Her late husband had hidden the truth, Joan has Alzheimer's disease. As Joan's mind continues to unravel, family relationships are put to the test. When Joan is abused by those entrusted with her care, the question arises; is anyone prepared to reveal the truth of what really goes on behind closed doors?

    Jim Higley was a forty-year-old bobblehead. Just like those collectible figurines with oversized, bouncy heads, he'd put on a smiling face and bobble through his hectic, overflowing days.Higley's bobbling came to a screeching halt with the diagnosis of cancer, surgery, and a summer of healing. More than a cancer story, however, Bobblehead Dad puts you in a front row seat as the author discovers the illuminating parallels between events in his childhood and his adulthood. Higley, whose weekly fatherhood column appears in the Chicago Tribune's TribLocal, unwraps poignant lessons from his family history with rich, vivid detail. His story reveals meaning in simple moments and the people who fill them--including the surprise discovery of his most important lesson, which had been quietly waiting for over thirty years.

    In the years of pain and heartache that followed as he tried to save his son from opioid addiction, Van Warner discovered what the American public is just now becoming aware of: opioids prescribed for even minor pain relief are so addictive that even a few days of use can create dependency. On Pills and Needles is a memoir that also serves as a wake-up call and crash course in opioid addiction. Through his harrowing personal story, Van Warner exposes the common causes of opioid addiction, effective and ineffective ways it has been treated, and how families can walk alongside loved ones who are dealing with the daily realities of addiction.

    Her dad’s Alzheimer’s was in high gear. And the rent on her parents’ small Chicago apartment had just gone up. Again. But Lori was holding it all together: helping care for her dad and pay her family’s bills, figuring out how to navigate graduate school and four jobs on top of her family responsibilities, and, somehow, continuing to believe that there was more to life than this. And there was. An exciting job teaching at a prestigious school in China. Although the previous month, she had turned down a job offer in Iowa―thinking it was too far away from her family―she felt completely at ease accepting the job in China. Grasping on to the fierce determination she’d had since childhood, Lori found herself in Guangzhou, China, where she fell in love with the culture and with a man from a tiny town in Hubei province. What followed was a transformative adventure―one that will inspire readers to use the bitter to make life even sweeter.

    . ."--Daniel G. Amen, MDDr. W. Lee Warren, a practicing brain surgeon, assumed he knew most outcomes for people with glioblastoma, head injuries, and other health-care problems. Yet even as he tried to give patients hope, his own heart would sink as he realized, I've seen the end of you.But it became far more personal when the acclaimed doctor experienced an unimaginable family tragedy. That's when he reached the end of himself.Page-turning medical stories serve as the backdrop for a raw, honest look at how we can remain on solid ground when everything goes wrong and how we can find light in the darkest hours of life.I've Seen the End of You is the rare book that offers tender empathy and tangible hope for those who are suffering. No matter what you're facing, this doesn't have to be the end. Even when nothing seems to makes sense, God can transform your circumstances and your life. And he can offer a new beginning.

    

    After an emergency landing, she discovered that Dave—a healthy thirty-year-old athlete and surgical resident—had suffered a rare and life-threatening stroke. Next thing Allison knew, she was sitting alone in the ER in Fargo, North Dakota, waiting to hear if her husband would survive the night. When Dave woke up, he could not carry memories from hour to hour, much less from one day to the next. Allison lost the Dave she knew and loved when he lost consciousness on the plane. Within a few months, she found herself caring for both a newborn and a sick husband, struggling with the fear of what was to come. As a way to make sense of the pain and chaos of their new reality, Allison started to write daily letters to Dave. Not only would she work to make sense of the unfathomable experiences unfolding around her, but her letters would provide Dave with the memories he could not make on his own. She was writing to preserve their past, protect their present, and fight for their future. Those letters became the foundation for this beautiful, intimate memoir. And in the process, she fell in love with her husband all over again. This is a manifesto for living, an ultimately uplifting story about the transformative power of faith and resilience. It’s a tale of a husband’s turbulent road to recovery, the shifting nature of marriage, and the struggle of loving through pain and finding joy in the broken places.

     Why so many people keep watching Duck Dynasty is because of something unique in the contemporary smorgasbord of contemporary television - the actual presence of real values. These people are salt of the earth folks who simply love each other and receive all of life as a gift. They also love God in a naturally supernatural way which is communicated without the necessity of words. There are real, human, redemptive values on display in each episode as the family faces the raising of children, remaining faithful to their marriages and supporting one another in the rough and tumble of real life. In addition, in almost every episode, they end with the extended family sharing a meal which begins with a heartfelt and sincere prayer of thanksgiving to the Lord. In this day and age where 'God' is a bad word to say, they embrace their faith and share it with the world. No wonder Duck Dynasty is one of the top shows on television today.

    She and her husban, Carlen, feel as though they've been shoved out of a plane 10,000 feet up, with nothing to grab but themselves. But A Path Revealed is not about the fallout from an insidious disease that extended nearly seventeen years. It is in Carlen's words, "The story of a path emerging during our darkest hours, a path that we neither planned, nor foresaw." Carlen traveled with Martha to the backwoods of Kentucky, where the quiet presence of a Catholic nun revealed a hidden path. He was forced to slow down as he traced this path halfway around the world to Australia, retreated weekends to a monastery, embraced meditation, and landed all alone in Thomas Merton's cabin. A Path Revealed echoes accents heard in Anne Lamott's Traveling Mercies, Richard Rohr's Falling Upward, and John Bunyan's 17th-century classic, The Pilgrim's Progress.

    For it's the day that Paul, my late husband and father to my seven children, decided he'd had enough of the life he had created for us all, and took himself off to the woods on the edge of our property, and fatally slashed his neck and arms." When Vikie Shanks met Paul, he seemed to be everything a girl could ever want. Handsome, attentive, caring and musically gifted, he felt like the antidote to all the bad things that had happened in her life. Vikie had had a deeply unhappy childhood, and it had scarred her. Sexually abused by her eldest brother and dominated by a violent father, her childhood ended with the death of her mother when she was just sixteen. Unravelled is the story of Vikie's life with Paul. Of the years in which his behaviour and mental state became ever more erratic. Of his casual cruelty, his spying, his inexplicable and sudden rages. Of his growing obsession with having more and more children, and of naming them according to a precise set of rules. How, over a period of years, he all but gutted their family home, tearing down most of the internal walls and removing almost everything but basic furniture, while simultaneously creating a secret home for himself, made out of plywood, in what used to be a shed. Of his secret diaries - the tens of thousands of entries he made, documenting every minute of every day. After his death, it would be these writings that would provide such compelling evidence of what further tragedy might have happened had he not made the decision that he did that fateful morning. Because whatever was wrong with him was like a ticking bomb that even Vikie hadn't properly heard; it seemed he'd spent time planning to kill the whole family.

    In this simple yet profound memoir, she shares her experiences as she explores what it means to be a lone woman homesteader at the end of the 20th century, discovering the quiet spirituality born of a life on the land.

    Married to the son of a renowned Italian family with ties to the underworld, Dorothy fervently eschewed motherhood and domesticity, turning Deborah over to her spinster aunts to raise while she was the star of a vibrant social life. As a child, Deborah revered her charismatic mother, but Dorothy was a woman full of secrets with a troubled past—a mistress of illusion whose love seemed just out of her daughter’s grasp. In vivid, lyrical prose, Saturday’s Child tells the story of Deborah’s eccentric upbringing and her quest in midlife, long after her parents’ death, to uncover the truth about her mother and their complex relationship. No longer under the spell of her maternal goddess, but still caught in a wrenching cycle of love and longing, Deborah must finally confront the reality of her mother’s legacy—and finally claim her own.

    You're often treated like a living blow-up doll and a therapist simultaneously. It's a life that many judge easily ... until you know more. Sita Kaylin, a California-based veteran in the sex industry, has lived the pitfalls of being naked in front of strangers and the absurdities that arise when you fake intimacy for a living. She left home when she was sixteen, worked hard at several jobs and eventually started college after dropping out of high school. There, a roommate turned her on to stripping, revealing a way out of the crushing financial pressures she felt and her struggles as a pre-law student with very little time or energy to study. She had no idea how wild her journey would become and what a large part of her life it would be. Sita's stories take shape through an often altered, occasionally sarcastic, sometimes illegal and frequently funny magnifying glass she holds up to not just the sex industry, but also to human needs and desires, modern relationships, mental health, personal independence. Anything But a Wasted Life is the memoir of an unorthodox life about a woman who has rarely said 'no' to life.

    This was Ireland of the 1970s and 80s before the arrival of the short-lived economic riches of the Celtic Tiger.Dwyer's vivid and colorful prose describes his hard but happy life as part of a isolated but close-knit community:Early school days spent in a building with no running water or electricityAn encounter with a violent sheep that literally turned his world upside downThe days spent cutting the turf and saving the hay by handAn Irish Christmas where nearly everything on the table was sourced from the farmHis exciting family history that brought his relations to the Klondike Gold Rush in CanadaComplemented by a collection of evocative photographs, each story tells of a way of life that has now largely disappeared.Sprinkled with a selection of fitting works by some of Ireland's best-known poets such as Seamus Heaney and Patrick Kavanagh, this gem of a book is a chronicle of the simple but happy life of an Irish farmer boy.

     He awoke five days later with to learn of the catastrophic loss of his two friends and both of his legs. Recovering physically presented a great challenge, but the mental recovery was the toughest battle. For three and a half months he never left the hospital because he didn't want people to see his injured body. In One Step at a Time, Bleill shares the story of his own personal redemption and the many life-changing moments he encountered, from his enlistment to active duty in Fallujah, through two years of intensive rehabilitation, and ultimately to his job as the community spokesman for the Indianapolis Colts. Readers will be inspired by his undying enthusiasm, infectious joy, and sense of humor as he shares his message of going forward, one step at a time.