Radical Islam, Mass Immigration, and Their Effects on the Western World:
Immigration, Extremism, and the Test of Liberal Democracy



The mountains caught fire in August. He had already seen the end of the world.
Chicago, 1903. On the coldest afternoon of the year, fireman Silas Dunne climbs the marble stairs of the Iroquois Theater and finds a wall of the dead. He carries out one small girl who is still breathing. His own daughter is not among the living.
Idaho, 1910. Seven years later, Dunne is a drifter with thirty-one cents in his pocket and a brass badge he can't bring himself to throw away. In the mining town of Wallace he signs on to a Forest Service crew for twenty-five cents an hour, cutting fire line in the Bitterroot Mountains under a hard, quiet ranger named Ed Pulaski.
It is the driest summer anyone can remember. The sun rises red and gives no warmth. Ash falls on the town like snow. On the mountain, Dunne takes a red-haired Irish boy from Butte under his wing, and he stands between the crew and a lynch rope when they turn on the immigrant they blame for the fires. Someone is setting them. Dunne begins to suspect who, and he doesn't want to know.
Then, on August 20th, hurricane winds drive three thousand fires together into a single wall of flame. In two days it will burn three million acres and destroy a third of Wallace. Cut off on both sides, forty-five men follow Pulaski into an abandoned mine tunnel, hang wet blankets across the entrance, and wait for the fire to arrive.
What happens in the Nicholson tunnel that night is history. What it costs Silas Dunne, and what he carries out, is the story.
Based on the true events of the Big Burn and the heroism of ranger Ed Pulaski, A Country of Ash is a novel of fire and faith, guilt and mercy, and the terrible arithmetic of survival. It asks what a man owes the dead, and what he still owes the living.
Click here to get A Country of Ash
on Amazon / Kindle / Kindle Unlimited
Click here to get A Country of Ash on Barnes & Noble
Capitalism: A Pillar for People, Community, and Our Ways of Life
What if the future of capitalism depends not only on how markets grow, but on how widely opportunity is shared?
Economic systems are often discussed through statistics, policies, and political arguments. William M. Togbah takes a more human-centered route in Capitalism: A Pillar for People, Communities, and Our Ways of Life, examining capitalism through the people and communities expected to live within it. Rather than treating capitalism as a settled idea, Togbah presents it as an economic model that should be reconsidered for a changing, increasingly interconnected century.
Africa plays an important role in that discussion. Togbah argues that conversations about capitalism often overlook developing economies, particularly places where governments and public services may have less capacity. His examination considers how private enterprise, individual initiative, competition, and different levels of government regulation affect economic life across African societies.
Yet the book reaches beyond a defense of one economic system. Its chapters move through women’s empowerment, the growth of the middle class, technology, education, multinational business, and job creation—subjects that bring economics closer to everyday concerns. Education receives particular attention as a path toward specialization, productivity, knowledge sharing, and greater economic participation.
That perspective gives the book particular relevance for today’s writers, thinkers, students, and socially conscious readers. Discussions of inequality, employment, education, and development can easily become abstract. Togbah continually returns those discussions to human outcomes: whether people can find work, develop useful skills, participate economically, strengthen their communities, and imagine better possibilities for the next generation. His exploration also draws from interviews concerning education, wealth disparity, public safety, and other social concerns, alongside his own experience of economic inequality in Liberia.
For contemporary society, perhaps the book’s most valuable invitation is not that every reader must agree with its conclusions. It is that economic ideas deserve closer examination when they shape education, opportunity, work, identity, and community life.
Readers interested in African politics, global economics, development, education, and the continuing debate over capitalism will find plenty to consider in William M. Togbah’s Capitalism: A Pillar for People, Communities, and Our Ways of Life.
A Pillar for People, Community, and Our Ways of Life
A Pillar for People, Community, and Our Ways of Life

Some children grow up believing the world is fair. Others learn to survive before they are old enough to understand why they have to.
Stevie G. Davis was born to a teenage mother and abandoned by his father before birth. His childhood unfolded in the coal camps and small communities of rural northern Alabama, where his family moved from one cheap house to another in search of work and a place they could afford. The houses had cracked walls, little insulation, and few comforts. Hunger was never far away, and every dollar mattered.
As a boy, he picked cotton, hauled pulpwood, baled hay, cut fence posts, and accepted whatever work he could find. He wore hand-me-down clothes, carried paper-sack lunches, and stuffed cardboard inside worn-out shoes because new ones were a luxury his family could not afford. Poverty was not something he recognized at first—it was simply life.
Everything began to change when he discovered a set of "Future Cards" describing the emerging world of computers. To a boy who had never seen one, they represented more than technology. They represented possibility.
At seventeen, Davis enlisted in the United States Air Force as a medic. Through persistence, self-education, and a willingness to embrace every opportunity, he built a career that eventually led him into medical information systems. In 1992, he was recognized as the United States Air Force Medical Information Systems Non-Commissioned Officer of the Year before continuing his journey into corporate information technology.
Yet success never erased the memories of the cheap houses that shaped him.
Written with honesty, humility, and the eye of someone who remembers every detail, Cheap Houses is more than a memoir of poverty. It is a story of resilience, family, sacrifice, fear, reinvention, and the quiet determination to build a different future without forgetting where you came from.
For readers who appreciated the emotional honesty of The Glass Castle or the perseverance found in Hillbilly Elegy, Cheap Houses offers an unforgettable journey from hardship to hope—proving that while our beginnings shape us, they do not have to define the rest of our lives.