Smiling Again captures Sally’s experience with the removal of a brain tumor and the recovery process. It captures her faith journey while navigating the crisis. She educates the reader on the specific disease and explains how a caregiver can support a patient throughout a medical crisis. Immediately following surgery, she captured her feeling in parallel with her blog while processing the changes in her life.
I am no doctor, psychologist, or licensed therapist. I am a person who has suffered with depression and who has been right at that moment when I was going to take my own life. Ive stood at the edge of a bridge and looked down upon the water of the Ohio River. Ive held a bottle of pills and just stared at the lid. I have been behind the wheel of a car without a seatbelt on and watched for the next telephone pole. Yet I never did itI never jumped, took the lid off, or hit the telephone pole. I hope that by the end of this book, you can see there are people out there who suffer through this daily, and if you are one suffering, you are not alone. You can live with this, you can turn it all around, and you will find yourself smiling again.
An award-winning zookeeper, author, and bear expert shares the insights she has gleaned from a career spent working with the majestic animals. Few people have known bears as intimately as Else Poulsen has. This remarkable book reveals the many insights about bears and their emotional lives that she has gained through her years of work with them. Always approaching each bear with the same two questions in mind—“Who are you?” and “What can I do for you?” —Poulsen has shared in the joy of a polar bear discovering soil under her paws for the first time in 20 years and felt the pride of a cub learning to crack nuts with her molars. She has also felt the hateful stare of one bear that she could not befriend, and she has grieved in the abject horror of captivity for a sun bear in Indonesia. Featuring photographs from Poulsen’s personal collection, Smiling Bears provides an enlightening and moving portrait of bears in all their richness and complexity. Praise for Smiling Bears “An inspiring trip into the mind and reality of bears.” —Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, author of When Elephants Weep “If you doubt bears are able to smile, buy this book—it’ll open your eyes and change the view.” —Terry D. Debruyn, author of Walking with Bears “A rare window of opportunity to begin to understand not only the incredible challenges that face these species but also the meaning of their existence in nature.” —Robert Buchanan, president of Polar Bears International
From the acclaimed author of Sirens, damaged Detective Aidan Waits returns in a mind-bending new thriller that will have everyone asking “Who is the Smiling Man?” Aidan Waits is back on the night shift, the Manchester PD dumping ground for those too screwed-up for more glamorous work. But the monotony of petty crimes and lonesome nights is shattered when he and his partner are called to investigate a break-in The Palace, an immense, empty hotel in the center of the city. There they find the body of a man. He is dead. The tags have been cut from his clothes, his teeth have been filed down, and even his fingertips have been replaced… And he is smiling. But as Waits begins to unravel the mystery of the smiling man, he becomes a target. Someone wants very badly to make this case disappear, and as their threats escalate, Aidan realizes that the answers may lie not only with the wealthy families and organized criminals connected to the Palace, but with a far greater evil from his own past. To discover the smiling man’s identity, he must finally confront his own.
“A cannot-put-down thriller that’s dark, edgy and intense . . . Another great addition to this stunning series” from the author of Dark Places (Fresh Fiction). Die Young Hilde Swensen is a beauty pageant queen with a face to die for and a body to kill for. But by the time Detective Claire Morgan finds her in a shower stall—posed like a grotesquely grinning doll—Hilde is anything but pretty. She’s the victim of a sick, deranged killer. And she won’t be the last . . . Die Beautiful Brianna Swenson is the beauty queen’s sister—and the girlfriend of Claire’s partner. She tells Claire that Hilde had plenty of enemies, including a creepy stalker, an abusive ex-boyfriend, and a slew of jealous competitors. But what she doesn’t say is that they both shared a dark, disturbing secret. A secret that refuses to die . . . Die Smiling From the after-hours parties of a sinister funeral home to the underworld vendettas of the Miami mob, Claire follows the trail with her lover, a psychiatrist with secrets of his own. But it’s not until she uncovers evidence of unspeakable acts of depravity that Claire realizes she’s just become a diabolical killer’s next target . . . Praise for the Claire Morgan series “A tough, no-nonsense detective with a well-hidden vulnerable side . . . edgy, clever!” —Beverly Barton, New York Times bestselling author “Chilling, compelling suspense . . . be prepared to lose sleep!” —Eileen Dreyer, New York Times bestselling author “A feisty new heroine to root for . . . Ladd is a bright
The work of renowned Ivoirian playwright Koffi Kwahulé has been translated into some 15 languages and is performed regularly throughout Europe, Africa, and the Americas. For the first time, Seven Plays of Koffi Kwahulé: In and Out of Africa makes available to an Anglophone audience some of the best and most representative plays by one of Francophone Africa’s most accomplished living playwrights. Kwahulé’s theater delves into both the horror of civil war in Africa and the diasporic experience of peoples of African origin living in Europe and the “New World.” From the split consciousness of the protagonist and rape victim in Jaz to the careless buffoonery of mercenaries in Brewery, Kwahulé’s characters speak in riffs and refrains that resonate with the improvisational pulse of jazz music. He confronts us with a violent world that represents the damage done to Africa and asks us, through exaggeration and surreal touches, to examine the reality of an ever-expanding network of global migrants. His plays speak to the contemporary state of humanity, suffering from exile, poverty, capitalist greed, collusion, and fear of “the other”—however that “other” gets defined. Judith G. Miller’s introductory essay situates Kwahulé among his postcolonial contemporaries. Short introductory essays to each play, accompanied by production photos, contextualize possible approaches to Kwahulé’s often enigmatic work. Anglophone theater scholars and theater professionals eager to engage with contemporary theater beyond their borders, particularly in terms of what so-called minority theater artists from other countries are creating, will welcome this indispensable collection. Students and scholars of African studies and of global French studies will also find this work intriguing and challenging.
