The Second Life of Mirielle West

The Second Life of Mirielle West

Author: Amanda Skenandore

Publisher: Kensington Books

Published: 2021-07-27

Total Pages: 474

ISBN-13: 1496726529

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The glamorous world of a silent film star’s wife abruptly crumbles when she’s forcibly quarantined at the Carville Lepers Home in this page-turning story of courage, resilience, and reinvention set in 1920s Louisiana and Los Angeles. Based on little-known history, this timely book will strike a chord with readers of Fiona Davis, Tracey Lange, and Marie Benedict. Based on the true story of America’s only leper colony, The Second Life of Mirielle West brings vividly to life the Louisiana institution known as Carville, where thousands of people were stripped of their civil rights, branded as lepers, and forcibly quarantined throughout the entire 20th century. For Mirielle West, a 1920’s socialite married to a silent film star, the isolation and powerlessness of the Louisiana Leper Home is an unimaginable fall from her intoxicatingly chic life of bootlegged champagne and the star-studded parties of Hollywood’s Golden Age. When a doctor notices a pale patch of skin on her hand, she’s immediately branded a leper and carted hundreds of miles from home to Carville, taking a new name to spare her family and famous husband the shame that accompanies the disease. At first she hopes her exile will be brief, but those sent to Carville are more prisoners than patients and their disease has no cure. Instead she must find community and purpose within its walls, struggling to redefine her self-worth while fighting an unchosen fate. As a registered nurse, Amanda Skenandore’s medical background adds layers of detail and authenticity to the experiences of patients and medical professionals at Carville – the isolation, stigma, experimental treatments, and disparate community. A tale of repulsion, resilience, and the Roaring ‘20s, The Second Life of Mirielle West is also the story of a health crisis in America’s past, made all the more poignant by the author’s experiences during another, all-too-recent crisis. PRAISE FOR AMANDA SKENANDORE’S BETWEEN EARTH AND SKY “Intensely emotional…Skenandore’s deeply introspective and moving novel will appeal to readers of American history.” —Publishers Weekly


The Undertaker's Assistant

The Undertaker's Assistant

Author: Amanda Skenandore

Publisher: Kensington Books

Published: 2019-07-30

Total Pages: 338

ISBN-13: 1496713699

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An enthralling novel of historical fiction for fans of Lisa Wingate and Ellen Marie Wiseman, The Undertaker’s Assistant is a powerful story of human resilience set during Reconstruction-era New Orleans that features an extraordinary and unforgettable heroine at its heart. “The dead can’t hurt you. Only the living can.” Effie Jones, a former slave who escaped to the Union side as a child, knows the truth of her words. Taken in by an army surgeon and his wife during the War, she learned to read and write, to tolerate the sight of blood and broken bodies—and to forget what is too painful to bear. Now a young freedwoman, she has returned south to New Orleans and earns her living as an embalmer, her steady hand and skillful incisions compensating for her white employer’s shortcomings. Tall and serious, Effie keeps her distance from the other girls in her boarding house, holding tight to the satisfaction she finds in her work. But despite her reticence, two encounters—with a charismatic state legislator named Samson Greene, and a beautiful young Creole, Adeline—introduce her to new worlds of protests and activism, of soirees and social ambition. Effie decides to seek out the past she has blocked from her memory and try to trace her kin. As her hopes are tested by betrayal, and New Orleans grapples with violence and growing racial turmoil, Effie faces loss and heartache, but also a chance to finally find her place . . .


Restoration in the Barrens

Restoration in the Barrens

Author: Joe Riederer

Publisher: Big Bluestem Press

Published: 2014-08-01

Total Pages: 165

ISBN-13: 0967138620

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The story of a young teen's struggle to rebuild his life while helping to rebuild a local prairie.


Hollywood Highbrow

Hollywood Highbrow

Author: Shyon Baumann

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2018-06-05

Total Pages: 242

ISBN-13: 0691187282

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Today's moviegoers and critics generally consider some Hollywood products--even some blockbusters--to be legitimate works of art. But during the first half century of motion pictures very few Americans would have thought to call an American movie "art." Up through the 1950s, American movies were regarded as a form of popular, even lower-class, entertainment. By the 1960s and 1970s, however, viewers were regularly judging Hollywood films by artistic criteria previously applied only to high art forms. In Hollywood Highbrow, Shyon Baumann for the first time tells how social and cultural forces radically changed the public's perceptions of American movies just as those forces were radically changing the movies themselves. The development in the United States of an appreciation of film as an art was, Baumann shows, the product of large changes in Hollywood and American society as a whole. With the postwar rise of television, American movie audiences shrank dramatically and Hollywood responded by appealing to richer and more educated viewers. Around the same time, European ideas about the director as artist, an easing of censorship, and the development of art-house cinemas, film festivals, and the academic field of film studies encouraged the idea that some American movies--and not just European ones--deserved to be considered art.


A Woman in Search of…

A Woman in Search of…

Author: Lynne Brightman Horn

Publisher: Lynne Brightman Horn

Published: 2022-08-25

Total Pages: 328

ISBN-13:

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"This character-driven slice-of-life drama...explores love, friendship, self-esteem, heartbreak, trust, and healing as its hero rebuilds her life and rediscovers the power of friendship." — BookLife "Fantastic...vivid...A lively read with tons to offer fans of women's drama and nostalgic fiction everywhere." - Reader's Favorite "A Woman in Search Of...is a beautiful story of a woman trying to navigate life on her own terms." - San Diego City Book Reviews It’s the swingin’ 70’s–a time of change, when singers sang about making life better by being there for others. Helen Reddy’s “I Am Woman” became an anthem for the women’s movement while other songs like Simon and Garfunkel’s “Bridge Over Troubled Waters” offered comfort to people. This was a time for spreading peace and love. In 1973, Wendy, a recently separated woman, discovers a new life when she starts her own business and becomes part of the bar scene. The once conservative Wendy makes major changes to her lifestyle, including her involvement with a number of men. Wendy’s life becomes complicated with the different men she sees, combined with her estranged husband’s continual reappearance. She turns to drugs to help her relax and escape, creating a downward spiral that only her best friend can save her from.


The Sex-Starved Marriage

The Sex-Starved Marriage

Author: Michele Weiner-Davis

Publisher: Simon & Schuster Limited

Published: 2004

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 9780743252416

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'Not tonight, darling, I've got a headache...' An estimated one in three couples suffer from problems associated with one partner having a higher libido than the other. Marriage therapist Michele Weiner Davis has written THE SEX-STARVED MARRIAGE to help couples come to terms with this problem. Weiner Davis shows you how to address pyschological factors like depression, poor body image and communication problems that affect sexual desire. With separate chapters for the spouse that's ready for action and the spouse that's ready for sleep, THE SEX-STARVED MARRIAGE will help you re-spark your passion and stop you fighting about sex. Weiner Davis is renowned for her straight-talking style and here she puts it to great use to let you know you're not alone in having marital sex problems. Bitterness or complacency about ho-hum sex can ruin a marriage, breaking the emotional tie of good sex.


Churchill's Trial

Churchill's Trial

Author: Larry P. Arnn

Publisher: HarperChristian + ORM

Published: 2015-10-13

Total Pages: 411

ISBN-13: 1595555315

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No statesman shaped the twentieth century more than Winston Churchill. To know the full Churchill is to understand the combination of boldness and caution, of assertiveness and humility, that defines statesmanship at its best. With fresh perspective and insights based on decades of studying and teaching Churchill, Larry P. Arnn explores the greatest challenges faced by Churchill over the course of his extraordinary career, both in war and peace—and always in the context of Churchill’s abiding dedication to constitutionalism. Churchill’s Trial is organized around the three great challenges to liberty that Churchill faced: Nazism, Soviet communism, and his own nation’s slide toward socialism. Churchill knew that stable free government, long enduring, is rare, and hangs upon the balance of many factors ever at risk. Combining meticulous scholarship with an engrossing narrative arc, this book holds timely lessons for today. Arnn says, “Churchill’s trial is also our trial. We have a better chance to meet it because we had in him a true statesman.” In a scholarly, timely, and highly erudite way, Larry Arnn puts the case for Winston Churchill continuing to be seen as statesman from whom the modern world can learn important lessons. In an age when social and political morality seems all too often to be in a state of flux, Churchill’s Trial reminds us of the enduring power of the concepts of courage, duty, and honor. --Andrew Roberts, New York Times bestselling author of Napoleon: A Life and The Storm of War Larry Arnn has spent a lifetime studying the life and accomplishments of Winston Churchill. In his lively Churchill’s Trial, Arnn artfully reminds us that Churchill was not just the greatest statesman and war leader of the twentieth century, but also a pragmatic and circumspect thinker whose wisdom resonates on every issue of our times. --Victor Davis Hanson, senior fellow, The Hoover Institution, Stanford University In absorbing, gracefully written historical and biographical narration, Larry Arnn shows that Churchill, often perceived as inconsistent and opportunistic, was in fact philosophically rigorous and consistent at levels of organization higher and deeper than his detractors are capable of imagining. In Churchill’s Trial Arnn has rendered great service not only to an incomparable statesman but to us, for the magnificent currents that carried Churchill through his trials are as admirable, useful, and powerful in our times as they were in his. --Mark Helprin, New York Times bestselling author of Winter’s Tale and In Sunlight and in Shadow Churchill’s Trial, a masterpiece of political philosophy and practical statesmanship, is the one book on Winston Churchill that every undergraduate, every graduate student, every professional historian, and every member of the literate general public should read on this greatest statesman of the twentieth century. The book is beautifully written, divided into three parts–war, empire, peace–and thus covers the extraordinary life of Winston Churchill and the topics which define the era of his statesmanship. --Lewis E. Lehrman, cofounder of the Lincoln and Soldiers Institute at Gettysburg College and distinguished director of the Abraham Lincoln Association


The Highly Sensitive Man

The Highly Sensitive Man

Author: Tom Falkenstein

Publisher: Citadel

Published: 2020-04-28

Total Pages: 273

ISBN-13: 080653933X

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Although high sensitivity affects both men and women equally, being a highly sensitive man comes with unique challenges. Working closely with Dr. Elaine Aron - the originator of The Highly Sensitive Person--cognitive behavioral psychotherapist Tom Falkenstein offers the only book written specifically for highly sensitive men and those who love them. Highly sensitive people think deeply, empathize instinctively, and behave in an ethical way that benefits everyone. Today, with the negative effects of "toxic masculinity" and aggressive behavior in evidence all around us, we need highly sensitive people--especially men--more than ever. Yet for men in particular, being highly sensitive brings distinct challenges, such as gender stereotypes that portray them as too emotional or not "manly" enough. Cognitive behavioral psychotherapist Tom Falkenstein offers the first psychological guide that specifically addresses highly sensitive men and those who care about them, and explores the unique advantages and obstacles they face. Drawing from his training with pioneer in the field Dr. Elaine Aron, and his own groundbreaking work, Falkenstein incorporates the most up-to-date research on high sensitivity--what it is and isn't, and how it relates to male identity--and provides one-of-a-kind advice and practical tools, including: - Self-assessment tests to measure high sensitivity - Strategies to cope with overstimulation and intense emotions - Exercises that enhance relaxation, mindfulness, and acceptance - Advice on self-care and self-compassion - Techniques to deal with situations that highly sensitive people often find difficult - Interviews with men who have learned to live well with high sensitivity - Insights into the key role that highly sensitive men have to play in today's world Including an illuminating conversation with Dr. Aron, The Highly Sensitive Man is an invaluable book that will help redefine masculinity and reveal how high sensitivity can enrich men's lives, their communities, and the lives of those who love them.