RICHARD SCOTT SACKS Author | Updates

A TRIP BY CANOE (excerpt)

RICHARD SCOTT SACKS Author — Sat, 14 Sep 2024 17:10:57 -0400

Looking back, I spotted a large canoe directly behind us moving fast, trying to overtake us. It was still some distance away. Lee had a look at them. We decided to go for it.

We didn’t stand a chance but we paddled like madmen. Pulling hard, we shot across the water. That canoe behind us fell back a bit. But after a minute or two they had speeded up again. We knew we couldn’t win this game because, well, because there was no canoe race in this country that we could win. And we were clearly outclassed: Five paddlers standing erect on the gunnels, all stabbing the water as one with nine-foot-long paddles pointed at the ends like knives. Call them oars, more like.

Before long they were dead even with us. Covered with sweat, their black bodies worked like machines made of oiled wood and their muscles stood out sharp under their skin.

“They want to board,” I said to Lee but looking back at them, Lee indicated that we would follow. Still they tried to board and we fended off furiously with our paddles. Passing us, the stern man grinned at me as we fell in behind, his filed teeth gleaming like tiny ivory daggers.

Ahead on the west bank was a village, a large one. The landing was all confusion. Hundreds of wide-eyed faces watched us arrive. Everywhere people were running down to the river. The boatmen tied up the canoes and got up on the dock. The stern man gave me a big grin.

"What happens now?” I whispered to Lee.

"We just have to show them that we're serious and that we know what we're doing. They're much more afraid of us than you think.”

Lee climbed out on the rough dock all business and the crowd fell back, cowering, amazed and afraid.

"I think we better show them the laissez-passer,” I told Lee.

A tall thin youth appeared with some followers, walked right up to Lee and grasped him around the wrist, his thumb and forefinger touching to show that he was officially handcuffed.

"I arrest you in the name of the Revolution,” the youth said in French. Lee pushed him hard and he nearly fell over. He glowered and came back at him. "This time you'll land on the ground,” Lee told him. Wary, losing face fast, angry and confused, the youth held back. He raised his arm and pointed the way.

As Lee started going back toward the canoe, a roar went up from the crowd and they carried us forward in a human wave.

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INTERVIEW with LITERARY TITAN on WORLD OF WORLDS

RICHARD SCOTT SACKS Author — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Nimble, Restless Intellects

JUN 11

Posted by Literary-Titan

Richard Scott Sacks Author Interview

World of Worlds follows young travelers, reporters, climbers, drifters, and idealists across continents and political upheaval as adventure becomes a reckoning with danger, history, and the self. What drew you to the period between 1968 and 1981 as the backdrop for these stories?

WORLD OF WORLDS is a collection of action and adventure stories during a time of transition, upheaval, exploration, and self-discovery. These tales are the product of culture shock. Or more precisely, reverse culture shock. Whatever it was by the mid-1970s, my life on the road at an end but not quite willing to give it up, I decided to try my hand at literature by recreating in fictional form the characters, complexities, landscapes, situations, tastes, smells, psychologies, dramas, insights, pleasures, and terrors I had seen in the worlds I had traveled. The main time focus is from 1968, that hinge year, to 1974. That was the moment of the Chinese Cultural Revolution and the Vietnam War, when Apartheid firmly gripped South Africa and wars of national liberation swirled around it, and African dictatorships sprouted like poisonous weeds, and political killing became the norm.

Many of the characters are young, restless, and morally tested. What interested you about writing people at that stage of life?

Only young people should contemplate making the journeys described in the stories. The characters – overwhelmingly young – are Americans, mostly, but there also are Australians, Brits, and Africans. An alienated, energetic, and rebellious bunch, they have been on the move for months on end. They often are challenged by the situations they encounter. That is due partly to their limited experience and judgment. Also, they are alone in foreign spaces, where everything is new and strange. To overcome their problems and to succeed, they need courage, quick thinking, energy, curiosity, and empathy in much higher doses than if they had simply stayed at home. The characters create their own predicaments and manage their own escapes. Or sometimes not.

The stories balance adventure with reflection and consequence. How did you approach that balance?

The characters in WORLD OF WORLDS have nimble, restless intellects. They think a lot. But they face fearful stress often of their own making: an engagement going up in smoke; an illusory friendship unmasked; ideals nearly betrayed; a journalist chasing a perilous story; a conniving financial fugitive near broke in central Africa; an Englishman begging in India; a hitchhiker surrounded by violent hatred in South Africa; an overworked reporter about to burn his bridges; a mountain climber escaping from himself; two travelers in a leaky canoe on the Congo River. Consequence and responsibility come from personal choice; they can be frighteningly unpredictable.

What do you hope readers take away from the collection’s encounters with political unrest, culture shock, and personal ambition?

It’s usually a good idea to be aware of what the locals are thinking when one is abroad. It can save you a lot of trouble. The triad of political unrest, culture shock, and personal ambition were constants among travelers in underdeveloped parts of the world in the 1960s and 1970s, though. They were particularly prominent in Africa amid the instability and aftershocks that followed the end of colonialism. Is that moment behind us? The characters make unlikely role models. As one reviewer of WORLD OF WORLDS remarked, “What lingers most powerfully is the remarkable fortitude of these central characters. Seen from a contemporary perspective, they feel almost otherworldly—resilient figures thrust into remote corners of the globe, often facing misfortune or profound uncertainty. One cannot help but wonder if, placed in similar predicaments today, would modern travelers possess the same grit and resourcefulness?”

Author Links: GoodReads | Website | Amazon

This is political fiction from the front lines. An unusually evocative and immersive work based on lived experience, the authentic international narratives in WORLD OF WORLDS wrestle with the tumultuous years 1968-1981, but they are painfully, ironically current.
The characters, Americans mostly-tough, rebellious youth, far from home, on bad roads, usually broke-test cultural and racial limits in strange, alluring, but pitiless surroundings, exposed to relentless existential and physical pressures that threaten their moral underpinnings and their very survival.
WORLD OF WORLDS readers prize Vietnam-era historical fiction, post-colonial Africa travel stories, character-driven 1970s political thrillers, coming-of-age adventure. They want moral seriousness alongside the action. Anyone who has traveled the world’s back roads-foreigners abroad, children of expats, tourists, students of post-independence Africa, Africans, Europeans, Americans, Australians-will recognize the authenticity immediately.
The author is an accomplished novelist, journalist, and diplomat. But above all, he was there.

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WORLD OF WORLDS wins LITERARY TITAN GOLD BOOK AWARD FOR FICTION

RICHARD SCOTT SACKS Author — Fri, 5 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

🏆 Congratulations!

We are proud to present you with the Literary Titan Book Award. Your book deserves extraordinary praise, and we are proud to acknowledge your hard work, dedication, and writing talent.

Literary Titan Gold Book Award: Fiction

JUN 5

The Literary Titan Book Award honors books that exhibit exceptional storytelling and creativity. This award celebrates novelists who craft compelling narratives, create memorable characters, and weave stories that captivate readers. The recipients are writers who excel in their ability to blend imagination with literary skill, creating worlds that enchant and narratives that linger long after the final page is turned.

Posted by Literary Titan

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REVIEW of WORLD OF WORLDS by Win Dayton — Educator and retired senior US diplomat

RICHARD SCOTT SACKS Author — Tue, 2 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

As life’s most precious truths are revealed in fiction, aspiring and inveterate travelers alike would be well served to immerse themselves in Richard Scott Sacks's World of Worlds, an arresting exposition of the uncertainties, surprises, and revelations that come to those traveling far from home. While the book's 15 stories are set from the late 1960s to the early 80s, their value is not as time capsules, but rather in timeless themes that have always confronted strangers in strange lands. As a journalist, diplomat, and wanderer traversing four continents across four decades, Sacks knows of what he writes. He delivers crisp, insightful prose that keeps the pages turning. His characters are genuine and their predicaments are representative and realistic.

On one level, World of Worlds spotlights a fascinating array of geographic settings from Chicago and Detroit to Chamonix and Delhi, though African venues predominate — all different worlds within our world. Sacks conveys a sensuous, authentic feel of each place. The reader is choked on dust, mired in mud, and drenched by rain. Tedium yields to danger, and scenery ranges from mind-numbingly mundane to awe-inspiring. Exotic foods delight and revolt. Transport is an ever-changing character unto itself — inconvenient, often perilous, and as elemental to understanding a place as it is to getting there.

More significantly, the stories illuminate the constant and often unrecognized tensions of starkly different personal worldviews that animate our world — again, worlds within a world. Tensions typically play out among those trying to bridge the chasms between different cultural perspectives. Traveler and native alike struggle to communicate and understand each other. Misplaced assumptions corrupt communication, cementing misunderstanding, often despite the best of intentions. Racial and tribal dimensions permeate many encounters. We see two kinds of outsiders — hose with naive notions of "noble savage" native hosts, and those with condescending or suspicious attitudes. Each exploits in their own ways, witting or not, in realms of business, romance or seemingly simple tourist encounters. Some differences simmer between those sharing a culture — clashing perspectives of fellow travelers or debating students, for example — an underappreciated complication for unpracticed travelers. Contradictions within cultures and individuals confound throughout.

Especially insightful are Sacks's sensitive elaborations of native perspectives that travel guides cannot begin to offer. Many stories highlight natives' motives and attributes that are obscure to visitors: their imperative to impress outsiders and overcome assumed prejudices, their overestimation of any visitor as a person of influence and power, their curiosity about the unfamiliar, their deeply ingrained cultural priority on generosity to strangers. Romances between native and outsider — as in “The Coast Holiday” — are suffused with exhilarating excitement of the moment, complicated by the consequences of real world cultural differences.

One story — “The Bribe”— offers a particularly enlightening examination of clashing perspectives on what Americans view as corruption and many others accept as stabilizing conventions of reciprocal social obligation. Perhaps most poignant are the temporal dimensions of most relationships between visitor and native, whether in love, business, or innumerable tourist encounters: no matter how intense or bonding a relationship is, its boundaries are limited by the temporariness of the visitor's presence. One day the visitor will be gone — a factor that usually holds more significance to the native, who nearly always realizes it before the visitor does, with implications for both. The native must stay, making the best of whatever the relationship was in the context of an inescapable native world. An outsider who does choose to make a life in a foreign land may end up alone, not fully a part of either their old or new homes.

Sacks perceptively explores the motives of the traveler, which become a lens for understanding the travel experience. His characters are not formulaic; we meet inquisitive students, jaded journalists, greedy grifters, and direction-less drifters. We learn that the impulses to travel are varied and often more complicated than apparent. Some travel to, seeking a destination or excitement; others travel from, escaping a place or circumstance. As many stories reinforce, the 'whys' of one's travel invariably affect the 'whats' of the ensuing travel experience.

"Detroit is for Dreamers" stands out as a meditation on the conflicting priorities of travel, and the sometimes compelling reasons to stay home. "In the Mountains Above Chamonix" suggests that those seeking solitude paradoxically must rely on others, a nettlesome fact for the many misanthropes, fugitives, and loners out on the road. Echoed in other stories, "At the Border" dramatizes another undervalued distinction: the foreign passport as a talisman that confers on visitors presumptions, privileges, and protections that no native can ever enjoy.

Many of the stories are unsettling, often filled with danger and proliferating risks. But the author infuses them with a healthy degree of optimism — not a Panglossian confidence that all turns out for the best, but an appreciation that uncertainty is the birthplace of discovery and confronting risk yields life lessons. As in real life, many stories conclude not with a clear climax and denouement, but rather with continuing unresolved dramatic tension. No right and wrong. No judgment. Just a clearer understanding of what's happening and why, with hubris frequently yielding to humility.

The rewards of any overseas experience should include discoveries about our place in the world, our relationship to others. To this end, World of Worlds is invaluable both as preparation for any intending overseas traveler and as a thought-provocation for veteran globetrotters who think they understand the world.

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WORLD OF WORLDS notches its 2nd 5-STAR review — from LITERARY TITAN

RICHARD SCOTT SACKS Author — Tue, 2 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Dear Friends — Literary Titan recently posted this five-star review for WORLD OF WORLDS. Available on Amazon for pre-order, WORLD OF WORLDS will be published July 14. Best, Richard

WORLD OF WORLDS

WORLD OF WORLDS Richard Scott Sacks’s World of Worlds is a literary action-adventure short story collection that follows young, ...

WORLD OF WORLDS
MAY 27
Posted by Literary Titan

Richard Scott Sacks’s World of Worlds is a literary action-adventure short story collection that follows young, restless travelers, reporters, climbers, drifters, and idealists across Africa, Europe, India, and the United States between 1968 and 1981. The book gathers fifteen stories shaped by travel, political unrest, culture shock, danger, and moral pressure, with much of its world centered on the turbulence of the late 1960s and 1970s.
I came away feeling that Sacks is less interested in adventure as spectacle than in adventure as a test of character. That surprised me, in a good way. The stories have movement, and sometimes real peril, but the strongest moments often happen in the quiet after the danger, when a character has to sit with what they have done, avoided, misunderstood, or lost. The writing feels alert to place. Rivers, roads, mountain air, crowded rooms, border crossings, and decaying outposts don’t just sit in the background. They press on the characters. They wear them down. The prose has the confidence of someone who has carried these landscapes in memory for a long while.
What I found most compelling was the author’s choice to keep the characters young, often proud, often naïve, and not always easy to like. That gives the book its bite. These are people who want freedom, meaning, escape, or a story worth telling, but they keep running into systems and histories much larger than themselves. Colonial aftermath, corruption, racial violence, war, and personal ambition all move through the collection without turning it into a lecture. Some stories are more direct politically, while others work through mood and tension. I appreciated that mix. Its pace can be reflective, and its moral questions are not neatly packaged. I liked that. Life on the road rarely comes with clean lessons.
I would recommend World of Worlds to readers who enjoy literary short fiction with an adventurous edge, especially those drawn to travel writing, political fiction, and stories about outsiders trying to understand places they can never fully possess. It will appeal most to readers who like their action grounded in atmosphere and consequence. For me, the collection works best as a map of uneasy encounters, both with the wider world and with the self.
Pages: 264 | ASIN: B0GX2Z6MJV

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WORLD OF WORLDS WINS FIVE STAR REVIEW FROM THE BOOK REVUE

RICHARD SCOTT SACKS Author — Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

World of Worlds

5 Star Review

Click HERE to Purchase Your Copy Today!

Editorial Book Review:

By BL Ritchey

World of Worlds insists you pay attention. This book is not a single story; it is a collection of fifteen short stories spanning four continents, each one a small, stubborn world that refuses tidy answers. From the first pages you know you are in the hands of someone who has seen the places he writes about and will not let you off the hook with easy sympathy.

Reading it is a physical thing. Some stories slam you with heat and immediacy; others leave a slow bruise that surfaces days later. You move fast through deserts, train stations, and cheap guesthouses, then slow to a careful, painful stillness inside a single room. The emotional range is raw and honest. You laugh at survival improvised on the fly and then sit with a memory that will not soften. That tension between motion and quiet makes the collection feel alive.

At its core the book is about testing. Young Americans abroad measure themselves against language, race, and politics. Travel is presented not as escape but as exposure. The choices characters face are often moral and small and as consequential as any headline. Political violence hums under some scenes and erupts in others, yet the moral question remains exquisitely personal. These are stories about who we are when rules fall away, and those questions land far beyond the page.

The prose is lean and muscular. Richard Scott Sacks writes with a journalist’s eye for detail and a fiction writer’s patience for character. Concrete images arrive without fanfare and accumulate until meaning forms. The structure favors short, taut bursts rather than sweeping chapters, which keeps the book urgent and varied. He trusts the reader to hold the gaps and to feel what the characters cannot say.

This collection will not comfort you. It will teach you how to notice small, decisive moments. If you want fiction that scratches and then refuses to stop scratching, read it.

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THE ACCOLADE LIST — DRINKING FROM THE STREAM — BOOK EXCELLENCE MAKES FIFTEEN!

RICHARD SCOTT SACKS Author — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

2025-2026 ACCOLADES FOR DRINKING FROM THE STREAM

Literary Global Book Award for Fiction: Winner — Thriller-Adventure 2025
Literary Titan Silver Book Award 2026
Pinnacle Book Achievement Award: Best Book — Literary Fiction Fall 2025
Chrysalis/BREW Reader’s Choice Award 2026
The Bookish Reader’s Pick Award 2026
Independent Press Award: 2026 Distinguished Favorite — Action-Adventure
International Firebird Book Award: First Place Winner — Thriller
Pencraft Award for Literary Excellence: 2026 Winter’s Best Book Winner Fiction — Adventure
BREW Book Excellence Award 2026 — Political Fiction
LITERARY TITAN GOLD BOOK AWARD
2025 Incipere Awards: Thriller — First Place
2025 Incipere Awards: Adventure — Third Place
2025 Incipere Awards: Historical — Third Place
2026 The BookFest — Fiction: Political Thriller — First Place
2025 Book Excellence Award Finalist: Adventure Fiction

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STREAM WINS THREE NEW AWARDS — TOTAL NOW 13 ACCOLADES

RICHARD SCOTT SACKS Author — Wed, 8 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

ANNOUNCING THE WINNERS OF THE 2025 AWARDS The Incipere Awards

2025 Incipere Winners

Thriller

First Place - Drinking From the Stream - Richard Sacks

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LATEST FROM MY PUBLISHER — STREAM WINS TEN AWARDS!

RICHARD SCOTT SACKS Author — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

https://www.koehlerbooks.com/author-richard-sacks-hauls-in-over-10-awards/

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MY INTERVIEW WITH ONETRIBUNE IN THE WORLD’S BEST MAGAZINE ASSISTED BY The Chrysalis BREW Project

RICHARD SCOTT SACKS Author — Sun, 1 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

https://theworldsbestmagazine.com/2026/02/16/richard-scott-sacks-on-travel-language-and-writing-fiction-from-global-encounters/

Richard Scott Sacks on Travel, Language, and Writing Fiction from Global Encounters

“I’ve been to 80 countries and speak four foreign languages.”
– RICHARD SCOTT SACKS

Richard Scott Sacks has a background in U.S. diplomacy and has used his experiences abroad to inform his fiction. His language proficiency, cultural immersion, and decades spent travelling are all evident in his work. In this interview, Sacks talks about how his travels across continents influenced his research and writing on how people react when faced with difficult moral decisions.

Richard, thank you for joining us. To begin, could you introduce yourself in your own words—what you do, what draws you to your work, and what you aim to contribute through it?

Hello! It’s wonderful to have this opportunity. My name is Richard Scott Sacks. I’m a writer with two books under my belt and a third on the way. And I’m an American diplomat. Writer and diplomat. Those are two vocations I identified at an early age because I loved reading and language and wanted to write, and I loved to travel and living abroad. I was good at learning languages, and I got along easily with foreigners.

I’ve been to 80 countries and speak four foreign languages. Writing has led me to specialize in journalism and fiction. My novel, DRINKING FROM THE STREAM, focuses on difficult moral choices, politics, friendship, acts of courage, coming of age, and long-distance travel in the East African outback at a time of upheaval, dictatorship, and mass murder. Set in the early 1970s during the Vietnam War and the Chinese Cultural Revolution, STREAM presents the world as the characters see it while they grapple with moral ambiguity, cultural clashes, and revolution. Under great strain and uncertainty, constantly worried about how their lives and careers will turn out, these young people face the added stress of constantly crossing borders without knowing what new crisis they will face.

Your writing reflects time spent in many places and roles. How has moving across different environments influenced the way you observe people and situations?

Culture can be defined broadly as how people think within a given group, society, or nation. So understanding cultures offers a key to predicting what people will do and how they will view events. History, or historical myth, is an important part of culture and offers clues about political behavior. Understanding local economics is important, too.

How do people make a living? What do they eat? How do they live? What are their goals? What threatens them? What benefits them? How are they divided? Whom do they resent? These are just examples. You have to meet people where they live, and it helps if you know something about the place they inhabit.

Also be aware of how people perceive you—your nationality, your background, your language, your appearance, your actions and behavior. What are you yourself bringing to the interaction? It’s not just them!

When you begin a long-form project, what usually comes first for you: a question, a setting, a character, or a moment you cannot let go of?

Sometimes great events touch us deeply. In May 1972, while hitchhiking through Africa, I had reached Angola, which was then a Portuguese colony. I was reading the International Herald Tribune in a student cafeteria at the University of Luanda when an article caught my eye about ethnic killings in Burundi.

One month earlier, in April 1972, in a three-day rampage, Hutu rebels using pangas—machetes—had killed hundreds of unsuspecting Tutsi citizens in hopes of sparking a civil war.

The massacres that followed were even more shocking. The Tutsi-led Burundi army quickly defeated the Hutu death squads. Then they launched a much bigger, better organized ethnic bloodletting of their own. The Hutu revolt had been led by Hutu schoolteachers, jobless because no one in Tutsi-ruled Burundi would hire them. Burundi’s answer to unemployed Hutu schoolteachers was to kill educated Hutus, who were defined as any Hutu who had gotten past the fourth grade.

Tens of thousands were already dead in 1972. As we now know, by 1973 well over 200,000 Hutus had been murdered.

How and why did the initial uprising happen? And how could so many people be murdered so quickly—first by one group, then by another—I wondered. And why was the world ignoring it? I had been less than fifty miles from Burundi. What if I had decided to visit Burundi myself? If I had done that, I would have been there exactly when the killings broke out. This event is what led me to write DRINKING FROM THE STREAM.

Your work often explores how individuals respond to unfamiliar settings. What have you learned about adaptation and perspective through your own experiences?

Some people adapt to new settings quickly; others can’t do it. I’ve learned to be willing to be surprised. In an unfamiliar place, one must drop expectations and preconceptions, not jump to conclusions or stereotype, but look and listen instead.

Pay attention to what’s going on: study what people say, what they do, and how they act. You’ve got to go out and talk to people, ask questions, make friends, read newspapers, and listen to the radio. And if possible, you must learn the language. Without language, you’re sunk. You’ll never understand a culture and a society without it.

Looking back across your career, are there milestones, recognitions, or turning points that helped clarify your direction, and what did those moments teach you?

There were definitely moments of clarity. I lived in Germany when I was sixteen and studied German while living with a German family. Right out of college, I traveled and worked overseas for five years. I picked up languages quickly, kept a journal, and loved reading all kinds of novels, including foreign novels, plus history, politics, philosophy, travel stories, and economics.

When I came home, I decided to earn my living as a writer, though I didn’t always stick to it. I joined the Foreign Service partly to live abroad. I was well suited to the lifestyle. I noticed that I often enjoyed the company of foreigners as much as my fellow countrymen. If I don’t watch myself, I tend to “go native” quickly.

Writing often requires balancing research, memory, and imagination. How do you approach accuracy and responsibility while still allowing a story to breathe?

Imagination is crucial. It is the basis of fiction. Memory is not reliable; it’s more like a picture story we keep watching on our private movie screen. Keeping a journal helps.

I often have compared memories with people who traveled with me and find they either don’t remember the things I remember, and vice versa, or else they remember the same event completely differently. No matter. Writing fiction is impossible without memory, unreliable though it may be, but the author’s depiction of memory must be true.

A character must act in a way that’s true to herself, to what she and the other characters know, and to the situation. When writing historical fiction, the writer must keep his facts straight and be very sure not to contradict the historical record. At the same time, he must immerse the characters in a real framework of events as they actually transpired—or in situations that could have arisen within that framework. That requires careful research and careful sequencing of the plot.

Many readers are interested in how authors sustain curiosity over time. What practices or habits help you continue learning and refining your craft?

I’m always curious about how things work, about what makes people unique and why they do the things they do. I read a lot—newspapers, magazines, novels, biography, history. I try not to get stuck in my comfort zone.

I often force myself to branch out to areas where I know nothing, like fashion or sailing, and to areas where I would like to know more, like business or finance. About writing, I often hear people praise someone for being a born writer, which is just nonsense.

I won’t say everyone can learn how to write well, but I will say that the more you do something, the better you get at it. That’s also true of writing. Working at it constantly is what makes great writers.

In your view, how can storytelling contribute to greater understanding across cultures and backgrounds without simplifying complex realities?

“Novel” means “something new”—literally. At least part of the reason we read novels and fiction is to see new things with new eyes. As someone who has observed or been immersed in many foreign cultures, I thought writing about them could show readers something new—things that could lead to insights about foreign places they may never have a chance to visit.

But writing novels isn’t just a didactic exercise. A novel is meant to entertain, and what better way to entertain than by showing something novel? Complex realities will always remain complex. Maybe the best we can do is to gradually chip away at the complexities and gradually make them more familiar so that they become less intimidating and mysterious.

Your recent book was selected as a winner of The Bookish Reader’s Pick Award from The Bookish Magazine. What did that recognition represent to you personally and professionally?

I was thrilled to receive the award. Honestly, it was a huge surprise and a bit overwhelming—like I suddenly had friends and readers, enthusiastic ones, on the other side of the world. I am grateful to The Bookish judges for their unexpected recognition and fervent interest in my work.

As you look ahead to future projects, what themes or questions are you most interested in exploring next, and why do they matter to you now?

My next book, now with the publisher, is a short story collection called WORLD OF WORLDS: Stories from Four Continents. My idea was to explore how young people behave under pressure in strange environments.

The storylines follow characters often traveling in remote places globally—from India to the Congo—but sometimes in Europe or very close to home in Chicago, Detroit, Texas, or the East Coast. The characters, like all young people, are trying to figure out who they are and what to do with their lives.

They often must cope with stark internal conflicts and terrible moral dilemmas. It’s tough for young people on the move, who are vulnerable, have illusions, and lack experience, friends, and support networks. Forced to think on their feet, they often face unpalatable choices. Will they make their choices with resilience and grace, or will they resist making any choice at all? And how does that turn out for them?

If you were to write your bio in your own words, what would you say? Looking ahead, what kind of long-term impact would you like your work to have?

Credit: Richard Scott Sacks

I’ve written three books, including two works of fiction. I worked over 35 years in diplomacy, foreign relations, and government. I worked for newspapers and a wire service. I’ve lived all over the world. I speak multiple languages. I married and raised a family.

I hope to be known and remembered as someone who made a difference. I hope to be an influential writer, and that means someone accomplished at their craft who called things by their real names and who stood up to injustice.

I also would like to be remembered as someone who did what he promised to do; who worked hard and provided for his family; who was faithful to his ideals; who was a true friend; who treated people fairly; who respected truth and knew it from a lie; who was willing to show the way to those searching for it; who knew he was part of a human continuum much bigger than any one person; and who always had time for children and for laughter.

“Complex realities will always remain complex.”
– RICHARD SCOTT SACKS

Links

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DRINKING FROM THE STREAM WINS LITERARY TITAN GOLD BOOK AWARD — that’s #10 for STREAM !!

RICHARD SCOTT SACKS Author — Sat, 7 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

2025-2026 ACCOLADES FOR DRINKING FROM THE STREAM

LITERARY TITAN GOLD BOOK AWARD
BREW Book Excellence Award 2026 for Political Fiction
Pencraft Award for Literary Excellence — 2026 Winter’s Best Book Winner Fiction - Adventure
International Firebird Book Award — First Place Winner / Thriller Category
Independent Press Award — 2026 Distinguished Favorite / Action-Adventure
2026 The Bookish Reader’s Pick Award
2026 Chrysalis/BREW Reader’s Choice Award
Fall 2025 Pinnacle Book Achievement Award — Best Book / Literary Fiction
2026 Literary Titan Silver Book Award
2025 Literary Global Book Award for Fiction — Winner / Thriller-Adventure

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LITERARY TITAN AUTHOR INTERVIEW

RICHARD SCOTT SACKS Author — Tue, 3 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Book Review: https://wp.me/p3cyvH-LSi

Author Interview - Richard Scott Sacks

Sometimes great events touch us deeply.

Drinking from the Stream follows two young men in 1971 who are on the run and attempting to escape their pasts by traveling to East Africa, where their personal reckonings unfold alongside violence. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?

In June 1972 when I was twenty-two years old and hitchhiking across Africa I was sitting in a student cafeteria at the University of Luanda reading the International Herald Tribune. Angola was then a Portuguese colony but armed African guerrillas in the countryside were fighting to overthrow white-minority rule. I had been hosted at the Zaire border by conscripted Portuguese soldiers who had seen combat with MPLA guerrillas. An article caught my eye that morning about ethnic killings in Burundi. I had been within fifty miles of Burundi, having hitchhiked from Ethiopia through Kenya, Uganda, and Rwanda, then to Zaire (Congo) and Angola. The article described a bloody uprising in late April 1972 where Hutu rebels had used pangas — machetes — to kill hundreds of unsuspecting Tutsi citizens with the idea of sparking a civil war to end Tutsi rule. Even more shocking were the slaughters by the Burundi army that followed. It turned out that unemployed Hutu school teachers — unable to find a job in Tutsi-ruled Burundi — had led the revolt. Burundi’s solution to the unemployment problem was to kill all the educated Hutus they could find. The Tutsi-led army countered the Hutu death squads with a much bigger, much better organized ethnic bloodletting of their own, killing any Hutu who had completed the fourth grade. Tens of thousands were already dead, the report said, and the killings were gathering momentum with no end in sight. By 1973 well over 200,000 Hutus had been murdered.

This made a deep impression on me. How could so many people be murdered so quickly? More importantly, why was the world ignoring it? And why and how did it come about? What if I had decided, as was entirely possible, to visit Burundi myself? And if I had, I would have been on the spot when the killings broke out. What then? The entire African continent seemed to be on a bloody run. A year or two back, peace had been restored to Zaire, formerly the Democratic Republic of the Congo, after ten years of mayhem and revolt. Mass ethnic killings were in full swing in 1972 in Uganda, when I was there, led by the Ugandan army under Idi Amin. Rwanda had seen bloody spasms of anti-Tutsi violence even before independence in the early 1960s. And all of southern Africa, not just Angola, was in revolt against white minority rule. The 1994 Tutsi holocaust in Rwanda was still twenty-two years away.

This is a coming-of-age novel, but a harsh one. What does “growing up” mean here?

I spent three years in Africa when I was quite young. I worked construction jobs in the bush and at line camps I bumped into white supremacists. Basically, they were American nazis. I kept my distance even though they sometimes tried to recruit me. They spoke openly of violence against Jews and Blacks. Listening to them made me extremely angry. They had no idea I was Jewish. But what would happen if I wasn’t Jewish and one of them thought I was? That was the inspiration for Jake Ries.

The characters discover that their choices impose responsibility that must be faced and borne, there’s no magic that will make it disappear, and its weight increases over time. Knowledge imposes its own burden. And it doesn’t matter if they never wished to make those choices or learn those things in the first place. Maybe they never asked for them, but they still can’t put them down.

What scenes were hardest to write—not technically, but ethically?

This may sound funny, given the extent of political chicanery in the plot, but the parts of the book that gave me the most trouble were working out Karl’s relationships with his girlfriends, first Helen, then Swee’Pea. Karl might have been conflicted about both those relationships, particularly in combination, but I wanted to present them as believable dilemmas not only for Karl, but for both women, while trying to be fair to all three.

What lessons from the 1970s feel disturbingly contemporary?

What I see today is that resentments never cease, that humanity is easily misled and memories are short; that peace is fragile, something not to be taken for granted; that politicians can seduce thousands, or millions, to contemplate unspeakable acts; that the great issues of the past, which we thought were finally settled, are never really settled; and that active individuals following the ancient moral codes or their own personal compass to judge right from wrong can do a great deal of good.

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BREW CERTIFICATE OF RECOGNITION

RICHARD SCOTT SACKS Author — Sun, 1 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

DRINKING FROM THE STREAM BREW Book Excellence Award 2026 Political Fiction

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STREAM WINS BREW BOOK EXCELLENCE AWARD FOR POLITICAL FICTION

RICHARD SCOTT SACKS Author — Sat, 31 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Embedded Youtube video removed, see original post to watch.

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GOODREADS REVIEW, DRINKING FROM THE STREAM, JANUARY 29, 2026

RICHARD SCOTT SACKS Author — Sat, 31 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

January 29, 2026

*****

Drinking from the Stream follows two young Americans, Jake and Karl, whose chance meeting turns into a long, hazardous journey across East Africa in the early 1970s. What begins as flight, Jake from a violent past in Louisiana, Karl from ideological and emotional dead ends in the United States, becomes immersion. As they move through Ethiopia, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, and beyond, their personal reckonings unfold alongside coups, ethnic violence, and the aftershocks of colonial rule. The novel braids coming-of-age restlessness with political catastrophe, asking what it means to stay human, or decent, when history is on fire around you.

I read this book with a mounting sense of unease, and I mean that as praise. Sacks doesn't offer Africa as backdrop or metaphor; he insists on its specificity. Roads that punish the body, bureaucracies that toy with fate, conversations that slide from flirtation to terror without warning. Jake's voice, in particular, is sharp-edged and morally alert, a man who knows he has crossed an invisible line and can't uncross it. The novel's early scenes on the oil rig, heavy with menace and casual hatred, establish a moral pressure that never really lifts, even when the landscape opens into beauty. I felt myself readingfaster, not because the prose rushed me, but because it refused to soften what it saw.

What stayed with me most were the arguments about race, revolution, guilt, and responsibility that erupt in buses, bars, and borrowed rooms. These exchanges feel earned rather than staged, the product of young people who are smart, frightened, idealistic, and often wrong. The author has little patience for slogans, whether they come from Western radicals or newly empowered strongmen, and that skepticism gives the book its bite. Sometimes the historical density is demanding, but it mirrors the characters' own overwhelm; ignorance here has consequences, sometimes lethal. By the end, I felt the weight of the knowledge the characters carry, knowledge they never asked for and can't put down.

This book will most reward readers of historical fiction, literary adventure, and political coming-of-age novels, especially those drawn to morally complex travel narratives. If you admire the restless intelligence of The Sheltering Sky or the political consciousness of A Bend in the River, Drinking from the Stream belongs on your shelf. It's a novel for readers who don't want reassurance so much as reckoning. This is not a story about finding yourself abroad; it's about discovering how much of the world you can carry back, and what it costs to do so.

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DRINKING FROM THE STREAM wins The BREW Book Excellence Award 2026 for Political Fiction

RICHARD SCOTT SACKS Author — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

award #9 for DRINKING FROM THE STREAM

2025-2026 ACCOLADES FOR DRINKING FROM THE STREAM

BREW Book Excellence Award 2026 for Political Fiction
Pencraft Prize — Best Book for Fiction - Adventure
International Firebird Book Award — First Place Winner / Thriller Category
Independent Press Award — 2026 Distinguished Favorite / Action-Adventure
2026 The Bookish Reader’s Pick Award
2026 Chrysalis/BREW Reader’s Choice Award
Fall 2025 Pinnacle Book Achievement Award — Best Book / Literary Fiction
2026 Literary Titan Silver Book Award
2025 Literary Global Book Award for Fiction — Winner / Thriller-Adventure Category

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PENCRAFT PRIZE — BEST BOOK FOR FICTION / ADVENTURE — AWARD #8 FOR DRINKING FROM THE STREAM

RICHARD SCOTT SACKS Author — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

BY RICHARD SCOTT SACKS

Best Book Winners for the 2026 Winter PenCraft Seasonal Book Awards

Best Book for Fiction - Adventure

2025-2026 ACCOLADES FOR DRINKING FROM THE STREAM

Pencraft Prize — Best Book for Fiction - Adventure
International Firebird Book Award — First Place Winner / Thriller Category
Independent Press Award — 2026 Distinguished Favorite / Action-Adventure
2026 The Bookish Reader’s Pick Award
2026 Chrysalis/BREW Reader’s Choice Award
Fall 2025 Pinnacle Book Achievement Award — Best Book / Literary Fiction
2026 Literary Titan Silver Book Award
2025 Literary Global Book Award for Fiction — Winner / Thriller-Adventure Category

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AWARDS FOR DRINKING FROM THE STREAM

RICHARD SCOTT SACKS Author — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

International Firebird Book Award — First Place Winner / Thriller Category

Independent Press Award — 2026 Distinguished Favorite / Action-Adventure

2026 The Bookish Reader’s Pick Award

2026 Chrysalis/BREW Reader’s Choice Award

Fall 2025 Pinnacle Book Achievement Award — Best Book / Literary Fiction

2026 Literary Titan Silver Book Award

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

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DRINKING FROM THE STREAM WINS THE BOOKISH READER’S PICK AWARD plus outstanding Book Review

RICHARD SCOTT SACKS Author — Sun, 11 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

January 7, 2026

The Bookish Magazine

The Bookish, The Bookish Awards

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 that strange burden—discover how by reading the full review.

Drinking from the Stream by Richard Scott Sacks

Genre: Fiction

Sub-genres: Historical Fiction, Literary Fiction, Political Fiction

Themes: Moral choice, friendship, displacement, accountability

Review

This novel begins with consequence. Drinking from the Stream follows two young men who believe that distance might bring clarity, only to learn that experience has a longer reach than geography. Richard Scott Sacks builds his story around a simple but enduring human question: what happens when ideas meet events that refuse to stay abstract?

The novel opens with an incident that cannot be undone, and its echo shapes everything that follows. Rather than releasing tension through resolution, Sacks allows it to travel with his characters, quietly influencing decisions, silences, and friendships. As Jake and Karl move from classrooms and conversations into unfamiliar countries, the book shifts from intellectual exploration to lived reality without announcing the change. Readers feel it happen.

What distinguishes this novel is its attention to scale. Large historical forces are present, but always filtered through individual perception. Borders are crossed, but so are thresholds of understanding. The writing resists spectacle, favoring accumulation instead. Landscapes matter not because they are exotic, but because they press upon the characters’ assumptions. A road becomes a test. A conversation becomes a reckoning. A pause becomes a turning point.

Sacks writes with restraint and confidence, trusting readers to notice patterns rather than spelling them out. The prose is precise, grounded, and steady, particularly effective in moments when the characters confront the limits of their own certainty. Social scientists have long noted that exposure to unfamiliar environments can either harden beliefs or unsettle them; this novel explores the latter with patience and credibility. Ideals are examined not in theory, but through consequence.

Despite its seriousness, the book remains deeply human. Friendship is neither romanticized nor diminished. It is shown as sustaining, flawed, and sometimes inadequate. The bond between the central characters anchors the story, reminding readers that connection can exist even when answers do not. The result is a narrative that feels earned rather than engineered.

This book is for readers who appreciate fiction that engages history without reducing it to backdrop, and character without reducing it to confession. It is less suited to those seeking light diversion or swift reassurance. Readers drawn to thoughtful travel narratives, morally attentive storytelling, and literary fiction that trusts silence as much as speech will feel at home here.

Drinking from the Stream does not ask to be agreed with. It asks to be considered. That confidence, rare and refreshing, is its lasting strength.

Content Warning

This book contains depictions of violence, death, and historical human suffering that may be difficult for some readers.

The Bookish Reader’s Pick

This book has been honoured with The Bookish Reader’s Pick title, a prestigious category of The Bookish Awards. This recognition celebrates books that have deeply resonated with readers, capturing their hearts and minds through compelling storytelling, memorable characters, and meaningful themes. Chosen by passionate book lovers, this award highlights the power of literature to inspire, entertain, and leave a lasting impact.

Share Your Insights
Feel free to share your answers in the comments below:

What part of this post resonated with you the most, and why?
How does this post connect with your own journey?
Do you have any other bookish insights you’d like to share?

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DRINKING FROM THE STREAM WINS THE CHRYSALIS/BREW READER’S CHOICE AWARD FOR 2026 plus stunning Book Review

RICHARD SCOTT SACKS Author — Sun, 11 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

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

“In spirit, it may remind some of the existential weight of Joseph Conrad, the political awareness of Graham Greene, or the restless motion found in Kerouac, though Sacks’s voice remains distinctly his own."

A sweeping literary journey where personal moral reckoning collides with the unforgiving currents of history.

Restless youth tested.

Some novels ask what happened; this one keeps asking why it mattered. Drinking from the Stream follows two young men who believe movement itself might offer clarity—one fleeing a private reckoning born on an offshore oil rig, the other escaping intellectual exhaustion inside Oxford’s stone walls—only to discover that motion does not dilute responsibility. Long before the phrase became fashionable, neuroscientists observed that sustained uncertainty heightens moral decision-making rather than numbing it, and Sacks builds his narrative on that very pressure, placing his characters where indecision is no longer a luxury.

The book unfolds with a visceral opening that readers will not forget: a poker table, a wrench, a fall, and the irreversible silence afterward. That private moment becomes the undertow beneath everything that follows, resurfacing quietly as the story carries Jake and Karl across airports, dirt roads, border posts, and conversations that oscillate between youthful bravado and dawning seriousness. Sacks does not rush these passages. Instead, he trusts accumulation: the way repeated near-misses, bureaucratic absurdities, and overheard arguments slowly reveal a larger pattern. Readers who notice the recurring maps, the shifting routes through Ethiopia and Uganda, and the way certain names reappear only briefly will recognize how carefully the geography mirrors the characters’ narrowing choices.

The prose is muscular without being showy, attentive to physical detail yet anchored in interior consequence. A reader can feel the weight of a backpack after days on the road, hear the unnatural quiet that precedes violence near Lake Victoria, and sense the brittle unease inside university debates that suddenly feel bloodless when compared to events beyond the classroom. The book’s historical grounding is evident not through lectures, but through placement: a conversation in a bar just before borders harden, a photograph of Idi Amin appearing not as spectacle but as context, and the chilling matter-of-factness with which entire communities can vanish from a landscape.

What makes the novel particularly resonant is its refusal to simplify. Sacks allows ideals to sound persuasive until they fail, allows courage to coexist with fear, and permits friendship to be both sustaining and insufficient. The editing largely supports this ambition, keeping a steady narrative line even as the story crosses continents and perspectives. The result is a novel with an undeniable gravity, one that invites reflection rather than insisting on conclusions.

My favorite moment arrives not during chaos, but during a pause: a quiet stretch of travel when Jake and Karl share space without certainty, and the reader realizes that the most dangerous crossings are no longer geographic but internal. That restraint is part of the book’s enduring effect.

This is a book for readers who appreciate literary travel narratives, morally serious fiction, and stories that trust the reader to sit with discomfort long enough for insight to emerge. It is less suited to those seeking light escapism or neatly resolved arcs. In spirit, it may remind some of the existential weight of Joseph Conrad, the political awareness of Graham Greene, or the restless motion found in Kerouac, though Sacks’s voice remains distinctly his own.

Drinking from the Stream does not shout its importance. It earns it, page by page, asking whether witnessing history is ever a neutral act and whether surviving it is the same as understanding it.

About the Author

Richard Scott Sacks is a U.S. diplomat and writer who served in Pakistan, Panama, Korea, Vietnam, Morocco, Mexico, and Washington, DC. Before government service, he traveled across Africa and surveyed in Congo. He reported for major U.S. newspapers, holds graduate degrees from National War College and Johns Hopkins SAIS, authored an award-recognized academic study, and lives in northern Virginia with his spouse and three children.

Book Details

Title: Drinking from the Stream
Author: Richard Scott Sacks
Genre: Fiction
Sub-genres:
- Historical Fiction
- Literary Fiction
- Political Fiction
Themes:
- Coming-of-age
- Political violence
- Racism
- Moral choice
- Friendship
Minimum Audience Age (assessment): 18+
Main Language Used: English

Book Themes

(Note: 0=none, 1=a few, 2=considerable, 3=pronounced, 4=excessive)

Sexual themes: 1
- Brief, non-graphic references tied to character development.
Religious themes: 1
- Present as background reflection, not doctrinal focus.
Violence, self-harm, etc.: 3
- Central events include death and historical mass violence.
Crude language, expletives, swearing: 2
- Contextual language reflecting setting and characters.
Other adult themes: 3
- Moral guilt, genocide, racism, political terror.

Rating

Content: 5
Writing Style / Visual Presentation: 5
Appeal to Target Audience: 4
Uniqueness: 5
Editing: 4
Other Factors: 4
Overall Average Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars

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