Winner Autobiography/Memoirs 2021 Best Book Awards
Dancing in the Narrows chronicles a mother and daughter’s multiyear journey through illness and trauma. At sixteen, Anna’s youngest daughter, Dana, is stricken with a mysterious and debilitating condition, eventually diagnosed as Lyme disease. Desperate to find a cure, the two women are thrust into the established medical world, then far beyond. Full of adventure, humor, and blind faith, Dancing in the Narrows is an inspiring story of self-discovery as a single mother fights to save the life of her child.
Nearly one hundred Labrador retrievers, many sick or dying, are discovered one hot summer day in a rural Colorado field.They’ve been abandoned by Dodie Cariaso, a college-educated woman from an upper middle-class Midwestern family.
What drove this tragedy? Former journalist and prosecutor Cary Unkelbach unfolds a riveting account of how Dodie’s early success as a talented potter devolves into unimaginable neglect. Along the way, Cary gives animal lovers everywhere insight into the pitfalls and responsibilities of dog ownership through uplifting tales of Max, a Labrador from Dodie’s kennel, who finds his forever home with the author’s family.
Heartbreak Kennel will shock you but will also give you a wealth of information for the canines in your life.
Finalist Autobiography/Memoirs 2021 Best Book Awards
Farm Girl is a memoir of urgent grace that crosses boundaries of genre and time. In her second year of college, Megan finds herself bonded to a lover spiraling into addiction and two thousand miles away from her heart’s home—a stretch of forty certified-organic acres along the banks of the Connecticut River separating Vermont and New Hampshire. In the crucible of a rainy Portland winter, Megan is forced to decide whether to embrace her future as a farm girl or to continue growing into the woman everyone hopes she’ll become. Farm Girl is about two love affairs that force a decision: the love between two people and the love between Megan and the landscape. With innovative prose and lush description, Farm Girl raises the earth up as a character and asks questions about the work we choose to sustain us—how careful attention and devotion to the earth transcends human tragedy.
Finalist Autobiography/Memoirs 2021 Best Book Awards
Only once in a lifetime does a war so brutal erupt. A war that becomes an official genocide, causes millions to run from their homes, compels the slaughtering of thousands in the most horrific of ways, and inspires terrorist attacks to transpire across the world.
That is the chilling legacy of the ISIS onslaught, and Only Cry for the Living takes a profoundly personal, unprecedented dive into one of the most brutal terrorist organizations in the world.
Journalist Hollie S. McKay offers a raw, on-the-ground journey chronicling the rise of ISIS in Iraq exposing the group's vast impact and how and why it sought to wage terror on civilians in a desperate attempt to create an antiquated caliphate.
The book, constructed chronologically through memos, captures the historical impact of ISIS across Iraq and Syria, as seen through the eyes of sex slave survivors, internally displaced people, persecuted minorities, humanitarian workers, religious leaders, military commanders, and even the terrorists themselves.
Finalist Autobiography/Memoirs 2021 Best Book Awards
The peaceful farm life of a teenage girl in Germany is abruptly upended when WWII comes knocking at her family’s door. One month before her sixteenth birthday, Mildred “Mickchen” Schindler and her family are captured by Russian Soldiers. Having already survived life in Hitler’s Nazi Germany, they now face the terror of a new enemy—Stalin’s Red Army.
Driven from their home, Mildred and her family become refugees along with a sad, slow-moving caravan of other families who have suffered the same fate. Cleverly disguised by her mother, Mildred avoids being taken to a work camp until one morning when authorities arrive unexpectedly. Her father has already been taken by Russian soldiers, and now she is taken from her mother and brother.
Finalist Autobiography/Memoirs 2021 Best Book Awards
Desperate to find respite from her father's verbal abuse, his various affairs, and her step-mother's psychological torment, Gina spent hours doing Jane Fonda's workouts, smoked cigarettes instead of eating food, and became obsessed with her thinness... with the notion of fading away. She found solace in restlessness-drinking hallucinogenic mushroom tea and inhaling crushed pills and powders-perching herself on the periphery of danger again and again.
Gina soon glimpsed a better life for herself when her grandfather, a man who was a surrogate father to her, became terminally ill. She soon fell in love with John, a stranger who was utterly familiar, but who was addicted to heroin. She moved from New Hampshire to California, crossing the country in an attempt to alleviate her self-destructive tendencies, but found herself pulled back to New Hampshire, to John, a man with whom, despite his struggle, she could not deny the sense of home she felt.
What would it cost for a girl to run wildly and recklessly into womanhood, making instant, temporary homes?
Finalist Autobiography/Memoirs 2021 Best Book Awards
Born of illustrious New England stock, Rachel Field was a National Book Award–winning novelist, a Newbery Medal–winning children’s writer, a poet, playwright, and rising Hollywood success in the early twentieth century. Her light was abruptly extinguished at the age of forty-seven, when she died at the pinnacle of her personal happiness and professional acclaim.
Fifty years later, Robin Clifford Wood stepped onto the sagging floorboards of Rachel’s long-neglected home on the rugged shores of an island in Maine and began dredging up Rachel’s history. She was determined to answer the questions that filled the house’s every crevice: Who was this vibrant, talented artist whose very name entrances those who still remember her work? Why is that work—so richly remunerated and widely celebrated in her lifetime—so largely forgotten today? The journey into Rachel’s world took Wood further than she ever dreamed possible, unveiling a life fraught with challenge, and buried by tragedy, and yet incandescent with joy.
Finalist Autobiography/Memoirs 2021 Best Book Awards
Abandoned By Her Mother
Ronit was six years old when her mother left her and her four year old sister for India to follow a cult guru. Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, whose commune was responsible for the largest biological attack on U.S. soil, preached that children were hindrances and encouraged sterilizations among his followers. Luckily Ronit's father, who'd left the family the previous year, stepped up and brought the girls to live with him first in Newark, New Jersey, and later in Flushing, Queens. On the surface, his nurturing was the balm Ronit sought, but she soon paid a second emotional price, taking on the role of partner and confidant to him, and substitute mother to her sister. By the end of her childhood, Ronit would discover she had lost her mother and the close and trusting relationship she once had with her father. Though they have had a relationship now for years, she grappled with the toll her mother's leaving took, measuring her self-worth by her absence.
Mary Steinhauser is the only peace officer in the history of penal institutions in Canada to willingly offer up her life in the service of her country. It was during a 1975 prison escape attempt and 41-hour hostage-taking by three desperate inmates of the British Columbia Penitentiary in New Westminster, B.C. that Mary volunteered to be the principal hostage. For 41 hours, she was held as a human shield, protecting not only the inmates but the fourteen other hostages sequestered in a nearby vault. Her calmness, composure and bravery throughout the entire hostage-taking was noted by the negotiators and penitentiary staff alike. She was killed there. This is her story.
This biography of Mary's life and tragic death is narrated by Margaret, her younger sister. From Mary's early childhood in rural B.C., it charts the evolution of a young nurse from social worker to symbol for those dedicated to prison reform. Mary's experiences are fascinating reading for any adult interested in local history, law enforcement, mental health awareness, and criminal justice. Her work as a psychiatric nurse in hospitals and institutions across Canada led to her introduction to prison life, which sparked her fierce determination to improve the inmate experience, prisoner justice, and prison reform.
In spring 1942, eighteen-year-old Bill Gemmill was eager to serve his country. After a recruiter stamped his paperwork “Deferred,” Bill reluctantly agreed to pursue a college football scholarship. It was the crash of a ferried bomber behind his frat house that changed his life and spurred him on to war.
Following fourteen months of training, Bill’s vision of fighting from the air finally took shape as his bombardier insignia was pinned by the girl he had to leave behind. Within a month, he and his crew were on their way to Southern Italy.
After more than twenty successful missions, on 22 November 1944, disaster struck: Bill and his crew were hit badly. Unable to re-cross the Alps, the decision was made to abandon ship. Parachuting into the Yugoslavian countryside, Bill found himself alone. Would he find his way back to Italy or end up in the hands of German allies? Would he be reunited with his crew? Ultimately, would he survive?
A mixture of memoir and biography, Chasing the Ghost: Nobelist Fred Reines and the Neutrino tells a deeply human story that appeals both to scientists and non-scientists. Although the book relates to the important discovery of neutrinos, it is more intimately about Fred Reines than the technical details of neutrino physics. Narrated in a fashion to interest and excite the reader, the science presented here is accessible to a broad audience. Coursing through Reines' life, his various challenges and encounters, the book reveals constants of his persona. Reines displayed a sustained consistency as a respected leader, admired by students and colleagues as a fount of big ideas and ambition. A continuing source of inspiration and motivation to others, his most basic consistency was his passion for science. The quest for knowledge about the wondrous universe is a profoundly human endeavor. Fred Reines' life and his unremitting scientific curiosity are emblematic of that truth.
Ice & Oil is indeed a biography of an unlikely titan. Meet Dan Murphy, the man who shaped Los Angeles as the 19th century turned into the 20th century Murphy and his endeavors parallel the history of California. But, because he’s shunned renown his name is virtually unknown. Author Joseph Francis Ryan delves into the complex life of Dan Murphy, businessman-turned-tycoon: Mentored by Southern Pacific’s Charles Crocker, he built the town of Needles the transfer point for a second transcontinental railroad. His ingenuity made it possible to transport citrus across the country. He honored Mojave culture in and the Native American’s respect. He saved the day when Edward Doheny needed money for his oil company. His California Portland Cement Company provided cement for Los Angeles just as it was becoming a 20th century metropolis and for the construction of Boulder dam. “Another important piece of California history has emerged.”
A young woman's gripping account of faith, courage, and survival during and after World War II. Follow Marion Ghent as she endures the death of her father, Japanese attacks during World War II, hiding among the feared Moros on Mindanao Island, becoming a Japanese POW, escaping, and then hiding out in the mountains and rain forests just trying to survive the war. Learn the miraculous story of how she reconnects with her father's American family, then comes to the USA to live among the family and complete her education. See how her constant Faith, Courage, and Strength saw her through every trial, and how she clung to the knowledge that she was "NEVER FORSAKEN!"
Nobody’s Child: A Biography is an urban drama. It takes place in the Brooklyn, Queens & Harlem sections of New York City, from the beginning of the Second Great Migration to the present day. It is a family drama rooted in the life experiences of a mother, my mother Brenda. It’s about overcoming drug addiction, complicated black family dynamics, surviving domestic violence, and the healing of family trauma. It’s about choices parents make and how those choices affect their children and everyone else around them. And, It’s also about secrets kept and the far-reaching, dysfunctional affects those secrets have on families. Finally, it’s about LOVE. Love between mothers and daughters, mothers and sons, love between women, sisters and friends, husbands and wives and fathers and their daughters.One thing is certain… no life is perfect. This story is about imperfect lives, the ones lived by my family, mainly my mother – a most beautiful, God-fearing soul.
The true story of a soldier, a pacifist, and the woman who loved them both
In June 1964, Ann Garretson skips her college commencement to tour Europe with Lieutenant Jack Sigg, a tank commander on the German-Czech border, with the hope of returning as his fiancée. A month into their rendezvous, her best friend, Terry, proposes marriage--by mail--throwing all their lives into turmoil.
Jack offers the military life Ann knows as an army brat. Terry, a conscientious objector, will leave for the Peace Corps at summer's end, unless the draft board intervenes and sends him to jail. Her dilemma: she loves them both.
Caught between the old mores and winds of change, Ann must make an agonizing choice.
In alternating voices, A Rendezvous to Remember presents firsthand accounts by the two who eventually married, enriched by letters from the rival, whose path led him elsewhere. Provocative and delightfully uncensored, this coming-of-age memoir is a tribute to the enduring power of love and family.
As a husband and wife make plans for an Italian vacation with friends-to visit her family's Tuscan village-she makes an unexpected, last-minute addition to the itinerary: she plans to leave him upon their return to the States. And her bombshell includes a strange caveat. He isn't allowed to breathe a word of it to their traveling companions. So begins Things That Crash, Things That Fly, the groundbreaking new memoir from award-winning writer Scott Gould.
Gould navigates that awkward vacation with his soon-to-be estranged wife in Serra, Italy, then sets out on another, longer journey-a winding route through heartbreak and anger, confusion and futility, despair and discovery. When Gould wangles (under dubious circumstances) a fellowship to research the death of William Guilfoil, a young WWII fighter pilot who crashed and died in the hills near Serra, he instead sets his sights on clarity and closure in his ex-wife's ancestral home. As he grinds through an uncharted future, his story and Guilfoil's become intertwined, and Gould gathers the fragments of a fractured heart. With a brutal honesty tempered with surprising humor, he tells us how he begins to stitch them back together.
Mud Flower: Surviving Schizophrenia and Suicide Through Art shows the perspective of a person who has a serious mental illness, who survives extreme treatments, who both family and the health system have given up on, but who defies all expectations and common beliefs of what is possible.
Along the way, the author describes the role of art in her survival, grappling with how the life force can be either nurtured or destroyed by elements in our environment, such as nature, beauty, and art versus dehumanization and coercion.
"A raw and honest journey of addiction, love, trauma, and redemption—grounded in a deep love of place and all things mustang." —LAURA PRITCHETT, author of Stars Go Blue
Kathryn Wilder's powerful story of grief, motherhood, and return to the desert entwines with the story of America's mustangs as Wilder makes a home on the Colorado Plateau, her property bordering a mustang herd. Desert Chrome illuminates these controversial creatures—their complex history in the Americas, their powerful presence on the landscape, and ways to help both horses and habitats stay wild in the arid West—and celebrates the animal nature in us all.
“Throughout this book is the metaphor to archery. Arrows fly; arrows land; arrows miss; arrows hit. The aim isn't merely metaphoric. It's a missed opportunity: a mother to know her son, a father to be the protector... the boy.
As the author targets the past and present in a series of well-paced vignettes, we are not left wondering about the destruction of child abuse and the scars it leaves. Text credited to The Wounded Storyteller gives the author a chance to share his questions of faith and existence, a search for meaning.
The Day the Sky Broke Open is an engaging read into hurt. Hoerner weaves dialog with honesty and poetic verse. His sense of emotional timing puts the reader in the front row of a house of dysfunction.
For those who are self-reflective, have questions of their own—or some experience with abuse, read this book. Lovingly attentive to the complications of the family heart, The Day the Sky Broke Open hits the bull's-eye.” —LitStack
It is August 1990, and Iraq has just invaded Kuwait, setting off a chain reaction of events leading up to the first Gulf War. Vicki Cody’s husband, the commander of an elite Apache helicopter battalion, is deployed to Saudi Arabia—and for the next nine months they have to rely on written letters in order to stay connected.
From Vicki’s narrative and journal entries, the reader gets a very realistic glimpse of what it is like for the spouses and families back home during a war, in particular what it was like at a time when most people did not own a personal computer and there was no Internet—no iPhones, no texting, no tweeting, no Facetime. Her writing also illuminates the roller coaster of stress, loneliness, sleepless nights, humor, joys, and, eventually, resilience, that make up her life while her husband is away. Meanwhile, Dick’s letters to her give the reader a front row seat to the unfolding of history, the adrenaline rush of flying helicopters in combat, his commitment to his country, and his devotion to his family back home. Together, these three components weave a clear, insightful, and intimate story of love and its power to sustain us.
As an only child isolated within a troubled family, F. Scott Service found solace in fantasy and imagination, until a fateful day led to the discovery of his father's Korean War field jacket hidden in a closet. What began as innocent emulation and approval, eventually spiraled into the calamitous loss of everything he had built as an adult. Faced with a grievous divorce, post-traumatic stress, homelessness, substance abuse, and the failure of everything he had willed himself to believe was truth, one night communing with a loaded pistol became the mechanism for self-clarity. From that darkest time, only elemental deconstruction and reconstruction of identity would allow him to forge a reclamation with his true, original self.
Visceral, with breathtaking candor, Playing Soldier powerfully captures the unlearning of expectation, the celebration of individuality, and the nourishing of self-acceptance once buried by cultural stamps of approval and societal convention. Braided with humor, courage, fear, despair, and hope, his unflinching, evocative story of passage into adulthood, the Iraq War, and beyond, speaks to anyone who has confronted adversity from without and grappled for their dreams from within.
A founding author of Our Bodies, Ourselves—the bestselling classic on women’s health and sexuality—Wendy Sanford has turned her probing mind to her own life as a white woman in today’s world of race and class inequities. Sanford tells a story, at once profoundly intimate and powerfully political, of her sixty-five year friendship with Mary Norman, whom she met as a Black domestic worker in her privileged white family when both were in their teens. Sanford comes of age within the cultural revolutions of the 1960s, 70s and 80s. Reading deeply in classic works by African-American writers, she begins to reckon with the impact of her training in “the habits of dominance” and her white skin privilege, to see Ms. Norman more fully and to become a more dependable friend.
"Finally, a story from a white woman raised with 'help' who interrogates the relationship’s complexities. As Wendy looks inwards to examine her socialization into a racial hierarchy, and strives to break from her inherited role in order to step differently into a potential friendship with Mary, I found myself gripped by the overwhelming forces working against both of them. Their mutual love and courage to choose differently again and again renders a tender, honest, cringeworthy, and powerful read." —Debby Irving, author of Waking Up White
At thirty-one, Kirsten has just returned to San Francisco from a bohemian year in Rome, ready to pursue a serious career as a writer and eventually, she hopes, marriage and family. When she meets Steve Beckwith, a handsome and successful attorney, she begins to see that future materialize more quickly than she’d dared to expect.
Twenty-two years later, Steve has turned into someone quite different. Unemployed and addicted to opioids, he uses money and their two children to emotionally blackmail Kirsten. What’s more, he’s been having an affair with their real estate agent, who is also her close friend. So she divorces him—but after their divorce is finalized, Steve is diagnosed with colon cancer and dies within a year, leaving Kirsten with $1.5 million in debts she knew nothing about. It’s then that she finally understands: The man she’d married was a needy, addictive person who came wrapped in a shiny package.
God? I can’t feel him, touch him, see him, or hear him, so how can he be, and what could he ever want with me?” Illegitimate, poor, bi-racial in 1960s America – searching for an identity and unconditional love. As she recalls a childhood trauma and hair straightening “torture” sessions, we feel her heartache, pain, and sense of not being good enough. A critical choice leads her down a path of self-destruction as she denies her authentic self in search of wealth and worthiness. Fleeing to Australia, suffering a dysfunctional marriage, battling with alcohol, drugs, sugar, and relationships with all the wrong men, it’s a chance meeting with a long lost friend that is her saving grace. His belief in her music and God’s purpose for her life leads her on a path to salvation, devastating loss, and ultimately, Perfect Love.
Life for Autumn Toelle-Jackson started out on a happy and ordinary timeline. When she entered her thirties, however, tragedy made up for lost time. Over the span of a few short years, she endured several miscarriages and the loss of her husband, a dear cousin, and child.
But one small cross-section of a life doesn't do justice to the amount of love, resilience, growth, and blessings a person experiences after such titanic losses. With each new harbinger of grief, Toelle-Jackson was forced to discover another way to survive the pain. In Boldly into the Darkness, she examines all the lessons and outcomes of her life story with aching intimacy and insight. The result is a portrait of healing so complete, it transcends the traditional survivor narrative and enters new territory, a bold light shining where before was only darkness.
What would you do if, while deployed to a war zone, a detained enemy revealed he'd somehow obtained an envelope with your family's address? Five years later, still in the midst of a difficult transition home, you face another conundrum. What if the only path to forgiveness and reconciliation came through reading that enemy's correspondence with his family, a gift from your interpreter? Would you read them? Could you possibly learn to forgive, respect, and even mourn the human loss of your worst enemy?
A riveting tale of love and redemption, and the beauty to be found in the intersection of the mysterious and the terrible! Jim Enderle's powerful prose reveals the "courageous catalysts" of grief and joy which transform ethical principles into action, in war and in our daily lives. Jim Enderle has taken his own wartime experience, and the experiences of other veterans, to illuminate the path to where we can each become a "selfless catalyst for healing."
A wise teacher once said, “Everyone has a challenge. Some you see, some you don’t.” As a writer with cerebral palsy, Erin M. Kelly promised herself long ago to utilize her writing skills and platform to make a positive impact on the world. Her autobiography, The Resilient WriterWheels: Can’t Is a Bad Word, traces her personal and professional journey as a writer. Raised in a household where she was taught that nothing was impossible, this, her second book, is a direct reflection of that mentality.Kelly uses her voice on behalf of those who don’t yet know how to use their own. The book is an extension of the author and her journey as a writer, and aims to be accessible and enjoyable for all readers regardless of age or ability.
Join an adventure walking in the shoes of Abigail Adams, wife of the second President of the United States, John Adams. Many stepping stones along this journey are first-hand accounts of Abigail's correspondence before, during, and after the birth of her nation.
Her forthright, knowledgeable insights reporting from the hotbed of Boston during the Revolution reveal the struggle of a young, loving family often separated as they balanced the needs of family vs. the needs of the emerging nation. You will encounter discourse from famous people and witness Abigail's benevolence. She taught a young African-American boy to read, advocating for his inclusion in a traditional school. An early abolitionist, she also fought for women's education and suffrage.
Keema Waterfield grew up chasing music with her twenty-year-old mother on the Alaskan folk festival circuit, two small siblings in tow. Summers they traveled by ferry and car, sharing the family tent with a guitar, cello, and fiddle. Adrift with a revolving cast of musicians, drunks, stepdads, and one man with a gun, Keema yearned for a place to call home. Preferably with heat and flushing toilets. Trying to understand the absence of her pot-dealing father, she is drawn deeper into her mother's past instead. Inside Passage is an unflinching mother-daughter love story that leaves you laughing, weeping, and wanting more.
Bob Pence found his dream job in being an FBI Agent. Working his way up to Special Agent in Charge, Bob was assigned throughout the United States to combat crime for the Bureau. He was in the South during the civil rights unrest of the 1960s, was trained in Cantonese Chinese for assignments in the Big Apple, was responsible for security at FBI Headquarters and all FBI properties throughout the world, and helped thwart the efforts of bank robbers, drug dealers, and outlaw motorcycle gang members. He and his team helped close down the polluted and controversial Rocky Flats nuclear site in Colorado.
Bob also details the acceptance and growth of female Special Agents working in the FBI, what is required to become a Special Agent, and comments on the troubling trend he sees of the growing violence in America.
This book is an informative and loving look at the Bureau and the Special Agents that serve there.
For more than six decades, Joe Besser brought gales of laughter to millions—in vaudeville, on Broadway, on radio, in motion pictures, and on television. From his days working as a bumbling assistant to the world-famous Thurston the Magician, he carved out success with his own act—that of a childlike sissy who brandished his foils with a flick of the wrist and such hilarious verbal assaults as “Ooh, you crazy you!” and “Not so f-a-s-t!” From stage to film and television screens, the famed roly-poly comedian left an indelible mark–from starring in his own feature films and short-subject series for Columbia Pictures, to dishing out huge laughs on scores of popular programs of the day, most notably as the malevolent brat “Stinky” on The Abbott and Costello Show, to stepping in to replace Shemp Howard after his death as a member of Three Stooges comedy team.
2021 AML Creative Nonfiction Winner 2021 International Book Awards Finalist 2021 Author Elite Finalist
What happens when an ambitious girl grows up to be a mother?
Maleah thinks being a stay-at-home mom makes her inferior to women with paying jobs. Plagued with unrelenting thoughts of inadequacy, she struggles to heal from postpartum depression without medication. Her search to save her body, her marriage, and her family leads to an unexpected revelation.
Lies of the Magpie sweeps readers into the heart and mind of an accomplishment-driven woman who worries that being a mother isn’t enough. Flowing with humor, witty observation, and sensitivity, the narrative escorts readers to a surprising epiphany of the liberating and healing power of motherhood.
In 1999, a 49-year-old woman tended her garden outside of the Chicago suburban home she shared with her husband, daughter and pet dogs. Extended family lived close by. She had a job that she loved. Life didn’t get any better than this. One phone call changed everything.
A random blood test had just revealed that she had hepatitis C. She’d never heard of it before. Not only did she have it, but it had been swimming in her bloodstream for 30 years, contracted from a blood transfusion in 1969. Tests would reveal that her liver was engulfed in chronic active liver disease – almost cirrhotic. Hepatitis C in 1999 was a degenerative, often incurable and deadly disease. Something had to be done.
The only treatment at the time offered less than a 50% chance for cure and came with a plethora of nasty side effects. It was a yearlong regimen of chemotherapy that could trigger flu-like symptoms. And those patients who didn’t respond to this difficult protocol frequently found themselves immunocompromised when it was over and sicker than before. The “wonder drugs” were still a long way off.
While waiting 15 years for a cure, Labar Laskie took extraordinary measures – except the chemotherapy – to keep her symptoms at bay, calm her fears, and lift her spirits. Above the Din is her story.
A stunning, funny, and heartbreaking memoir, Welcome to California recalls one woman's diagnosis with bipolar disorder, which ultimately leads to her wrongful and traumatic incarceration in the Los Angeles County jail system.
At age thirty-one, Sandra Boszko leaves her Winnipeg home for Hollywood with two secrets: her desire to perform and her mental illness. Although her health has already twice sent her packing from L.A.'s world of acting schools, auditions, and stunt work, she's determined to succeed this time. But shortly after her arrival, Sandra's mind clicks into a manic state, and within twenty-four hours she finds herself in the worst hell imaginable: detained and manic in a system that refuses to follow protocol for inmates with mental illness.
"PLAYING FOR KEEPS” in business is a self-help memoir that provides a “cheat sheet” for your career success.
Best-Selling and Award-Winning Author, Mom and Mentor Therese Allison is recognized as a groundbreaking pioneer and female executive, who broke the glass ceiling in a mostly male business niche (insurance brokerage). Her goal now is to empower women (and men) to “WIN” in business and life by landing a dream job, building business allies, achieving financial success and creating a work/life balance.
Based on 35 years of years of success in business and life, Allison uncovers how she became financially independent at age 38 when her company (McKenna & Associates) was sold to AON, and then retired early at age 43 to spend quality time with her children.
I Had A Secret for Seventeen Years is the redemptive life story of Tori Shaw, centered around her abortion as a teenager. She spent years covered by guilt and shame while enduring continual abandonment and rejection. Childhood experiences taught her to hide hardship, so she silently dealt with depression, fear, anxiety, self-loathing, and addictions. After hiding her dark secret for seventeen years, Tori shares her story with the world. A woman who once walked in fear and self-doubt is now willing to go wherever God wants her to go. Through Tori’s story, God builds a ministry that helps abortion-minded women choose life for their babies and shares God’s forgiveness and love with post-abortive women. I Had a Secret for Seventeen Years enables the reader to see a post-abortive woman come full circle and embrace the world of possibilities God makes available to those who are willing.
"I found my Feats in These Shoes engaging and poignant with a strong call for us all to continue taking giant steps toward who we want to be and what we want to do." —James Reed, bestselling author and Chairman of REED - Britain's biggest and best-known recruitment brand and the largest family-owned recruitment company in the world.
"The stories in 'My Feats in These Shoes' sparkle and shine with wit, warmth, and lessons for anyone looking for a place to not just fit in but stand out." —Courtney Anderson, Founder/CEO SparklBands
"A delightful read, full of imagery and imagination, from a woman who knows how to step up!" —Nanci Bell, Author of "Visualizing and Verbalizing" and Founder of the global education firm, LIndamood-Bell Learning Processes
An Educational Journey to Deanship: A Memoir explores and highlights achievements and stories of success throughout the author's academic and administrative experiences. Specifically, this book includes photographs and personal narratives from early educational experiences to deanship. The information presented in this memoir will serve to provide role modeling, lessons of success, mentorship, and hope for other persons who aspire to become an academic dean.
Think Under the Tuscan Sun meets La Passione. Through heart-warming and humorous stories that unfold across Italy's 20 regions over the span of 15 years, Italy Through the Rear-View Mirror makes a persuasive case for why so many of us fall in love with Italy.
“What can I say: Susan's 'Italy Through the Rear-View Mirror' IS Italy." —Franco Cavalleri, Italian Journalist and Photographer
While pursuing her insatiable passion for Italy, Italy and its inhabitants helped Susan discover the real reason behind a growing attachment to this sun-drenched country. Beneath the obvious beauty and intriguing diversity that we learn about, she knew there was something more profound building her sense of connection to a country she otherwise had no connection with. A rear-view mirror perspective opened Susan's eyes to the underlying role that every-day aspects of the Italian lifestyle—its traditions and rituals, its food, its people and their engaging approach to 'living life in the piazza'—played in cultivating this sense of connection. These were the ties binding it all together for her, and her to it. Travel was the vehicle and Italy the teacher, helping to illuminate how we are all wired for connection, how we crave a sense of belonging, and how simple human encounters can feed our soul.
Italy Through the Rear-View Mirror inspires us to reflect on our own journey, whether it involves travel or not, and in the process learn about our connection to this global community we call humanity. In fragile times, when our capacity to travel may be constrained and our ability to connect feels distant, the message is even more relevant.
