Download or read book Smash Mouth Jesus A Memoir written by Jack Flynn and published by WestBow Press. This book was released on 2015-07-16 with total page 114 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The life of an abused child is filled with pain and self-blame. And there is the never-ending question of why one of the people who is supposed to love you is also responsible for hurting you. Millions of children experience abuse and neglect every day. For most, their stories go untold. In author Jack Flynn’s memoir, Smash-Mouth Jesus—A Memoir: God’s Answer to Violence, he takes you on a journey of redemption through the nightmare of helplessness and self-hatred associated with child abuse. Flynn illustrates the challenges an abandoned and abused child faces when thrown into a cruel world with no direction. He shares his journey of coming to terms with a God he fears—a God who seems to be cruel and all-powerful. Each day Flynn faced the challenge to trust the God who seemed to be destroying him. Smash-Mouth Jesus—A Memoir: God’s Answer to Violence is a story of working through the past and not letting it define you. As Flynn shows, that journey is long and difficult, and the temptation to give up can be great. But if one perseveres, the rewards and love are tremendous.

Download or read book Sex Drugs Jesus written by De'Vannon Hubert and published by De'Vannon Hubert. This book was released on 2022-03-28 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Transparency is one of the most effective tools we have that can help us heal. It can also help us understand ourselves better as well as other people. What would you do if you believed you only had months to live? How would you feel if your community was stolen from you? Could you survive living on the streets for any length of time? Can you imagine what it's like to try to find a job when you have felonies on your record? Are there any words to describe the heart of a mother as she watches her youngest child die? It’s taken my whole life to realize that the main person I’ve been battling against has been me. As such, my memoir delves into raw detail about my war with my myself. I open up about my crystal meth addiction and how I became a drug dealer in Houston, Tx. The pain of growing up in poverty under the hand of an abusive dad is put on display as well. The time I spent serving in the Air Force during Don’t Ask Don’t Tell and the promiscuity that went along with it is also divulged. I talk about how I received my HIV + diagnosis on a voicemail and my Hep B + diagnosis in the postal mail. My story gets more intense as I share about how I got 3 felonies, the time I spent in jail, and how I ended up homeless after S.W.A.T. kicked my door in. I talk about the biggest heartbreak in my life which happened when I was kicked out of a megachurch, that I had served with my whole soul for years, just because I am a member of the 2SLGBTQIA+ community and refused to accept the conversion therapy package they offered. So often people judge those who have been in similar situations. My hope is that my honesty can offer a glimpse into these issues from the inside, rather than from the outside looking in. I struggled with dividing my memoir into two separate books, but I felt it would be more impactful to tell everything all at once. My memoir is my testament and it’s the greatest form of outreach I have ever offered to the world. I hope that I can earn your trust and attention with the words I have written within these pages.

Download or read book Happy written by Alex Lemon and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2009-12-29 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: His freshman year of college, Alex Lemon was supposed to be the star catcher on the Macalester College baseball team. He was the boy getting every girl, the hard-partying kid everyone called Happy. In the spring of 1997, he had his first stroke. For two years Lemon coped with his deteriorating health by sinking deeper into alcohol and drug abuse. His charming and carefree exterior masked his self-destructive and sometimes cruel behavior as he endured two more brain bleeds and a crippling depression. After undergoing brain surgery, he is nursed back to health by his free-spirited artist mother, who once again teaches him to stand on his own. Alive with unexpected humor and sensuality, Happy is a hypnotic self-portrait of a young man confronting the wreckage of his own body; it is also the deeply moving story of a mother’s redemptive and healing powers. Alex Lemon’s Technicolor sentences pop and sing as he writes about survival—of the body and of the human spirit.

Download or read book Jesus Land written by Julia Scheeres and published by Catapult. This book was released on 2012-10-30 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New York Times bestseller: An “exquisitely wrought memoir” about how “love can flourish even in the harshest climates”—for readers of The Liar’s Club and Running with Scissors (People). This poignant, darkly funny account of two siblings—one white, one Black—growing up in the Christian fundamentalist communities of Indiana and the Dominican Republic is “one of the best memoirs in years” (Anne Lamott, author of Bird by Bird). Julia and her adopted brother, David, are 16 years old. Julia is white. David is black. It is the mid–1980s and their family has just moved to rural Indiana, a landscape of cottonwood trees, trailer parks, and an all–encompassing racism. At home are a distant mother—more involved with her church’s missionaries than her own children—and a violent father. In this riveting and heartrending memoir, Julia Scheeres takes us from the Midwest to a place beyond imagining. Surrounded by natural beauty, Escuela Caribe—a religious reform school in the Dominican Republic—is characterized by a disciplinary regime that extracts repentance from its students by any means necessary. Julia and David strive to make it through these ordeals and their tale is relayed here with startling immediacy, extreme candor, and wry humor. Over a decade after its first publication, Jesus Land remains deeply resonant with readers. This New York Times bestselling memoir is a gripping tale of rage and redemption, hope and humor, morality and malice—and most of all, the truth: that being a good person takes more than just going to church.

Download or read book The Encore written by Charity Tillemann-Dick and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2017-10-03 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this “heartrending, passionate, and surprisingly humorous account of the conjunction between art and death” (Andrew Solomon, New York Times bestselling author), acclaimed opera singer Charity Tillemann-Dick recounts her remarkable journey from struggling to draw a single breath to singing at the most prestigious venues in the world after receiving not one but two double lung transplants. Charity Tillemann-Dick was a vivacious young American soprano studying at the celebrated Franz Liszt Academy of Music in Budapest when she received devastating news: her lungs were failing, her heart was three and a half sizes too big, and she would die within five years. Medical experts advised Charity to abandon her musical dreams, but if her time was running out, she wanted to spend it doing what she loved. In just three years, she endured two double lung transplants and had to slowly learn to breathe, walk, talk, eat, and sing again. With new lungs and fierce determination, she eventually fell in love, rebuilt her career, and reclaimed her life. More than a decade after her diagnosis, she has a chart-topping album, performs around the globe, and is a leading voice for organ donation. Weaving Charity’s extraordinary tale of triumph with those of opera’s greatest heroines, The Encore illuminates the indomitable human spirit and is “an uplifting story of overcoming significant odds to fulfill a dream” (Kirkus Reviews).

Download or read book Smile Even If Your Life Is Upside Down written by Jenny Matula and published by WestBow Press. This book was released on 2014-03-26 with total page 124 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is the true story of a child-abuse survivor who found Gods love and through it was able to survive the hard times in her life. The inspirational story of Jenny Matula shows how Psalm 23 came alive and describes how Gods miraculous works in her life gave her the strength to overcome hardships. Each chapter of the book will uplift your spirit with examples of how faith in Gods love enables her to overcome challenges and become stronger in her Christian faith. It is a story that will inspire you to place your trust in God in his love for you.

Download or read book Jesus a Memoir written by Xavier DeCosta and published by . This book was released on 2021-12-15 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Blood in the Water written by Jack Flynn and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2019-09-10 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Blood in the Water by Jack Flynn is a thriller set in Boston in the gritty world of mob bosses, con artists and gangs, where allegiances are formed with law enforcement and criminals just as easily as they are broken. Homeland Security agent, Kit Steel, is committed to avenge terrorism. And she’s after the blood of her nemesis, one of world’s most ruthless and dangerous criminals, Vincente Carpio. He has the blood of her husband and young son on his hands, and Kit is unwavering in her determination to see him kept behind bars forever. Clever, calculating, and manipulative, Carpio has aid and influence on the outside, and he’s waiting for the perfect moment when the final pieces of the jigsaw fall into place. Harbour Union chief, Cormack McConnell, has lived his life close to the wire above and below the law, and he controls everything that happens on Boston’s waterfront. Someone wants him out of the way, fast. After he narrowly survives a brutal attack on his bar, The Mariner, complications arise when Cormack believes he’s been betrayed by one of his crew – a young man, Buddy Cavanaugh, who he’s shocked to discover is the love of his precious nineteen-year-old daughter, Diamond. Everyone has a game to play until it becomes apparent that there are much darker, far-reaching forces of evil at work which look to be preparing for the international stage. What follows is a gripping race against time, a rollercoaster action-packed story with international terrorism at its core and family at its heart.

Download or read book Fresh Off the Boat written by Eddie Huang and published by Spiegel & Grau. This book was released on 2013 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Taiwanese American rebel restaurateur chronicles his rise to success from his difficult childhood in the American South to his decision to embrace all he had learned about food in his father's restaurants and his mother's kitchen to create his own culinary identity.

Download or read book How to Murder Your Life written by Cat Marnell and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2017-01-31 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the New York Times bestselling author and former beauty editor Cat Marnell, a “vivid, maddening, heartbreaking, very funny, chaotic” (The New York Times) memoir of prescription drug addiction and self-sabotage, set in the glamorous world of fashion magazines and downtown nightclubs. At twenty-six, Cat Marnell was an associate beauty editor at Lucky, one of the top fashion magazines in America—and that’s all most people knew about her. But she hid a secret life. She was a prescription drug addict. She was also a “doctor shopper” who manipulated Upper East Side psychiatrists for pills, pills, and more pills; a lonely bulimic who spent hundreds of dollars a week on binge foods; a promiscuous party girl who danced barefoot on banquets; a weepy and hallucination-prone insomniac who would take anything—anything—to sleep. This is a tale of self-loathing, self-sabotage, and yes, self-tanner. It begins at a posh New England prep school—and with a prescription for the Attention Deficit Disorder medication Ritalin. It continues to New York, where we follow Marnell’s amphetamine-fueled rise from intern to editor through the beauty departments of NYLON, Teen Vogue, Glamour, and Lucky. We see her fight between ambition and addiction and how, inevitably, her disease threatens everything she worked so hard to achieve. From the Condé Nast building to seedy nightclubs, from doctors’ offices and mental hospitals, Marnell “treads a knife edge between glamorizing her own despair and rendering it with savage honesty.…with the skill of a pulp novelist” (The New York Times Book Review) what it is like to live in the wild, chaotic, often sinister world of a young female addict who can’t say no. Combining “all the intoxicating intrigue of a thriller and yet all the sobering pathos of a gifted writer’s true-life journey to recover her former health, happiness, ambitions, and identity” (Harper’s Bazaar), How to Murder Your Life is mesmerizing, revelatory, and necessary.

Download or read book Life Soup written by Pamela Lynn France and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 189 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Through It All Jesus Kept Me Strong written by Elisheva and published by Abbott Press. This book was released on 2013-06 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Elisheva had given up hope. She thought that because she hadn't become a marine biologist, as she dreamed, and had instead become a heavy drinker and high school dropout, that her life was basically over. She began chasing men who really didn't love her, and she was confused about her sexuality because of the sexual abuse and molestation she had experienced. Now, in her memoir Through It All, Jesus Kept Me Strong, she tells the story of her struggle to find herself in the wake of physical and mental abuse. A victim of parental neglect and low self-esteem, she never took the time to listen to God. When she finally realized just how much He really loved her, however, her life began to turn around. She finally understood that no matter how beat-up she was, He would stand by her through many challenging times as she drew strength to keep on going. God sees all and hears all prayers. Elisheva was raised in the chaos of abuse and struggled to find a positive life force--her Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. As she grew up trying to survive the lies, family secrets, deceit, abuse, and more, she finally found God and learned that there is love in turning to God for salvation.

Download or read book Things I Didn t Know written by Robert Hughes and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2009-06-03 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Robert Hughes has trained his critical eye on many major subjects, from the city of Barcelona to the history of his native Australia. Now he turns that eye inward, onto himself and the world that formed him. Hughes analyzes his experiences the way he might examine a Van Gogh or a Picasso. From his relationship with his stern and distant father to his Catholic upbringing and school years; and from his development as an artist, writer, and critic to his growing appreciation of art and his exhilaration at leaving Australia to discover a new life, Hughes’ memoir is an extraordinary feat of exploration and celebration.

Download or read book Wineskin Freakin Jesus in the 60s and 70s written by Michael Hicks and published by . This book was released on 2022-11-21 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mormonism begins with a memoir: Joseph Smith kneeling in a grove until two-thirds of the Godhead appear and promise him a quixotic religious renown. Since then, the faith Smith birthed has raised up memoirs as gritty as Parley P. Pratt's quasi-­canonical Autobiography or as luminously sarcastic as Elna Baker's New York Regional Mormon Singles Halloween Dance. Grafted somewhere into those works' genealogy comes this boyhood memoir, rooted not in Mormonism but in the Protestantism of American suburbia and the Jesus Freak movement of the early 1970s, then in, out, and back into the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Michael Hicks's story is a tale studded with awkward episodes of sex, drugs, and rock and roll (not necessarily in that order), along with alcohol, sci-fi, theft, radical politics, cartooning, halfway houses, and the musical avant-garde. The one constant is the brooding figure of Jesus Christ behind Hicks's various personal reclamations and metamorphoses, often via methods admittedly off the books. While many readers know Hicks as a Mormon academic--thirty-five years a professor of music at Brigham Young University--­Wineskin excavates the path, from boyhood to a PhD, that led him toward a faith that is both primitively Christian and highmindedly Mormon.

Download or read book Far From Respectable written by Daniel Oppenheimer and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2021-06-01 with total page 150 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Regarded as both a legend and a villain, the critic Dave Hickey has inspired generations of artists, art critics, musicians, and writers. His 1993 book The Invisible Dragon became a cult hit for its potent and provocative critique of the art establishment and its call to reconsider the role of beauty in art. His next book, 1997’s Air Guitar, introduced a new kind of cultural criticism—simultaneously insightful, complicated, vulnerable, and down-to-earth—that propelled Hickey to fame as an iconoclastic thinker, loved and loathed in equal measure, whose influence extended beyond the art world. Far from Respectable is a focused, evocative exploration of Hickey’s work, his impact on the field of art criticism, and the man himself, from his Huck Finn childhood to his drug-fueled periods as both a New York gallerist and Nashville songwriter to, finally, his anointment as a tenured professor and MacArthur Fellow. Drawing on in-person interviews with Hickey, his friends and family, and art world comrades and critics, Daniel Oppenheimer examines the controversial writer’s distinctive takes on a broad range of subjects, including Norman Rockwell, Robert Mapplethorpe, academia, Las Vegas, basketball, country music, and considers how Hickey and his vision of an “ethical, cosmopolitan paganism” built around a generous definition of art is more urgently needed than ever before.

Download or read book Everything s Trash But It s Okay written by Phoebe Robinson and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2019-10-15 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: DON’T MISS PHOEBE ROBINSON’S COMEDY SERIES EVERYTHING’S TRASH—NOW ON FREEFORM! New York Times bestselling author and star of 2 Dope Queens Phoebe Robinson is back with a new, hilarious, and timely essay collection on gender, race, dating, and the dumpster fire that is our world. Wouldn't it be great if life came with instructions? Of course, but like access to Michael B. Jordan's house, none of us are getting any. Thankfully, Phoebe Robinson is ready to share everything she has experienced to prove that if you can laugh at her topsy-turvy life, you can laugh at your own. Written in her trademark unfiltered and witty style, Robinson's latest collection is a call to arms. Outfitted with on-point pop culture references, these essays tackle a wide range of topics: giving feminism a tough-love talk on intersectionality, telling society's beauty standards to kick rocks, and calling foul on our culture's obsession with work. Robinson also gets personal, exploring money problems she's hidden from her parents, how dating is mainly a warmed-over bowl of hot mess, and definitely most important, meeting Bono not once, but twice. She's struggled with being a woman with a political mind and a woman with an ever-changing jeans size. She knows about trash because she sees it every day--and because she's seen roughly one hundred thousand hours of reality TV and zero hours of Schindler's List. With the intimate voice of a new best friend, Everything's Trash, But It's Okay is a candid perspective for a generation that has had the rug pulled out from under it too many times to count.

Download or read book Seriously I m Kidding written by Ellen DeGeneres and published by Grand Central Publishing. This book was released on 2011-10-04 with total page 146 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ~b~>With the winning, upbeat candor that has made her show on of the most popular and honored daytime shows on the air, beloved talk show host and comedian Ellen DeGeneres shares her views on life, love, and American Idol. "I've experienced a whole lot the last few years and I have a lot to share. So I hope that you'll take a moment to sit back, relax and enjoy the words I've put together for you in this book. I think you'll find I've left no stone unturned, no door unopened, no window unbroken, no rug unvacuumed, no ivories untickled. What I'm saying is, let us begin, shall we?" Seriously... I'm Kidding is a lively, hilarious, and often sweetly poignant look at the life of the much-loved entertainer as she opens up about her personal life, her talk show, and more. PRAISE FOR Seriously... I'm Kidding "DeGeneres's amiably oddball riffs on everything from kale to catwalks to Jesus will make fans smile." -- People "Whatever the topic, DeGeneres's compulsively readable style will appeal to fans old and new." - Publishers Weekly "Fans will not be disappointed...[DeGeneres's] trademark wit and openness shine through and through." -- Kirkus/DIVspan