Download or read book The Sanctuary of Illness written by Thomas Larson and published by Hudson Whitman/ ECP. This book was released on 2014-01-02 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “…a series of jazz-master riffs on illness.” — TriQuarterly Review “…graceful and engaging…” — Rain Taxi We all know someone who has suffered a heart attack. But, how often do we learn the intimate, potentially life-saving details that accompany coronary disease? In The Sanctuary of Illness, Thomas Larson (The Memoir and the Memoirist; The Saddest Music Ever Written) gives a powerful and personal inside tour of what happens when our arteries fail. He chronicles the three heart attacks in five years that he survived, and the emergency surgeries that saved his life each time. Slowly waking up to the genetic legacy and dangerous diet that pushed him to the brink, he reveals a path to healing that he and his partner, Suzanna, discovered together. Told with urgency and sensitivity, The Sanctuary of Illness is a subtle reminder that heart disease seldom affects just one heart.
Download or read book Sanctuary written by Emily Rapp Black and published by Random House. This book was released on 2021-01-19 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “[An] often beautiful jewel of a book . . . Black’s power as a writer means she can take us with her to places that normally our minds would refuse to go.”—The New York Times Book Review (Editors’ Choice) From the New York Times bestselling author of The Still Point of the Turning World comes an incisive memoir about how she came to question and redefine the concept of resilience after the trauma of her first child’s death. “Congratulations on the resurrection of your life,” a colleague wrote to Emily Rapp Black when she announced the birth of her second child. The line made Rapp Black pause. Her first child, a boy named Ronan, had died from Tay-Sachs disease before he turned three years old, an experience she wrote about in her second book, The Still Point of the Turning World. Since that time, her life had changed utterly: She left the marriage that fractured under the terrible weight of her son’s illness, got remarried to a man who she fell in love with while her son was dying, had a flourishing career, and gave birth to a healthy baby girl. But she rejected the idea that she was leaving her old life behind—that she had, in the manner of the mythical phoenix, risen from the ashes and been reborn into a new story, when she still carried so much of her old story with her. More to the point, she wanted to carry it with her. Everyone she met told her she was resilient, strong, courageous in ways they didn’t think they could be. But what did those words mean, really? This book is an attempt to unpack the various notions of resilience that we carry as a culture. Drawing on contemporary psychology, neurology, etymology, literature, art, and self-help, Emily Rapp Black shows how we need a more complex understanding of this concept when applied to stories of loss and healing and overcoming the odds, knowing that we may be asked to rebuild and reimagine our lives at any moment, and often when we least expect it. Interwoven with lyrical, unforgettable personal vignettes from her life as a mother, wife, daughter, friend, and teacher, Rapp Black creates a stunning tapestry that is full of wisdom and insight.
Download or read book Close to the Bone written by Jean Shinoda Bolen and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 1998-04-03 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Communication with those we love and with ourselves.
Download or read book Restoring Sanctuary written by Sandra L. Bloom and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2013-01-04 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the third in a trilogy of books that chronicle the revolutionary changes in our mental health and human service delivery systems that have conspired to disempower staff and hinder client recovery. Creating Sanctuary documented the evolution of The Sanctuary Model therapeutic approach as an antidote to the personal and social trauma that clients bring to child welfare agencies, psychiatric hospitals, and residential facilities. Destroying Sanctuary details the destructive role of organizational trauma in the nation's systems of care. Restoring Sanctuary is a user-friendly manual for organizational change that addresses the deep roots of toxic stress and illustrates how to transform a dysfunctional human service system into a safe, secure, trauma-informed environment. At its heart, The Sanctuary Model represents an organizational value system that is committed to seven principles, which serve as anchors for decision making at all levels: non-violence, emotional intelligence, social learning, democracy, open communication, social responsibility, and growth and change. The Sanctuary Model is not a clinical intervention; rather, it is a method for creating an organizational culture that can more effectively provide a cohesive context within which healing from psychological and socially derived forms of traumatic experience can be addressed. Chapters are organized around the seven Sanctuary commitments, providing step-by-step, realistic guidance on creating and sustaining fundamental change. "Restoring Sanctuary" is a roadmap to recovery for our nation's systems of care. It explores the notion that organizations are living systems themselves and as such they manifest various degrees of health and dysfunction, analogous to those of individuals. Becoming a truly trauma-informed system therefore requires a process of reconstitution within helping organizations, top to bottom. A system cannot be truly trauma-informed unless the system can create and sustain a process of understanding itself.
Download or read book Sanctuary for a Lady written by Naomi Rawlings and published by Harlequin. This book was released on 2012-04-03 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Michel Belanger finds an injured duke's daughter in the woods, despite the danger, he knows he must bring her to his cottage to heal. Attacked by soldiers and left for dead, Isabelle de La Rouchecauld has lost everything. An aristocrat cannot hope for mercy in France, so Isabelle must escape to England. The only thing more dangerous than staying would be falling in love with this gruff yet tender man of the land.
Download or read book The Devil s Sanctuary written by Marie Hermanson and published by . This book was released on 2014-07 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Daniel arrives in Himmelstal, a private Swiss psychiatric facility, to visit his twin brother Max, he has no idea what's in store for him. He finds himself unquestioningly accepting Max's plea for help and the brothers swap paces in order for Max to take care of some business. All he claims to need is a couple of days in the outside world to settle his debt. But soon Daniel realizes Max isn't coming back-- and the clinic is far from a place of recovery. Struggling to get anyone to believe who he really is, Daniel finds himself trapped in a cruel and highly secretive prison. This is no sanctuary. It's a living nightmare.
Download or read book Sanctuary written by Nora Roberts and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2024-09-03 with total page 529 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From #1 New York Times bestselling author Nora Roberts comes a seductive and suspenseful novel of dangerous liaisons and family betrayals… Photographer Jo Ellen Hathaway thought she'd escaped the house called Sanctuary long ago. She'd spent her loneliest years there, after the sudden, unexplained disappearance of her mother. Yet the sprawling inn on an island off the Georgia coast continues to haunt her dreams. And now, even more haunting are the pictures someone is sending her: strange close-ups and candids, culminating in the most shocking portrait of all—a photo of her mother—naked, beautiful, and dead. Now Jo must return to the island, and to her bitterly estranged family. With the help of Nathan Delaney—who was on the island the summer her mother disappeared—Jo hopes to learn the truth about the tragic past. But Sanctuary may be the most dangerous place of all.
Download or read book Restoring Sanctuary written by T. Pitt Green and published by Dog Ear Publishing. This book was released on 2010-08 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Impatience with the long-suffering nature of all grief is not uniquely Catholic. The criticism is that survivors, and others who grieve, cling to an isolating distinction too long. Yet, like all people who suffer, we are, after taking all the right steps, still helpless to bestow healing on ourselves. We all need to be saved." T. Pitt Green In this short work about fierce faith, Green has crafted an unflinching and charming memoir to showcase the true dimensions of a scourge within the Roman Catholic Church from which most people still recoil. Doing so, she lays a cornerstone for healing and reconciliation badly needed in order to free Catholics to thrive with single-minded spiritedness in the discipleship to which they have been called. Her work challenges prevailing assumptions about the motives and psychological life sentence imposed on survivors, reminding readers that healing and forgiveness really do exist - on none other than God's terms. Her message is surprisingly inspiring for all Catholics, and in particular for Catholic priests.
Download or read book Transcendent Kingdom written by Yaa Gyasi and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2020-09-01 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER • A TODAY SHOW #ReadWithJenna BOOK CLUB PICK! • Finalist for the WOMEN'S PRIZE Yaa Gyasi's stunning follow-up to her acclaimed national best seller Homegoing is a powerful, raw, intimate, deeply layered novel about a Ghanaian family in Alabama. Gifty is a sixth-year PhD candidate in neuroscience at the Stanford University School of Medicine studying reward-seeking behavior in mice and the neural circuits of depression and addiction. Her brother, Nana, was a gifted high school athlete who died of a heroin overdose after an ankle injury left him hooked on OxyContin. Her suicidal mother is living in her bed. Gifty is determined to discover the scientific basis for the suffering she sees all around her. But even as she turns to the hard sciences to unlock the mystery of her family's loss, she finds herself hungering for her childhood faith and grappling with the evangelical church in which she was raised, whose promise of salvation remains as tantalizing as it is elusive. Transcendent Kingdom is a deeply moving portrait of a family of Ghanaian immigrants ravaged by depression and addiction and grief—a novel about faith, science, religion, love. Exquisitely written, emotionally searing, this is an exceptionally powerful follow-up to Gyasi's phenomenal debut.
Download or read book Spirituality and the Writer written by Thomas Larson and published by Ohio University Press. This book was released on 2019-03-29 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Today, the surprisingly elastic form of the memoir embraces subjects that include dying, illness, loss, relationships, and self-awareness. Writing to reveal the inner self—the pilgrimage into one’s spiritual and/or religious nature—is a primary calling. Contemporary memoirists are exploring this field with innovative storytelling, rigorous craft, and new styles of confessional authorship. Now, Thomas Larson brings his expertise as a critic, reader, and teacher to the boldly evolving and improvisatory world of spiritual literature. In his book-length essay Spirituality and the Writer, Larson surveys the literary insights of authors old and new who have shaped religious autobiography and spiritual memoir—from Augustine to Thomas Merton, from Peter Matthiessen to Cheryl Strayed. He holds them to an exacting standard: they must render transcendent experience in the writing itself. Only when the writer’s craft prevails can the fleeting and profound personal truths of the spirit be captured. Like its predecessor, Larson’s The Memoir and the Memoirist, Spirituality and the Writer will find a home in writing classrooms and book groups, and be a resource for students, teachers, and writers who seek guidance with exploring their spiritual lives.
Download or read book Earth Last Sanctuary written by Christian Kallias and published by CreateSpace. This book was released on 2015-09-16 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "I absolutely loved this book! The author has a writing style that kept me hooked from the first word until the last." -Van Warren When the evil Obsidian Empire delivers a deathblow against the Star Alliance, fighter pilot Lieutenant Chase Athanatos leads a band of scattered survivors to the farthest reaches of the known universe, to a little planet called Earth. But Earth is in trouble. The Obsidian Empire is hot on their trail, and unless they find a way to stop them, what's left of the Alliance and the entire planet are doomed to extinction. With the help of the beautiful Commander Sarah Kepler and under the guidance of the goddess of love Aphroditis, Chase races against time to find a way to save the planet from total annihilation. Unbeknownst to him, something dormant is coursing through Chase's blood. But does it hold the key to changing their destiny ?
Download or read book The Chimps of Fauna Sanctuary written by Andrew Westoll and published by HMH. This book was released on 2011-05-10 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The “moving” true story of a woman fighting to give a group of chimpanzees a second chance at life (People). In 1997, Gloria Grow started a sanctuary for chimps retired from biomedical research on her farm outside Montreal. For the indomitable Gloria, caring for thirteen great apes is like presiding over a maximum-security prison, a Zen sanctuary, an old folks’ home, and a New York deli during the lunchtime rush all rolled into one. But she is first and foremost creating a refuge for her troubled charges, a place where they can recover and begin to trust humans again. Hoping to win some of this trust, journalist Andrew Westoll spent months at Fauna Farm as a volunteer, and in this “incisive [and] affecting” book, he vividly recounts his time in the chimp house and the histories of its residents (Kirkus Reviews). He arrives with dreams of striking up an immediate friendship with the legendary Tom, the wise face of the Great Ape Protection Act, but Tom seems all too content to ignore him. Gradually, though, old man Tommie and the rest of the “troop” begin to warm toward Westoll as he learns the routines of life at the farm and realizes just how far the chimps have come. Seemingly simple things like grooming, establishing friendships and alliances, and playing games with the garden hose are all poignant testament to the capacity of these animals to heal. Brimming with empathy and entertaining stories of Gloria and her charges, The Chimps of Fauna Sanctuary is an absorbing, bighearted book that grapples with questions of just what we owe to the animals who are our nearest genetic relations. “A powerful look at how we treat our closest relatives.” —The Plain Dealer “I knew the prison-like conditions of the medical research facility from which Gloria rescued these chimpanzees; when I visited them at their new sanctuary I was moved to tears. . . . Andrew Westoll is a born storyteller: The Chimps of Fauna Sanctuary, written with empathy and skill, tenderness and humour, involves us in a world few understand. And leaves us marveling at the ways in which chimpanzees are so like us, and why they deserve our help and are entitled to our respect.” —Dr. Jane Goodall “This book will make you think deeply about our relationship with great apes. It amazed me to discover the behaviors and feelings of the chimpanzees.” —Temple Grandin, author of Animals in Translation
Download or read book Between Two Kingdoms written by Suleika Jaouad and published by Random House. This book was released on 2021-02-09 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A searing, deeply moving memoir of illness and recovery that traces one young woman’s journey from diagnosis to remission to re-entry into “normal” life—from the author of the Life, Interrupted column in The New York Times ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, Bloomberg, The Rumpus, She Reads, Library Journal, Booklist • “I was immersed for the whole ride and would follow Jaouad anywhere. . . . Her writing restores the moon, lights the way as we learn to endure the unknown.”—Chanel Miller, The New York Times Book Review “Beautifully crafted . . . affecting . . . a transformative read . . . Jaouad’s insights about the self, connectedness, uncertainty and time speak to all of us.”—The Washington Post In the summer after graduating from college, Suleika Jaouad was preparing, as they say in commencement speeches, to enter “the real world.” She had fallen in love and moved to Paris to pursue her dream of becoming a war correspondent. The real world she found, however, would take her into a very different kind of conflict zone. It started with an itch—first on her feet, then up her legs, like a thousand invisible mosquito bites. Next came the exhaustion, and the six-hour naps that only deepened her fatigue. Then a trip to the doctor and, a few weeks shy of her twenty-third birthday, a diagnosis: leukemia, with a 35 percent chance of survival. Just like that, the life she had imagined for herself had gone up in flames. By the time Jaouad flew home to New York, she had lost her job, her apartment, and her independence. She would spend much of the next four years in a hospital bed, fighting for her life and chronicling the saga in a column for The New York Times. When Jaouad finally walked out of the cancer ward—after countless rounds of chemo, a clinical trial, and a bone marrow transplant—she was, according to the doctors, cured. But as she would soon learn, a cure is not where the work of healing ends; it’s where it begins. She had spent the past 1,500 days in desperate pursuit of one goal—to survive. And now that she’d done so, she realized that she had no idea how to live. How would she reenter the world and live again? How could she reclaim what had been lost? Jaouad embarked—with her new best friend, Oscar, a scruffy terrier mutt—on a 100-day, 15,000-mile road trip across the country. She set out to meet some of the strangers who had written to her during her years in the hospital: a teenage girl in Florida also recovering from cancer; a teacher in California grieving the death of her son; a death-row inmate in Texas who’d spent his own years confined to a room. What she learned on this trip is that the divide between sick and well is porous, that the vast majority of us will travel back and forth between these realms throughout our lives. Between Two Kingdoms is a profound chronicle of survivorship and a fierce, tender, and inspiring exploration of what it means to begin again.
Download or read book Sanctuary written by Caryn Lix and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2018-07-24 with total page 480 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Alien meets Alexandra Bracken’s The Darkest Minds in this thrilling debut novel about prison-guard-in-training, Kenzie, who is taken hostage by the superpowered criminal teens of the Sanctuary space station—only to have to band together with them when the station is attacked by mysterious creatures. Kenzie holds one truth above all: the company is everything. As a citizen of Omnistellar Concepts, the most powerful corporation in the solar system, Kenzie has trained her entire life for one goal: to become an elite guard on Sanctuary, Omnistellar’s space prison for superpowered teens too dangerous for Earth. As a junior guard, she’s excited to prove herself to her company—and that means sacrificing anything that won’t propel her forward. But then a routine drill goes sideways and Kenzie is taken hostage by rioting prisoners. At first, she’s confident her commanding officer—who also happens to be her mother—will stop at nothing to secure her freedom. Yet it soon becomes clear that her mother is more concerned with sticking to Omnistellar protocol than she is with getting Kenzie out safely. As Kenzie forms her own plan to escape, she doesn’t realize there’s a more sinister threat looming, something ancient and evil that has clawed its way into Sanctuary from the vacuum of space. And Kenzie might have to team up with her captors to survive—all while beginning to suspect there’s a darker side to the Omnistellar she knows.
Download or read book The Memoir and the Memoirist written by Thomas Larson and published by Ohio University Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The memoir is the most popular and expressive literary form of our time. Writers embrace the memoir and readers devour it, propelling many memoirs by relative unknowns to the top of the best-seller list. Writing programs challenge authors to disclose themselves in personal narrative. Memoir and personal narrative urge writers to face the intimacies of the self and ask what is true. In The Memoir and the Memoirist, critic and memoirist Thomas Larson explores the craft and purpose of writing this new form. Larson guides the reader from the autobiography and the personal essay to the memoir--a genre focused on a particularly emotional relationship in the author's past, an intimate story concerned more with who is remembering, and why, than with what is remembered. The Memoir and the Memoirist touches on the nuances of memory, of finding and telling the truth, and of disclosing one's deepest self. It explores the craft and purpose of personal narrative by looking in detail at more than a dozen examples by writers such as Mary Karr, Frank McCourt, Dave Eggers, Elizabeth Wurtzel, Mark Doty, Nuala O'Faolain, Rick Bragg, and Joseph Lelyveld to show what they reveal about themselves. Larson also opens up his own writing and that of his students to demonstrate the hidden mechanics of the writing process. For both the interested reader of memoir and the writer wrestling with the craft, The Memoir and the Memoirist provides guidance and insight into the many facets of this provocative and popular art form.
Download or read book Healing written by Thomas Insel, MD and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2022-02-22 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A bold, expert, and actionable map for the re-invention of America’s broken mental health care system. “Healing is truly one of the best books ever written about mental illness, and I think I’ve read them all." —Pete Earley, author of Crazy As director of the National Institute of Mental Health, Dr. Thomas Insel was giving a presentation when the father of a boy with schizophrenia yelled from the back of the room, “Our house is on fire and you’re telling me about the chemistry of the paint! What are you doing to put out the fire?” Dr. Insel knew in his heart that the answer was not nearly enough. The gargantuan American mental health industry was not healing millions who were desperately in need. He left his position atop the mental health research world to investigate all that was broken—and what a better path to mental health might look like. In the United States, we have treatments that work, but our system fails at every stage to deliver care well. Even before COVID, mental illness was claiming a life every eleven minutes by suicide. Quality of care varies widely, and much of the field lacks accountability. We focus on drug therapies for symptom reduction rather than on plans for long-term recovery. Care is often unaffordable and unavailable, particularly for those who need it most and are homeless or incarcerated. Where was the justice for the millions of Americans suffering from mental illness? Who was helping their families? But Dr. Insel also found that we do have approaches that work, both in the U.S. and globally. Mental illnesses are medical problems, but he discovers that the cures for the crisis are not just medical, but social. This path to healing, built upon what he calls the three Ps (people, place, and purpose), is more straightforward than we might imagine. Dr. Insel offers a comprehensive plan for our failing system and for families trying to discern the way forward. The fruit of a lifetime of expertise and a global quest for answers, Healing is a hopeful, actionable account and achievable vision for us all in this time of mental health crisis.
Download or read book The Saddest Music Ever Written written by Thomas Larson and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2010-09-15 with total page 185 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An exploration of the cultural impact of Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings, the Pieta of music, and its enigmatic composer. "Whenever the American dream suffers a catastrophic setback, Barber’s Adagio plays on the radio.” —Alex Ross, author of The Rest is Noise In the first book ever to explore Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings, music and literary critic Thomas Larson tells the story of the prodigal composer and his seminal masterpiece: from its composition in 1936, when Barber was just twenty-six, to its orchestral premiere two years later, led by the great Arturo Toscanini, and its fascinating history as America’s secular hymn for grieving our dead. Older Americans know Adagio from the funerals and memorials for Presidents Roosevelt and Kennedy, Albert Einstein, and Grace Kelly. Younger Americans recall the work as the antiwar theme of the movie Platoon. Still others treasure the piece in its choral version under the name Agnus Dei. More recently, mourners heard Adagio played as a memorial to the victims of the 9/11 attacks. Barber’s Adagio is truly the saddest music ever written, enrapturing listeners with its lyric beauty as few laments have. The Adagio’s sonorous intensity also speaks of the turbulent inner life of its composer, Samuel Barber (1910-1981), a melancholic who, in later years, descended into alcoholism and severe depression. Part biography, part cultural history, part memoir, The Saddest Music ever Written captures the deep emotion Barber’s great elegy has stirred throughout the world during its seventy-five-year history, becoming an icon of our national soul.
