A Country of Ash

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.

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Set The Tone: What to Say, and How to Lead, When It Matters Most (Coaching Playbook For Modern Times)

  

Set The Tone:

What to Say, and How to Lead, When It Matters Most

(Coaching Playbook For Modern Times)

Restaurant and food service managers do not need more theory. They need something that holds up on a Saturday night when half the team is new, the rush will not stop, and everyone is watching to see how you handle it. This is that system. Written for the people who run the floor, The Coaching Playbook gives you a full framework built on behavior, not personality. You will learn how to build trust fast, cut turnover, and lead with purpose even when you are not the one with the title. At the center is the Coaching Loop: Observe, Coach, Apply, Review, Repeat. Five simple moves you can run on any shift, with any team, starting tomorrow. Around it you get the daily huddle that builds culture in five minutes, coaching logs and behavior scoreboards that actually get used, and feedback scripts written the way people really talk. No corporate language. No binder nobody opens.

Inside you will find four frameworks that work together. The Ted Lasso Effect, on leading with belief. The Shoresy Standard, on holding the line and hating to lose. The Assist Standard, on putting the team above the individual. And the Whole Roster Principle, the idea that you do not have weak people, you have strengths and opportunities you have not coached yet. It is warmth and fire in the same leader. Heart and an uncompromising standard. Written in one voice that reads the same whether you run a line, a floor, a bar program, or a district. Clay David Laugier spent more than twenty years leading teams in restaurants, food service, and hospitality before founding Clay Laugier Ventures. He writes for the person running a double on four hours of sleep who still finds a way to make their team believe the night is going to go well. Your team isn't broken. Your system is. Lead with heart. Coach with clarity. Let's set the tone.

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Capitalism: A Pillar for People, Community, and Our Ways of Life

    

Capitalism: A Pillar for People, Community, and Our Ways of Life

By William M. Togbah

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. 

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Capitalism:

A Pillar for People, Community, and Our Ways of Life

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Capitalism:

A Pillar for People, Community, and Our Ways of Life

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Cheap Houses: A Memoir of Poverty and Reinvention in Rural America

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.

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Cheap Houses:

A Memoir of Poverty and Reinvention in Rural America

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Right or Wrong.....You Decide

You know right from wrong, surely. But do you really? This intriguing and sometimes humorous, collection of thirty short stories will test your moral compass – would you, could you, should you? Chances are you've already faced a situation like one of these. What did you do? Given the opportunity or the need, we may all face moral choices and ethical dilemmas. Each story ends with a surprise that leaves the reader to ask, did the protagonist make the right decision…..what is the right decision….what decision would you make? What is right, and what is wrong? You decide…..

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Right or Wrong.....You Decide

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Operational Integrity in Action: A Plant Turnaround Story Using the 3P Diagnostic System (Operational Integrity Series Book 2)

  

 

Operational Integrity in Action:

A Plant Turnaround Story Using the 3P Diagnostic System (Operational Integrity Series Book 2)

Operational Integrity in Action: A Plant Turnaround Story Using the 3P Diagnostic System takes readers inside a struggling manufacturing plant where safety concerns, recurring defects, rework, missed schedules, downtime, weak handoffs, and low morale have become part of daily operations. When Plant Manager Daniel Mercer steps into Ridgeway Trailer Manufacturing, he quickly sees that the problems are not isolated. They are connected symptoms of a deeper operating-system failure. Using the principles of the 3P Diagnostic System — People, Process, and Product — Daniel begins looking beyond blame, workarounds, and familiar explanations to uncover the structural conditions allowing problems to repeat. Through realistic shop-floor situations, leadership challenges, and a developing plant turnaround, readers see how concepts from Operational Integrity Code can be applied to: - Identify Hidden Failure Nodes - Challenge the Reality Filter - Reduce recurring defects, rework, and operational firefighting - Improve process stability and accountability - Strengthen safety and quality at the source - Restore productive flow without relying on constant pressure or heroics - Build lasting operational discipline through Structural Recode - Lead with Safety First, Quality Second, Productivity Last Written for plant managers, operations managers, production leaders, supervisors, quality professionals, maintenance leaders, safety professionals, Lean practitioners, and continuous improvement professionals, Operational Integrity in Action combines manufacturing leadership with a practical plant-turnaround story. If you work in manufacturing and have ever asked why the same problems keep returning even after corrective actions, meetings, retraining, and increased oversight, this book offers a different way to look at the operation. Stop chasing symptoms. Start understanding the system behind them. Operational Integrity in Action shows how manufacturing leaders can move from reaction to diagnosis, from workarounds to structure, and from temporary improvement to sustainable operational integrity.

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Dying to Serve: Confessions of Suicides (Attempted/Completed) Within Our Military Ranks

    

Dying to Serve:

Confessions of Suicides (Attempted/Completed)

Within Our Military Ranks

Dying to Serve is a candid compilation of twelve moving stories written to honor the memories of United States service members who were facing dire circumstances and chose to take their own lives (attempted or completed). Many of these circumstances were temporary issues that could be mitigated with the right assistance provided. The purpose of sharing these stories and the author's CARE paradigm is to help eliminate these tragedies in the future. CARE stands for Concern, Awareness, Referral and Evaluate, and it reflects a well-reasoned and thoughtful approach to the mental health crisis occurring in both military and civilian populations. This must-read book encourages us all to remain vigilant, act, when necessary to truly help CARE for each other and potentially save lives!

TUCSON, AZ — September 2026 — Local writer N.K. Stephens announces the release of his impactful book; Dying to Serve: Confessions of Suicides (Attempted/Completed) Within Our Military Ranks, available worldwide today. 12 short stories depicting situations that forced some military members to make a decision that impacted their branch of service, themselves, families and friends.

Drawing from a 28-year military career, N.K. Stephens crafts a compilation of compelling stories to ultimately raise awareness about a crisis impacting our military. A crisis seldom discussed outside those who serve. The stories are creative, entertaining and thought-provoking. Readers will connect with the characters and their circumstances. Not every story ends tragically, however each story ends with the same decision. The author uses an acronym: CARE, to strike a chord with readers leaving them to answer questions on how they could potentially help someone contemplating suicide and possibly save a life!  

Dying to Serve is an independent release targeting military members, families, friends, acquaintances and civilians with no military ties at all.  This book is to raise awareness on a subject that many might initially be hesitant to read about. In the end the reader is encouraged by the author to take a moment and recognize using CARE could eliminate this crisis altogether!

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