Essential Writings: A Journey Through Time, 2nd and Revised Edition

Helmut Schwab’s Essential Writings: A Journey through Time aims to distill the author’s previous essays on topics as diverse as the origin of the universe, human evolution, consciousness, and the search for spiritual meaning. The subtitle, “A modern ‘De Rerum Natura’” is a reference to Lucretius’s work of the same name, which spanned topics within the sciences as well as speculations about mind and soul.

Essential Writings emulates Lucretius’s approach from a time when science and religion were seen as simply branches of philosophy. The project is broad, aiming to explain many of the mysteries of existence and the human condition from the dawn of time into the future, and Schwab is skilled at synthesizing neuroscience, biochemistry, psychology, and philosophy of mind in a way that is accessible to a wider audience. Particularly notable is his economical explanation of the debate on free will.

Schwab’s treatment of politics and religion is nuanced and complex. He shares compelling arguments for agnosticism, if not atheism, but he finds relevant guidance in the moral teachings of religious traditions. His morality is grounded in virtues of personal fulfillment, service to others, and aesthetic appreciation. Readers may object to his implication that violence is endemic to (but certainly not exclusive to) Islam, yet he also demonstrates empathy for the plight of Palestinians.

Essential Writings is a niche book, with primary appeal for academics in philosophy or similar fields. It is overly ambitious in seeking to describe and justify a worldview about so much of our existence in so short a format, and the passages are too brief to be as effective as they could be. (Note: Schwab’s longer essays are available on his website.) In addition, it occasionally feels as if the author added threads of thought, ad hoc, to unrelated topics.

Despite such drawbacks, this project has commendable moments of real success grappling with complicated ideas that will interest its specific audience.

Also available in hardcover and ebook.

Author’s Current Residence
Princeton, New Jersey

Source: BlueInk Review

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The Hunted

The Hunted is a brilliantly understated fusion of anthropological mystery, apocalyptic science fiction, and ecological thriller. Stellar character development, a fascinating storyline, and vivid description make this a stay-up-all-night-until-your-eyes-bleed kind of read.

It all begins in the Amazon where the last remnants of an indigenous tribe (called the Ipanao) that has remained separate from the civilized world for thousands of years is discovered by a geological survey team — and almost all members killed. The survivors, all of whom have coffee-colored skin and jet-black hair, are brought to a medical facility and forced to undergo a series of tests. The results are mind-boggling: their DNA is radically different than that of modern humans.

Two Brazilian cultural anthropologists, David and Cecelia Goncalves, are brought in to assess the situation. Cecelia, seven months pregnant, falls in love with the orphaned Ipanao infant girl called Suyape. She quickly realizes there is something unusual about the baby, who seems to be able to communicate telepathically, but she keeps the information secret to save the child from further harm.

Fast-forward 17 years. David and Cecelia live in Brunswick, Maine, with their two daughters, Fabia and Suyape, whom the couple adopted before leaving Brazil. Suyape is a high school senior and actively promotes awareness of “non-contacteds,” people who live in tribes on the edge of civilization. By all outward appearances, she is a normal teenaged girl, until she begins experiencing bizarre visions and embarks on a journey of self-discovery that will take her back to her native jungles.

The beauty of this novel is that it works simultaneously as a Da Vinci Codesque suspense, a science fiction thriller, and an anthropology-powered mystery — and beneath it all is the monumentally significant issue of environmental degradation and looming ecological collapse. This is a compelling and powerful read.

(The only criticism is the ill-conceived cover art, which inexplicably depicts a light-skinned, blue-eyed girl and is completely unrelated to the storyline.)

Also available in hardcover and ebook.

Author’s Current Residence
Haverhill, Massachusetts

Source: BlueInk Review

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ATOM

Stephen C. Sutcliffe’s ambitious first novel covers a lot of territory. Negotiating its wide-ranging landscape, readers will be hard-pressed to peg a specific genre. Is it an action-packed adventure? Psychedelic mysticism? An apocalyptic manifesto? ATOM aspires to be all of these, with limited success.

The story is that of Michael Brethren and his buddies, privileged kids enjoying a parent-funded prolonged adolescence, and yet obsessed with the specter of nuclear war. They wonder, “What is it like to grow up in a world that can’t annihilate itself in a matter of days or hours?” The group, known as The Children of Atom, counter-intuitively decides it will make way for a more peaceful world in the most violent way possible: setting off a nuclear bomb at a public event.

It’s a curious idea, that the world must suffer one final nuclear explosion before choosing to shun such weapons forever. These characters don’t question themselves, however, and rather nonchalantly embark on a violent drug heist, which they accomplish with unbelievable efficiency, little remorse, and an excess of film-worthy explosions.

Sutcliffe attempts to mark an emotional evolution in Michael as events unfold ---he has many dramatic moments of doubt---but Michael ultimately decides it’s “too late to dwell on right and wrong.” As the fate of 150,000 people hangs in the balance, readers might disagree.

Mired in melodramatic descriptions ranging from the cliché (a rainbow dancing in the mist) to the murky (“calliopes of manifold dissonance”) the action moves forward sporadically. Michael takes several unrelated side trips to play guitar, see a girl, and score some cocaine. Sutcliffe compounds the feeling of detachment by using the passive voice even in action scenes. Michael doesn’t crash into a lamp fixture while searching a drug lord’s study, but instead feels “his actions arrested by his collision with the faulty lamp.”

ATOM puts forth an intriguing idea, but ultimately fails to fully engage either its characters or its audience.

Source: BlueInk Review

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In the Frightened Heart of Me: Tennessee Williams's Last Year

Tony Narducci had idolized Tennessee Williams for two decades when they met at a gay Key West disco in February 1982. Narducci offered his arm after having seen Williams stumble on the stairs. That simple act — the playwright stumbling, the young man propping him up — became the template for a complex and challenging friendship that lasted until Williams’s death almost exactly a year later.

Narducci was 34 to Williams’s 71, too young to put aside his own dreams and become Williams’s live-in companion as the writer exhorts him to do. Instead, the two travel and spend time together, in Narducci’s hometown of Chicago as well as Boston, New York and Key West.

Narducci’s poignant, well-written memoir (the title taken from Williams’s The Night of the Iguana), is based on his journal from that time, along with letters the two men exchanged. His description of a show staged by Williams and Vanessa Redgrave (in which Williams reads an essay with a loose denture bridge garbling some of his words) enlivens the narrative, as do cameo appearances by Mike Wallace and Andy Warhol, among others.

Narducci portrays his literary hero as alternately needy and lascivious, gracious and demanding; a pill-popping, wine-guzzling, emotional wreck prone to tears over his fear of dying loveless and alone. It’s a sympathetic portrait of a highly complex man, a man the author describes as an amalgam of Williams’s own fictional characters: “He was always protean: wise like Big Daddy, fragile like Laura, gentile like Blanche, persistent like Maggie, and fickle like Alexandra.”

Along with the last year of Williams’s life, Narducci’s memoir paints an indelible portrait of gay life on the brink of the AIDS epidemic, before the emerging “gay plague” is linked to unprotected sex. His bittersweet memoir is sure to captivate readers with an interest in Williams or in gay life on either side of the Great Divide that was AIDS.

Also available in hardcover.

Author’s Current Residence
Chicago, Illinois

Source: BlueInk Review

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iUniverse 2013 - TopTenREVIEWS

If you are looking at online book publishing companies and want one that is fast, affordable and gives you more amenities than any other print-on-demand service, then iUniverse is for you. Their Select package offers authors a strong publishing package with excellent book selling capabilities and terrific help support helping it earn our TopTenREVIEWS Bronze Award.

In addition, for authors who do not have the experience to market their own book, iUniverse offers an extensive array of up-to-date marketing services that you can purchase for an extra fee beyond the initial publication services package. These services include getting help from a personal publicist, writing press releases, assistance in arranging public appearances and other traditional means of selling books.

This company has entered into the electronic world in a big way and that undoubtedly can be an enormous help to any author who wants to sell books on a wide scale. As part of this company’s additional paid services, it will do such things help you set up an author website, get Barnes & Noble “See Inside the Book” service and get keyword search help with Google/Amazon.

In short, if you have written a book, iUniverse gives you just about everything you need to publish, market and sell your creation. If it is now just sitting there either on your computer or in printed manuscript form, perhaps examining what iUniverse has to offer would be a wise move toward reaching that treasured goal of being a published author.

Read more: http://online-book-publishing-review.toptenreviews.com/iuniverse-review.html

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