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Independent Press Award — 2026 Distinguished Favorite

2026 The Bookish Reader’s Pick Award

2026 Chrysalis/BREW Reader’s Choice Award

Fall 2025 Pinnacle Book Achievement Award — “Best Book in the Category of Literary Fiction”

2026 Literary Titan Silver Book Award

2025 Literary Global Book Award for Fiction — Thriller-Adventure Category Winner

January 7, 2026

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Drinking from the Stream by Richard Scott Sacks

What would follow you across continents if memory weighed more than luggage? Drinking from the Stream by Richard Scott Sacks explores...

Book Review: “Drinking from the Stream” by Richard Scott Sacks
By Mary Jones
JAN 8, 2026 #book review, #dailyprompt, #featured, #Friendship, #moral choice, #Political violence, #Reader Review, #the chrysalis brew project

What would you carry across continents if the weight wasn’t luggage but memory? Drinking from the Stream by Richard Scott Sacks explores that question—read the full review to follow where it leads.

Table of Contents

• Review
• About the Author
• ...

Award-winning news

Hi Richard Sacks,

We are honored to share the news that your book has been announced a winner in Independent Press Award. Congratulations!

The following information was provided by Independent Press Award:

Congratulations! Your book has placed as a "Distinguished Favorite" in the Independent Press Awards.

Attached are the digital seals, and your book cover with the seal attached. Permalinks, sample press release, digital certificates and banners will be sent to you by the award...

Congratulations!

Your book has been chosen as one of the NABE Pinnacle Book Achievement Award Winners for Fall 2025.

We have a Pinnacle Award Winners page on our website that you can visit at

Fall 2025 Pinnacle Book Achievement Awards

Thanks again for doing a great job on your book.

Happy New Year!

Al

** Congratulations!

**

We are proud to present you with the Literary Titan Book Award. Following the recent review of your book through our Book Review Service, it was automatically entered into our Literary Book Award competition. Your book deserves extraordinary praise, and we are proud to acknowledge your hard work, dedication, and writing talent. Start telling the world that you're an award-winning author because we will be!

Literary Titan Silver Book Awards

JAN 2

Posted by Literary Titan

...

DRINKING FROM THE STREAM follows two young men on the run from themselves. The story is set in the early 1970s, a time of violent upheavals when the Chinese Cultural Revolution and the Vietnam War marked a generation. Jake, a Nebraska kid turned Louisiana roughneck, flees the guilt of a killing on an oil rig. Karl, a disillusioned American student at Oxford, escapes the wreckage of the sixties and a painful relationship. Their paths cross. Together they jump on a plane to explore East Africa...

The old title, A TRIP BY CANOE, was too pedestrian, too prosaic, too unimaginative. WORLD OF WORLDS is more evocative and ambitious, and it does a better job of suggesting the actual subject matter.

A sampling from WORLD OF WORLDS:

A solitary risk-taker climbs a mountain near Europe’s highest peak;

three Australians dazzle a traveler on the Kenya coast with their financial acumen and nerve;

a desperate alcoholic in the Congo latches onto a reckless Irish newsman;

a former student protester...

Congratulations — 2025 Literary Global Book Awards Category Winner

WINNER

FICTION-THRILLER/ADVENTURE

FULL BOOK TITLE: DRINKING FROM THE STREAM

AUTHOR NAME: Richard Scott Sacks

PUBLISHER NAME: Koehler Books

Dear LGBA Category Winner,

Congratulations! We are delighted to inform you that your book has been selected as a Category Winner in the 2025 Literary Global Book Awards.

After careful review by our distinguished panel of judges, your work stood out for its exceptional craft, originality, and...

Drinking from the Stream follows two young men on the run from themselves. Jake, a Nebraska kid turned Louisiana roughneck, flees the guilt of a killing on an oil rig. Karl, a disillusioned American student at Oxford, escapes the wreckage of the sixties and a painful relationship. Their paths cross, and they drift through Ethiopia, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi and Tanzania in the early seventies, bumping into coups, massacres and love affairs as they go. The book stretches from the Gulf of Mexico...

He will render judgment upon the nations, and they will be filled with corpses; He will crush heads over a vast land. He will drink from the stream on the way and so will hold his head high.

“Cinematic, immersive, and absolutely timely. It has the bones of a cult classic."

"Drinking from the Stream isn’t just a debut novel, it’s a high-voltage cocktail of political thriller, action-adventure, and history— Vietnam, the Cultural Revolution, Africa on the cusp of transformation… a fugitive farm boy, a tortured Oxford dropout, and a dangerous plunge into dictatorship and chaos. That’s not 'just a book'… that’s a cinematic gut-punch."

"A political thriller woven with history, action,...

In STREAM, set in the early 1970s, orphaned oil roughneck Jake Ries flees after killing unintentionally a murderous white supremacist cook on a platform in the Gulf of Mexico, who mistakes him for a Jew. Graduate student Karl Appel meets Jake in Oxford. Karl is fed up with his life and with academia. Together they jump on a plane and explore Ethiopia by thumb. Their travels bring them to Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, the Congo, and Tanzania. And along the way they pick up Howard (South...

Exciting!! My second book of fiction, A TRIP BY CANOE, will be published in July 2026 by Koehler Books.

CANOE follows my March 2025 historical action-adventure/political thriller novel, DRINKING FROM THE STREAM.

Set during the tumultuous years between 1968 and 1981, A TRIP BY CANOE opens windows for readers on a vast expanse of little-explored terrain from Kenya to Texas, from Chicago to the Congo, from Detroit to the Alps, from India to to Paris.

Graphic and gritty, at times heavy and...

WHY I WROTE STREAM

I went to Africa right after college in the early 1970s. I traveled. I worked in construction. I hung out. When I got back home five years later mother asked me again and again, “What did you actually do in Africa?” She was very persistent. She wanted to know: Where had I gone? Whom did I meet? Who were my friends? Was I ever in danger? What had I seen? Was I ever afraid? What was in my mind? What was I thinking? I wrote DRINKING FROM THE STREAM to answer those questions.

...

In June 1972 when I was twenty-two years old I was sitting in a student cafeteria at the University of Luanda reading the International Herald Tribune. Angola was then Portuguese but armed African guerrillas in the countryside were fighting to overthrow white-minority rule. In fact, I recently had been hosted at the Zaire border by conscripted Portuguese soldiers who recently had seen combat with guerrillas. What caught my eye in the Herald Trib was an article about ethnic killings in...

Foreword

Drinking from the Streamis a tale of modern Africa. The story takes place in 1971, 1972 and 1973, a time of violent upheaval when the Vietnam War and the Chinese Cultural Revolution marked a generation. The action spans ten countries, from Louisiana and the United States to Tanzania.

Mass killing in Uganda was already in full swing in 1972 when the Stream characters arrive, a year after General Idi Amin overthrew President Milton Obote. Yet Amin could not rule Uganda without the guns...

Thank you so much. Thank you all for coming. It’s a great pleasure for me to be here with all of you.

First, a little about me. Please check my website, richardsacks.com, for imformation about the book and pictures of Africa.

I joined the State Department Foreign Service in 1989. I was posted with my family to six countries in Asia, North Africa, and Latin America. And I held a bunch of increasingly important jobs in Washington. I have two graduate degrees — one from Johns Hopkins University in...