Resilience: Navigating Life, Loss and the Road to Success


Lisa Lisson - 2017
    One night, after putting their four children to bed, her husband, Patrick, marvelled that their lives seemed perfectly happy.Just a few hours later, everything changed.One moment Lisa was sleeping beside Patrick, and the next, she was kneeling on the floor beside his unconscious body frantically administering CPR. Patrick had had a massive heart attack and was in a coma, and the doctors were blunt: there was no hope. But for the next two years, Lisa stood by his side and awaited a miracle, while continuing to balance life as a high-powered executive and mother of four.Part leadership guide, part memoir of loss, and part personal empowerment primer on how to achieve your goals no matter what the universe throws at you, Resilience is an inspirational story about how to rise to the top in a man’s world, triumph over adversity, lead a fulfilling life, and live each day with purpose and gratitude.

God is in Control


Charles F. Stanley - 2003
    Fortunately, we also live in a world with the answer -- a wise and all-knowing Father.God Is In Control is inspired by a series of fresh messages from pastor and best-selling author Charles Stanley. His powerful message is simply that we can recognize, appreciate and rely on God's sovereignty even when our whole world seems out of control. God is always at work for His beloved. In addition, Stanley blesses the reader with his own nature photography, offering unique glimpses of the natural beauty crafted by our very own Creator.Whether a graduate, parent or simply someone going through a challenging time, Charles Stanley offers direction, trust and hope. Let him show you how blessed we are to have a God who is always in control.

The Wisdom House


Rob Parsons - 2014
    And then Rob began to think about how he hoped he'd have the chance to talk with all his grandchildren as they grew. He imagined them coming into his study, settling into one of the two comfy armchairs in front of the fire and opening up about the challenges they were facing. Perhaps it would be when they were beginning their first job, buying their first house, getting married or starting a family. Or perhaps they'd talk long into the night, when their hearts were broken or friends had betrayed them. Perhaps he would have the chance to help them rebuild the dream that somebody had trodden on. "Come on in, take a seat—tell me what's been going on. . ." Rob knew he wouldn't have all the answers. But maybe he could help—just a little.

Love You Hard: A Memoir of Marriage, Brain Injury, and Reinventing Love


Abby Maslin - 2019
    After her husband suffered a traumatic brain injury, the couple worked together as he recovered--and they learned to love again. When Abby Maslin's husband, TC, didn't make it home on August 18, 2012, she knew something was terribly wrong. Her fears were confirmed when she learned that her husband had been beaten by three men and left for dead mere blocks from home, all for his cell phone and debit card.The days and months that followed were a grueling test of faith. As TC recovered from a severe traumatic brain injury that left him unable to speak and walk, Abby faced the challenge of caring for--and loving--a husband who now resembled a stranger.Love You Hard is the raw, unflinchingly honest story of a young love left broken, and the resilience required to mend a life and remake a marriage. Told from the caregiver's perspective, this book is a daring exploration of true love: what it means to love beyond language, beyond abilities, and into the place that reveals who we really are.At the heart of Abby and TC's unique and captivating story are the universal truths that bind us all. This is a tale of living and loving wholeheartedly, learning to heal after profound grief, and choosing joy in the wake of tragedy.

The Best Advice I Ever Got on Parenting: Incredible Insights from Well Known Moms & Dads


Jim Daly - 2012
    If they’d only known. This cleverly designed book published in conjunction with Focus on the Family shares heartwarming and vulnerable experiences from well-known moms and dads. Readers will love the upbeat, surprising, sometimes humorous stories of their toddlers, grade-schoolers, tweens and teens. All parents can relate.

Sweet Grace: How I Lost 250 Pounds and Stopped Trying To Earn God's Favor


Teresa Shields Parker - 2013
    Once weighing 430 pounds, she's been through every magic fix imaginable. The thing she found that worked, really worked, was a key she had available to her all along. After years of praying about her difficult, she finally realized she had to make a bold decision to change her life. She knew she was addicted processed sugar and flour because she craved them day and night. With God’s help, she gave up what she craved and began walking choice by choice into freedom. Sweet Grace will challenge you. It may shock you at times. You may shed a tear. But one thing is certain, you will never again be able to say you don't know what to do to become healthy. It is possible to overcome food cravings and live free and healthy.

A Beautiful, Terrible Thing: A Memoir of Marriage and Betrayal


Jen Waite - 2017
    In a raw, first-person account, Waite recounts each heartbreaking discovery, every life-destroying lie, and reveals what happens once the dust finally settles on her demolished marriage.After a disturbing email sparks Waite's suspicion that her husband is having an affair, she tries to uncover the truth and rebuild trust in her marriage. Instead, she finds more lies, infidelity, and betrayal than she could have imagined. Waite obsessively analyzes her relationship, trying to find a single moment from the last five years that isn't part of the long-con of lies and manipulation. With a dual-timeline narrative structure, we see Waite's romance bud, bloom, and wither simultaneously, making the heartbreak and disbelief even more affecting.

How to Fall in Love with Anyone: A Memoir in Essays


Mandy Len Catron - 2017
    In a series of candid, vulnerable, and wise essays that takes a closer look at what it means to love someone, be loved, and how we present our love to the world, Catron deconstructs her own personal canon of love stories. She delves all the way back to 1944, when her grandparents first met in a coal mining town in Appalachia, to her own dating life as a professor in Vancouver, drawing insights from her fascinating research into the universal psychology, biology, history, and literature of love. She uses biologists’ research into dopamine triggers to ask whether the need to love is an innate human drive. She uses literary theory to show why we prefer certain kinds of love stories. She urges us to question the unwritten scripts we follow in relationships and looks into where those scripts come from in the first place. And she tells the story of how she decided to test a psychology experiment that she’d read about—where the goal was to create intimacy between strangers using a list of thirty-six questions—and ended up in the surreal situation of having millions of people following her brand-new relationship. In How to Fall in Love with Anyone Catron flips the script on love and offers a deeply personal, and universal, investigation.

How I Got My Wiggle Back: A Memoir of Healing


Anthony Field - 2011
    Their extraordinary success over the last twenty years includes TV shows, the sale of tens of millions of CDs and DVDs, and sell-out live performances for a million people annually as well as honors including being named UNICEF goodwill ambassadors. Now, for the first time, Anthony Field, the "blue" Wiggle, tells his inspiring, behind-the-scenes story of how he overcame depression, life-threatening illness, and chronic pain to get his life back.Takes you inside the life of the Wiggles' co-founder Anthony Field and the story of his successful struggle to overcome debilitating emotional and physical health challengesShares practical action steps to help relieve pain, prevent and heal disease, and achieve peak fitness regardless of ageReveals groundbreaking approaches to wellness developed by two acclaimed chiropractorsIncludes more than seventy photographs from Anthony Field's personal collection

Finding Chika: A Little Girl, an Earthquake, and the Making of a Family


Mitch Albom - 2019
    You can’t help but fall for Chika. A page-turner that will no doubt become a classic.” --Mary Karr, author of The Liars’ Club and The Art of Memoir From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Tuesdays With Morrie comes Mitch Albom’s most personal story to date: an intimate and heartwarming memoir about what it means to be a family and the young Haitian orphan whose short life would forever change his heart.  Chika Jeune was born three days before the devastating earthquake that decimated Haiti in 2010. She spent her infancy in a landscape of extreme poverty, and when her mother died giving birth to a baby brother, Chika was brought to The Have Faith Haiti Orphanage that Albom operates in Port Au Prince. With no children of their own, the forty-plus children who live, play, and go to school at the orphanage have become family to Mitch and his wife, Janine. Chika’s arrival makes a quick impression. Brave and self-assured, even as a three-year-old, she delights the other kids and teachers. But at age five, Chika is suddenly diagnosed with something a doctor there says, “No one in Haiti can help you with.” Mitch and Janine bring Chika to Detroit, hopeful that American medical care can soon return her to her homeland. Instead, Chika becomes a permanent part of their household, and their lives, as they embark on a two-year, around-the-world journey to find a cure. As Chika’s boundless optimism and humor teach Mitch the joys of caring for a child, he learns that a relationship built on love, no matter what blows it takes, can never be lost. Told in hindsight, and through illuminating conversations with Chika herself, this is Albom at his most poignant and vulnerable. Finding Chika is a celebration of a girl, her adoptive guardians, and the incredible bond they formed—a devastatingly beautiful portrait of what it means to be a family, regardless of how it is made.

Women Who Worry Too Much: How to Stop Worry and Anxiety from Ruining Relationships, Work, and Fun


Holly Hazlett-Stevens - 2005
    This predispostion inclines women to worry more than men about things like social problems, work, finances-even about worry itself, a phenomenon psychologists call meta-worry. The goal of this book is to help readers control excessive worry by learning to perceive threats more accurately and to stop focusing on things that are unlikely to happen.Following an introduction by noted psychologist Michelle Craske that explores the reasons women worry more than men, the book addresses the fundamentals of worry: what it is, how it differs from anxiety, and how it can develop into a chronic state of mind. The book offers strategies for overcoming worry that include monitoring personal worry triggers, breaking worry-provoking habits, and avoiding avoidance-a major aggravating factor for all anxiety disorders. From it, you'll learn to use mindfulness techniques to avoid ruminating on the past or the future and how to use progressive relaxation to cope with worrisome situations.

Handywoman


Kate Davies - 2018
    Forced to change direction, Kate took a radical new creative path. Handywoman tells this story.This is not a book about Kate's triumph over adversity. Rather, it is her account of the ordinary activities and everyday objects that stroke and disability made her see differently. From braiding hair for the first time to learning how to knit again; from the lessons of a working-class creative childhood to the support of the contemporary craft community; from the transformative effects of good design to developing a new identity as a disabled walker; in this engaging series of essays, Kate describes how the experience of brain injury allowed her to build a new kind of handmade life. Part memoir, part personal celebration of the power of making, in Handywoman Kate reclaims disability as in itself a form of practical creativity. Kate Davies is an award-winning knitwear designer and author writing on many topics from disability and design to textile history and women’s history. She’s published eight books about hand-knitting, lives on the edge of the Scottish Highlands and is inspired by her local landscape every day.

But God, Wouldn't I Be More Useful to You If I Were Healthy? (Chronic Pain and the Christian Life)


Esther Smith - 2016
    Perhaps no questions cause more confusion than the ones that arise when you are pulled out of a thriving life of work that benefits the world, only to spend your hours, days, and weeks languishing in bed. It just doesn’t make sense. Why, God? Why would you take away my thriving career when it took me years to get to this point? Why would you take away my ability to serve and help and contribute? In this first book in the Chronic Pain and the Christian Life series, explore what it looks like to live a life of work, service, and rest, even when the pain doesn’t go away.

Cheating Destiny: Living With Diabetes, America's Biggest Epidemic


James S. Hirsch - 2006
    James Hirsch’s myth-shattering blend of history, reportage, advocacy, and memoir will speak for, and to, the 20 million Americans who live with this disease. Cheating Destiny offers revealing views of the diabetic subculture, the urge toward secrecy that many diabetics feel, the glycemic rollercoaster they ride constantly, and the remarkable perseverance—even heroism—required for survival.Hirsch is uniquely qualified to write this book. An award-winning journalist and best-selling author, he has lived with type 1 diabetes for twenty-five years. His brother Irl, also a diabetic, is one of the country’s leading diabetologists. Most poignantly, he knows firsthand the toll diabetes can take on parents: his three-year-old son was diagnosed with the disease while Hirsch was writing this book.Hirsch draws on all this expertise to craft an incisive, surprising portrayal of the fascinating science behind the disease and the skyrocketing impact of diabetes on our economy and society. Most striking is his candid, authoritative writing about the psychological and emotional hurdles that diabetics confront every day. Anyone who lives with diabetes—or loves a diabetic—will find here an empowering voice of empathy.

The Scar: A Personal History of Depression and Recovery


Mary Cregan - 2019
    But it’s apparent that something is terribly wrong, and two days later, Anna dies—plunging Cregan into suicidal despair. Decades later, sustained by her work, a second marriage, and a son, Cregan reflects on this pivotal experience and attempts to make sense of it. She weaves together literature and research with details from her own ordeal—and the still-visible scar of her suicide attempt—while also considering her life as part of the larger history of our understanding of depression.