Richard E Kelly

I am pleased to announce the release today of a You Tube video promoting my book, Growing Up in Mama’s Club.

Check it out…

For as long as I can remember, books and and the written word have been an important part of my life.  In fact, I wouldn’t be who I am without them. For me, it was a very special privilege to be invited last May to participate, along with four hundred other authors, in the first annual two-day Tucson Festival of Books in March 2009. Scheduled to be held on the lovely University of Arizona campus, I could not imagine a better setting for the fifty thousand readers that were expected to attend.

Seven months before the book fair, I received a phone call from a lady on the Festival’s planning committee. She had read my book,Growing Up in Mama’s Club, and Esther Royer Ayers’ Rolling Down Black Stockings, a memoir about growing up as an Old Order Mennonite. She believed we both had interesting stories to tell and wondered if I would be willing to put on a one-hour presentation with Esther to share our childhood experiences. This presentation would be in addition to the time each author would be allowed to sell and sign books at their assigned booths. Continue Reading »

I just finished reading The Green Collar Economy, and I can’t ever recall reading a book that changed my way of thinking so dramatically. Now I believe it’s possible to reverse the current economic free-fall and at the same time make the world a better place for my six granddaughters to raise their children.

The book’s author, Van Jones, presents a well-written, substantive, and viable first-draft plan for solving what I believe are some of the biggest issues facing our country today. These include repairing the failing economy, eliminating our foreign oil dependency (a major threat to national security), and efficiently reducing our reliance on fossil fuels with clean and renewable energy.

I think the author may have tried to appeal to too many constituents because I felt the first 77 pages of the book dragged a bit and I was suspicious that this was just pie-in-the-sky stuff. When I finished reading the book in its entirety, however, I was a believer.

Am I getting soft in my old age? I don’t think so. I’m still a capitalist at heart, a business man who wants data, facts, and numbers, not wishful thinking. Continue Reading »