by Kim McLarin (2007)
Grace Jefferson is an educated and accomplished modern woman, a child of the Civil Rights dream, and she knows it. But after a series of rattling personal transitions, she finds herself in a new house in a new city and in a new career for which she feels dangerously unsuited: a stay-at-home mom. Caught between the only two models of mothering she has ever known--a sharecropping grandmother who abandoned her children to save herself and a mother who sacrificed all to save her kids--Grace struggles to embrace her new role, hoping to find a middle ground. But as the days pass and the pressures mount, Grace catches herself in small acts of abandonment--speeding up on neighborhood walks, closing doors with the children on one side and her on the other--that she fears may foretell a future she is powerless to prevent. Or perhaps one she secretly seeks.--From publisher description.
Anna Ralph
In the time when he was still a collection of movements and mannerisms I observed from a distance, when he had no history, no future that I could guess, that is the time I'd have back. Then, he was a boy, like me, though nothing like me. Perhaps it was that, the differences which drew me to him.
Craig English, James Rapson
Do you (or does someone you know)...--Apologize frequently or for things you are not responsible for?--Get preoccupied with what other people think of you?--Become unhappy when your partner isn't happy?--Feel worried or fretful so often it seems normal?--Often not know what you want?--Constantly second-guess yourself? Chronic Niceness affects multitudes, causing severe anxiety and depression, crippling self-esteem, and undermining and destroying relationshipsAnxious to Please reveals the primary psychological cause of Chronic Niceness--Anxious Attachment. Anxious Attachment drives the Nice Person to accommodate, acquiesce and avoid conflict. Nice People take what they're given rather than asking for what they want, often sacrificing relationship, careers and their own integrity.Anxious to Please presents seven powerful practices designed to bring about: resilient self-esteem; a happier and calmer emotional life; a reality-based optimism for the future; fulfilling sex; and satisfying relationships.
Patricia A. McKillip
The Riddle-Master of Hed: In seeking the answer to the riddle of the three stars on his forehead and the three stars on the enchanted harp and sword, Morgon, Prince of Hed, goes ultimately to the High One, himself. Heir of Sea and Fire: When Morgon, Prince of Hed, fails to return from his journey to the High One, his fiancée, accompanied by his sister and a friend, sets out to find him. Harpist in the Wind: In the midst of conflict and unrest the Prince of Hed solves the puzzle of his future when he learns to harp the wind, discovers who the shape changers are, and understands his own relationship to Deth, harpist of the wizard Ohm.
George E. Vaillant
In our current era of holy terror, passionate faith has come to seem like a present danger. Writers such as Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens have been happy to throw the baby out with the bathwater and declare that the danger is in religion itself. God, Hitchens writes, is not great.But man, according to George E. Vaillant, M.D., is great. In Spiritual Evolution, Dr. Vaillant lays out a brilliant defense not of organized religion but of man's inherent spirituality. Our spirituality, he shows, resides in our uniquely human brain design and in our innate capacity for emotions like love, hope, joy, forgiveness, and compassion, which are selected for by evolution and located in a different part of the brain than dogmatic religious belief. Evolution has made us spiritual creatures over time, he argues, and we are destined to become even more so. Spiritual Evolution makes the scientific case for spirituality as a positive force in human evolution, and he predicts for our species an even more loving future.Vaillant traces this positive force in three different kinds of "evolution": the natural selection of genes over millennia, of course, but also the cultural evolution within recorded history of ideas about the value of human life, and the development of spirituality within the lifetime of each individual. For thirty-five years, Dr. Vaillant directed Harvard's famous longitudinal study of adult development, which has followed hundreds of men over seven decades of life. The study has yielded important insights into human spirituality, and Dr. Vaillant has drawn on these and on a range of psychological research, behavioral studies, and neuroscience, and on history, anecdote, and quotation to produce a book that is at once a work of scientific argument and a lyrical meditation on what it means to be human. Spiritual Evolution is a life's work, and it will restore our belief in faith as an essential human striving.