Newspaper Blackout


Austin Kleon - 2010
    Armed with a daily newspaper and a permanent marker, he constructs through deconstruction--eliminating the words he doesn't need to create a new art form: Newspaper Blackout poetry. Highly original, Kleon's verse ranges from provocative to lighthearted, and from moving to hysterically funny, and undoubtedly entertaining. The latest creations in a long history of "found art," "Newspaper Blackout" will challenge you to find new meaning in the familiar and inspiration from the mundane. "Newspaper Blackout" contains original poems by Austin Kleon, as well as submissions from readers of Kleon's popular online blog and a handy appendix on how to create your own blackout poetry.

Make Me a Mother: A Memoir


Susanne Paola Antonetta - 2014
    After meeting their six-month-old son, Jin, at the airport—an incident made memorable when Susanne, so eager to meet her son, is chased down by security—Susanne and her husband learn lessons common to all parents, such as the lack of sleep and the worry and joy of loving a child. They also learn lessons particular to their own family: not just how another being can take over your life but how to let an entire culture in, how to discuss birth parents who gave up a child, and the tricky steps required to navigate race in America.In the end, her relationship with her son teaches Susanne to understand her own troubled childhood and to forgive and care for her own aging parents. Susanne comes to realize how, time and time again, all families have to learn to adopt one another.

Bloom: Finding Beauty in the Unexpected--A Memoir


Kelle Hampton - 2012
    The author of the popular blog Enjoying the Small Things—named The Bump’s Best Special Needs Blog and The Blog You’ve Learned the Most From in the 2010 BlogLuxe Awards—Kelle Hampton interweaves lyrical prose and stunning four-color photography as she recounts the unforgettable story of the first year in the life of her daughter Nella, who has Down syndrome. Poignant, eye-opening, and heart-soaring, Hampton’s Bloom is ultimately about embracing life and really living it.

The Lucky Few: Finding God's Best in the Most Unlikely Places


Heather Avis - 2017
    That's what adoptive mom Heather Avis learned, and that's the invitation of this book.As the mother of three adopted children - two with Down syndrome - Heather Avis has learned that it's truly the lucky few who get to live a life like hers, who actually recognize that God's plans are best, even when they seem so radically different from the plans we have for ourselves.When Heather started her journey into parenthood she never thought it would look like this, never planned to have three adopted children, and certainly never imagined that two of them would have Down syndrome. But like most things God does, once she stepped into the craziness and confusion that comes with the unknown and the unplanned, she realized that they were indeed among the lucky few.Discover in this book what 70,000+ followers of Heather's hit Instagram account @macymakesmyday already know: the power of faith and family can help us stay strong in the toughest times. This book will also be especially touching to those with adopted family members or children with Down syndrome in their lives.

Hungry Heart: Adventures in Life, Love, and Writing


Jennifer Weiner - 2016
    In her first foray into nonfiction, she takes the raw stuff of her personal life and spins into a collection of essays on modern womanhood as uproariously funny and moving as the best of Tina Fey, Fran Lebowitz, and Nora Ephron.Jennifer grew up as an outsider in her picturesque Connecticut hometown (“a Lane Bryant outtake in an Abercrombie & Fitch photo shoot”) and at her Ivy League college, but finally found her people in newsrooms in central Pennsylvania and Philadelphia, and her voice as a novelist, activist, and New York Times columnist.No subject is off-limits in this intimate and honest essay collection: sex, weight, envy, money, her mom’s newfound lesbianism, and her estranged father’s death. From lonely adolescence to modern childbirth to hearing her six-year-old daughter’s use of the f-word—fat­­—for the first time, Jennifer Weiner goes there, with the wit and candor that have endeared her to readers all over the world.By turns hilarious and deeply touching, this collection shows that the woman behind treasured novels like Good in Bed and Best Friends Forever is every bit as winning, smart, and honest in real life as she is in her fiction.

Origins: How the Nine Months Before Birth Shape the Rest of Our Lives


Annie Murphy Paul - 2010
    Others are sure it's the environment we experience in childhood. But could it be that many of our individual characteristics—our health, our intelligence, our temperaments—are influenced by the conditions we encountered before birth? That's the claim of an exciting and provocative field known as fetal origins. Over the past twenty years, scientists have been developing a radically new understanding of our very earliest experiences and how they exert lasting effects on us from infancy well into adulthood. Their research offers a bold new view of pregnancy as a crucial staging ground for our health, ability, and well-being throughout life.Author and journalist Annie Murphy Paul ventures into the laboratories of fetal researchers, interviews experts from around the world, and delves into the rich history of ideas about how we're shaped before birth. She discovers dramatic stories: how individuals gestated during the Nazi siege of Holland in World War II are still feeling its consequences decades later; how pregnant women who experienced the 9/11 attacks passed their trauma on to their offspring in the womb; how a lab accident led to the discovery of a common household chemical that can harm the developing fetus; how the study of a century-old flu pandemic reveals the high personal and societal costs of poor prenatal experience. Origins also brings to light astonishing scientific findings: how a single exposure to an environmental toxin may produce damage that is passed on to multiple generations; how conditions as varied as diabetes, heart disease, and mental illness may get their start in utero; why the womb is medicine's latest target for the promotion of lifelong health, from preventing cancer to reducing obesity. The fetus is not an inert being, but an active and dynamic creature, responding and adapting as it readies itself for life in the particular world it will enter. The pregnant woman is not merely a source of potential harm to her fetus, as she is so often reminded, but a source of influence on her future child that is far more powerful and positive than we ever knew. And pregnancy is not a nine-month wait for the big event of birth, but a momentous period unto itself, a cradle of individual strength and wellness and a crucible of public health and social equality.With the intimacy of a personal memoir and the sweep of a scientific revolution, Origins presents a stunning new vision of our beginnings that will change the way you think about yourself, your children, and human nature itself.

Mom: A Celebration of Mothers from StoryCorps


Dave Isay - 2010
    That's what I would give to you." -Fanni Victoria Green-Lemons, in conversation with her daughter, Danyealah Green-Lemons In "Mom," Dave Isay-StoryCorps's founder and the editor of the project's bestselling collection, "Listening Is an Act of Love"-presents a celebration of American mothers. Featuring StoryCorps's most revelatory stories on the subject, "Mom" looks across a diversity of experience to present an entirely original portrait of motherhood. Through conversations between parents and children, husbands and wives, siblings and friends, the life of the American mother unfolds. In stories that take us from the woods of New Hampshire to urban Detroit and beyond, we meet mothers and children from all walks of life-an immigrant mother instilling in her children the importance of education, adult children caring for an elderly parent, a woman remembering the sound of her mother's laugh, and mothers and children of all ages learning to grow into new roles over time. Visiting families in moments of profound joy and sadness, courage and despair, struggle and triumph, we learn new truths about that most primal and sacred of bonds-the relationship between mother and child. With this vital contribution to the American storybook, StoryCorps has created a tribute to mothers that honors the wealth of our national experience. An appreciation of the wisdom and generosity passed between mothers and children, this generation to the next, "Mom" offers powerful lessons in the meaning of family and the expansiveness of the human heart. Watch a Video

Scatterling of Africa: My Early Years


Johnny Clegg - 2021
    Suspended for a few seconds, they float in their own space and time with their own hidden prospects. For want of a better term, we call these moments “magical” and when we remember them they are cloaked in a halo of special meaning.’For 14-year-old Johnny Clegg, hearing Zulu street music as plucked on the strings of a guitar by Charlie Mzila one evening outside a corner café in Bellevue, Johannesburg, was one such ‘magical’ moment. The success story of Juluka and later Savuka, and the cross-cultural celebration of music, language, story, dance and song that stirred the hearts of millions across the world, is well documented. Their music was the soundtrack to many South Africans’ lives during the turbulent 70s and 80s as the country moved from legislated oppression to democratic freedom. It crossed borders, boundaries and generations, resonating around the world and back again. Less known is the story of how it all began and developed. Scatterling of Africa is that origin story, as Johnny Clegg wrote it and wanted it told. It is the story of how the son of an unconventional mother, grandson of Jewish immigrants, came to realise that identity can be a choice, and home is a place you leave and return to as surely as the seasons change.

Stronger: Courage, Hope, and Humor in My Life with John McCain


Cindy Mccain - 2021
    

Crossing the Moon: A Memoir


Paulette Bates Alden - 1998
    On the way to achieving her most important goal, she had always considered motherhood but as she neared the end of her fertile years, with a wonderful husband and aging, obstinate, yet irreplaceable parents, Alden was struck by all she would be giving up by not having a child. Suddenly, she found herself faced with the possibility that she had waited too long. In this intimate and searching memoir, Alden looks back on her southern upbringing and her conscious rejection of what seemed in the sixties to be antiquated roles -- those of wife and mother. Finally, she and her husband embark on a long and difficult course of infertility treatment.Crossing the Moon is a wry, poignant, and beautifully wise story of the choices that all women make -- and learn to live with.

Parenting with Fire: Lighting Up the Family with Passion and Inspiration


Shmuley Boteach - 2006
    According to Shmuley Boteach, author of Kosher Sex and host of TLC's Shalom in the Home, transmitting passions, motivating children with shared goals, and getting them excited about values are the most important things any parent can do. With great humor and insight, Boteach shows parents how to take their child to life's mountaintop-and create a parent-child bond based on vitality, exuberance, and mutual respect.

Prudent Advice: Lessons for My Baby Daughter (A Life List for Every Woman)


Jamie Morrison Curtis - 2010
    These are the rules of contemporary wisdom rewritten for our time—the new adages to be passed from woman to woman that represent the best advice about mastering life in our complex twenty-first century era. Illustrated with four-color art throughout.Prudent Advice isn't what your mother taught you--it's more. Delivering 500 mini-lessons meant to educate and entertain, Curtis writes with wit and fresh insight into motherhood wrought from her own experiences and those of her blog followers. Time-honored canons such as "Dress appropriately for work" and "You reap what you sow" mingle with more unconventional prudence such as "Talk to strangers" and "Don't be afraid to get lost." She teaches how to jump-start a battery and make summer squash with goat cheese pasta--everything a mother wants for her little girl.Curtis emphasizes the importance of being ethical, practicing kindness, thinking for oneself, and seeing the beauty in everything and everyone, especially on the inside. This compelling guide also offers poetry, inspirational quotes, and recipes meant to embellish cultural perspective and cultivate a well-rounded, sophisticated woman. Prudent Advice will inspire mothers and daughters to celebrate their differences while unearthing shared core values that bond them together as family.

Bottled Up: How the Way We Feed Babies Has Come to Define Motherhood, and Why It Shouldn’t


Suzanne Barston - 2012
    Called “A Parent is Born,” the program’s tagline was “The journey to parenthood . . . from pregnancy to delivery and beyond.” Barston valiantly surmounted the problems of pregnancy and delivery. It was the “beyond” that threw her for a loop when she found that, despite every effort, she couldn’t breastfeed her son, Leo. This difficult encounter with nursing—combined with the overwhelming public attitude that breast is not only best, it is the yardstick by which parenting prowess is measured—drove Barston to explore the silenced, minority position that breastfeeding is not always the right choice for every mother and every child.Part memoir, part popular science, and part social commentary, Bottled Up probes breastfeeding politics through the lens of Barston’s own experiences as well as those of the women she has met through her popular blog, The Fearless Formula Feeder. Incorporating expert opinions, medical literature, and popular media into a pithy, often wry narrative, Barston offers a corrective to our infatuation with the breast. Impassioned, well-reasoned, and thoroughly researched, Bottled Up asks us to think with more nuance and compassion about whether breastfeeding should remain the holy grail of good parenthood.

Moms Don't Have Time To: A Quarantine Anthology


Zibby OwensElliot Ackerman - 2021
      It’s impossible to ignore how life has changed since COVID-19 spread across the world. People from all over quarantined and did their best to keep on going during the pandemic. Zibby Owens, host of the award-winning podcast MomsDon’t Have Time to Read Books and a mother of four herself, wanted to do something to help people carry on and to give them something to focus on other than the horrors of their news feeds. So she launched an online magazine called We Found Time. Authors who had been on her podcast wrote original, brilliant essays for busy readers. Zibby organized these profound pieces into themes inspired by five things moms don’t have time to do: eat, read, work out, breathe, and have sex. Now compiled as an anthology named Moms Don’t Have Time To, these beautiful, original essays by dozens of bestselling and acclaimed authors speak to the ever-increasing demands on our time, especially during the quarantine, in a unique, literary way. Actress Evangeline Lilly writes about the importance and impact of film. Bestselling author Rene Denfeld focuses on her relationship with food after growing up homeless. Screenwriter and author Lea Carpenter and Suzanne Falter, author, speaker, and podcast host, focus on loss. New York Times bestselling authors Chris Bohjalian and Gretchen Rubin write about the importance of reading. Others write about working out, love and sex, eating and cooking, and more. Join Zibby on her journey through the winding road of quarantine and perhaps you, too, will find time.

The Panic-Free Pregnancy: An OB-GYN Separates Fact from Fiction on Food, Exercise, Travel, Pets, Coffee, Medications, and Concerns You Have When You Are Expecting


Michael S. Broder - 2004
    Dr. Broder separates fact from fiction, media hype from old wives tales, and drawing on the latest scientific research offers an accessible, comprehensive reference book that answers questions about... � Caffeine � Exercise � Flying � Prescription and over-the-counter medications � Sex � Cosmetics � Alcohol � Herbal remedies � and more Organized in an easy-to-use question-and-answer format, this book will help women have the safest, healthiest, most anxiety-free pregnancy possible.