A Life Stolen: My Father's Journey Through Alzheimer's


Vanessa Luther - 2014
    It’s an inside look into the day-to-day challenges facing not only the patient, but also the caregivers. For many years, her father exhibited signs of dementia, eventually becoming too significant to ignore. Everything culminated during an incident one night, after which her father was taken away, never to return to his home again. The disease changed him every day until he was a stranger. Then, it stole his life. Through the initial days at home to hospital stays, living in a memory care unit, rehab stints and eventually hospice care, this book reveals many of the struggles encountered while facing Alzheimer’s in a world not quite ready for it. It is based on actual events depicted exactly as they happened while travelling the heartbreaking and harrowing road through this horrific illness. Its purpose is to give guidance and insight to others caring for loved ones with this terrible affliction, whether it is in providing helpful information, feelings of support or simply words of encouragement. Most importantly, the hope is that it will make the road for others an easier one to travel. May the many tears in this journey be the fortitude that helps others deal with the adversity from this overwhelming disease.

Too Pretty to be Good


Lindsay Byron - 2021
    

Best White and Other AnxiousDelusions


Rebecca Davis - 2015
    Her razor-sharp wit combines with her acute powers of observation to produce social and political commentary that will have you in stitches even as it informs and provokes you to think seriously about the topics she discusses. In Best White, Davis offers advice on life’s tricky issues; discusses the perils of being a ‘Best White’; laments the fact that society does not have a universally adopted form of greeting, such as the high five; explores the intricacies of social media and internet dating; considers the future of reading and tackles a range of controversial topics in between.

Dhi's Oracle of Divine Epiphanies


Saudamini Mishra - 2021
    

Prisoners Without Bars: A Caregivers Tale


Donna O'Donnell Figurski - 2018
    Donna's husband, David, stumbled into their bedroom, his hand covering a blood-filled eye from a brain hemorrhage. Donna called 9-1-1. David slipped into a coma. At that moment, Donna was thrust onto the path of caregiver for her best friend and the love of her life. In her debut memoir, Donna shares how a neurosurgeon said that David would make a "great organ donor." She writes of arrogant doctors, uncaring visitors, insensitive ambulance drivers, and problematic nurses. She also tells of the many compassionate doctors, nurses, therapists, staff, strangers, family members, and friends who helped them on their journey. Donna compellingly describes her ability to appear positive as she experiences the horror of making life-or-death decisions. As her world crashes, she credits laughter as her lifesaver. More than thirteen years later, Donna and David are living a "new normal" together.

Breakfast, School Run, Chemo: The Sometimes Funny, Definitely Not Depressing, True Story of a Mum With Cancer


Julia Watson - 2015
    But with humour and courage, Julia faces the greatest challenge of her life – and in the process becomes the person she'd always wanted to be.A survivor of child abuse, brought up by a mother with mental illness, Julia was no stranger to adversity. After her daughter Georgie was born with Down syndrome, she thought she'd faced it all. But when doctors offer her the chance of risky but potentially life-saving surgery, Julia faces her toughest situation yet.Follow Julia and her family, as she writes her way through the crisis, chases her dreams, gets her dancing shoes on and discovers the lighter side of life with a colostomy bag.This is a candid, entertaining look at life with cancer and living each day with humour and hope.

How to Heal a Broken Heart: From Rock Bottom to Reinvention (via ugly crying on the bathroom floor)


Rosie Green - 2021
    

Nobody Eats Parsley: And other things I learned from my family


David Oakley - 2020
    They're so ridiculous you may think they're fiction. Like the time I went to a drive-in X-rated movie without realizing my parents were in the next car. Or the time I let my kid throw a rock through our living room window. There's the time I bought a camouflage thong in a bait shop and the time I ruined a kid's birthday party. And the other time I ruined a kid's birthday party. I can't guarantee that these stories will make you laugh, but I can guarantee that I didn't make them up.

A Girl Raised by Wolves: An inspiring memoir of one woman's journey through sex trafficking, cancer, murder and more.


Lockey Maisonneuve - 2018
    town, an adolescent girl is unwittingly handed a one-way ticket by her mother to allegedly "visit" her estranged father in Florida. Young and vulnerable, Lockey Maisonnueve has no idea she is being abandoned and sent to live with a vile and dangerous pedophile who would spend the next several years violently raping, abusing and mercilessly selling his daughter's body into childhood prostitution to other adult men. After being rescued by her naive, but well-intentioned, grandparents, her troubled life is further devastated by cancer and ravaged by the subsequent brutal murder of her mother, in which Lockey is briefly considered a suspect. "A Girl Raised by Wolves' is the inspirational memoir of a survivor of the darkest circumstances one can endure in a single lifetime and still emerge with a sense of humor and to defiantly proclaim "they didn't break me!"

Cutty, One Rock: Low Characters and Strange Places, Gently Explained


August Kleinzahler - 2004
    We witness scenes of passionate, even violent intensity that give rise to meditations on eros and literature, the solitariness of travel, and the poetics of place.These individual pieces, most of which first appeared in The London Review of Books and won an international cult following, are by turns "poignant, surreal, down home and lyrical, a mixture of qualities that inheres in his language with uncommon delicacy and effect" (Leonard Michaels). Together they make up an intellectual and emotional autobiography on the run. The book's final section, about Kleinzahler's adored, doomed older brother, is unforgettable, and since its appearance last year in the LRB, has already entered the literature as one of the most moving contemporary memoirs.

Early Morning: Remembering My Father, William Stafford


Kim Stafford - 2002
    His first major collection--Traveling Through the Dark--won the National Book Award. He published more than sixty-five volumes of poetry and prose and was Poetry Consultant to the Library of Congress-a position now known as the Poet Laureate. Before his death in 1993, he gave his son Kim the greatest gift and challenge: to be his literary executor.In Early Morning, Kim creates an intimate portrait of a father and son who shared many passions: archery, photography, carpentry, and finally, writing itself. But Kim also confronts the great paradox at the center of William Stafford's life. The public man, the poet who was always communicating with warmth and feeling-even with strangers-was capable of profound, and often painful, silence within the family. By piecing together a collage of his personal and family memories, and sifting through thousands of pages of his father's daily writing and poems, Kim illuminates a fascinating and richly lived life.

The Road Less Graveled (Kindle Single)


Wendy Laird - 2013
    <br><br>Part Tuscan idyll and part cautionary tale, Wendy Laird’s latest Kindle Single tells the flip-side story of expat existence, what it takes to make it happen, and how a life on a well-mapped trajectory can veer off course in the process. Laird’s beautiful prose and acerbic wit keep the book, if not her own agenda, on the right track.

Next Word, Better Word: The Craft of Writing Poetry


Stephen Dobyns - 2011
    Stephen Dobyns, author of the classic book on the beauty of poetry, Best Words, Best Order, moves into new terrain in this remarkable book. Bringing years of experience to bear on issues such as subject matter, the mechanics of poetry, and the revision process, Dobyns explores the complex relationship between writers and their work. From Philip Larkin to Pablo Neruda to William Butler Yeats, every chapter reveals useful lessons in these renowned poets' work. Both enlightening and encouraging, Next Word, Better Word demystifies a subtle art form and shows writers how to overcome obstacles in the creative process.

End Of The Road


Brian Keene - 2020
    I'm a writer by trade and a road warrior by heart. Neither of these things are wise career or life choices. The tolls add up.Over the last twenty years, things have changed. Book tours have changed, publishing has changed, bookselling has changed, conventions have changed, horror fiction—and the horror genre—have changed. I've changed, too.The only things that haven't changed are writing and the road. They stay the same. The words we type today are the past tomorrow. Everything is connected like the highways on a map are connected. This holds true for the history of our genre, as well.I rode into town twenty years ago. Now I'm riding out. You're all coming with me..."So begins Brian Keene's End of the Road—a memoir, travelogue, and post-Danse Macabre examination of modern horror fiction, the people who write it, and the world they live—and die—in. Exhilarating, emotional, heartfelt, and at times hilarious, End of the Road is a must-read for fans of the horror genre. Introduction by Gabino Iglesias.

17


Bill Drummond - 2008
    He references his own contributions to the canon of popular music, and he provides fascinating insider portraits of the industry and its protagonists. But above all, he questions our ideas of music and our attitude to sound, introducing us throughout this provocative and superbly written book to his current work, The17.