A Purposeful Life
A Purposeful Life is the inspiring personal story of author, Agitu Wodajo, detailing her life and extraordinary accomplishments growing up in the 60s in Ethiopia, studying and working in both Ethiopia and the United States, her services to others while raising five well accomplished children as a single mom, and traveling the world. The author takes readers through her various tribulations and the incredible perseverance, optimism, and faith she sustained through it all in order to find and heed her call to empower underprivileged women to become self-reliant and bring a positive change to their family lives and their communities.
Better Lucky Than Good : From Outlaw Biker to Airline Pilot, And Beyond
The impossible is possible! Fly with the author on an inspiring and improbable journey as he seeks to build a better life despite all the odds being against him. Book one in a series.
Brain Storm: A Life in Pieces
She lived with these, and over thirty other parts of her mind, no less real than you and I, throughout endless periods of deepest depression, paralyzing panic, thoughts of suicide, a revolving door of psychotherapists. A harbinger of the coming storm, darkness followed her everywhere, from infancy to a career as a renowned, openly gay OB/GYN in New York City. A loving wife and three remarkable kids completed the façade while inside, her mind was a raging tempest of terror and rage. A fierce will to survive sustained her until, at long last, a gifted therapist gave a name to her unrelenting psychic pain: Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID). In Brain Storm, Dr. Shelley Kolton tells the story of a childhood marked by unimag- inable abuse and the distinct parts her brain created to hold the horrific memories, protecting her until she was strong enough to let them go.
Can I Come HOME Now?
In this moving and painful memoir of growing up from age five to adulthood, the author paints a sad and all too familiar story of early sexual abuse from men whom she should have been able to trust that evolves into a shattered sense of self-worth, and ultimately her own dysfunctional and abusive marriage. The story relates how little Barbara came to be vulnerable to such trauma after the break-up of her family and being shuttled among various, not always willing relatives. She details the highly effective and shrewd tactics predators use to keep their victims under their total control. The unrelenting theme throughout is her constant longing for her mother’s elusive love, always just beyond her reach. This is not a story of self-pity but a story of surviving the odds and creating the life you want.
Celtic Journeys
The historic and scenic richness of the Celtic countries come to life through encounters with the modern keepers of the celebrated folklore. This collection of journeys to Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and other Celtic regions, seeks out the places that inspire the spiritual and cultural origins of the memorable songs and tales that stir the soul. Join the journey to these magical lands and beyond.
Grace for Grant: A Journey with an Old Soul
Why I Wrote Grace for Grant: A Journey with An Old Soul After several years of navigating through a fog amidst friends, family, acquaintances and strangers, I came to a point where I knew I needed to wake up and be a part of society again. A person can’t roam the earth in a cloud pretending they’re relevant when they can hardly put one foot in front of the other. Dinosaurs had better survival instincts in their last days than I could muster. They say year three can be the toughest, and by Christmas I was so near the bottom I could touch the rock with my toe. After having tried different therapy options, I finally moved to Neurolinguistic Programming, changing my brain patterns to move toward positive thoughts rather than negative ones. As year four pressed in on me, along with a pandemic, I could no longer ignore the last request of Grant Miller Galvin to write his story.
Green Zone Diary: A Diplomat’s War Story
Green Zone Diary: A Diplomat’s War Story is a vivid insider’s account by a State Department Foreign Service Officer posted in the Middle East during the early 2000s. Centered on Baghdad’s Green Zone, Madsen takes us behind the scenes of a war effort with heartwarming and heartbreaking honesty. Different from the military accounts of war, it chronicles the perspective of one civilian, very junior, State Department official whose mundane bureaucratic duties in Iraq all too often alternated with tragedy. The reader is offered a glimpse of war-time diplomatic tasks we rarely stop to think about: signing death certificates of people you admire or coordinating a return of a minor who inexplicably found himself in Iraq. With the background noise of guns, Madsen reveals the contrasts of surviving the close quarters living and the amenities (or lack thereof) provided in the Green Zone and the hardships of being a woman predominantly among men. Separated from the chaos of the war only by her office walls, Madsen struggles to find her place and safety among the soldiers and private contractors she swore to serve alongside.
HIGH Confessions of a Cannabis Addict
The most laugh-filled, action-packed recovery memoir imaginable but you never imagined reading one as raunchy, wild, and, entertaining as this one! What delights me the most are his unflinchingly honest and vastly amusing sexual adventures and misadventures (Msventures?) because he doesn’t coat them with a veneer of feigned regret or faux embarrassment. Burl Barer, Award winning true crime author.
Journey of a Twelve -Year -Old, To a Woman of God : Limited Edition
“Life is like standing in quicksand when you don’t have faith! But the Creator always provides.” The story of a girl’s journey to adulthood, guided by family and faith as; she navigates life’s struggles. Discover how she overcame grief, trauma, and challenges to her morality to emerge the triumphant woman she is today. The Beginning Journey from childhood to a woman of God delivers a valuable message to us all: there is courage to be found in turmoil and strength to be gained in adversity. A lifetime of lessons, wisdom, and observations, this intriguing story will keep you firmly gripped and help you forge your path through life with faith. The lessons learned on this journey will ring true to readers of all ages. As a man, woman, or discovering faith in God yourself, you will find the Bible verses helpful, inspiring, and motivational. They are a blueprint to help you journey through life’s many challenges.
Keep Your Fork! Something Sweet is Coming
Keep Your Fork: Something Sweet Is Coming is an inspiring and motivating guide for anyone experiencing a challenge, whether it’s addiction, cancer, sexuality, depression, long-term readjustments from the global pandemic, or trauma. Chapter by chapter, Bill Kavanagh offers concrete help using his personal experiences and professional training to lead readers in examining their past, present, and future through exercises, writing prompts, and meditations.There is always light, always hope, and always love. If you are currently struggling with a challenge in your life, keep your fork. Something in this book will lead you to a sweet dessert.
Lifeline to a Soul
The Victories and Challenges One Man Faced as a First-Time Teacher in the Strange World of Prison Life After devoting half of his lifetime transforming his start-up business into a multi-million dollar industry leader, author John McLaughlin set out in a new direction: to teach what he had learned to others. Due to a lack of teaching experience, his only job offer was to teach entrepreneurship to prisoners at a minimum-security camp in North Carolina. John gradually builds an effective program until a scandal involving prison officials blindsides his progress and threatens to bring his teaching career to an unceremonious end.
Me and My Shadow: Memoirs of a Cancer Survivor
Me and My Shadow – Memoirs of a Cancer Survivor is a brutally honest account of one teenager’s struggle to understand and deal with the most feared diagnosis known to society: cancer.
At 18 years of age, John Walker Pattison was thrust onto a roller coaster ride of emotional turbulence – his innocence cruelly stripped from him; his fate woven into the tapestry of life.
After years of failed chemotherapy and radiotherapy treatments that ravaged his physical frame and almost destroyed his psychological stability – his parents were told that he would not survive. Yet, today, he is one of the longest surviving cancer patients in the UK.
Eight years after his unexpected recovery, the news that all parents fear, his daughter is diagnosed with terminal leukaemia. Yet like her father, she too would defy the odds and go on to become an international swimmer.
Pattison turned his life full circle and became a cancer nurse specialist at the same hospital that made his diagnosis decades earlier. He prescribes chemotherapy and cares for individuals with the same cancers experienced by both him and his daughter.
Throughout his journey, Pattison’s inspirations were the space rock legends, Hawkwind. He would get to play on stage with his heroes at the Donnington Festival in 2007.
More significantly, he found solace throughout his cancer journey in the history and spirituality of the Lakota Sioux Nation. In 2018, he would spend time on Pine Ridge Indian Reservation with the indigenous people of South Dakota. The same people who, unknowingly, supported him through life’s greatest challenge: cancer.
Opening the Door: My Journey Through Anorexia to Full Recovery
My memoir describes my gut-wrenching journey of recovery from anorexia nervosa from a young girl to entering treatment at the age of thirty-five to full recovery many years later. My memoir is broken down into five sections: History, Treatment, Recovery, Relapse, and Full Recovery. My recovery was not linear. It had ups and downs and twists and turns. I uncover the steps I personally needed to make to reach full recovery. These effective principles include food exposure, feeling my feelings without judgment, strengthening my healthy self, slowing down, practicing mindfulness, building a healthy relationship with food, connecting to others, and creating an identity apart from my body, shape, or weight. Recovery was the hardest path of my life, but I did not give up and now I am a woman without an eating disorder. Now fully recovered, my passion is to write, to inspire others and to help people with eating disorder recovery through mental health counseling and eating disorder coaching. Hopefully this memoir will inspire you to take one step towards recovery and finally have the life you dream of. It’s possible, and there is a life waiting for you on the other side.
Paris Blue: A Memoir of First Love
PARIS, 1976: Twenty-year-old American student Julie Scolnik arrives in the City of Light to study the flute when, from across a sea of faces in the chorus of the Orchestre de Paris, she is drawn to Luc, a striking (married) French lawyer in the bass section. This deeply moving tale of an ebullient young American and a reserved Frenchman will transport readers to the cafés, streets, and concert halls of Paris in the late seventies, and, spanning three decades, evolves from deep romance to sudden heartbreak, and finally to a lifelong quest for answers to release hidden immutable grief. A deeply felt, bittersweet reflection on how youthful passion changes you and clings to you forever, this is a story that has embedded itself in Julie’s heart and mind for forty years.
Permission to Land
I gave myself permission to step out of the darkness my life had become and learn to find my own light. I gave myself permission to take back control of my life and learn to live into my purpose, find meaning and joy, learn to love myself, and become the person, the mother, the daughter, the teacher, the creative visionary I had always secretly known I was meant to be. My hope for you is that by me feeling safe to reveal my processes and my healing journey you will feel safe to reveal and share yours. As I lay bare my own awakening process you will be able to start to envision yours. My path might be different from yours, but the humanity of my feelings and experiences, my struggles and traumas, my healing and salvation are things we all share. We all experience these feelings and can learn from each other’s journeys. This is the place where empathy is born. Join me on this lifetime adventure.
Portal Tears
Portal Tears transport you out of one place and into another. In this transformative memoir, Lisa Ceizyk takes you on her journey through healing as she learns to love and live life in a totally new way. When Dr. Death gave her the shocking news at 33-years-old that she was destined to die young, she made it her mission to prove his fateful prediction wrong. She endured 6 years of infertility treatments including 11 embryo transfers on the path to the birth of her baby girl. She refused to let that little girl face a motherless future.
Red Card: A Bet You Can Win!
Astory of redemption/ recovery, and hope. An ex professional footballers journey through gambling addiction, and how he lost everything but recoevred to become an inpsirational advocate and speaker, educating young people on gambling harms.
ROSCO The Fastest Aussie on Earth
Rosco McGlashan is a legend of Australian motor sport and drag racing. He is also the current Australian land speed record holder. His early years were tough. He spent time in state-run homes and remand centers, eventually leaving home and school at 12. He then drives up north in Western Australia, upping his age from 12 to 16, to find work and fund his racing. He fought everyone and everything and, at 17, ended up in prison and solitary confinement. Once released, his salvation comes through his love of speed and raw horsepower. He focuses his fighting spirit on racing and going very fast. His V8 drag bike and jet dragsters take him from Perth and WA all over the world to race. He meets some incredible people, leading to some amazing adventures and tales that will leave you speechless. He crashes a car at nearly 600 mph and walks away. He also clinically dies on an operating table when another car he was racing went off a mountain road. He was revived and went on to break many more motor racing and land speed records. He meets mass murderers and world leaders, then casually chats with the Dalai Lama. Eventually, Rosco turns his attention to capturing the Australian and world land speed records, a goal he set himself at age 12. This motorsport and land speed quest takes him to Russia, where he is kidnapped by the Russian Mafia when trying to buy two MIG jet fighter engines and fights his way out. In 1994 he beats Donald Campbell’s Australian land speed record. Rosco and the Aussie Invader team are now putting the finishing touches to their latest record-breaker, the world’s fastest and most powerful car, Aussie Invader 5R. This car has 200,000 horsepower, the equivalent of 200 Formula One cars! You won’t be able to pause Rosco: The Fastest Aussie on Earth. This book is an incredibly inspiring, moving, and motivational story of guts, grit, and determination. Quitting is not in this man’s vocabulary.
Saving Grace at Guantanamo Bay: A Memoir of a Citizen Warrior
U.S. Army Reserve Captain Montgomery Granger found himself the ranking Army Medical Department officer in a joint military operation like no other before it – taking care of terrorists and murderers just months after the horrors of September 11, 2001. Granger and his fellow Reservists end up running the Joint Detainee Operations Group (JDOG) at Guantanamo Bay’s infamous Camp X-Ray. In this moving memoir, Granger writes about his feelings of guilt, leaving his family and job back home, while in Guantanamo, he faces a myriad of torturous emotions and self-doubt, at once hating the inmates he is nonetheless duty bound to care for and protect. Through long distance love, and much heartache, Granger finds a way to keep his sanity and dignity. Saving Grace at Guantanamo Bay is his story.
Shedding Lies: Living Beyond Childhood Trauma
This book is a must read for any adult who has experienced trauma and is willing/wanting to work through it. The road to recovery isn’t easy and it isn’t pleasant, but you don’t have to do it alone. Filled with insights and her own experiences, this book sheds a light on how to move forward.
Sky Ranch: Living on a Remote Ranch in Idaho
SKY RANCH is a memoir about a naive suburban woman who struggles to navigate an industrial farm and its commercial cattle enterprise. She survives dangerous white-outs during Rocky Mountain blizzards as well as terrifying flash floods in early spring. She learns to duck hunt, fly fish, and row a drift boat. SKY RANCH appeals to readers interested in Western culture, cattle and row-crop farming, hunting and fishing, and those who only dream of living on a ranch. It takes the reader on an exciting ride of terror, drama, and humor, giving us a look at what goes on behind the scenes at a rural ranch, many miles from civilization.
Survival: From a broken childhood to PhD
Born illegitimate in north east England in 1944, John Fahey was sent to his father’s parents in western Ireland. John’s parents later married and brought back to England when he was nine, he was continually beaten and battered by his father, who called him a bastard, throughout his teenage years. Surviving on his memories of Ireland, his trust in his Catholic faith, the help of kind people and relatives, and his love of chemistry, John went through major crises, feeling lost and alone in 1960s England and Scotland, he took on challenges, fought back against despair, and struggled with his sexual identity under legal intolerance. But determined to find a better life he went to university and finally to America.
This is a story of surviving against the odds.
Taming the Dragon
Following are examples of the 75+, five-star Amazon reviews: “From the earliest kindergarten days when family and society define boyhood too narrowly to allow Gary’s vibrant spirit to express fully, through the awkward discoveries of teenage years, and into the higher stakes dilemmas of adulthood, Gary reveals a life of passion, love, addiction, pain and joy. A life that is a quest for true freedom that inspires me to examine my own life for blockers that limit my joy.” “Gary tells his story in a straightforward and compelling way, with exceptional clarity about himself and his heart. He has the courage to look honestly at himself and do the hard work that is necessary to be healthy and happy. Without apology, he talks about the inner demons he had to fight, including a sex addiction that isn’t widely discussed in our society, but is a real and potentially destructive force in the lives of many people. His book is a tribute to the eventual rewards that are realized when a person looks unflinchingly at his own truth and works hard, not giving up on himself in order to realize his dream of being whole and happy. Inspiring to anyone who wants to live a wholehearted life.”
The Luna Moth Papers
Shortly after graduating from high school, David Cavagnaro began a correspondence with his 1957 high school freshman English teacher, Katherine Martin. Thus began a 20-year sojourn of mutual mirroring of life lessons, personal philosophies, and creative experience that was influenced by everything from the wordly-the tumultuous 1960s, the tragedy of the Vietnam War, David’s conscientious objector appeal to the U.S Supreme Court, crises in education, the civil rights movement, the drug years, and the moon landing-to the very personal. David was in and out of marriages (which Kay already had been). They were both writing books. Relationships, raising children, evaluating life styles, the process of aging, the loss of loved ones, and especially sharing their creative lives, all become grist for their mutual mill. At the end of their correspondence, Kay was 76, looking over a life, the same age. David is now, doing the same, exploring also his own life experience with the written word itself. For them both, this was a “love affair” of the most noble kind, a sharing of words of the heart, a full-circle inter-generational meeting of heart, mind, and spirit.
THE REJECT BENCH
The Reject Bench…
In June, 1961, the Morgan family moved from their little house in a blue collar neighborhood in Upland, California to a bigger and better house in Claremont, five miles away. Jim Morgan had just completed his freshman year, and he was not happy about leaving his Upland friends, who claimed he was moving to Snob City. But after nearly a full year of solitary lunches at his new school, he finally made a couple of friends, and over the next two years, other transfer students found their way to their group, a group that occupied a bench that one of them christened the Reject Bench.
Venus Pluto : Letters to Lost Lovers
This book is a memoir of past and present relationships and what they taught me, how they transformed me. The lens of astrology and astrocartography was the impetus for transformation each and every time,w ether in Ireland, Italy or the USA. These relationships continue to transform me, even in Portugal, where I now live.
When Your Family Says No
In the wake of ex-communication, at age 25, Laya Steinberg was abandoned by every member of her family and every person who filled her childhood memories. When Your Family Says No is a story through the eyes of a young girl who falls in love with a non-Jewish man, violating centuries of tradition and Jewish law. As Laya chooses love over religious traditions, she wakes up to a new world of independence and freedom, where she must risk losing everything she has ever known to become the woman she was meant to be. This memoir details a story of love, passion, interfaith marriage, and family betrayal. For anyone who has abandoned for stepping outside their family’s expectations, Laya’s story reminds us of the beautiful and unexpected turns life can take us if we are brave enough to take the helm of our own truth,