By Terri Schlichenmeyer
The Bookworm Sez

Some say you march to a different drummer.

You follow the music you hear in your soul, blazing your own path while the rest of the world watches. You’re the best companion you know for yourself. You know who you are, and that’s all that matters.

In “The Outsider Advantage” by Ciera Rogers, founder, and CEO of Babes, you’ll see what you can do with your “you-niqueness.”

There was once a time when Rogers lived in her mother’s Jeep.

She was a teenager then, and though her mother tried to keep a roof over their heads, a handful of low-paying jobs just didn’t cut it. They were constantly moving, and Rogers switched schools often, which forced her to learn how to fit in quickly and get by.

That resourcefulness was key to her survival later in life. As the first in her family to attend college, Rogers earned a degree, but she was unable to take an unpaid intern position, which were all that were available a decade or so ago, she says. This hurt her job chances, but she knew she would survive. She was bold and smart.

One afternoon, broke and unemployed, she thought about her mother’s small boutique in Houston, launched with few resources and less money. Rogers knew how to thrift. She could make videos. She could sell clothing online, eventually creating one-of-a-kind outfits, mixing and matching, catching the attention of celebrities and moviemakers becoming a million-dollar business started literally on scraps.

“Remember,” she says, “most big things start with a tiny idea.”

You don’t have to have piles of cash or big inheritances to start a business. Look for free help or free platforms that can move your enterprise along. Make do with what you have at first. Stop procrastinating and don’t miss any opportunities.  Know what you stand for. Know that you are not alone, either in your uniqueness or your situation.

“There’s a box where everyone else is,” says Rogers. “Get out of it. Be different.”

So, you don’t have any money. You don’t even have bootstraps to pull yourself up. But if you can read, you have what it takes to be an entrepreneur, says Rogers. “You only need to take that first confident step.”

As you start this book, though, you may wonder why anyone would think it’s for entrepreneurs. What Rogers has to offer is, indeed, more memoir than advice, though there are nuggets to capture on nearly every page and end-of-chapter takeaways embedded in a lively, fun sort of treasure hunt. Rogers’ entire life on the edge shows readers that being a little bit (or a whole lot) unique isn’t a hurdle. Unconventionality is not a deal-breaker; in fact, it can help you break into success.

This book inspires — especially for readers whose dreams are burning with ideas but not a lot of coin. “The Outsider Advantage” is for when the drum beat of entrepreneurship is just too irresistible.

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By Terri Schlichenmeyer

Author: Leonard Pitts, Jr.

Deep down inside, there’s a part of you that always wants to do right.

Did someone teach you that? Or were you just modeling what your elders did when they did what was true and right? Either way, your moral compass points the way, always. You do right for the world, even if, as in the new novel “54 Miles” by Leonard Pitts, Jr., it’s the wrong personal decision for you.

Sitting in church, hundreds of miles from home, Adam Simon felt the distance keenly.

This surprised him. It wasn’t like he was close to his parents. No, his father, a White minister, had over-preached to Adam for too long, and his Black mother never showed Adam much warmth. With no siblings to help soften these facts, Adam left college to head to Alabama, to work with SNCC’s voter registry efforts.

That was the plan, anyhow, but down-deep, Adam had no idea what he was doing. It was a good cause, a great and righteous one, but not without danger: he was almost killed while marching across the Edmund Pettis Bridge.

And that’s how his frantic parents learned where he was: alerted by Simon’s parents, his Uncle Luther tracked the young man down in a Selma hospital, took him in, and notified Simon’s parents that he was safe.

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By that time, Simon was on his way to Alabama for his son’s sake.

Years ago, George, the elder Simon, and his now-wife, Thelma, had busted almost every racial law the South imposed, and they married. Shortly afterward, Simon’s father sent the new family north, for safety.

And now Simon was in Alabama, in the mouth of the dragon and he had other troubles on his mind.

Simon knew he shouldn’t have snooped, but while staying with his Uncle Luther, he found a stash of old letters, and he read them. What he learned shocked him, and he had to leave Luther’s home immediately.

The problem was, Simon had nowhere to go.

Were you there? If not, can you imagine what it was like to live in 1965, at the height of the Civil Rights Movement? Readers who don’t know or can’t picture it will get an eyeful of what was possible inside “54 Miles.”

In setting his novel roughly in the years 1945 to 1965, author Leonard Pitts, Jr. doesn’t make reading this book easy. There are passages inside this novel that will make you want to wince and turn away and – caution! – they’re not for the weak-stomached.

Just remember, they’re essential to the story and to why the characters act as they do.

On that, you’ll enjoy most of these characters as they look to the past and future, working their ways through personal struggles and one of the more tumultuous periods in American history. Details help, making this books’ cast feel more authentic.

Be aware that “54 Miles” can be slow, at certain points, but stick with it and you won’t be disappointed. Especially if you’re a historical novel fan, this book will do you right.

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By Terri Schlichenmeyer

Your toes didn’t wait long before they started tapping.

They knew what was coming, almost as soon as the band was seated. They knew before the first notes were played and the hep cats and jazz babies hit the floor to cut a rug. Daddy, it was the bee’s knees but in the new book “The Jazzmen” by Larry Tye, if you were the Sheik on the stage, makin’ cabbage wasn’t all that swank.

Louis Armstrong was born in 1900 or thereabouts in a “four-room frame house on an unpaved lane” in a section of New Orleans called “Back o’Town … the Blackest, swampiest, and most impoverished” area of the city. His mother was a “chippie,” and the boy grew up running barefoot and wild, the latter of which led to trouble. At age twelve, Armstrong was sent to the Colored Waif’s Home for recalcitrant Black boys, and that changed his life. At the “home,” he found mentors, father-figures and love, and he discovered music.

For years, Bill “Count” Basie insisted that he’d grown up with “no-drama, no-mystery, and nobody’s business but his,” but the truth was “sanitized.” He hated school and dropped out in junior high, hoping to join the circus. Instead, he landed a job working in a “moving-picture theater” as a general worker. When the theater’s piano player didn’t come to work one day, Basie volunteered to sit in. He ultimately realized that “I had to get out … of Red Bank [New Jersey], and music was my ticket.”

Even as a young teenager, Edward Ellington insisted that he be treated like a superstar. By then, his friends had nicknamed him “Duke,” for his insistence on dressing elegantly and acting like he was royalty. And he surely was — to his mother, and to millions of swooning female fans later in his life.

Three men, born at roughly the same time, had more in common than their ages. Two of them had mothers “who doted” on them. All three were perform-aholics. And, for all three, “Race … fell away as America listened.”

Feel up to a time-trip back a century or more? You won’t even have to leave your seat, just grab “The Jazzmen” and hang on.

In his introduction, author Larry Tye explains why he so badly wanted to tell the story of these three giants of music and how Basie’s, Ellington’s, and Armstrong’s lives intersected and diverged as all three were near-simultaneously performing for audiences world-wide. Their stories fascinated him, and his excitement runs strong in this book. Among other allures, readers used to today’s star-powered gossip will enjoy learning about an almost-forgotten time when performers took the country by storm by bootstrapping without a retinue of dozens.

And the racism the three performers encountered disappeared like magic sometimes, and that’s a good tale all by itself.

This is a musician’s dream book, but it’s also a must-read story if you’ve never heard of Basie, Ellington, or Armstrong. “The Jazzmen” may send you searching your music library, so make note.

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