This week we welcome Dina R. Rose who has a PhD in sociology from Duke University and is the author of the popular blog, It’s Not About Nutrition where she focuses on helping parents find the right approach to get kids eating right.

After her mother’s premature death from obesity-related illnesses at the age of 65, Dina knew she wanted to give her daughter a better — and happier — food-life. Dina made helping parents solve their kids’ eating problems her life work. Most parents know what their children should eat, but have trouble putting this knowledge into practice. Dina offers parents the relief they need: practical, research-based strategies so they can stop struggling and start succeeding.

A Food Sociologist, Dina answers the how not the what when it comes to nutrition. The foods children should eat is not so much a mystery as getting them to actually accept and enjoy a regular healthy diet.

In her workshops and one-on-one sessions, Dina gives parents the tools to teach kids to eat right without having to rely on calorie counting systems, complex menus, or portion limits. By making smart decisions based on the latest in parenting, sociology, nutrition, and food psychology research, parents can learn to:

• Deliberately and consciously shape children’s eating habits.
• Identify why children eat the way they do.
• Manage events as they happen so unexpected treats don’t ruin your plans.
• Use taste and texture to teach kids to eat a wide variety of foods.
• Avoid the 3 most common ways parents inadvertently teach bad eating habits.
• Teach children how to try new foods.
• Identify how parenting style influences children’s eating.
• Solve eating problems that arise at different developmental stages.
• Know what to do instead of bribing and begging kids to eat.
• Consciously shape children’s relationships to food.

Look for Dina Rose’s upcoming book, It’s Not About Nutrition: Unexpected Lessons In Teaching Your Child Healthy Eating for Life. For more information on how to get a preview of this book, visit the It’s Not About Nutrition Web site and make sure you visit Dina’s blog as well for the latest in parenting and nutrition.

The clip below features Dina Rose on Better Connecticut where she provides tips for parents on how to feed their children healthy foods.

Are you a social media fan?

Join the It’s Not About Nutrition community on Facebook and catch up with Dina Rose on Twitter.

Changeling Moon by Dani Harper

He roams the moonlit wilderness, his every sense and instinct on high alert. Changeling wolf Connor Macleod and his Pack have never feared anything — until the night human Zoey Tyler barely escapes a rogue werewolf’s vicious attack.

As the full moon approaches, Zoey has no idea of the changes that are coming, and only Connor can show her what she is, and help her master the wildness inside. With her initiation into the Pack just days away and a terrifying predator on the loose, the tentative bonds of trust and tenderness are their only weapons against a force red in tooth, claw . . . and ultimate evil.

Changeling from Kensington – Brava is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

Keys to the Kingdom by Senator Bob Graham

FORMER SENATOR JOHN BILLINGTON KNEW WRITING THIS NEW YORK TIMES OP-ED PIECE MIGHT GET HIM KILLED . . .

July 6th
The congressional inquiry into the 9/11 attacks left several secrets unanswered. The top three are Saudi Arabia’s full role in the preparation for and the execution of the plot; the Kingdom’s willingness and capacity to collaborate in future terrorist actions against the United States; and why this and the prior administration conducted a cover-up that thus far has frustrated finding the answers to the first two questions.

Now, there is an even more ominous unknown. Does Saudi Arabia have the bomb? . . . The United States should take prompt action to prevent this potential conflict from becoming a reality.

Shortly after this appears in print, his suspicion comes true: Senator Billington, a co-chair of the 9/11 Congressional Inquiry Commission, is murdered near his Florida home. Sensing the danger he faced before he was murdered, Billington left ex-Special Forces operative Tony Ramos detailed instructions for an investigation into Saudi complicity in the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Now Ramos, in conjunction with Billington’s daughter Laura, must uncover a shocking international conspiracy linking Saudi Arabia — the Kingdom — to Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda, in a race against time that will span Saudi Arabia, India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan.

But will Ramos and his team be able to stop al-Qaeda from unleashing nuclear disaster on American shores and beyond?

Destined to be a titan amongst thrillers, Keys to the Kingdom is infused with inside information and insight into the world of terrorism that only Senator Bob Graham — as former Chairman of the Senate’s Select Committee on Intelligence — can offer.

Keys to the Kingdom from Vanguard Press is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

Lucky Stiff by Deborah Coonts

Lucky O’Toole — head of Customer Relations at premier mega resort the Babylon — thinks it’s just another night in Las Vegas. A tractor-trailer has spilled its load of a million honeybees, blocking not only the Strip but the entrance to her hotel. . .The district attorney for Clark County — apparently the odd man out of a threesome on the twelfth floor — is hiding in the buff in one of the hotel’s laundry rooms. . . And Numbers Neidermeyer — one of Vegas’s less-than-savory oddsmakers — is throwing some major attitude at Las Vegas’s ace private investigator, the beautiful Jeremy Whitlock.

The next day, Lucky discovers Ms. Neidermeyer has been tossed into the shark tank at the Mandalay Bay Resort as a snack for the tiger shark. When the police show up at the Babylon with a hastily prepared search warrant, applied for by the district attorney himself, and Jeremy lands in the hot seat, Lucky realizes her previous night was far from routine.

Amid the chaos of fight weekend, the Babylon’s hiring of an eccentric new French chef, and her madam mother’s scheme to auction off a young woman’s virginity, Lucky is drawn into a deadly game where no one is what they seem, a game that will end only when she discovers who made fish food out of Numbers Neidermeyer.

Lucky O’Toole and fabulous Las Vegas — life doesn’t get any better.

Lucky Stiff from Forge Book is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

Untouchable by Scott O’Connor

It is the autumn of 1999. A year has passed since Lucy Darby’s unexpected death, leaving her husband David and son Whitley to mend the gaping hole in their lives. David, a trauma-site cleanup technician, spends his nights expunging the violent remains of strangers, helping their families to move on, though he is unable to do the same. Whitley — an 11 year-old social pariah known simply as The Kid — hasn’t spoken since his mother’s death. Instead, he communicates through a growing collection of notebooks, living in a safer world of his own silent imagining.

As the impending arrival of Y2K casts a shadow of uncertainty around them, their own precarious reality begins to implode. Questions pertaining to the events of Lucy’s death begin to haunt David, while The Kid, who still believes his mother is alive, enlists the help of his small group of misfit friends to bring her back. As David continues to lose his grip on reality and The Kid’s sense of urgency grows, they begin to uncover truths that will force them to confront their deepest fears about each other and the wounded family they are trying desperately to save.

Untouchable from Tyrus is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

County Line by Bill Cameron

When the steadfast Ruby Jane Whittaker drops out of sight, dogged ex-cop Skin Kadash sets out to discover what drove the woman he loves to leave her life behind so suddenly and without explanation.

The discovery of a dead man in Ruby Jane’s apartment and an attack by a mysterious stalker send Skin from Portland to California — and into a charged encounter with her one-time love Peter McKrall.

As questions mount and answers grow increasingly out of reach, Skin and Peter cross the country on a desperate journey deep into Ruby Jane’s haunted past — and toward an explosive confrontation which will decide if any of them has a future.

County Line from Tyrus is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

by John Coats, author of Original Sinners, Why Genesis Still Matters

Divinity of Doubt

by Vincent Bugliosi

Vanguard Press

Any editor can tell you tales about the effect of a book’s title. One of the more famous of these is of F. Scott Fitzgerald, how it took both his wife, Zelda, and Maxwell Perkins, his editor at Charles Scribner’s Son’s to talk him into using the title The Great Gatsby. Fitzgerald preferred Under the Red, White and Blue, or Among Ash-Heaps and Millionaires, or Trimalchio in West Egg. Whoever came up with the title The Divinity of Doubt, The God Question should run for President.

You see, I have an ancient, deep-in-the-bone weariness from forty years of being told that I’m going to hell for the sin of taking the Bible as metaphor, not history. Now, to my surprise, having published a thoroughly non-religious interpretation of Genesis, and in the same vein, written periodic blogs here and elsewhere, I find there to be others, as dogmatic, close-minded and as ready as their Bible-thumping nemeses to state opinion as fact and/or final word on the subject, who inform me that only a deluded fool could find anything of value in what is no more than a collection of fairy tales. While I admit to quiet pleasures taken from watching the scions of the New Atheism tear the religious right a new one, their see-it-our-way-or-you’re-an-idiot polemic that drops me and others like me into the same bucket with Pat Robertson, et al., smacks of the very sort of unfettered certainty they set out to oppose. Literalism, I suppose, will beget its opposite.

It’s the agnostic, the anti-know-it-all, with whom I’ve long felt the greatest kinship. Once considered to be the sign of the beginning of wisdom, doubt, as a species of expression and, I fear, of thought, has become all but extinct in the absolutist atmospheres of our national conversation. Which is why Bugliosi’s title, The Divinity of Doubt, The God Question, first intrigued me with its implied promise that here is a successful, obviously intelligent adult who’d been around the block more than a few times, who is willing to say I don’t know! His logic is simple: Just as you can’t know—that is, prove—that God does exist, you can’t know that God does not exist. And it succeeds.

Bugliosi first came to national attention with his prosecution of Charles Manson, and the national best selling Helter Skelter (co-authored with Curt Gentry). He has now authored some thirteen books, including Outrage, Five Reasons Why O.J. Simpson Got Away With Murder; The Betrayal of America: How the Supreme Court Undermined the Constitution and Chose Our President; The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder, and; Till Death Us Do Part: A True Murder Mystery. The preponderance of critical attention for his work has been positive: “Brilliant”, “Brutally candid”, “Authoritative”, along with admiration for his “Zealousness”, and “Conscientious”.

His current effort, quite a departure in subject matter, is three hundred twenty-four pages of closing argument by a prosecutor skilled at presenting evidence in the worst possible light. Not that I fault him for this; Bugliosi goes after both camps with equal ferocity. While I take exception to some of his characterizations—for instance, Joseph Campbell was not a “religious” writer or even religious in any traditional sense of the word; Augustine’s definition of love is broader than what is represented here—I found it useful to keep in mind that this is lawyer-speak on behalf of his client, which is not so much some larger truth as it is reason. He intends to build a case against those who claim absolute knowledge where there is none.

Religious pieties, put on a level playing field with reason, will fold under the pressure. From the Doctrine of Original Sin to the “remarkable beliefs” of the born-again Christians, to Billy Graham, to the buttoned-up dogmas of the “Great, Grand, and Silly” Roman Catholic church, to Intelligent Design and its parent doctrine, Creationism, each is treated to Bugliosi’s scorn. One theme which he hammers time and again is that of the all-powerful God who loves us and, for his own reasons (which we’re not to understand), allows and/or causes, earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes, war, and genocide.

Nor does he spare the New Atheists, whose arguments he finds unconvincing. About Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion, he writes, “You don’t defeat the existence of God by simply saying that you find such an entity too improbable to believe…It would seem that someone of even rather dull intelligence would know this. Since Dawkins is a man of high intelligence, this gives rise to the possibility that Dawkins, unable to produce common sense to support his position, decided to rely on the hope that his startlingly vapid argument would go over the heads of his readers without them feeling the breeze.” Ouch! He is no kinder to Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason, nor to Christopher Hitchens, author of God Is Not Great, How Religion Ruins Everything. As if to leave no one untouched, before arriving at his final chapter “The Sense and Morality of Agnosticism,” Bugliosi turns his attention to Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, and Hindus.

The Divinity of Doubt, The God Question, provides a voice for those looking neither to be saved by religion nor saved from it, who know that they don’t know, and suspect they will never know because there are things that we humans, with our all-too-human limitations, can’t know. My advice to anyone in that category is that you use this book as a starting point, read it carefully, then read for yourself the sources that he cites. Read, think, write, talk with people willing to ponder things deeper than celebrity gossip and reality television. In other words, make up your own mind, which, ironically, may insist on remaining unmade, in a perpetual state of wonder—and wondering. If I read the author’s intentions correctly, that is just what he would tell you.

John R. Coats, author of “Original Sinners, Why Genesis Still Matters” (Copyright © 2009), holds master’s degrees from Virginia Theological Seminary and Bennington College Writing Seminars.  A former Episcopal priest, he was a principal speaker and seminar leader for the More To Life training program in the United States, Great Britain, and South Africa and an independent management consultant. He lives with his wife in Houston, Texas.

Join John R. Coats on Twitter and Facebook.

There are six essential elements for successful digital marketing and when used together they make for a powerful combination. Each element is important on its own, but when you use all six together you will see a strategy that is effective, scalable and long term.

• Website — A professional website is the single most important step towards your digital marketing plan. Your website is your homebase, so make sure it is updated regularly and is current. Use your site as a platform for all other activities. Post your blog and photos along with links to your social networks. Always remember your audience when developing content. If a person cares enough to come to your site, you need to make sure their trip was worth the effort.

• eNewsletter — email is still the most powerful digital tool. Every single author should have an enewsletter. You should collect as many email addresses of your readers as you can. Overtime email addresses of your readers will be a huge asset. You can communicate with your readers through a regular enewsletter sent either once a month or once every 3 months. Just keep those lines of communication open.

• Blog — A blog is the best way to share your expertise and drive traffic to your site. Use your blog on your own website along with posting it on an important high-traffic website as a guest post. Everyone needs content, and it never hurts to ask a popular blog if they want to run your blog post. Blogs don’t have to be long, 500-700 words tend to be the most popular lengths.

• Facebook — Every author should have a Facebook fan page so they can socialize and communicate with their readers. It’s an important element of digital marketing and honestly at 520 million people, you can’t afford to ignore it. Along with being a great place to build community, Facebook fan pages also offer Insights a great tool for monitoring your audience and your interactions.

• Video — There is not a better or easier way to show your passion and personality than video. It can be fun content for your Facebook fan page, your blog, and your website. Remember to post it on YouTube as well.

• Twitter — I know many authors are intimidated by Twitter, but it’s a fabulous way to share resources and develop a following. I find Twitter to be an incredible tool for listening and for doing market research. You can listen to your readers, find out what other people are doing and saying, and build a relationship with current and future readers.

If you chose not to participate in digital marketing and social media, you are only hurting yourself and your readers. There are millions of people on social networks; they don’t miss you, but you are missing out if you ignore them.

Digital marketing is a wonderful way to connect with people who care about your work. Just remember that all six elements of digital marketing working together will produce the best results. There are no short cuts here, but it is all well worth the investment of time and attention.

From New York Times bestselling author and internationally renowned environmental and consumer advocate Erin Brockovich, comes Rock Bottom, a debut thriller and first in a series of novels that introduces one of the most fascinating and memorable characters in suspense fiction. In Rock Bottom, Erin Brockovich combines passionate intensity, first-rate story-telling, and her real-life experiences in a novel that will leave you breathless. Rock Bottom from Vanguard Press is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

If you’re one of the 13 million Americans who have survived a heart attack or been diagnosed with heart disease, Dr. Janet Bond Brill offers a delicious and foolproof plan that can lower your risk of a second heart attack by up to 70 percent.  Inspired by the heart-healthy Mediterranean diet, the Prevent a Second Heart Attack Plan is based on satisfaction, rather than deprivation. Prevent a Second Heart Attack: 8 Foods, 8 Weeks to Reversing Heart Disease from Crown/Three Rivers Press is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

For Conor Grennan, what began as a footloose adventure volunteering at the Little Princes Children’s Home in war-torn Nepal becomes a commitment to reunite children he had grown to love with their families, but this would be no small task. He would risk his life on a journey through the legendary mountains of Nepal, facing the dangers of a bloody civil war.

Little Princes is a true story of families and children, and what one person is capable of when faced with seemingly insurmountable odds. At turns tragic, joyful, and hilarious, Little Princes is a testament to the power of faith and the ability of love to carry us beyond our wildest expectations.  Little Princes: One Man’s Promise to Bring Home the Lost Children of Nepal from William Morrow is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

What Could Happen if You Do Nothing? offers managers clear, usable tools to enhance the way they listen and engage their people. Mini-dialogues, sample questions, listening tips, and suggestions use familiar situations to show how to transform business challenges into coaching opportunities. This is an essential resource for developing employees to their full potential and for fostering better working relationships for individuals, teams, and the business itself. What Could Happen If You Do Nothing? A Manager’s Handbook for Coaching Conversations from Giraffe Business Publishing is available on Amazon.

A new book from Krause Publications, John Lennon: Life Is What Happens by John M. Borack celebrates the life and times of one of the most influential musicians in pop music history. This fascinating read features rare images of Lennon juxtaposed by the myriad pop-culture memorabilia created from the height of Beatlemania into the late 1970s and the Plastic Ono Band. Chronicling his musical career, the book includes hundreds of classic photographs, dozens of quotes by and about Lennon, and personal reminiscences from fans and celebrities recalling Lennon’s impact on their lives.

Visit the John Lennon: Life Is What Happens Facebook page for up-to-date information and to interact with a like-minded community. John Lennon: Life Is What Happens is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

See the John Lennon: Life Is What Happens slideshow on Slideshare.net.