We all experience emotional pain. Whether it’s from ongoing relational wounds or past hurts, this pain can threaten to destroy your marriage, family, and your life. But what if there was a way to reach past that pain and experience total healing and restoration for you and those you love? In From Pain to Paradise, Karen Evans takes you on an autobiographical journey through the hurts of her past. Through her vulnerable testimony, she’ll show you how to restore relationships, heal broken marriages, and gain victory over emotional pain through the power of the Word of God.
The acclaimed Nobel Prize winner challenges our most fiercely held beliefs as she weaves folklore and history, memory and myth into an unforgettable meditation on race, religion, gender, and a far-off past that is ever present—in prose that soars with the rhythms, grandeur, and tragic arc of an epic poem. “They shoot the white girl first. With the rest they can take their time.” So begins Toni Morrison’s Paradise, which opens with a horrifying scene of mass violence and chronicles its genesis in an all-black small town in rural Oklahoma. Founded by the descendants of freed slaves and survivors in exodus from a hostile world, the patriarchal community of Ruby is built on righteousness, rigidly enforced moral law, and fear. But seventeen miles away, another group of exiles has gathered in a promised land of their own. And it is upon these women in flight from death and despair that nine male citizens of Ruby will lay their pain, their terror, and their murderous rage. “A fascinating story, wonderfully detailed. . . . The town is the stage for a profound and provocative debate.” —Los Angeles Times
Marriage was meant to be a healing journey to Paradise. Teaching how-to's to thrive (not just survive), Evans' straightforward and humorous style helps readers realize that Paradise in marriage is not only God's intent, but that it's truly attainable.
The Tinys are sent back to the nursery, as Professor Lemans and Evan clean up from the catastrophic accident. Baby animals, new activities and a restored Paradise keep everything exciting for a time.Entering adolescence, the Tinys discover that even in a perfect world with only two rules, human misunderstandings, envy and pride can undermine happiness and ruin friendships. As the Professor and Evan attempt to showcase Paradise to their colleagues, will suffering and mortality turn the world against this project? And what happens when some Tinys continue to use their new-found knowledge in destructive ways?
Jens Naumann, a typical energetic young man of 17 had just moved out of his parent's home in Northern British Columbia, moving into a railway camp as an employee with the British Columbia Railway. All goes well as Jens enjoys his new found freedom, treasuring his driver's license and its associated freedom of travel. Then on a wintry day in 1981, fate rears its ugly head and strikes him blind in his left eye. Jens quickly rearranges his life to accommodate his new found fear - that of losing his remaining eye now that the true vulnerability of his eyesight is revealed. As his life continues onwards despite the initial readjustment, he finds ultimate happiness in his new marriage to his young wife Lorri, and just when life stands at its threshold of paradise exploring fatherhood along with the beauty of travel and thrill, his worst nightmare becomes reality not once, but twice in the most bizarre series of unforeseen incidents of bad luck; as Jens is totally blinded with no foreseeable chance of seeing again according to the best medical experts. Jens tries his best to adjust to this unwanted situation, exploring conventional methods of rehabilitation to live with blindness, as well as using imaginative, totally unheard - of activities in order to pass his time in a hope of someday being able to see again despite all the odds stacked against him. Close to the turn of the century, Jens unexpectedly receives news of an American Medical Device Engineer, Dr. William H. Dobelle, inviting blind adults as patients for his newly developed artificial vision system designed to provide limited vision via visual cortex stimulation. Dr. Dobelle claims that his system has a good chance in functioning based on previous experimenting with volunteers, at the same time classifying the surgical procedure as minor. The system and its related components is complicated; consisting of not only the implants, but a series of "electrical sockets" protruding from the patients head to which an array of computer boxes and stimulator hardware is connected and worn by the patient. Jens is determined to be one of the patients, regardless of the remoteness of the chance of being one out of literally millions of blind people in the World possibly lining up to have this procedure in hopes of ending their blindness for once and for all. To his absolute surprise, Jens is accepted as the first patient for this procedure and slowly builds a relationship with Dr. Dobelle as Jens overcomes obvious barriers of raising enough money for the very expensive procedure, as well as fighting the challenges of relentless forces working against him for his involvement in the Dobelle vision project. Armed with preconceived ideas of how a research institute should be run, Jens travels overseas for the various stages of the procedure, only to find the most astonishing facts of what goes on in the heart of a renowned medical research institute. Not only is Jens looking at the workings of the Dobelle Institute from the view of a patient, but in short time Jens is hired by the firm as Patient Representative, providing further exploration yet on the inner most details concerning a research company and its treatment of the 15 additional implanted patients. Throughout the book, Jens describes the devastation, exhilaration, disappointment, elation, and confusion that attempts at sight recovery, medical intervention, media propaganda, and ethical boundaries conjure in the most illustrative intensity. The manner in which the book ends is most indescribable; one could view it as the final straw, the beginning of a new era, the curse of the unforgiven, the sadness of a crushing reality, the beginning of a good job left unfinished; or that of the birth of a new expert compelled to unleash the new found knowledge for the whole World to thrive. Just as many questions are answered, many more yet are opened and left so far undiscovered. Search for Paradise is ce
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER • From the award-winning, best-selling author of the classic A Little Life—a bold, brilliant novel spanning three centuries and three different versions of the American experiment, about lovers, family, loss and the elusive promise of utopia. A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: VOGUE • ESQUIRE • NPR • GOODREADS To Paradise is a fin de siècle novel of marvelous literary effect, but above all it is a work of emotional genius. The great power of this remarkable novel is driven by Yanagihara’s understanding of the aching desire to protect those we love—partners, lovers, children, friends, family, and even our fellow citizens—and the pain that ensues when we cannot. In an alternate version of 1893 America, New York is part of the Free States, where people may live and love whomever they please (or so it seems). The fragile young scion of a distinguished family resists betrothal to a worthy suitor, drawn to a charming music teacher of no means. In a 1993 Manhattan besieged by the AIDS epidemic, a young Hawaiian man lives with his much older, wealthier partner, hiding his troubled childhood and the fate of his father. And in 2093, in a world riven by plagues and governed by totalitarian rule, a powerful scientist’s damaged granddaughter tries to navigate life without him—and solve the mystery of her husband’s disappearances. These three sections comprise an ingenious symphony, as recurring notes and themes deepen and enrich one another: A townhouse in Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village; illness, and treatments that come at a terrible cost; wealth and squalor; the weak and the strong; race; the definition of family, and of nationhood; the dangerous righteousness of the powerful, and of revolutionaries; the longing to find a place in an earthly paradise, and the gradual realization that it can’t exist. What unites not just the characters, but these Americas, are their reckonings with the qualities that make us human: Fear. Love. Shame. Need. Loneliness.
What does it mean to bring progress—schools, electricity, roads, running water—to paradise? Can our consumer culture and desire to “do good” really be good for a community that has survived contentedly for centuries without us? In October 2008, climbing expedition leader and attorney, Jeffrey Rasley, led a trek to a village in a remote valley in the Solu region of Nepal named Basa. His group of three adventurers was only the third group of white people ever seen in this village of subsistence farmers. What he found was a people thoroughly unaffected by Western consumer-culture values. They had no running water, electricity, or anything that moves on wheels. Each family lived in a beautiful, hand-chiseled stone house with a flower garden. Beyond what they already had, it seemed all they wanted was education for the children. He helped them finish a school building already in progress, and then they asked for help getting electricity to their village. Bringing Progress to Paradise describes Rasley’s transformation from adventurer to committed philanthropist. We are attracted to the simpler way of life in these communities, and we are changed by our experience of it. They are attracted to us, because we bring economic benefits. Bringing Progress to Paradise offers Rasley’s critical reflection on the tangled relationship between tourists and locals in “exotic” locales and the effect of Western values on some of the most remote locations on earth.
A finalist for the PEN Center USA Award for Nonfiction Welcome to Paradise, Now Go to Hell, is surfer and former war reporter Chas Smith’s wild and unflinching look at the high-stakes world of surfing on Oahu’s North Shore—a riveting, often humorous, account of beauty, greed, danger, and crime. For two months every winter, when Pacific storms make landfall, swarms of mainlanders, Brazilians, Australians, and Europeans flock to Oahu’s paradisiacal North Shore in pursuit of some of the greatest waves on earth for surfing’s Triple Crown competition. Chas Smith reveals how this influx transforms a sleepy, laid-back strip of coast into a lawless, violent, drug-addled, and adrenaline-soaked mecca. Smith captures this exciting and dangerous place where locals, outsiders, the surf industry, and criminal elements clash in a fascinating look at class, race, power, money, and crime, set within one of the most beautiful places on earth. The result is a breathtaking blend of crime and adventure that captures the allure and wickedness of this idyllic golden world.
Ellen Peng straddles two inescapable complexities in her young life and family – her status as the first born and role model for her younger siblings and her very complicated relationship with her mother, Lydia who’s chosen to jeopardize her own future and that of her entire family. Lydia orchestrates the death of her husband in order to accommodate Tom, a younger, able-bodied and attractive lover in her life. Her insatiable epicurean lifestyle, coupled with her longing for self-aggrandizement make up the ingredients for her atrocious choices. How would Ellen respond to Tom and Lydia’s cat and mouse games that potentially, could lead to abysmal psycho-social suffering for the family and the larger community?
