Oak Logs and Gasoline Tending Your Internal Fire by Jake Knox, Raising Readers How to Help Your Child Learn to Read by Amy Coffey; The Platinum Workforce: How to Train and Hire For the 21st Century's Industrial Transitions by Trond Arne Undheim; The Divine Feminine: From Awakening to Walking to Union by James Compton

Oak Logs and Gasoline: Tending Your Internal Fire by Jake Knox 

  Jake Knox’s personal development book, Oak Logs and Gasoline: Tending Your Internal Fire, uses fire as an extended metaphor for life and the choices that we make. This metaphor is concrete and poetic as Readers are encouraged to consider whether their lives overwhelm with excess heat, are underdeveloped leaving them in the cold, or provide just the right amount of warmth.

Knox used various analogies such as that people are “simply cold” because they don't know how to start their own fires. He advises Readers to find a “woodsman” or a mentor that will build a fire that lasts and guides Readers to use their talents and choices wisely.

This book encourages inner reflection and considers questions like "Why am I here? What drives me? Who am I here for? Who makes this worth fighting for? What do I want in life?" These questions and the answers help readers shape their journeys. They are the sparks that light the flames.

Each chapter includes reflections and conversations. They ask questions like “When was the last time you said or did something that is truly yours not copied, not influenced but born from what you believe?” 

A unique approach is that the reflections ask from the perspective of both the student and the mentor. Mentor questions include “when in your life did you first find your own voice-the moment you stopped echoing and started speaking from conviction?” 

This allows Readers to focus on where they are in their specific journeys either just starting out and looking for advice or if they are experienced and want to guide others. 

Raising Readers: How to Help Your Child Learn to Read by Amy Coffey

Reading is very important as a necessity and as a pleasure. Unfortunately, many statistics state reading problems or have high basic reading skills but none for pleasure. This book discusses what the brain does to read, why reading is important, and what parents, guardians, and educators can do to encourage a generation of readers.

The brain lights up in all four lobes and enables three jobs: visual process of registering orthographic symbols, translates symbols to sounds, and sounds into meaning and comprehension. Many children that have trouble with that process are dyslexic. Educational methods and technology do their part in shaping this process.

The book suggests different means to encourage children to read like online tutoring services like Reading Adventures, reading out loud with children, have interactive questions and answer sessions about the book, sound out and study hard to follow words and terms, compare books to other pop culture touchstones like movies and television, play games like I Spy or card games with words, have book club parties, and high impact tutoring, and of course work with teachers, librarians, principals, and educators together to create a comprehensive plan from all sides.

The Platinum Workforce How to Train and Hire For the 21st Century's Industrial Transitions by Trond Arne Undheim 

The current workforce is changing because of the abundance of AI and the remaining need for the human element. Futurist and author Trond Arne Undheim suggests ways that workers can adjust to work with and not against AI. There are certain things that AI is unable to replicate like creativity, critical thinking, human to human communication, and empathy. This book takes a look at that changing environment and what employers and employees need to do to adapt and adjust to it.

Among the suggestions that Undheim makes is for employers to revamp their reskilling programs to help employees train skills that they may not have learned or known before. It would also do a lot of good for employers to reskill and retrain as well.

Other suggestions include enhancing human capabilities through scientific and engineering interventions like AI systems, genetic modification technologies, biotechnological innovations, nanoscale engineering, neural interface development, and cybernetic integration. Many of these and other fields are transformative in nature and still rely on human technology interaction.

Undheim also suggests changing the workforce by becoming aware of various skills, managing the integration of these skills and employees, and teaching by using immersive real world learning activities. The Human+ workforce features two core skills: human-AI collaboration and interoperability mindset. The future critical capabilities include eco-awareness, maker skills, mediation, megascale operations, mobility, risk aptitude, agile R&D, psycho-resilience, socio-technological insight, agentic AI management, and systems thinking.

This book shows that it is indeed possible to have a workforce that builds on AI innovation and human interaction and connection.

The Divine Feminine: From Awakening to Walking in Union by James Crompton 

This is a summary of the review. The full review can be found on Reader's Views website. The link is provided above.

James Crompton 's memoir, The Divine Feminine: From Awakening to Walking in Union, is a deeply personal and spiritual memoir about a man’s search for faith and finding it in the form of the Goddess Figure who appears within various mythologies and religions under different names.

Because the Divine Feminine takes many forms and names, she isn't limited to any one specific myth or religion. Crompton speaks of her as Mary, Sophia, Shakti, Kali, Lalitha and others. She can offer wisdom, sensuality, abundance, justice, beauty, maternity, shelter anything. 

This book can be seen as a starting point for those who are interested in other mythologies and spiritual paths to find a connection with a deity who represents some personal struggle. 

Crompton describes his own personal issues, the process of meditation, his vision of the Divine Feminine and in what form(s) she took, the message that she conveyed, and how he implemented it into his life. The solutions or messages weren't all quick fixes. Sometimes it took years to find answers, or led to a separate path than the one Crompton visualized. Mostly it took a lot of study, research, openness, understanding, and acceptance. 

Weekly Reader: You Got To Read This Book: 55 People Tell The Story Of The Book That Changed Their Life Edited by Jack Canfield and Gay Hendricks; Beautiful Affirmative Stories About The Importance of Reading

Weekly Reader: You Got To Read This Book: 55 People Tell The Story of The Book That Changed Their Life Edited By Jack Canfield and Gay Hendricks; Beautiful Affirmative Storied About The Importance of Reading





By Julie Sara Porter


Bookworm Reviews





Here at the Bookworm Reviews, I believe that the right person could be matched to the right book. Sometimes you are going along with your day. You have a question about your life or are so stressed that you need escape. You pick up a book and BOOM! You find parallels to your situation. You find characters that are struggling with situations similar to yours. You may even find a truth that fits and that you can use in your daily life. You consider it a favorite book that you keep coming back to again and again and find something new every time you read as well as a friend who always has your back. (The book that fits that in my life is Alice's Adventures in Wonderland/Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll which I reviewed in my inaugural review for this blog.)





Jack Canfield, co creator of the Chicken Soup books and Gay Hendricks, president of the Hendricks Institute and author of several self-help books understood that power that books have to transform lives. They gathered many of the best writers, spokespersons, musicians, artists, entrepreneurs, and leaders to describe the books that changed their lives, helped them look at their world differently, and gave them solutions to their problems in their book You Got To Read This Book.





Many of these authors found fictional characters that related to them. Jacquelyn Mitchard, author of Deep End of the Ocean found herself in Francie Nolan, the protagonist of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith. Both came from impoverished backgrounds, had troubled childhoods, and had imaginative spirits that allowed them to become writers. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn captivated Mitchard so much that she reads it before she begins working on a new novel and when she adopted a daughter, she named her Francie Nolan.





Another person who found an answer through a fictional character was fifth grade teacher, Rafe Esquith. After Esquith won the Walt Disney Company's 1992 Teacher of the Year award, he felt like a failure because many of his students got involved in drugs and gang violence in middle and high school. Reading To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee helped Esquith understand through Atticus Finch what it means to be a good leader and role model for children. That he has to do what is right even if he doesn't see the positive results right away.





Self-help books are some of the books that are cited most often that helped people. Motivational speaker, Lisa Nichols found assistance reading Stephen Covey's 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Covey's book particularly the haunting “Begin With The Ending” exercise (where Covey invited the Reader to imagine they are at their own funeral) moved Nichols so much that she strove to change her life. She withdrew from habits that she didn't want to be remembered for (like hosting lingerie parties and writing steamy romance novels), cut abusive men from her life, and started a career that appealed to her talents for speaking.





In a true case of “physician heal thyself”, Covey himself has a chapter in which he cites two books: Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl and A Guide for the Perplexed by E.F. Schumacher. Both books gave Covey the vision to choose how he dealt with life. Frankl's book was about his time in a concentration camp and how he chose to seek happiness even in the worst circumstances such as when the Nazis burned his manuscript, Frankl just decided to “rewrite it: make it better.” This attitude was the framework for Covey's 7 Habits in which the book explores how we react when things upset or detain us.





Of course these books don't offer quick solutions and many of the authors describe that the book was simply the catalyst and the first step to a life of self-improvement. Malachy McCourt, author of A Monk Swimming, acknowledges a biography of Mahatma Gandhi that inspired him to become more spiritual. He even later took a trip to India to see Gandhi's memorial and vow to change his life to fit his. However, McCourt did not live a subsequent exemplary life. Instead it was one of alcoholism, divorce, and self-loathing to the point where a doctor gave him a prescription to change his life or else. While McCourt reveals that his transformation was a long time, the biography of Gandhi was the inspiration that began this chain of events.





Some chapters recount not how much the person loved the book but how much they hated it and disagreed with the message. Holocaust survivor, Max Edelman selects surprisingly Mein Kampf for his chapter. He selected it because of how much it changed Germany and the world. Edelman analyzes Hitler's anti-Semitism argument by saying that he used one specific point to unite the Germans. Besides taking an analytic approach to Hitler's arguments, Edelman vowed to live a life of forgiveness and love especially in the face of his enemies such as Neo-Nazis and Holocaust deniers. Edelman said that Mein Kampf gave him the strength to become a counter example to Hitler's hateful words.





The most important thing that this book teaches the Reader is that the books don't change the person, the person does. This is particularly evident with Dr. Bernie Siegel, retired pediatrician and general surgeon who selected William Saroyan's The Human Comedy. He begins his chapter with “I don't believe that any book can change your life only you can. Look two people read the same book. One is inspired while the other is bored. It's the person-not the book-that creates the transformation. That power lies within each of us. That said I do believe that an author's insights when combined with the reader's inspiration and desire to change can lead to a new life for the reader.”





So in effect, it's not the book but it is the Readers that changed their lives.