across the Pacific to Port Townsend, the small waterfront town on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula where he was born and raised, and where his parents are buried.

Over the course of the flight, Rowell tells Dr. Thu the story of his life: a difficult childhood, an unlikely stint as a high school quarterback, and his enlistment in the U.S. Army, which sent him to Vietnam in 1966 as a demolitions specialist. There, he became one of the “tunnel rats” who crawled through the Viet Cong’s underground tunnel networks near Cu Chi, narrow, booby-trapped passages filled with venomous snakes, scorpions, and near-total darkness. Captured and held by North Vietnamese soldiers and villagers, Rowell endured months as a prisoner before a forced march to Hanoi and, eventually, release at the war’s end.

Decades later, haunted by memories of the woman who helped care for him during his captivity, Rowell returned to Vietnam, married her, and built an unlikely fortune there, turning a wartime observation about rice paper into an international business empire. Now, with his health failing, he is drawn back to Port Townsend for one last look at the schools, streets, and shoreline of his youth.

Dr. Thu, his in-flight physician, becomes an unexpected confidante on this journey. A gifted facial reconstruction surgeon trained at Harvard and the Royal London Institute of Surgery, she has her own quiet story of leaving Vietnam behind, and the long flight across the Pacific becomes a conversation between two people separated by generation and circumstance but bound by the same distant homeland.

McCune weaves together two vividly rendered worlds, the claustrophobic terror of Vietnam’s wartime tunnels and the quiet, salt-air familiarity of a small Pacific Northwest town, into a meditation on memory, homecoming, and the pull of the place where a life began. Readers familiar with Port Townsend will recognize real landmarks along the way, including Fort Worden, the Hood Canal Bridge, Water Street, and the beach where the story reaches its close.

The novel closes with an unexpected final gesture from Rowell, one that reaches beyond Port Townsend and back across the Pacific to the country and the people who shaped his life, bringing the story full circle.

Though presented as fiction, the novel draws on extensive research into the tunnel warfare of the Vietnam War era and on McCune’s own long familiarity with Port Townsend, where he lived and worked for three decades. The result is a story that moves fluidly between two very different settings, always circling back to the same questions of home, identity, and what it means to return to a place after a lifetime away.

Vietnam – Port Townsend Bay is available now in hardcover, softcover, and eBook editions through Xlibris and major booksellers.

About the Author

Calmar Austin McCune grew up in Seattle, Washington, and went on to practice law in Port Townsend, Washington, for many years. He now lives back in Seattle, where he continues to write. McCune is 87 years old, and Vietnam, Port Townsend Bay draws on his deep familiarity with the Olympic Peninsula town he called home for decades, as well as his lifelong interest in the history and legacy of the Vietnam War.

Every Generation Believes It Is Preserving Its History, But Every Generation Also Loses Part Of It

NY Weekly Staff on July 16, 2026

Modern life has become an endless exercise in storage. Photographs rest inside cloud servers, birthdays appear as automated reminders, and family milestones are documented before anyone has the chance to experience them. We have accumulated more records than any civilization before us, yet many families struggle to answer surprisingly ordinary questions: Who first owned this home? Why did our grandparents make the choices they did? Which stories shaped the people we became?

Memory, it turns out, has never been measured by volume. It survives because someone decides that a story is worth telling. That tension lies quietly beneath Rebecca McDonald’s My Grandmother’s Treasures. A novel that treats family history not as nostalgia but as an active conversation between generations. Rather than relying on sweeping historical spectacle, the narrative begins with something remarkably familiar. A grandmother opens her jewelry box for her fourteen-year-old granddaughter. Each object becomes less an ornament than an invitation, carrying fragments of lives that might otherwise disappear.

Objects That Outlive Their Owners

For centuries, families entrusted heirlooms with responsibilities now assigned to digital archives. A ring commemorated a sacrifice. A watch recorded the migration. A faded brooch carried the memory of someone whose name might never appear in a history textbook.

These possessions mattered because they demanded interpretation. Unlike a smartphone gallery containing thousands of nearly identical images, an heirloom arrives without explanation. Someone must supply the missing narrative.

Rebecca’s novel recognizes this distinction. The jewelry itself possesses little importance without Cassie McAllister’s willingness to explain why each piece exists and what emotional weight accompanies it. The exchange between grandmother and granddaughter becomes an act of preservation, reminding readers that heritage is transferred conversationally long before it becomes historical documentation.

The quiet ritual feels increasingly uncommon. Families often inherit possessions after funerals, when the storytellers capable of explaining them are already gone.

Silence Between Mothers And Daughters

My Grandmother’s Treasures refuses to romanticize family relationships. Running alongside its recollections is an unresolved conflict between Cassie and her daughter, Vivian, whose disagreements remain deliberately obscured from young Tessa.

This emotional architecture reflects an uncomfortable truth about family memory. Every household maintains competing versions of the past.

  • Parents remember responsibility.
  • Children remember absence.
  • Grandparents remember sacrifice.
  • No account is entirely complete.

The novel acknowledges that inheritance extends beyond cherished keepsakes. Families also pass along misunderstandings, unanswered questions, protective silences, and unresolved disappointments. These intangible legacies often prove more durable than physical possessions.

The resulting friction feels authentic precisely because it refuses convenient reconciliation. Families rarely argue only about the present. More often, they revisit decades-old decisions using contemporary language.

History Lives Best In Ordinary Rooms

Rebecca McDonald spent more than two decades teaching history and English before turning to fiction, an experience reflected in her attention to overlooked lives rather than celebrated figures. The perspective challenges a widespread assumption that history belongs primarily to nations, wars, presidents, and revolutions.

Instead, history appears around kitchen tables.

  • Inside family photographs.
  • Within recipes whose origins no one fully remembers.
  • In conversations postponed until summer afternoons.

These intimate settings rarely receive institutional recognition, yet they shape identity far more consistently than public monuments. The stories shared inside households influence values, loyalties, fears, and ambitions long before formal education begins.

Perhaps this explains why novels centered on family memory continue attracting readers despite an era obsessed with acceleration. They offer something increasingly scarce: continuity. Not certainty, because every family contains contradictions.

Not perfection, because every inheritance arrives with imperfections. Continuity.

Takeaway

My Grandmother’s Treasures suggests that remembering is less about preserving flawless versions of the past than accepting that every generation edits history before passing it onward. The greatest inheritance may not be jewelry, photographs, or carefully stored documents. It is the willingness to remain curious enough to ask older relatives difficult questions while there is still time to hear the answers. The stories waiting inside those answers may become the only archives future generations truly trust.

The Silent Crisis in Christian Leadership and Why Good Leaders Are Quitting and How to Survive the Call

NY Weekly Staff on July 16, 2026

Something is happening in the church that many people may not be talking about openly. Behind the scenes of vibrant ministries and growing congregations, a quiet crisis can unfold. Good leaders, faithful men and women who answered the call of God, sometimes walk away. They may not be walking away because they lost their faith. They may be walking away because the weight of leadership became too much to carry.

If you are a leader, you may know what this feels like. There may have been moments when you looked at the responsibility on your shoulders and thought, “I do not know if I can keep doing this.” That thought does not make you a failure. It can make you honest. And honesty can become the first step toward survival.

The modern church often celebrates the platform. It celebrates influence, authority, and the visible results of leadership. But what the church does not always address is the internal collapse that can happen when a leader carries too much for too long. The quiet moments of pressure, the sleepless nights, and the weight of decisions that affect real lives are often unseen. Because they are unseen, leaders can suffer in silence. They smile on Sunday and fall apart on Monday. This is the silent crisis, and for many leaders, it can feel real.

One damaging lie leaders may believe is that strong leaders do not struggle. This myth can harm ministries more than many external challenges. The truth is that many leaders in the Bible faced moments of deep struggle.

Consider Moses. God called him to lead an entire nation out of slavery. That sounds powerful, but what did it actually feel like for Moses? He faced constant pressure, endless complaints, and the burden of people who depended on him for everything. At one point, Moses cried out to God and said, “I cannot carry all these people by myself. The burden is too heavy for me.” That is a leader talking. That is real. Moses was not weak. He was honest. He admitted that the weight was too heavy for human shoulders.

Consider Elijah. After one of the major victories of his life, he collapsed. He ran into the wilderness, sat under a tree, and asked God to take his life. He was exhausted, discouraged, and empty. This was not simply a moment of spiritual weakness. It was also a moment of human exhaustion. God did not rebuke Elijah for his honesty. Instead, God let him sleep, gave him food, and restored his strength.

If the prophet Elijah could hit a breaking point, leaders today can as well. The idea that leaders must always be strong can be dangerous. It can keep leaders from seeking help, and it can keep them from finding rest.

One difficult part of leadership is loneliness. A leader can be surrounded by people and still feel alone. This is not just a feeling. It can be a reality of leadership.

Leaders often carry a vision that others do not fully understand. They make decisions when others do not see the full picture. They carry burdens that no one else can fully carry for them. Slowly, their circle can become smaller. They may stop sharing their struggles because they do not want to worry people. They may stop being honest because they feel they must appear strong.

This isolation can become dangerous. It may lead to emotional shutdown, spiritual dryness, and poor decisions. Leaders were not meant to lead alone.

The pain of betrayal adds another layer to the weight. There is a unique kind of hurt that can come when people a leader trusted turn against them. They invested in them. They prayed for them. They stood by them. And then, for reasons they may never fully understand, those people walk away or turn on them.

This is not just painful. It can be confusing. A leader may replay every conversation, searching for what went wrong. But sometimes, they did nothing wrong.

David experienced this. He wrote about the pain of a close friend betraying him. Jesus experienced this as well. Judas walked with Jesus, learned from Jesus, ate with Jesus, and still betrayed him. If it happened to Jesus, Christian leaders should not be surprised when betrayal becomes part of their own journey.

But betrayal does not have to harden the heart. Leaders may need to guard their hearts without closing them off completely. Forgiveness is not easy, but Brantley presents it as necessary. Without forgiveness, bitterness can grow, and leadership can suffer.

So where is the hope? Where is the solution to this silent crisis? Evangelist Michael Brantley’s book, Leadership as a Christian HELP!, points overwhelmed leaders back to dependence on God.

The book speaks directly to leaders who feel worn down by responsibility. It does not present quick fixes. It offers a faith-centered message. One of the freeing ideas in the book is that leaders are not supposed to be enough on their own. Brantley argues that God did not design leadership for people to have all the answers, handle everything perfectly, or carry everything alone. He designed it so that leaders would need Him.

The moment a leader says, “God, I cannot carry this without You,” can become the moment they begin leading differently.

Evangelist Michael Brantley understands this struggle because he has lived through parts of it. His writing is not only theory. It is shaped by ministry experience and the quiet battles many leaders do not see.

He writes with compassion and conviction, calling leaders to stop pretending and start depending. He reminds readers that strong leaders are not the ones who never struggle. They are the ones who depend on God.

The weight of leadership does not always disappear when a leader releases it to God. But, in Brantley’s message, it can be transformed. Instead of pressure alone, it can become purpose. Instead of stress alone, it can become a shared responsibility with the God who called them.

Many leaders live under the pressure to be perfect. They feel they cannot afford to make a mistake. They feel they must hold everything together. This pressure can be crushing. It can lead to burnout, fear, and loss of joy.

Brantley’s message is that God did not call leaders to perfection. He called them to faithfulness. Faithfulness means showing up, doing the work, and trusting God with the results. It means being honest when they fall short and allowing God’s grace to cover their weaknesses.

Perfectionism can damage a leader. Faithfulness can help sustain one.

The silent crisis in Christian leadership may be real, but it does not have to define every leader’s story. Leaders do not have to quit. They do not have to fade away. They can survive the call, but Brantley argues that they cannot do it while carrying the weight alone.

They need to stay connected to God. They need trusted people who can speak truth into their lives. They need rest when rest is needed. They need forgiveness when they have been hurt. And above all, they need to remember that their identity is not in their role. Their identity is in Christ.

Leadership is an assignment, but it is not the whole of who a person is.

Evangelist Michael Brantley writes in Leadership as a Christian HELP! that finishing well is not about how fast a person goes. It is about staying connected to the source. A leader can have a visible ministry and still lose themselves if they are not careful.

The road can be hard, but Brantley points readers back to the One who called them. In his view, God can carry leaders through each season when they allow Him to do so.

For leaders who feel tired, overwhelmed, or alone, Leadership as a Christian HELP! offers a faith-based reflection on the cost of ministry, the need for dependence on God, and the importance of continuing with humility, honesty, and faithfulness.

Photo Courtesy: Michael Brantley

The Scientist Who Looked Up and Found a New Kind of Love

NY Weekly Staff on July 16, 2026

In My Friend Greg, Joaquim Procopio begins with a modest instrument pointed at the stars and then does something rare in contemporary speculative fiction: he lets wonder arrive slowly.

The narrator, Jota, is not a superhero, not a chosen savior in the usual cinematic sense, and not a young man chasing adventure. He is a Brazilian scientist and retired medical doctor whose curiosity is disciplined, tender, and sometimes comic.

At an amateur astronomy gathering in rural São Paulo, he meets Greg, a strange blond visitor with a magnificent telescope, dark glasses, uncertain explanations, and a relationship to the sky that feels, from the first pages, both intimate and suspicious.

The book’s own synopsis calls the story “a love story between two scientists,” one terrestrial and one extraterrestrial, but that description only begins to suggest the odd emotional temperature of Procopio’s novel.

What follows is science fiction with the patience of a diary and the temperament of a scientist who cannot stop noticing things. A telescope mount, a rural gate, a cool geodesic dome hidden among eucalyptus trees, a mysterious camera, a chessboard, a basement, a farm that is not exactly a farm: Procopio builds his world through instruments, procedures, habits, and small discontinuities. The reader is not pushed through revelation. The reader is invited to observe.

That observational quality is the novel’s signature pleasure. Procopio’s own background gives the novel an unusual texture. Writing under the pen name Joaquim Procopio, the author is Joaquim Procopio de Araujo Filho, a Brazilian MD and PhD from Universidade de São Paulo, with postdoctoral work at Cornell University Medical College in membrane biophysics. He has published more than 60 scientific papers across fields, including membrane biophysics, artificial membranes, bioelectricity, theoretical biophysics, diabetes, fatty acids, and physiology teaching. That résumé matters, not because fiction needs credentials, but because this book’s imagination is inseparable from scientific habit. It does not merely decorate itself with science. It thinks scientifically, sometimes obsessively, sometimes beautifully.

The love story at the center of the book is stranger than the familiar romance between human and alien. Antonina, the extraterrestrial scientist who becomes Jota’s mentor and object of fascination, is not written as a fantasy of softness or conquest. She is brilliant, commanding, vulnerable, and, in Jota’s eyes, almost unbearable to contemplate. The manuscript frames their relationship around a provocative idea: domination not through violence or power, but through “a sort of love.” That theme gives the novel its charge. It asks whether love can remain love when intelligence, dependence, awe, and influence become dangerously unequal.

There is a philosophical boldness here that recalls older speculative traditions, when science fiction was willing to pause for lectures, theories, arguments, and metaphysical unease. Yet My Friend Greg is also intimate, even domestic. Its alienness often appears over coffee, bread, homemade liquor, chess, car washing, improvised hospitality, and the smell of eucalyptus. Procopio understands that the uncanny becomes more powerful when it sits at the lunch table.

The result is a sprawling, eccentric, deeply earnest novel about contact, not only between species, but between forms of knowing. Jota looks at the night sky and sees beauty, distance, and time. Greg’s group looks at Earth and sees crisis, potential, and mystery. Antonina looks at Jota and seems to see something he does not yet understand about himself. That triangular tension, between science, love, and destiny, gives the book its emotional architecture.

Readers looking for clipped minimalism will not find it here. My Friend Greg is expansive, digressive, and unapologetically idea-driven. It belongs to the tradition of novels that want to contain a universe, not simply tell a story. Its ambitions are large: ecology, intelligence, medicine, memory, extraterrestrial civilization, the fragility of Earth, the limits of human perception, and the bewildering force of affection. The book’s table of contents alone suggests its range, moving from astronomy and the hidden farm to questions of intelligence, planetary organization, medical transformation, artificial gravity, and other speculative frontiers.

But beneath the scale, what lingers is the voice of a man trying to describe the moment his ordinary categories failed him. “I report them with no expectation that someone believes they actually took place,” Jota says at the beginning, framing the narrative as a record made against ridicule. That sentence gives the novel its human key. This is not merely a book about extraterrestrials. It is a book about credibility, wonder, humiliation, longing, and the loneliness of experiences too large to share easily.

My Friend Greg may be marketed as science fiction, but its deeper subject is surrender: to evidence, to beauty, to intelligence greater than one’s own, and to a love that arrives disguised as an experiment. For readers willing to follow its patient accumulation of detail, Procopio’s novel offers a rare pleasure: the feeling that the universe is not only bigger than we imagined, but more intimate, more demanding, and more emotionally dangerous.

My Friend Greg is available online for readers drawn to Joaquim Procopio’s strange, searching, and deeply imaginative universe. Those willing to sit with its questions will find a science-fiction love story that follows a few of the genre’s usual patterns.

Decide Now and Mean It, Julia Young Sandrock’s Guide to Abundance Is the Permission Slip You Didn’t Know You Needed

NY Weekly Staff on July 16, 2026

By: Julia Allen

Julia Young Sandrock’s Decide, Now: A Guide to Mastering Abundance and Fulfillment offers an introspective exploration of personal transformation, inviting readers to reconsider abundance not as an external achievement but as an internal state cultivated through conscious choice. Rather than positioning fulfillment as the product of circumstance or acquisition, Sandrock argues that it emerges through intentional living, self-awareness, and a willingness to challenge long-held assumptions about success. This reframing encourages readers to shift their focus inward, examining the beliefs and habits that shape their daily experiences.

Organized around the author’s proprietary Fulfillment Framework, the book guides readers through three interconnected stages of self-exploration designed to examine limiting beliefs, reconnect with one’s authentic essence, and align everyday decisions with personal values and purpose. Each stage builds upon the previous one, creating a cohesive journey that feels both structured and flexible. The framework provides a clear roadmap while still allowing space for individual interpretation, making the material accessible without sacrificing philosophical depth or nuance.

Sandrock’s writing favors contemplation over prescription. Rather than relying on dramatic promises of overnight transformation, she encourages readers to engage in an ongoing process of awareness and intentional practice. This approach lends the book a grounded and realistic tone, emphasizing that meaningful change unfolds gradually. The result is a work that feels less like a motivational manifesto and more like a reflective companion for those navigating periods of transition, uncertainty, or personal growth.

Recurring themes of intuition, energetic alignment, mindfulness, and conscious decision-making are woven throughout the narrative with consistency. Readers familiar with contemporary spiritual and personal development literature will recognize many of these concepts, but Sandrock distinguishes her work by emphasizing practical integration over abstract theory. Reflection prompts and thoughtful exercises encourage readers to pause between chapters, transforming the reading experience into an active dialogue rather than passive consumption. These moments of engagement deepen the reader’s connection to the material and reinforce its applicability to everyday life.

One of the book’s notable strengths lies in its tone. Sandrock writes with warmth and measured confidence, avoiding dogmatism in favor of gentle encouragement. Her voice consistently affirms the reader’s capacity for change without diminishing the complexity of personal transformation. This balance allows the book to remain accessible to newcomers while still offering moments of insight for readers already immersed in mindfulness or self-development practices. The language is clear and inviting, making complex ideas feel approachable without oversimplifying them.

The author’s central premise, that abundance is a condition of being rather than a reward earned through external accomplishment, serves as the book’s philosophical anchor. Throughout, she challenges achievement-driven narratives that equate worth with productivity or material success, instead advocating for a more integrated understanding of fulfillment rooted in authenticity, presence, and purposeful action. While these ideas have become increasingly familiar within modern personal growth literature, Sandrock presents them with sincerity and cohesion, reinforcing them through a structured progression rather than isolated inspiration.

The pacing encourages deliberate reading. Chapters build naturally upon one another, inviting readers to revisit previous insights as their understanding deepens. Those seeking highly tactical strategies or business-oriented productivity systems may find the book intentionally reflective, but readers open to contemplative exploration will likely appreciate its measured cadence and emphasis on internal transformation. The book rewards patience and introspection, offering value that unfolds over time.

Ultimately, Decide, Now succeeds as an invitation rather than an instruction manual. It asks readers to become active participants in their own evolution, recognizing that meaningful change begins with a series of intentional decisions made in the present moment. Sandrock presents fulfillment not as a distant destination but as a practice of aligning thought, energy, and action with one’s deepest values.

If you have been chasing a version of abundance that keeps moving further away the closer you get to it, and you are ready to discover that fulfillment was never something to be earned but something to be chosen, Decide, Now by Julia Young Sandrock is the reflective and genuinely transformative companion you have been looking for. Grab your copy on Amazon today and begin the most important series of decisions you will ever make, the ones that align everything you do with everything you actually are.

Jennifer Hashmi and the Floating Islands of Pongoland

NY Weekly Staff on July 15, 2026

By: Jaxon Lee

Some authors chase trends. Jennifer Hashmi does the opposite. She writes from a place most modern children’s fiction has forgotten, a place where kindness is a kind of power, and where a hidden archipelago in the sky still has lessons to teach a noisy world below.

Hashmi is the author behind the Sonny, Gogo, and Tobo series, including the most recent installment, The Adventures of Sonny Gogo and Tobo: An Epilogue, and the companion fantasy The Ruby Ring and the Black Knight. Her stories drop readers into Pongoland, Maridoland, Beldeena, and the other floating islands of an archipelago that her young hero, Sonny, first stumbles into at age seven. By the time readers meet a grown-up Sonny in the Epilogue, the world has grown with him.

A Writer Shaped By Two Countries

To understand the books, it helps to understand the woman who wrote them. Born in Bradford in 1938, Hashmi trained as a speech therapist, studied theology, and then, in 1964, boarded a ship to India. She lived in Delhi for forty-one years, married Professor Salman Hashmi of the University of Delhi, raised a son and daughter, and only returned to Britain in 2005. Today she writes from London, surrounded by her grandchildren.

That long arc, England, India, and back again, quietly runs through every island she invents.

Why Pongoland Exists in Her Own Words

Asked what pulled her toward this particular world, Hashmi speaks plainly.

“I wanted to build a place where children could think,” she explains. “Not a place without trouble, trouble is half the fun, but a place where the trouble is solved by being clever, being fair, and being kind. That isn’t old-fashioned to me. That feels urgent.”

She is direct about the contrast she draws between Earth and the islands. In the new Epilogue, her hero Sonny reflects on a world “recklessly destroying its eco-system” and choosing luxury for the few over the work of the many. Hashmi does not pretend the parallel is accidental.

“I wrote those passages because I believe them,” she says. “Children notice everything. They notice when the world around them doesn’t add up. I wanted to give them a world that does add up, bartering instead of buying, clean air instead of factories, leaders who actually listen. Not as a fantasy escape, but as a question. Why couldn’t ours look more like this?”

Choice, Not Magic, at the Heart of the Series

Readers expecting wand-waving will find something else. Hashmi’s magic is gentler. Owls carry travelers between islands. A wise woman, Mother Fulati, heals with herbs and intuition. A young hero learns that growing up means making harder choices, not flashier ones.

“Magic in these books is wisdom,” Hashmi says. “It is patience and the ability to see what other people miss. Mother Fulati is the heart of everything I believe about how the world should work. She listens. She tells the truth gently. She trusts people to grow.”

The Epilogue takes Sonny into adult territory, duty, partnership, finding the right person, and learning what real responsibility costs. Hashmi handles all of it without lecturing.

Why She Keeps Writing

At 87, Hashmi shows no sign of stopping. Alongside the Sonny books, she has produced poetry, a spiritual diary, and a translation of Le Grand Meaulnes from the French.

“Writing keeps me curious,” she says. “Every story asks me a question I haven’t answered yet. The islands are still teaching me things. I think that is why readers stay. They can feel that I’m still learning too.”

For families looking for fiction that respects a child’s intelligence and adults quietly hoping a book might restore something, Hashmi’s archipelago is waiting. Readers can find her full catalog, including the new Epilogue, on Jennifer Hashmi’s official author website.

Some authors chase trends. Jennifer Hashmi built a world that waits, patiently, for readers to find their way to it.

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Rising From the Setting Sun and How Teodorie and Geordie Ravara Turn Grief Into Light

NY Weekly Staff on July 15, 2026

By: Revamz LLC

When a story is born from pain, it can carry the ability to support reflection, not just for its creators, but for readers who connect with it. The Enlightened Series: Setting Sun is that kind of story. It springs from the intertwined lives of a mother and child, Teodorie and Geordie Ravara, whose personal trials became the spark for a fictional world where loss, identity, and courage meet the will to move forward.

From the first page, the novel plunges readers into a nightmare that feels painfully real, a child reliving the crash that shattered her family. “Nightmares occur because your body is trying to tell you something is wrong,” it opens. That single line reflects what both authors said in their interview: pain, when understood, can become part of purpose.

Teodorie Ravara, “the first American born on both sides” of her Filipino family, grew up feeling like the “first” and the “only,” an outsider even among relatives. That tension between belonging and isolation echoes through the book’s central character, Rianne, a young girl caught between what once was and what must now be. Teodorie described herself as an “adventure seeker,” confident yet marked by teasing that she was “adopted.” That duality, courage mixed with hidden hurt, became an emotional cornerstone of Setting Sun. In Rianne’s world, survival means living with questions that have no answers. The crash that took her sisters’ lives leaves her wondering why she was spared. “I don’t feel blessed,” Rianne admits. “I feel… empty.”

While Teodorie’s storytelling is grounded in resilience and cultural identity, her co-author and child, Geordie Ravara, brings a younger lens filled with empathy and imagination. Growing up surrounded by creativity, from professional acting to devouring books by age four, Geordie developed an early love for stories. “I’ve always wanted to write a book,” they said, recalling journals begun at six. That dream became more than fiction. It became a bridge between generations. The blend of youthful wonder and a mother’s hard-won wisdom gives Setting Sun its emotional pulse.

Geordie recalled calling 911 at four years old to save their mother during an allergic reaction, a moment revealing an instinct for courage under pressure. That same bravery appears in Rianne’s determination to live after tragedy. For Teodorie, writing became a form of therapy. After suffering a stroke three years before the interview, she explained that while her speech sometimes faltered, her spirit did not. Each page reflects that truth. The book’s emotional realism, its slow, tender portrayal of healing, comes from a woman who rebuilt her strength word by word.

Their shared Filipino heritage also anchors the story’s emotional depth. Teodorie remembered being “the only American cousin among a hundred,” both celebrated and teased for it. That push and pull between inclusion and distance infuses the novel’s meditation on belonging. It is not only about grief. It is about identity, faith, and the way culture shapes how people survive. In one haunting line, Rianne reflects that her sisters were “meant to accept the body of Christ for the first time. Instead, they met Christ.” Faith, irony, and love coexist there, reflecting the Ravara family’s grace amid sorrow.

The strength of Setting Sun lies in how honestly it portrays grief through a young girl’s eyes. Rianne’s pain feels real because the authors do not look away from difficult emotions. When she clutches her sisters’ bracelets before walking out the door and whispers, “The pain in my chest doesn’t get any worse, so I nod and walk out,” it becomes a quiet act of courage, the kind that can define healing.

In the interview, Geordie described themself as “a very independent person” and “a listener before a talker.” That patience shows in the pacing of the story. Scenes linger, emotions breathe, and readers are invited to feel, not just observe. The collaboration between mother and child is closely connected, their writing flowing like two hearts beating together, each understanding what the other cannot say aloud.

The series title itself, The Enlightened Series, reveals something deeper. For both authors, enlightenment is not sudden revelation but slow rediscovery. “The ache in my chest has not changed since I woke up in that hospital bed,” Rianne says. “They told me it’s all in my head. How could it be?” Her disbelief mirrors the numb shock of anyone who has lost deeply. Through her, Teodorie and Geordie offer a message: the human heart can be fragile yet enduring. Even in darkness, there can be glimmers of light, a child’s laughter, a parent’s promise, the rising sun after the longest night.

The book’s structure mirrors that journey, from the nightmare of “Full Moon” to the rebirth in “Morning Prayers.” Each chapter becomes a step toward acceptance. The dedication captures their purpose: “To all the young humans who were pushed to do something before they were ready. Don’t let anyone change who you are, even if those people are ones you love.” It is a call to self-trust and quiet defiance.

By the end, one theme becomes clear: Setting Sun is not only about death. It is about life after it. It is about the bond between mother and child, faith and reason, the person we were and the one we must become. Through honesty and vulnerability, Teodorie and Geordie Ravara have turned pain into art that may stay with readers.

When asked what keeps them moving forward, Teodorie smiled through her pauses. She did not need to finish the sentence. The answer was already there. The act of creating The Enlightened Series was both prayer and promise. It suggests that even when the sun sets, it can rise again.

From a California Laboratory to Ancient Rome, Robin E. Levin’s The Death of Carthage Reaches Readers

NY Weekly Staff on July 14, 2026

By: Alexander Sebastian

Robin E. Levin’s The Death of Carthage offers something different from the typical Roman epic. It is not a sweeping panorama of generals and senators told from above. It is a ground-level account of one of history’s longest and most consequential conflicts, narrated by three ordinary people whose lives are shaped by it. Levin draws on Livy and Polybius for the historical bones, then fills in the human texture that ancient historians left out: the boredom of camp life, the awkwardness of homecoming, the moral weight of survival.

The author is not a career novelist. Levin was born in Baltimore in 1949, moved to California in 1957, and has spent most of her adult life in San Francisco. She graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1971 with a degree in anthropology and zoology, and worked as a clinical laboratory scientist specializing in lipids at Quest Diagnostics until retiring in 2012.

The Death of Carthage is her first published novel, the product of a lifelong interest in ancient history that began in junior high school and was encouraged by a mother who watched I, Claudius on Masterpiece Theatre and read every Colleen McCullough novel about Rome. Levin has said the book grew directly out of her reading of Livy’s account of the Second Punic War, which struck her as a story that practically demanded novelization.

Three Voices, One Long War

The novel is built in three sections, and each section is told by a different first-person narrator. The first is Lucius Tullius Varro, a young Roman eques drafted into the cavalry at the start of the Second Punic War. He serves under Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus from the early campaigns in Hispania through the final defeat of Hannibal at Zama. The second narrator is his cousin Enneus, captured at the Battle of Lake Trasimene and sold into slavery on a Greek estate, where he remains for more than two decades. The third is Enneus’s son Hector, who comes of age in Rome and eventually witnesses the destruction of Carthage in 146 B.C.

This structure gives the book something that single-protagonist Roman novels often lack. By moving the point of view across three generations and three positions in Roman society, Levin presents the same long conflict from inside the cavalry, inside slavery, and inside the literate Greek-Roman expatriate world that produced figures like Polybius.

Drawn from the Ancient Sources

Levin’s research foundation is solid. The novel draws primarily on Livy’s Ab Urbe Condita, Polybius’s Histories, Appian of Alexandria, with additional material from Plutarch and Silius Italicus. Quoted passages from these classical authors appear as chapter epigraphs and are carefully footnoted at the back of the book. The major military and political events follow the sequence preserved in the ancient record. Readers familiar with the period will recognize Cannae, Baecula, Ilipa, Zama, the trial of the Scipios, and the long final siege under Scipio Aemilianus, all rendered with attention to what the surviving sources actually say.

The Human Cost of Empire

One of the most distinctive choices in The Death of Carthage is Levin’s willingness to dwell on slavery. Section Two of the novel is given over entirely to Enneus, who spends twenty-one years as a shepherd on a Greek estate before Titus Quinctius Flamininus negotiates the release of Roman captives. The account is unromantic. Enneus is flogged. He is starved. He survives by reading aloud from memory and by quietly accepting that, as he puts it, his loyalty is to his back, which does not want to be flogged.

When he returns to Rome, his mother is dead, and his brother was killed at Cannae. His old property has been taken over by squatters who do not believe his claim. The novel handles this without melodrama. It treats homecoming after captivity as a slow, awkward process that involves favors, family debts, and the practical need to find work.

Politics, Personalities, and Cato

Readers who enjoy political intrigue will find plenty of it. The rivalry between Scipio Africanus and Marcus Porcius Cato runs through the entire book and is presented with both sides given their best argument. Cato’s case for the destruction of Carthage is laid out at length. So is Scipio Nasica Corculum’s case that Carthage should be preserved as a rival to keep Rome alert. The eventual fall of Africanus, hounded out of public life over alleged financial malfeasance, is shown as a kind of political assassination by procedure, and the novel makes its sympathies clear without sermonizing.

Filling a Genre Gap

Levin has noted that while ancient Rome is a crowded subject in historical fiction, novels focused specifically on the Punic Wars are rare. The Death of Carthage was written in part to address this. Readers who came of age on Colleen McCullough’s First Man in Rome sequence, or on the I, Claudius adaptations, will find familiar terrain handled in a fresh way. The book is not a battle-by-battle military history in fictional dress. It is a study of how a hundred-year war reshaped private lives.

A Three-Generation Saga of Rome and Carthage

The Death of Carthage is available on Amazon for readers interested in historical fiction set during the Second and Third Punic Wars. The novel covers roughly a hundred years of Mediterranean history through the eyes of three connected narrators.

Levin shares historical insights, behind-the-scenes notes, and news about upcoming releases on Instagram and Facebook.

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