Another wonderfully warm and addictive tale from Michael Coatesworth. We accompany him on a journey which takes us from him growing up in the 1950s through very testing times to almost present day. A thought provoking tale of one man's sometimes difficult and traumatic journey through life and those people who touched his life along the way. Discipline at home was strict and harsh and when his father decides that it's time that he stood on his own two feet he turns him out on to the streets at the tender age of 14. It is heart-warming that after so much heartache and upset the author finds a woman to marry and share his life with. Without her unwavering support, from the good times to the sometimes very bad, a new family unit is formed to provide the love, support and companionship which was sometimes lacking in his earlier years.

The Ayahuasca Lodge deals with a river trip in the Peruvian Amazon made by two young Americans on their way to participate in some ayahuasca ceremonies at a lodge owned by another American. On the riverboat journey the two befriend another foreigner, a Canadian ethnologist, who informs them somewhat about ayahuasca and some of the sordid history of exploitation and violence in the Peruvian Amazon against the place and the Native people during the rubber days of the early 20th century. Though warned yet the two had to discover things for themselves and became involved with the results of a murder at the lodge. Postcards to the Dead contains several short stories on various topics, including death, philosophy, and war. Each story is independent and presents a unique point of view. Enjoy the journey. Tim Deppe was born in Grand Rapids, Michigan in 1953, but left rather quickly for the West Coast at age 19, to escape felony charges for growing marijuana. Then he spent most of the next 50 years working around the world, only interrupted by getting a BA from The Evergreen State College in Washington State and an MA in philosophy and theology from the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California. For the last three decades he has been the field worker for his tiny 501c3, NGO, Bookseed. Most of his time he spends as a delivery boy bringing books and seeds to impoverished schools, orphanages, refugee camps, jails and subsistence farmers in needy places around the world. He has one prior book titled “Little Gardens of Words” about the work he did in Latin America mostly with indigenous people. If you see him on the road give him a ride.

In the Summer of 1940, after the evacuation of the British Expeditionary Force from Dunkirk and the Franco/German armistice which followed the fall of France, Britain stood alone against the the armed might if Hitler's Germany, supported only by the forces of her dominions and inspired by little but the rhetoric of her newly-appointed Prime Minister, Winston Churchill. It seemed inevitable at the time that Hitler's next move would be the invasion of Britain and Churchill was not slow to use this threat to unite the people of Britain behind him; for not a few people in influential circles in Britain then favourited a quick settlement with the Fuhrer. Michael Glover's penetrating analysis of the mood of the British People that summer, of the German ability to mount an amphibious invasion at the time and of Britain's ability to repel such an invasion shows how ill-founded the scare was, while explaining how well it served the British course. Hitler, as he shows, had embarked upon a course to which there were only two outcomes- either of which was bound to lead to his ultimate downfall. But in the summer of 1940 the beleaguered inhabitants of Britain were in no mood or position to relax in the comfort of such historical hindsight. Unprepared they may have been but, as the author shows, they were unflinching, unbowed- and, timely, undefeated. This is, however by no means a work of chauvinistic self-congratulations; it is rather a distinguished historian's assessment of the last great invasion scare the British Isles have endured since the Martello towers were built in 1805.