Day in and day out, I saw young adults making horrible choices that altered their lives forever. They didnt realize what power they had to control their lives. Even at a young age, they had more power than they gave themselves credit. They can alter their destiny for good or bad. It is all up to their attitudes and their choices. This book is intended to help people 12 years of age and older work through the difficulties in their life. It is an eye opening book of true stories that is designed to help people realize the impact of their choices. Their choices not only impact themselves, but others around them. I wish I read a book similar to this book, when I was younger. It would have helped me put things into perspective!
Stacey Dash didn't have the ideal American childhood. Growing up in the South Bronx, her friends were the hustlers, hookers, and gang members who struggled in the face of futility, who sold drugs instead of living on food stamps, who settled matters with fists, knives, and guns because it seemed their only option, who stood tall against broken dreams. Dash's rough upbringing shaped the rest of her life—her relationships, her politics, even her faith. She has seen how conservative and liberal policies play out in the real world, and her experiences have made her the proud conservative she is today. That's why Stacey Dash, a Fox News contributor and Hollywood actress best known for starring in the 1995 classic Clueless, is now telling her story. Amidst all the heated racial rhetoric and the divisive language that flows from T.V., the Internet, self-appointed black spokespeople, and even President Obama, Dash feels compelled to speak out and say something true about race, politics, and America.
Synchronicity! "You leave on a Journey to write a book and you end up living the answer to the question you thought you were asking."How do you go about documenting YOUR "Journey of Discovery"? Paul Fisette left on an eight month tour around Canada and the United States living in his RV and came home with the answer to that age-old question, "What is the meaning of life?"But he didn't "just" find an answer; he actually "lived" the answer!His story, documented here, is three parts travelogue, two parts autobiography, one part storytelling, and one part theorizing. This recipe for arriving at an answer that has baffled the minds of many great thinkers from Plato to Einstein leaves us with a question that we must all be wondering.Can it be true?The only way to decide is to read this informative, witty, inquiring, emotionally charged, and inspirational story!
During the civil rights movement, epic battles for justice were fought in the streets, at lunch counters, and in the classrooms of the American South. Just as many battles were waged, however, in the hearts and minds of ordinary white southerners whose world became unrecognizable to them. Jason Sokol’s vivid and unprecedented account of white southerners’ attitudes and actions, related in their own words, reveals in a new light the contradictory mixture of stubborn resistance and pragmatic acceptance–as well as the startling and unexpected personal transformations–with which they greeted the enforcement of legal equality.
In her provocative new book Rednecks, Queers, and Country Music, Nadine Hubbs looks at how class and gender identity play out in one of America’s most culturally and politically charged forms of popular music. Skillfully weaving historical inquiry with an examination of classed cultural repertoires and close listening to country songs, Hubbs confronts the shifting and deeply entangled workings of taste, sexuality, and class politics. In Hubbs’s view, the popular phrase "I’ll listen to anything but country" allows middle-class Americans to declare inclusive "omnivore" musical tastes with one crucial exclusion: country, a music linked to low-status whites. Throughout Rednecks, Queers, and Country Music, Hubbs dissects this gesture, examining how provincial white working people have emerged since the 1970s as the face of American bigotry, particularly homophobia, with country music their audible emblem. Bringing together the redneck and the queer, Hubbs challenges the conventional wisdom and historical amnesia that frame white working folk as a perpetual bigot class. With a powerful combination of music criticism, cultural critique, and sociological analysis of contemporary class formation, Nadine Hubbs zeroes in on flawed assumptions about how country music models and mirrors white working-class identities. She particularly shows how dismissive, politically loaded middle-class discourses devalue country’s manifestations of working-class culture, politics, and values, and render working-class acceptance of queerness invisible. Lucid, important, and thought-provoking, this book is essential reading for students and scholars of American music, gender and sexuality, class, and pop culture.
In this life, we will endure trials, tribulations, and mistakesaEUR"our own mistakes or the mistakes of others, which affect our lives. This is my story. This is your story! Though we can't control certain circumstances that happen throughout our lives, we can, however, endure, fight, take responsibility for our own outcome, and conquer what was meant to tear us down. Will you accept the challenges with grace? The trials with faith? And the tribulations, knowing that God is using these to refine you, to make you stronger, to help you live your best life now, and to help you become all He created you to be? God created you and me for an abundant life, a life honoring and pleasing to Him. Don't just fit in when all along you were born to stand out!
Yes to Beyond is written with its message for you hidden in the space between the lines and beyond the words. Get ready for a trip that seems to be orchestrated by something or someone that is you at some level, but not all aspects of it are consciously known by you yet. Come aboard to discover more of your true self as you recognize who you are instead of who you thought you were. In these changing times, every human being is changing, whether it is recognized or not. Through your free choice, search these pages for clues as to what “changing” really means. Don’t fasten your seat belt so you will be free to move about!
In an “eye-opening memoir” (People) “as beautiful as it is discomfiting” (The New Yorker), award-winning writer Apricot Irving untangles her youth on a missionary compound in Haiti. Apricot Irving grew up as a missionary’s daughter in Haiti. Her father was an agronomist, a man who hiked alone into the deforested hills to preach the gospel of trees. Her mother and sisters spent their days in the confines of the hospital compound they called home. As a child, this felt like paradise to Irving; as a teenager, it became a prison. Outside of the walls of the missionary enclave, Haiti was a tumult of bugle-call bus horns and bicycles that jangled over hard-packed dirt, road blocks and burning tires triggered by political upheaval, the clatter of rain across tin roofs, and the swell of voices running ahead of the storm. Poignant and explosive, Irving weaves a portrait of a missionary family that is unflinchingly honest: her father’s unswerving commitment to his mission, her mother’s misgivings about his loyalty, the brutal history of colonization. Drawing from research, interviews, and journals—her parents’ as well as her own—this memoir in many voices evokes a fractured family finding their way to kindness through honesty. Told against the backdrop of Haiti’s long history of intervention, it grapples with the complicated legacy of those who wish to improve the world, while bearing witness to the defiant beauty of an undefeated country. A lyrical meditation on trees and why they matter, loss and privilege, love and failure. The Gospel of Trees is a “lush, emotional debut...A beautiful memoir that shows how a family altered by its own ambitious philanthropy might ultimately find hope in their faith and love for each other, and for Haiti.” (Publishers Weekly, starred review).
The book Abiding In His Grace is for those who are seeking God's help to overcome life's challenges. We all will endure grief, illness, and heartache in our lives and seek comfort and encouragement. When we are honest with our feelings, we can release them to God and leave them at the cross, where His grace and mercy abide. Jesus provides all we will ever need as long as we abide in Him. His grace is sufficient.
