Goodreads’ Synopsis: On a cold winter night, a passenger jet with 189 aboard crash landed, out of fuel, in a suburban neighborhood in Portland, Oregon. Ten people died. The pilot was blamed and stripped of his career, and a sweeping transformation of flight-crew training took place that made United Flight 173 (in)famous worldwide as the model for failure and change. That was only the half of it.
Hiding in plain sight for years in an attorney’s file boxes, the forgotten truths of the landmark air disaster reveal much more: an emotional journey tethered to the disgraced pilot and a three-year-old girl who survived the crash and became an unlikely hero for justice and public safety in the dramatic legal battle that followed.
Crash Course, by award-winning journalist Julie Whipple, is the long-overdue, true story of a misunderstood airline tragedy that changed more about our daily lives than most people know. Here is why we’re safer today, how we’re not, and what we can do about it.
Read Start Date: March 16, 2024
Read Finish Date: March 23, 2024
My Review: I received this book from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review. I had never heard of this 1978 crash in Portland, Oregon. Luckily, most of the passengers survived, but many suffered lifelong effects such as PTSD. The book discusses what happened and dives into the legal battles that followed. Whipple, the daughter of the lawyer who handled one such lawsuit, focuses mainly on her father’s case, which involved the personal injury lawsuit of a small child injured in the crash. She lost her entire family (parents and two sisters) and was suffering from not only physical injuries but emotional and mental as well.
I thought the book was well-researched and well-written. Although it describes a horrific event, the author doesn’t spend too much time on gory details, which is nice. Even though it was a nonfiction book, I was utterly invested in the outcome of little Lisa’s trial. She suffered so much, and I wanted a good outcome for her. I rejoiced when the jury gave her compensation and was morally outraged by the airline’s callous, reckless behavior.
Overall, this book seems like a good pick for readers who enjoy a mix of true crime, legal drama, and human interest stories, all presented in a well-written and informative way.
Disclosure of Material Connection: I received this book free from Netgalley. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.
Goodreads Monday is hosted by Budget Tales Book Blog. “Goodreads Monday allows you to post about what books are on your “to read” lists, the progress you have made on your current books and reading challenge, and any other Goodreads news!”
Rabbitlike aliens from outer space colonize Earth during humankind’s Second World War in a delightfully funny and thought-provoking science fiction adventure The Quozl just need somewhere to call home. A gentle race of extraterrestrial rabbits, they have a propensity for reproduction that has left their home planet, Quozlene, dangerously overpopulated, and in their search for greener and less-crowded pastures, they have discovered the perfect place to start the third planet away from a healthy, warming sun. What they don’t realize is that this world they call Shiraz is already inhabited by a species of violent sentient creatures known as humans. But there’s no going back now. In the midst of the brutal and helpfully distracting global conflict the Shirazians call World War II, the colony ship lands undetected, and the space rabbits immediately go into hiding. But a secret like the Quozl can be concealed for only so long, especially when their numbers start to increase and certain rebellious members of the long-eared society decide the time is ripe to claim their place in a world they believe is rightfully theirs. One of the most admired and prolific authors in the science fiction arena, Alan Dean Foster will delight readers who hunger for something different with this funny, thoughtful, and wildly inventive novel of first contact and coexistence. Once you meet the Quozl, you will never forget them.
On a cold winter night, a passenger jet with 189 aboard crash landed, out of fuel, in a suburban neighborhood in Portland, Oregon. Ten people died. The pilot was blamed and stripped of his career, and a sweeping transformation of flight-crew training took place that made United Flight 173 (in)famous worldwide as the model for failure and change. That was only the half of it.
Hiding in plain sight for years in an attorney’s file boxes, the forgotten truths of the landmark air disaster reveal much more: an emotional journey tethered to the disgraced pilot and a three-year-old girl who survived the crash and became an unlikely hero for justice and public safety in the dramatic legal battle that followed.
Crash Course, by award-winning journalist Julie Whipple, is the long-overdue, true story of a misunderstood airline tragedy that changed more about our daily lives than most people know. Here is why we’re safer today, how we’re not, and what we can do about it.
With The Three-Body Problem, English-speaking readers got their first chance to read China’s most beloved science fiction author, Cixin Liu. The Three-Body Problem was released to great acclaim, including coverage in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal and reading list picks by Barack Obama and Mark Zuckerberg. It also won the Hugo and Nebula Awards, making it the first translated novel to win a major SF award.
Now, this epic trilogy concludes with Death’s End. Half a century after the Doomsday Battle, the uneasy balance of Dark Forest Deterrence keeps the Trisolaran invaders at bay. Earth enjoys unprecedented prosperity due to the infusion of Trisolaran knowledge. With human science advancing daily and the Trisolarans adopting Earth culture, it seems that the two civilizations will soon be able to co-exist peacefully as equals without the terrible threat of mutually assured annihilation. But the peace has also made humanity complacent.
Cheng Xin, an aerospace engineer from the early twenty-first century, awakens from hibernation in this new age. She brings with her knowledge of a long-forgotten program dating from the beginning of the Trisolar Crisis, and her very presence may upset the delicate balance between two worlds. Will humanity reach for the stars or die in its cradle?
Karl Edward Wagner (1945-1994) has earned a reputation as one of the finest horror writers of the modern era, but his work has been out of print and nearly unobtainable for many years. His seminal volume In a Lonely Place collects eight of his best tales, including “In the Pines,” a classic ghost story evocatively set in the Tennessee woods, “Beyond Any Measure,” an original take on the vampire story, “River of Night’s Dreaming,” a surreal and nightmarish masterpiece inspired by The King in Yellow, and the author’s most famous tale, “Sticks,” a disturbing story thought by many to have been the basis for The Blair Witch Project. This new edition includes all the stories from the original 1983 edition, plus an additional rare tale and the author’s afterword from the Scream/Press limited edition, and features a new introduction by Ramsey Campbell.
Given the fact that there are perhaps 400 billion stars in our Galaxy alone, and perhaps 400 billion galaxies in the Universe, it stands to reason that somewhere out there, in the 14-billion-year-old cosmos, there is or once was a civilization at least as advanced as our own. The sheer enormity of the numbers almost demands that we accept the truth of this hypothesis. Why, then, have we encountered no evidence, no messages, no artifacts of these extraterrestrials? In this second, significantly revised and expanded edition of his widely popular book, Webb discusses in detail the (for now!) 75 most cogent and intriguing solutions to Fermi’s famous paradox: If the numbers strongly point to the existence of extraterrestrial civilizations, why have we found no evidence of them?
Progress: page 176 of 434. (Jan 6, 155, Jan 15, 164, Jan 29, 171, Feb 5, 176)
Writing a book is hard. Marketing it can be even harder.
Marketing a book in 2021 can seem like a full-time job, what with the crazy number of things authors seem to be expected to do: social media, blog tours, advertising, price promotions, mailing lists, giveaways, you name it.
But here’s a little secret: you don’t need to do all those things to successfully set your book on the path to success. What you need is a solid plan to find the one or two tactics that will work, and start to drive sales… in a minimum amount of time. And that’s exactly what you’ll find in this book.
Instead of drowning you in information or inundating you with hundreds of different tactics and strategies that eventually prove fruitless, this book will guide you through a step-by-step framework to find the ones that actually work for you and your book, so that you can start marketing more efficiently.
In particular, you’ll learn:
• How to change your mindset and sell more books with less effort.; • How to write books that guarantee a lasting, profitable career; • How to get Amazon’s Kindle Store to market your book for you; • How to get thousands of readers into your mailing list before you even release the book; • How to propel your book to the top of the charts at launch; and • How to automate your marketing so that you can spend less time marketing and more time writing,
After helping over 150,000 authors crack the marketing code through a popular weekly newsletter, Reedsy’s Co-founder Ricardo Fayet is sharing everything he’s learned over the past few years in this beginner-friendly, jargon-free guide to book marketing.
A magnetic novel about two families, strangers to each other, who are forced together on a long weekend gone terribly wrong
Amanda and Clay head to a remote corner of Long Island expecting a a quiet reprieve from life in New York City, quality time with their teenage son and daughter and a taste of the good life in the luxurious home they’ve rented for the week. But with a late-night knock on the door, the spell is broken. Ruth and G. H., an older couple who claim to own the home, have arrived there in a panic. These strangers say that a sudden power outage has swept the city, and – with nowhere else to turn – they have come to the country in search of shelter.
But with the TV and internet down, and no phone service, the facts are unknowable. Should Amanda and Clay trust this couple – and vice versa? What has happened back in New York? Is the holiday home, isolated from civilisation, a truly safe place for their families? And are they safe from one another?
“She took the record out and put it on. As it started to play, she simply didn’t know if good memories would come back. Maybe bad memories would overtake them. Whichever way she felt, she just knew that it was ‘absolutely necessary’ to purely have it play.”
Elsie Ragusin started out in life with everything laid out. She was passionate about God, music, and her family. However, life would soon test her in the most unimaginable ways. She would realize that during the worst atrocities that human history has ever witnessed, she had to rely completely on her Christian faith to get by. Some days, she never ate or felt too weak to work in the concentration camps. Her mental strength in using music and the hope of getting back to her family helped her get through it in 1945. Yet, those haunting memories are what she still has to overcome. Will she use the talents that God has given her to show her present family that one can truly overcome anything? Listen and follow along with Elsie’s Tune.
From an award-winning journalist, this “grippingly suspenseful true-crime tale details the foiling of a wealthy Texan’s plot to have his wife murdered”(Publishers Weekly).
To the world, Linda DeSilva’s marriage to Robert Edelman was perfect. He was her college boyfriend turned wealthy and successful husband, and the father of her children. But what friends and family didn’t know was that the Texas real estate tycoon who set her up with a luxurious life in Dallas was also her abuser. When she asked him for a divorce, the violence against her only escalated, until the shocking moment she learned her husband had hired an assassin to take her life.
From acclaimed journalist and author Jim Schutze, “My Husband’s Trying to Kill Me!” is the riveting true-crime account of how Linda DeSilva worked with the FBI to trap her husband before he could act on his murderous intentions—and how the sting operation nearly got her killed instead. A shocking and sensational story of a wife and mother’s escape from the marriage that went from American dream to every woman’s worst nightmare.
Progress: Audiobook 39%
Book I Will Read:
Title: Of Ants and Dinosaurs
Author: Cixin Liu
Published: 2003
Pages: 256
Genres: Fiction, Science Fiction, Novella
Goodreads Synopsis: The alliance between ants and dinosaurs created a veritable Age of Wonder! But such magnificent industry comes at a price – a price paid first by Earth’s biosphere, and then by all those dependent on it. A satirical fable and ecological warning.
A satirical fable, a political allegory and an ecological warning from the author of The Three-Body Problem. In a sunlit clearing in central Gondwana, on an otherwise ordinary day in the late Cretaceous, the seeds of Earth’s first and greatest civilization were sown in the grisly aftermath of a Tyrannosaurus’ lunch.
Throughout the universe, intelligence is a rare and fragile commodity – a fleeting glimmer in the long night of cosmic history. That Earth should harbour not just one but two intelligent species at the same time, defies the odds. That these species, so unalike – and yet so complementary – should forge an alliance that kindled a civilization defies logic. But time is endless and everything comes to pass eventually…
The alliance between ants and dinosaurs, was of course, based on dentistry. Yet from such humble beginnings came writing, mathematics, computers, fusion, antimatter and even space travel – a veritable Age of Wonder! But such magnificent industry comes at a price – a price paid first by Earth’s biosphere, and then by all those dependent on it.
And yet the Dinosaurs refused to heed the Ants’ warning of impending ecological collapse, leaving the Ant Federation facing a single dilemma: destroy the dinosaurs, destroy a civilization… or perish alongside them?
Goodreads Monday is hosted by Budget Tales Book Blog. “Goodreads Monday allows you to post about what books are on your “to read” lists, the progress you have made on your current books and reading challenge, and any other Goodreads news!”
Della Comb is the queen of her hive. She’s only in her early twenties, but she’s already managed to build an empire selling drugs to junkies who are looking for the ultimate escape. The key to her success is that she manufactures her drugs with a secret ingredient: a very specific blend of pesticides.
Her only problem is the two bumbling exterminators she’s come to rely on for product. They spend more time playing video games and making armchair philosophies than actually working. Thankfully, they realize they too are short on supplies—pizza and breakfast burritos—so they give her a call, asking to meet up at the Chase High Rise, a building known for its unique brand of squalor.
Immediately, she feels sick to her stomach. Not only is the place absolutely disgusting, but it’s also home to Bill Krang, a man who claims to hear insects speaking. The things they say don’t make sense, even to him, but the words are causing him to physically deteriorate at a rapid pace.
Della’s ultimate fear is meeting this man and contracting his disease. However, business is business, and Krang’s apartment is abundant of product. Before long, she finds herself thrown straight into her worst nightmare, and the experience…changes her.
HEARERS OF THE CONSTANT HUM challenges its readers to work against instinct by exposing the dangers of our own curiosity. It’s more than just a story, it’s a warning of a much needed social change. We either take its advice, or risk rewriting what it means to be human in a world ran by insects.
OUR PROTAGONIST is pretty sure he’s just committed a murder. The body is newly dead, he’s the only one around, and a quick look at the evidence suggests he’s guilty as sin.
Also, he’s totally insane.
A rare brain condition causes his memories to reset every day, and because of this, he often wakes up in strange places with no memory of how he got there. He can’t even remember his own name. When he’s not racking his brain over his shoddy memory, he’s arguing incessantly with a disembodied voice that doesn’t seem to belong to him, one he can only hear inside his head.
He may not know much about the troubling situation he just woke up to, but he knows, without a doubt, that he’s completely f*cked.
While the odds are certainly stacked against him, there may be hope for our protagonist yet, for clutched in the corpse’s cold, clammy hands is a handwritten tome that suggests not only his innocence, but also reveals some bizarre and dangerous secrets, leading him to believe his own apartment building may be to blame… or is, at the very least, an accomplice.
That sounded better inside his head.
Luckily he’s not the only one trying to solve the case. The book also leads him to a group of outcasts who are in the midst of their own investigation. The only problem? They all suspect one another!
One thing’s for certain, someone inside the tower is a cold-blooded killer. Can our protagonist solve the murder before he falls asleep and his memories reset? Or worse, before the killer strikes again?
Find out in HOLUS BOLUS. You’ll be pushed to the very edge of sanity!
Given the fact that there are perhaps 400 billion stars in our Galaxy alone, and perhaps 400 billion galaxies in the Universe, it stands to reason that somewhere out there, in the 14-billion-year-old cosmos, there is or once was a civilization at least as advanced as our own. The sheer enormity of the numbers almost demands that we accept the truth of this hypothesis. Why, then, have we encountered no evidence, no messages, no artifacts of these extraterrestrials? In this second, significantly revised and expanded edition of his widely popular book, Webb discusses in detail the (for now!) 75 most cogent and intriguing solutions to Fermi’s famous paradox: If the numbers strongly point to the existence of extraterrestrial civilizations, why have we found no evidence of them?
Progress: page 176 of 434. (Jan 6, 155, Jan 15, 164, Jan 29, 171, Feb 5, 176)
With The Three-Body Problem, English-speaking readers got their first chance to read China’s most beloved science fiction author, Cixin Liu. The Three-Body Problem was released to great acclaim, including coverage in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal and reading list picks by Barack Obama and Mark Zuckerberg. It also won the Hugo and Nebula Awards, making it the first translated novel to win a major SF award.
Now, this epic trilogy concludes with Death’s End. Half a century after the Doomsday Battle, the uneasy balance of Dark Forest Deterrence keeps the Trisolaran invaders at bay. Earth enjoys unprecedented prosperity due to the infusion of Trisolaran knowledge. With human science advancing daily and the Trisolarans adopting Earth culture, it seems that the two civilizations will soon be able to co-exist peacefully as equals without the terrible threat of mutually assured annihilation. But the peace has also made humanity complacent.
Cheng Xin, an aerospace engineer from the early twenty-first century, awakens from hibernation in this new age. She brings with her knowledge of a long-forgotten program dating from the beginning of the Trisolar Crisis, and her very presence may upset the delicate balance between two worlds. Will humanity reach for the stars or die in its cradle?
Progress: page 608 of 724 (Feb 5, 328, Mar 4, 345)
Karl Edward Wagner (1945-1994) has earned a reputation as one of the finest horror writers of the modern era, but his work has been out of print and nearly unobtainable for many years. His seminal volume In a Lonely Place collects eight of his best tales, including “In the Pines,” a classic ghost story evocatively set in the Tennessee woods, “Beyond Any Measure,” an original take on the vampire story, “River of Night’s Dreaming,” a surreal and nightmarish masterpiece inspired by The King in Yellow, and the author’s most famous tale, “Sticks,” a disturbing story thought by many to have been the basis for The Blair Witch Project. This new edition includes all the stories from the original 1983 edition, plus an additional rare tale and the author’s afterword from the Scream/Press limited edition, and features a new introduction by Ramsey Campbell.
Writing a book is hard. Marketing it can be even harder.
Marketing a book in 2021 can seem like a full-time job, what with the crazy number of things authors seem to be expected to do: social media, blog tours, advertising, price promotions, mailing lists, giveaways, you name it.
But here’s a little secret: you don’t need to do all those things to successfully set your book on the path to success. What you need is a solid plan to find the one or two tactics that will work, and start to drive sales… in a minimum amount of time. And that’s exactly what you’ll find in this book.
Instead of drowning you in information or inundating you with hundreds of different tactics and strategies that eventually prove fruitless, this book will guide you through a step-by-step framework to find the ones that actually work for you and your book, so that you can start marketing more efficiently.
In particular, you’ll learn:
• How to change your mindset and sell more books with less effort.; • How to write books that guarantee a lasting, profitable career; • How to get Amazon’s Kindle Store to market your book for you; • How to get thousands of readers into your mailing list before you even release the book; • How to propel your book to the top of the charts at launch; and • How to automate your marketing so that you can spend less time marketing and more time writing,
After helping over 150,000 authors crack the marketing code through a popular weekly newsletter, Reedsy’s Co-founder Ricardo Fayet is sharing everything he’s learned over the past few years in this beginner-friendly, jargon-free guide to book marketing.
A magnetic novel about two families, strangers to each other, who are forced together on a long weekend gone terribly wrong
Amanda and Clay head to a remote corner of Long Island expecting a a quiet reprieve from life in New York City, quality time with their teenage son and daughter and a taste of the good life in the luxurious home they’ve rented for the week. But with a late-night knock on the door, the spell is broken. Ruth and G. H., an older couple who claim to own the home, have arrived there in a panic. These strangers say that a sudden power outage has swept the city, and – with nowhere else to turn – they have come to the country in search of shelter.
But with the TV and internet down, and no phone service, the facts are unknowable. Should Amanda and Clay trust this couple – and vice versa? What has happened back in New York? Is the holiday home, isolated from civilisation, a truly safe place for their families? And are they safe from one another?
“She took the record out and put it on. As it started to play, she simply didn’t know if good memories would come back. Maybe bad memories would overtake them. Whichever way she felt, she just knew that it was ‘absolutely necessary’ to purely have it play.”
Elsie Ragusin started out in life with everything laid out. She was passionate about God, music, and her family. However, life would soon test her in the most unimaginable ways. She would realize that during the worst atrocities that human history has ever witnessed, she had to rely completely on her Christian faith to get by. Some days, she never ate or felt too weak to work in the concentration camps. Her mental strength in using music and the hope of getting back to her family helped her get through it in 1945. Yet, those haunting memories are what she still has to overcome. Will she use the talents that God has given her to show her present family that one can truly overcome anything? Listen and follow along with Elsie’s Tune.
Rabbitlike aliens from outer space colonize Earth during humankind’s Second World War in a delightfully funny and thought-provoking science fiction adventure The Quozl just need somewhere to call home. A gentle race of extraterrestrial rabbits, they have a propensity for reproduction that has left their home planet, Quozlene, dangerously overpopulated, and in their search for greener and less-crowded pastures, they have discovered the perfect place to start the third planet away from a healthy, warming sun. What they don’t realize is that this world they call Shiraz is already inhabited by a species of violent sentient creatures known as humans. But there’s no going back now. In the midst of the brutal and helpfully distracting global conflict the Shirazians call World War II, the colony ship lands undetected, and the space rabbits immediately go into hiding. But a secret like the Quozl can be concealed for only so long, especially when their numbers start to increase and certain rebellious members of the long-eared society decide the time is ripe to claim their place in a world they believe is rightfully theirs. One of the most admired and prolific authors in the science fiction arena, Alan Dean Foster will delight readers who hunger for something different with this funny, thoughtful, and wildly inventive novel of first contact and coexistence. Once you meet the Quozl, you will never forget them.
Progress: Audiobook 40%
Book I Will Read:
Title: Crash Course
Author: Julie Whipple
Published: 2018
Pages: 296
Genres: Nonfiction, Aviation
Goodreads Synopsis: “Relive the story of an ill-fated commercial flight that was doomed before it was ever airborne; and find out how it may one day save your life – if it hasn’t already.” (Chris Mendenhall, air traffic controller, Tinker Air Force Base)
On a cold winter night, a passenger jet with 189 aboard crash landed, out of fuel, in a suburban neighborhood in Portland, Oregon. Ten people died. The pilot was blamed and stripped of his career, and a sweeping transformation of flight-crew training took place that made United Flight 173 (in)famous worldwide as the model for failure and change. That was only the half of it.
Hiding in plain sight for years in an attorney’s file boxes, the forgotten truths of the landmark air disaster reveal much more: an emotional journey tethered to the disgraced pilot and a three-year-old girl who survived the crash and became an unlikely hero for justice and public safety in the dramatic legal battle that followed.
Crash Course, by award-winning journalist Julie Whipple, is the long-overdue, true story of a misunderstood airline tragedy that changed more about our daily lives than most people know. Here is why we’re safer today, how we’re not, and what we can do about it.
The Legal Alien 