In this warm and honest memoir, celebrated academic Njoki Wane shares her journey from her parents' small coffee farm in Kenya, where she helped her mother in the fields as a child, to her current work as a professor at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto. Moving smoothly between time and place, Wane uses memories, painful and tender, to show how her early lessons and the support given by her family allowed her to succeed as a woman of colour in the academy, and to later lift up her students facing their own difficult journeys.

How Do You Forgive a Parent Who Has Failed You? One summer, Melissa Cistaro’s mother stepped into her baby-blue Dodge Dart and drove away, leaving behind Melissa and her brothers. Rarely seeing their mother as they were growing up, they blamed themselves for her leaving, turning to each other for support and seeking out often destructive ways to cope with living without their mom. Decades later, with children of her own, Melissa finds herself in Olympia, Washington, as her mother is dying. She has just days to find out what happened that summer and to confront the unthinkable fear that a “leaving gene” might be lying dormant inside of her. She knew she came from a long line of mothers who left their children. But when Melissa stumbles across a folder titled “Letters Never Sent” tucked away in her mother’s filing cabinet, she begins to feel the wreckage of her mother’s painful journey, before and after she abandoned her family. Alternating between Melissa’s tumultuous coming-of-age and her mother’s final days, Without My Mother is a haunting yet ultimately uplifting story of one woman’s quest to discover how our parents’ choices impact our own and how we can survive those choices to forge our own paths.

An innovative memoir connecting ideas of grief, memory, and animals to illustrate the importance of storytelling. When his mother died, Timothy C. Baker discovered that there was almost no record of her existence, and no stories that were his to tell: the only way to bring her back was through reading. Reading My Mother Back is a genre-bending memoir that explores a life marked by trauma, illness, religion, and abuse through a focus on the books Baker and his mother shared. The book combines accounts of rereading childhood classics with true and apocryphal stories of a quiet life, marked by great sorrow and great joy. The book is about grief and memory and how our childhood reading shapes the way we see the world; it’s about loneliness and the search for belonging; it’s about how ordinary lives are transfigured by storytelling. Moving from accounts of American evangelical communities to kidney failure, from literary criticism to psychoanalysis, and from guilt to love, Baker shows how literature provides a framework for understanding our experiences, and offers a way of connecting with everything we have lost. The book illustrates how children’s animal stories bring us into a love of the world, and how acts of rereading become a way not of assuaging grief, but of bringing the past and present together. Reading My Mother Back offers a bold and personal view of why the stories we read and share matter so much. And there are bunnies.

This book will help better understand the different relationships with ones family, friends and supervisors in life. To understand that there are problems that happen without a purpose and one must deal with one situation after the other and still keep positive to continue your travels through life.

Barbara was born in unusual circumstances. She had her first encounter with the spirit world at the age of nine. She tells about many accidents in which she believes someone from the spirit world helped her survive. She has lived a life of very strange events that may cause some people to disbelieve. This book is of true events. Barbara tells you of a very rare medal of our Blessed Mother Mary, which came into her life. Read about her love for her mother, and her mother's fight with breast cancer, her own bout with cancer, her near fatal heart attack, and how faith got her through. It is a must read for any woman looking to find how to deal with those issues. Barbara, A Life of Miracles, will have every woman talking about these stories over lunch.

At the beginning of the morning, one’s life often feels relaxed until the daily drag of life negates even the former birds singing, where one is often forced into some other way of living and thinking—the way I’ve done just for the prospect of freedom to ruin the second life after freedom. Nevertheless, I can still for a short time revel in my deliberations and creations that reflect the incorporation of the lost life, the same way a DVD player reflects some intricacies of science to someone as starved and appreciative as we might create a DVD-like creativity. For this writer who is also the hero, my job must show how what one seemingly honored in life but disappeared by the dynamics of life was real. So real that others scoffed at my essential feelings, defying my relative paltriness in relation to those former illusory, illustrious lives facing the end of times—the apex—where much is lost by everyone’s anxiety that even excludes my alchemical process. A process created by someone so possessed by his former grandeur he must reconcile his worth by the laws of the reverse and the inverse. So we begin my last book the way James Fenimore Cooper couldn’t with The Deerslayer by using myself as the model for my hero who finds redemption by discovering himself through his living travail and Spartan tenacity. A hero whose only redeeming trait is the freedom that he radiates by some mystic connection to the birds singing just before doomsday’s eerie rings.