Blue Bicycle Books

Join celebrated local author Brad Taylor at Uptown Social (587 King St.), Sat., Jan. 18, 7 pm. Brad will talk and sign copies of his latest thriller Hunter Killer (William Morrow, hb., 432 pp., $28.99).

The fourteenth installment of his New York Times bestselling Pike Logan Series, Hunter Killer finds Logan and his team entangled in a byzantine scheme involving Russian and Israeli assassins, Brazilian politics, a cut-throat battle for control of offshore oil fields, leading to an attack on his team both in Brazil and Charleston, SC.

Brad Taylor served for more than twenty years in the U.S. Army, including eight years in 1st Special Forces Operational Detachment–Delta, commonly known as Delta Force. He retired as a Special Forces Lieutenant Colonel and now lives in Charleston.

On Thurs., Jan. 16, 6 pm, help us celebrate the release of attorney-turned-speaker and thought-leader Sallie Holder’s book Hitting Rock Middle: The Roadmap from Empty Success to True Fulfillment (Advantage Media Group, hb., 160 pp., $27.95) at Hampden Clothing, 314 King Street.

A nationally recognized public speaker and business coach, Sallie Holder has been helping businesses, entrepreneurs, and employees break through barriers and into success for over fifteen years. In Hitting Rock Middle, she has created a step-by-step plan to help you start creating the path to your greatest potential – a place that includes true fulfillment and success. Through the journey this book will take you on, you will pinpoint who you are, what you want to do with your life, and how to get out of Rock Middle and into the big, bold, successful career that was waiting for you all along.

Sallie hosts a weekly podcast of the same title, which can be found here.

Join us Wed., Dec. 18, 6 – 7:30 pm, for the Charleston release party of Say Grace: How the Restaurant Business Saved My Life (ForbesBooks, 184 pp., $25) by Steve Palmer, managing partner of Indigo Road (The Macintosh, Indaco and many more).

The author will talk and sign books, and Katie Daniel of Bar Mash will be on hand serving her award-winning mocktails.

About the Author: After an adolescence filled with addiction, rehabs, half-way houses, and homelessness, and with the help of colleagues, Steve Palmer was able to get sober. He is the managing partner of the Indigo Road Hospitality Group, which employs about a thousand people in 20 restaurants and bars that stretch across four Southern states and Washington, D.C. He is on a quest to help others learn how to be sober in an industry awash with alcohol and drugs.

Palmer has worked in hospitality since he was 13 years old. He has been recognized by The New York Times, NPR, Southern Living, Food & Wine, the James Beard Foundation, and Forbes Small Business Giants for his career as well as his charitable and community efforts. In 2016, Palmer co-founded Ben’s Friends, the food-and-beverage industry support group offering hope, fellowship, and a path forward to industry professionals struggling with substance abuse and addiction.

See the recent New York Times Visionary Series article on Palmer: After Rehab and Loss, A Restaurant Leader Helps His Colleagues

 Thurs., Dec. 19, 5:30 pm, Bernie Schein will discuss and sign his new memoir, Pat Conroy: Our Lifelong Friendship (Skyhorse, hb., 304 pp, $25.99). Both writers and educators, Schein and Conroy were best friends from the moment they met during a high school pickup basketball game until Pat Conroy’s death in 2016. A love letter and homage, and a way to share the Pat he knew, this book collects Bernie’s cherished memories about the gregarious, welcoming, larger-than-life man who remained his best friend, even during the years they didn’t speak. It offers a trove of insights and anecdotes that will be treasured by Pat Conroy’s many devoted fans.

Bernie Schein was born, bred, and Bar Mitzvahed in Beaufort, South Carolina. He was an educator for forty-five years, many of them in Atlanta. He is the author of three books, including If Holden Caulfield Were in My Classroom and the novel Famous All over Town. He has been published and featured in numerous newspapers and magazines, including Newsweek, the Jewish Advocate, Atlanta magazine, and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and interviewed on NPR and radio stations across the country. He is now an educational consultant as well as a humorist and raconteur. He and his wife live in Beaufort, South Carolina.

Join us Thurs., Dec. 5, 5:30 pm as journalist Ken Woodley will be here to discuss his new book The Road to Healing (NewSouth Books, hb., 224 pp., $28).

Prince Edward County, Virginia closed its public school system in 1959 in “massive resistance” to the U.S. Supreme Court’s historic Brown v. Board decision of 1954. The editorial pages of the local family-owned newspaper, The Farmville Herald, led the fight to lock classrooms rather than integrate them. The school system remained closed until the fall of 1964, when the County was forced by federal courts to comply with the school integration ordered by Brown. The vast majority of white children had continued their education in a private, whites-only academy. But more than 2,000 black students were left without a formal education by the five-year closure. Their lives were forever changed.

The Road to Healing: A Civil Rights Reparation Story in Prince Edward County, Virginia is Ken Woodley’s first-person account of the steps taken in recent years to redress the wound. The book’s centerpiece is the 18-month fight to create what legendary civil rights activist Julian Bond told the author would become the first Civil Rights-era reparation in United States history; it was led by Woodley, then editor of The Farmville Herald, still owned by the original family.

Ken Woodley was the editor for twenty-four years of the Farmville Herald in Prince Edward County, Virginia. A licensed lay preacher in the Episcopal Church, he has published daily spiritual meditations Forward Day By Day. He has also written half a dozen stories for elementary-aged children and is looking for the right publishing home for these. When he’s not writing, volunteering at an after-school program for at-risk children, or reading with his dog Pugsley in his lap, Woodley enjoys listening to half a dozen beautiful notes played slowly on an electric guitar rather than fifty played too fast to appreciate them. And he loves his wife, Kim.