BookSpeak Network

On this episode of The MIlford House Mysteries, co-hosts Sherry Knowlton and J.M. West welcome fellow Sunbury Press author, Carolyn Kleinman. Kleinman will talk to us about her debut novel, Love, Faith, and the Dented Bullet. A retired English and English as a Second Language teacher, Kleinman has always been a reader and a storyteller and enjoys writing books that explore how people respond to li...

Hope in Hell: How We Can Confront the Climate Crisis & Save the Earth (Earth Aware Editions, April 2021).  It's no longer a Climate Crisis.  It has become a Climate Emergency. Ultimately optimistic despite the dire challenge presented to the world, Porritt explores current science and new technologies, mobilization of younger people and political action, and encouraging intergenerational...

Henry enjoys going to visit his grandfather in Athens, Ohio. One day, they discover a pawpaw tree; Henry doesn't know what it is, but Grandpa sure knows about it. In learning about pawpaw, Henry learns about doing something new and different and has fun in the process. Kaitlin Kuliich is a journalist, a reporter for WTAP Television, the former editor of The Avenue News, and a realtor. Her fir...

Losing Earth: A Recent History by Nathaniel Rich (MCD, April 2019)By 1979, we knew nearly everything we understand today about climate change―including how to stop it. Over the next decade, a handful of scientists, politicians, and strategists, led by two unlikely heroes, risked their careers in a desperate, escalating campaign to convince the world to act before it was too late. Losing Earth is t...

Hope Matters: Why Changing the Way We think is Critical to Solving the Environmental Crisis (Greystone Books, Oct 2020) by Elin Kelsey. Fears about climate change are fueling an epidemic of despair across the world: adults worry about their children’s future; thirty-somethings question whether they should have kids or not; and many young people honestly believe they have no future at all. In the f...

On this episode of Milford House Mysteries, we feature co-host JM West and her new book of historical nonfiction, Madam Bessie Jones: Her Life and Times. Co-host Sherry Knowlton will interview West about her decision to take on a scandalous southcentral Pennsylvania figure and an unsolved murder for her first foray into historical non-fiction. We’ll also talk about West’s Carlisle Crime Cases seri...

(A highly prescient fiction account that helps all of us see the bleak future we are creating.)Blue Karma (Mar 2019, Spaekona Press) by J.K. Ullrich. Came out digitally in 2015.  In the near dystopian future, water is the coin of the realm.  People steal it.  People die for it.  Empires depend on it.  Water.  It covers almost three quarters of the planet, comprises more than half the human body, a...

The Pulaski Saga takes readers back in time, to the Antebellum Period of the American South, through the Civil War, and years beyond. Havre de Grace, Maryland, 1841 is the backdrop for Ben Pulaski, a sailor who returns home to find his house gone to a flood, and his family in disarray. Determined to remake himself, and get back on the good side of his long-suffering wife Sonja, Pulaski takes on an...

The Good Ancestor, A Radical Prescription for Long-Term Thinking (Nov 2020, The Experiment) is by leading public philosopher Roman Krznaric.  A timely perspective for this moment in history. Businesses eschew civic responsibility for immediate gains, politicians throw their support behind whatever will win the next election, and we all struggle to focus our attention beyond the next alert from our...

Chris Fenwick has been a visionary and entrepreneur throughout her career in a variety of roles. She is the author of the visionary fiction novel "the 100th Human", nearing its 15th anniversary since release. She is also the author of the State Changers fantasy series. 

The End of Ice: Bearing Witness and Finding Meaning in the Path of Climate Destruction (The New Press, Jan 2019)After nearly a decade overseas as a war reporter, the acclaimed journalist Dahr Jamail returned to America to renew his passion for mountaineering, only to find that the slopes he had once climbed have been irrevocably changed by climate disruption. In response, Jamail embarks on a journ...

Lawrence Knorr and the members of BANG, a hard rock trio from South Philadelphia, recounted the band's meteoric rise to fame during the early 1970s in their book The BANG Story: From the Basement to the Bright Lights. In this episode, host Lawrence Knorr delves into the business side of drummer Tony Diorio, who is a natural entrepreneur. Tony's family owned several five and dime retail o...

Sunbury Press miraculously brought together the daughters of Valentyn Koval and Julian Wojtowych by publishing Oxana Koval Lapchuk’s, book, “The Journalist, A Holocaust Story.” Tanya Wojtowych, daughter of Julian, found the book and then its author on the internet and realized that the man named “Stefan” on page 66 was her father. Both women were filled with gratitude to discover they were not alo...

In The 100% Solution: A Plan for Solving Climate Change (Melville House, Mar 2020), Solomon Goldstein-Rose, a leading millennial climate activist, makes clear what needs to happen to hit the 2050 target: the manufacturing booms we must spur, the moonshot projects we must fund, the amount of CO2 we’ll have to sequester from the atmosphere, and much more. Written because the author couldn’t find a c...

On this episode of Milford House Mysteries, Joan and Sherry interview author Children and Young Adult book author Joe Harvey. Harvey’s books focus on the lives, concerns and frustrations of pre-teens and teens.  We'll talk about Harvey's latest elementary-school age volume, If We’re Really Quiet , It Won’tFind Us that features a creature called The Howler rumored to be roaming the woods...

Lou Gehrig Day is on June 2. This annual, league-wide celebration will be a time to not only honor the legacy of this Hall of Fame first baseman but to also raise awareness and funds to fight ALS.  Dan Joseph is a Washington-based journalist, editor and writer, and a senior editor in the Voice of America's central newsroom. He is the author of "Last Ride of the Iron Horse," the firs...

Another example of serious fiction trying to fight ignorance. The Heatstroke Line (Sunbury Press, 2015) depicts a United State with its coastal cities flooded and its remaining land sweltering under debilitating heat.  It has broken into smaller units that are in conflict with each other and it's dominated by more northerly nations, like Canada, that now have temperate climates. It shows an i...

On this episode, Sherry Knowlton and J.M West interview Laury Egan, a versatile and prolific writer, back for a second visit to Milford House Mysteries to talk about her new work of literary fiction, The Swimmer. Reviewer Lori Ostlund describes “The Swimmer in this words: "a psychotherapist with end-stage cancer contemplates the end of her life and marriage and her failures as a mother, while...

(Fiction novels, too, play an important role in garnering public attention of the Climate Crisis)The Weathermaker (Milford House Press, Jan 2020) is a “cli-fi” genre-bending thriller, with the action aspects of Twister. It shows the tragic aspects of climate change (like The Day After Tomorrow) and “the cure is worse than the disease” (Snowpiercer). There is also evidence that controlling nature c...

Charles Miller is a thirteen-year-old who is looking forward to a lazy Florida summer with his friends. That all changes when a strange-looking raft rolls up, led by a certain "Captain Kid."The captain enlists Charles and the gang to aid him in a mission to rescue a princess known as the Patch Fairy. What follows is a wild ride through space, bringing them in contact with mysterious and...

How to Prepare for Climate Change: A Practical Guide to Surviving the Chaos (Jan 2021, Simon & Schuster) is by David Pogue, a science and technology writer best known for his work on CBS News Sunday Morning. Pogue cuts straight to the chase when it comes to climate change. “The world is getting hotter, natural systems are going haywire, and you should begin to prepare,”He lays out the harsh re...

Join Author Sherry Knowlton for the sixth and final episode of her limited podcast series, DEAD on the DELTA: An African Adventure. On today’s Episode, Africa Anecdotes, Writing What You Know, Sherry is joined by her husband and travel companion, Mike Knowlton. Together they’ll share a few anecdotes from their many safaris. Some of the stories are amusing. Some might make you gulp. Keep in mind, t...

In To Know the World: A New Vision for Environmental Learning (MIT Press, Nov 2020), Mitchell Thomashow proposes that we revitalize, revisit, and reinvigorate how we think about our residency on Earth. First, we must understand that the major challenges of our time--migration, race, inequity, climate justice, and democracy--connect to the biosphere. Traditional environmental education has accompli...

Aspen and Lori Wolfe are a pair of not-so-genteel young ladies, inventive, adventurous, and deadly. Like their father, Aspen and Lori build and operate machines that do wondrous things that should just not be in Victorian-era England, but then, things are never what they seem. Taking lodging at the home of a friend of sorts, Keagen Myrack, the Wolfe sisters embark on a quest to free "Dimies,&...

The Population Bomb (Ballantine Books) is a best-selling book written by Stanford University Professor Paul R. Ehrlich and his wife, Anne Ehrlich, (who was uncredited), in 1968. It predicted worldwide famine in the 1970s and 1980s due to overpopulation, as well as other major societal upheavals, and advocated immediate action to limit population growth. Fears of a "population explosion"...