Arms Wide Open provides a window into the lives of young pregnant women struggling with the decision of making an adoption plan or becoming a single parent. It is a vital tool for couples considering open adoption. Mrs. Waters clearly outlines the emotional turmoil of the birth mothers and offers suggestions to help make an open adoption a positive experience for the child, the adoptive parents and the birth mother.

Jack and Meredith are non-identical twins; the only similarity between them is their lives rapidly falling apart. Jack’s high-flying career in advertising has crashed and burned. Meredith’s world is also crumbling – a decomposing yogurt in her fridge now a symbol of her failed marriage. Her children, Jemima and Luke, offer little support, too consumed with the worlds of online dating and amateur taxidermy. All their lives, Jack and Meredith believed their father to be dead. One day, a throwaway comment leads Jack to question this, but with their mother fading ever-deeper into the grip of dementia, answers are hard to come by. As revelations start to untangle, the twins soon learn that what you seek is not always what you find...

The author of The Blue Cotton Gown recounts living free and naturally against all odds—and discovering her true calling as a midwife—in this deeply moving memoir In her first, highly praised memoir, Patricia Harman told us the stories patients brought into her exam room, and her own story of struggling to help women as a nurse-midwife in medical practice with her husband—an OB/GYN—in Appalachia. Now, Patsy reaches back to the 1960s and 1970s, recounting how she learned to deliver babies and her youthful experiments with living a fully sustainable, natural life. Drawing heavily on her journals, Arms Wide Open goes back to a time of counter-culture idealism that the boomer generation remembers well. Patsy opens with stories of living in the wilds of Minnesota in a log cabin she and her lover build with their own hands, the only running water being the nearby streams. They set up beehives and give chase to a bear competing for the honey. Patsy gives birth and learns to help her friends deliver as naturally as possible. Weary of the cold and isolation, Patsy moves to a commune in West Virginia, where she becomes a self-taught midwife delivering babies in cabins and homes. Her stories sparkle with drama and intensity, but she wants to help more women than healthy hippie homesteaders. After a ten-year sojourn for professional training, Patsy and her husband return to Appalachia, where they set up a women's health practice. They deliver babies together—this time in hospitals—and care for a wide variety of gyn patients. They live in a lakeside contemporary home, though their hearts are still firmly implanted in nature. The obstetrical climate is changing. The Harmans' family is changing. The earth is changing—but Patsy's arms remain wide open to life and all it offers. Her memoir of living free and sustainably against all odds will be especially embraced by anyone who lived through the Vietnam War and commune era, and all those involved in the back-to-nature and natural-childbirth movements.

Sinner’s Creed is the uncensored memoir of Scott Stapp, Grammy Award–winning leader of the multiplatinum rock band CREED. During CREED’s decade of dominance and in the years following the band’s breakup, Scott struggled with drugs and alcohol, which led not only to a divorce, but also to a much-publicized suicide attempt in 2006. Now clean, sober, and in the midst of a highly successful solo career, Scott has finally come full circle—a turnaround he credits to his renewed faith in God. In Sinner's Creed, Scott shares his story for the first time—from his fundamentalist upbringing, the rise and fall of CREED, and his ongoing battle with addiction, the rediscovery of his faith, and the launch of his solo career. The result is a gripping memoir that is proof positive that God is always present in our lives, despite the colossal mess we sometimes make of them.

Sexually abused as a child, pregnant at 18 and forced to give up her baby for adoption, Judi Davidson refused to stay a victim for the rest of her life. By her mid-thirties, she was happily married and the owner of a successful business. But six years later Judi was raising five children alone - two boys diagnosed with congenital spinal muscular atrophy and confined to wheelchairs, and a set of healthy, energetic triplets. Knowing what it is to be vulnerable and at the mercy of others, Judi was determined that her own children would never lack a champion. Despite being told that her two older sons were unlikely to reach the age of five, over the years Judi has continually fought for them to receive the best medical treatment and education possible. Now aged 18 and 16, Ryan and Blake are outstanding students while their three younger siblings are supportive, caring teens, mature beyond their years and with talents of their own. In 2005 the family was invited to visit Professor Stephen Hawking at Oxford, a trip made financially possible both through Judi's hard work and donations from hundreds of New Zealanders wanting to support this deserving family. Arms Wide Open is the inspiring true story of a New Zealand mother's battle to bring up five wonderful children on her own, despite many challenges.