Blooming Hollyhocks Coming This October
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September 16, 2025

Duluth-based journalist and creative writer Naomi Yaeger is counting down the weeks to the launch of Blooming Hollyhocks: Tales of Joy During Hard Times. This work of creative nonfiction is the author’s story of her mother, Janette Minehart, who grew up with four siblings in a small Minnesota prairie town during the Depression and came of age during WWII. Not yet available for pre-ordering, Blooming Hollyhocks will be published in October… [Read More]

Keeping History Alive—an Interview with Bett Fitzpatrick
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November 15, 2022

In the pre-dawn hours of February 18, 1942, three American warships zigzagged in convoy along the south coast of Newfoundland. Caught in a raging blizzard, the three ships ran aground on one of the most inhospitable stretches of coastline in the world—less than three miles apart, within eight minutes of each other. The Wilkes freed herself. The Truxton and Pollux could not. Fighting frigid temperatures, wild surf, and a heavy… [Read More]

Congratulations to Jean Raffa on the Launch of The Soul’s Twins
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November 17, 2020

The Soul’s Twins: Emancipate Your Feminine and Masculine Archetypes by Jean Benedict Raffa releases today, November 17, from Schiffer Books. A former television producer and college professor, Dr. Jean Raffa changed directions in midlife to discover and write about her passions. Informed by over 30 years of psychological and spiritual study, her books and teachings guide others to growth and self-empowerment. Humanity today is plagued… [Read More]

Death in the Baltic: WWII Sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff
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April 9, 2013

Horst Woit, a young boy, snatched his uncle’s jack knife from the kitchen table as he and his mother walked out the door of their home.  They trudged through the snow  and freezing weather toward the Baltic harbor where they boarded a ship named the Wilhelm Gustloff to flee from Nazi Germany while Stalin’s soldiers advanced on the Eastern Front in January 1945. When Alexander… [Read More]

Q & A How Local Politics Threaten the Global Economy
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April 29, 2011

Fresh from the press, my new copy of Risk Rules: How Local Politics Threaten the Local Economy arrived and it is really a study of unintended consequences. Authors Marvin Zonis, Dan Lefkovitz, Sam Wilkin and Joseph Yackley offer a new way to understand the global political economy. Here are seven questions posed about the current state of affairs and the author’s answers. 1) Obviously, there’s… [Read More]