The Erratics

Author : Vicki Laveau-Harvie
Publisher : Doubleday Canada
Page : 159 pages
File Size : 46,7 Mb
Release : 2020-08-25
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9780385695275

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The Erratics by Vicki Laveau-Harvie Pdf

In this award-winning memoir, two sisters reckon with the convalescence and death of their outlandishly tyrannical mother and the care of their psychologically terrorized father, all relayed with dark humour and brutal honesty. When Vicki and her sister learn their mother has been hospitalized for a broken hip, they return to their parents' home in Alberta to put things back in order. Though their parents disowned them years before, the sisters now reassert themselves in the dysfunctional household: their father, undernourished and suffering from Stockholm syndrome, is unable to see that he is in danger from his outlandish and vindictive wife. Rearranging their lives to be the daughters they were never allowed to be, the sisters focus their efforts on helping their father cope with the unending manipulations of their mother, and must encounter all the characters common in the circus of caretaking--oddball nurses and home helpers; over-opinionated hospital staff who have fallen for their mother's compulsive lies--along with the pressures that come with caring for elderly loved (and sometimes unloved) ones. Set against the natural world of remotest Alberta ("in winter the cold will kill you, nothing personal"), this memoir--at once dark and hopeful--shatters precedents about grief, anger and family trauma with surprising tenderness and humour.

Author : Marga Vicedo
Publisher : Beacon Press
Page : 274 pages
File Size : 49,8 Mb
Release : 2021-03-23
Category : Psychology
ISBN : 9780807025628

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Intelligent Love by Marga Vicedo Pdf

Winner of the History of Science Society's 2022 Davis Prize How one mother challenged the medical establishment and misconceptions about autistic children and their parents In the early 1960s, Massachusetts writer and homemaker Clara Park and her husband took their 3-year-old daughter, Jessy, to a specialist after noticing that she avoided connection with others. Following the conventional wisdom of the time, the psychiatrist diagnosed Jessy with autism and blamed Clara for Jessy’s isolation. Experts claimed Clara was the prototypical “refrigerator mother,” a cold, intellectual parent who starved her children of the natural affection they needed to develop properly. Refusing to accept this, Clara decided to document her daughter’s behaviors and the family’s engagement with her. In 1967, she published her groundbreaking memoir challenging the refrigerator mother theory and carefully documenting Jessy’s development. Clara’s insights and advocacy encouraged other parents to seek education and support for their autistic children. Meanwhile, Jessy would work hard to expand her mother’s world, and ours. Drawing on previously unexamined archival sources and firsthand interviews, science historian Marga Vicedo illuminates the story of how Clara Park and other parents fought against medical and popular attitudes toward autism while presenting a rich account of major scientific developments in the history of autism in the US. Intelligent Love is a fierce defense of a mother’s right to love intelligently, the value of parents’ firsthand knowledge about their children, and an individual’s right to be valued by society.

Author : Jenny Heijun Wills
Publisher : McClelland & Stewart
Page : 258 pages
File Size : 44,5 Mb
Release : 2021-02-16
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9780771070914

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Older Sister. Not Necessarily Related. by Jenny Heijun Wills Pdf

Winner of the 2019 Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction A beautiful and haunting memoir of kinship and culture rediscovered. Jenny Heijun Wills was born in Korea and adopted as an infant into a white family in small-town Canada. In her late twenties, she reconnected with her first family and returned to Seoul where she spent four months getting to know other adoptees, as well as her Korean mother, father, siblings, and extended family. At the guesthouse for transnational adoptees where she lived, alliances were troubled by violence and fraught with the trauma of separation and of cultural illiteracy. Unsurprisingly, heartbreakingly, Wills found that her nascent relationships with her family were similarly fraught. Ten years later, Wills sustains close ties with her Korean family. Her Korean parents and her younger sister attended her wedding in Montreal, and that same sister now lives in Canada. Remarkably, meeting Jenny caused her birth parents to reunite after having been estranged since her adoption. Little by little, Jenny Heijun Wills is learning and relearning her stories and those of her biological kin, piecing together a fragmented life into something resembling a whole. Delving into gender, class, racial, and ethnic complexities, as well as into the complex relationships between Korean women--sisters, mothers and daughters, grandmothers and grandchildren, aunts and nieces--Older Sister. Not Necessarily Related. describes in visceral, lyrical prose the painful ripple effects that follow a child's removal from a family, and the rewards that can flow from both struggle and forgiveness.

Author : Judy Batalion
Publisher : Penguin
Page : 352 pages
File Size : 44,9 Mb
Release : 2016-01-05
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9780698183681

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White Walls by Judy Batalion Pdf

A memoir of mothers and daughters, hoarding, and healing. Judy Batalion grew up in a house filled with endless piles of junk and layers of crumbs and dust; suffocated by tuna fish cans, old papers and magazines, swivel chairs, tea bags, clocks, cameras, printers, VHS tapes, ballpoint pens…obsessively gathered and stored by her hoarder mother. The first chance she had, she escaped the clutter to create a new identity—one made of order, regimen, and clean white walls. Until, one day, she found herself enmeshed in life’s biggest chaos: motherhood. Confronted with the daunting task of raising a daughter after her own dysfunctional childhood, Judy reflected on not only her own upbringing but the lives of her mother and grandmother, Jewish Polish immigrants who had escaped the Holocaust. What she discovered astonished her. The women in her family, despite their differences, were even more closely connected than she ever knew—from her grandmother Zelda to her daughter of the same name. And, despite the hardships of her own mother-daughter relationship, it was that bond that was slowly healing her old wounds. Told with heartbreaking honesty and humor, this is Judy’s poignant account of her trials negotiating the messiness of motherhood and the indelible marks that mothers and daughters make on each other’s lives.

Author : Kay Ryan
Publisher : Open Road + Grove/Atlantic
Page : 81 pages
File Size : 47,7 Mb
Release : 2015-10-06
Category : Poetry
ISBN : 9780802190857

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Erratic Facts by Kay Ryan Pdf

“Clear and lucid” poems from a US Poet Laureate and Pulitzer Prize winner who “journeys through the landscape of memory, consciousness, loss, and love” (The Washington Post). Kay Ryan is acclaimed for her highly relatable, deeply insightful poems. Erratic Facts is her first new collection since the Pulitzer Prize–winning The Best of It, and it is animated with her signature swift, clearheaded, lyrical style. At once witty and melancholy, playful and heartfelt, Ryan examines enormous subjects—existence, consciousness, love, loss—in compact poems that have immensely powerful resonance. Her sly rhymes and strong cadences convey both musicality and wisdom. While these pieces are composed of the same brevity and vitality that have characterized her singular voice over the course of more than twenty years, her imagination is more eccentric and daring than ever. Erratic Facts solidifies Ryan’s place at the pinnacle of American poetry. “Read a poem once and take in its crisp rhythms, subtle rhymes, and arresting images. Read it again and detect its hide-and-seek metaphors and meanings. . . . [Ryan’s] quantum poems pose resonant questions of physics and metaphysics, of attentiveness and caring on scales intimate and universal.” —Booklist

Author : Ralph James Savarese
Publisher : Other Press, LLC
Page : 538 pages
File Size : 55,6 Mb
Release : 2021-04-20
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9781635421446

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Reasonable People by Ralph James Savarese Pdf

Watch an interview with DJ on CNN Listen to Ralph Savarese's interview on NPR's "The Diane Rehm Show" Visit the book's website: www.reasonable-people.com "Why would someone adopt a badly abused, nonspeaking, six-year-old from foster care?" So the author was asked at the outset of his adoption-as-a-first-resort adventure. Part love story, part political manifesto about "living with conviction in a cynical time," the memoir traces the development of DJ, a boy written off as profoundly retarded and now, six years later, earning all "A's" at a regular school. Neither a typical saga of autism nor simply a challenge to expert opinion, Reasonable People illuminates the belated emergence of a self in language. And it does so using DJ's own words, expressed through the once discredited but now resurgent technique of facilitated communication. In this emotional page-turner, DJ reconnects with the sister from whom he was separated, begins to type independently, and explores his experience of disability, poverty, abandonment, and sexual abuse. "Try to remember my life," he says on his talking computer, and remember he does in the most extraordinarily perceptive and lyrical way. Asking difficult questions about the nature of family, the demise of social obligation, and the meaning of neurological difference, Savarese argues for a reasonable commitment to human possibility and caring.

Author : Wes Funk
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 173 pages
File Size : 43,6 Mb
Release : 2015-02
Category : Gay men
ISBN : 1927756413

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Dead Rock Stars by Wes Funk Pdf

Author : Fern Schumer Chapman
Publisher : Penguin
Page : 304 pages
File Size : 46,5 Mb
Release : 2021-04-06
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9780525561705

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Brothers, Sisters, Strangers by Fern Schumer Chapman Pdf

A warm, empathetic guide to understanding, coping with, and healing from the unique pain of sibling estrangement "Whenever I tell people that I am working on a book about sibling estrangement, they sit up a little straighter and lean in, as if I've tapped into a dark secret." Fern Schumer Chapman understands the pain of sibling estrangement firsthand. For the better part of forty years, she had nearly no relationship with her only brother, despite many attempts at reconnection. Her grief and shame were devastating and isolating. But when she tried to turn to others for help, she found that a profound stigma still surrounded estrangement, and that very little statistical and psychological research existed to help her better understand the rift that had broken up her family. So she decided to conduct her own research, interviewing psychologists and estranged siblings as well as recording the extraordinary story of her own rift with her brother--and subsequent reconciliation. Brothers, Sisters, Strangers is the result--a thoughtfully researched memoir that illuminates both the author's own story and the greater phenomenon of estrangement. Chapman helps readers work through the challenges of rebuilding a sibling relationship that seems damaged beyond repair, as well as understand when estrangement is the best option. It is at once a detailed framework for understanding sibling estrangement, a beacon of solidarity and comfort for the estranged, and a moving memoir about family trauma, addiction, grief, and recovery.

Author : Sally Schloss
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 314 pages
File Size : 44,9 Mb
Release : 2021-09
Category : Electronic
ISBN : 1637527837

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Helping Howard by Sally Schloss Pdf

From the moment the Author hustles Howard out of bed and into the kitchen to make breakfast, we know we're on a literary adventure like no other. The Author wants her story; Howard wants to understand who he is and what he's done with his one wild and precious life. By turns comic, poignant, lacerating and profound, HELPING HOWARD probes the complex and ever-changing nature of love, and seeks to understand, in the deepest way possible, the ties that bind. Schloss has written a remarkable story; hers is a nimble, inventive and wholly original voice. -Kitty Zeldis, author of Not Our Kind What a gorgeous novel! Romantic, deeply humane, astonishingly clever and moving - this is a love story between author and character that continually makes one gasp, even as it delivers great truths. Thank you, Sally Schloss, for writing it. -Bonnie Friedman, bestselling author of Writing Past Dark In Sally Schloss's insightful and engrossing novel, an Author writes a novel while regularly checking in with its real-life titular character. Howard is a kind and singularly tolerant man who has greatly compromised himself within his marriage. He nervously waits as the Author unveils each new phase of his life. Their ongoing conversation affords Howard-and the reader-a unique chance to see how his choices have at once enriched and undermined him. Schloss's writing is meticulous. -Patricia Grossman, author of Radiant Daughter. For those of you who delve into transactional dynamics as a profession this book is a fascinating must read. The characters engage in the all too typical tendencies of repeating the same patterns of behavior, thoughts, and feelings with their inevitable undesirable outcomes. The book sympathetically dramatizes how these underlying negative core beliefs affect these characters' lives over the course of their thirty-five-year marriage. -Robert Pazulinec Ed.D. Licensed Psychologist --- Helping Howard explores the fraught lifetime marriage of a straight older man, his younger gay wife, and the daughter that survives them. An anti-romantic romance, this book tells the tale of The Author who awakens Howard into consciousness in order to become her accomplice in figuring out what happens next. Their ongoing dialogue pushes the story forward through quarrelsome, humorous, psychological cliffhangers. Playing with, and exposing, the creative process adds another dimension to the narrative as The Author creates a relationship with her main character, which in turn, reflects on who she is. Helping Howard is about people struggling with understanding their own barriers to achieving and sustaining intimacy. It's a complex story of human longing and unmet desire.

Author : Andrew Kwong
Publisher : HarperCollins
Page : 265 pages
File Size : 44,9 Mb
Release : 2020-06-01
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9781460712399

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One Bright Moon by Andrew Kwong Pdf

Winner of the 2021 Michael Crouch Award, debut category of the National Biography Award: From famine to freedom, how a young boy fled Chairman Mao's China to a new life in Australia Andrew Kwong was only seven when he witnessed his first execution. The grim scene left him sleepless, anxious and doubtful about his commitment as a revolutionary in Mao's New China. Yet he knew if he devoted himself to the Party and its Chairman he would be saved. That's what his teacher told him. Months later, it was his own father on trial. This time the sentence was banishment to a re-education camp, not death. It left the family tainted, despised, and with few means of survival during the terrible years of persecution and famine known as the Great Leap Forward. Even after his father returned, things remained desperate. Escape seemed the only solution, and it would be twelve-year-old Andrew who undertook the perilous journey first. This is the poignant, resonant story of a young boy's awakening – to survival, education, fulfilment, and eventually to a new life of freedom. PRAISE 'An incredibly powerful book' Benjamin Law '[A] moving family saga, shot through with yearning and hard-won joy' Fiona Capp, Sydney Morning Herald 'This book will live on in your heart long after you've read the last page' Vicki Laveau-Harvie, author of The Erratics 'Heart-breaking, honest, personal, Andrew Kwong's moving journey from oppression to freedom is inspiring' Susanne Gervay, OAM, author 'A work of startling clarity ... reminiscent of Angela's Ashes' South China Morning Post Magazine 'Deeply moving ... The unique perspective of a child ... places One Bright Moon in the vicinity of Night, Elie Wiesel's pathbreaking memoir of his early life prior to and of his time in German concentration camps' Meenakshi Bharat, IIC Quarterly 'A few pages into this compelling memoir proves it was written by a master storyteller' Sharon Rundle, Australian Book Review 'A profoundly moving and spellbinding story that perfectly illuminates the terror of the times and the irrepressible yearning for something better' Carol Major, author and writing mentor 'One Bright Moon is extraordinary writing that encapsulates long-term hunger as a background feature of daily life in Mao's New China. In the foreground are images of adults and children populating the world of the pre-teenage boy with a photographic memory who would later write of them. The book is rich archival material for the study of China's social history' Mabel Lee, PhD FAHA, writer and translator 'Reading this memoir is a healing experience' Devika Brendon, author and editor

Author : Cecilia Chen,Janine MacLeod,Astrida Neimanis
Publisher : McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
Page : 510 pages
File Size : 55,7 Mb
Release : 2013-10-01
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9780773589346

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Thinking with Water by Cecilia Chen,Janine MacLeod,Astrida Neimanis Pdf

Emphasizing the role that vivid personalities – including engineers John Laing Weller and Alex Grant as well as contractors and labourers – played in the construction of the canal, Roberta Styran and Robert Taylor use archival sources, government documents, newspapers, maps, and original plans to describe a saga of technological, financial, geographical, and social obstacles met and overcome in an accomplishment akin to the building of the Canadian Pacific Railway. A story of Canadian skill, courage, vision, and hardship, This Colossal Project details the twenty-year excavation of the giant channel and the creation of huge concrete locks amidst war, the Great Depression, political change, and labour unrest.

Author : David H. Wagner
Publisher : Watkins Media Limited
Page : 306 pages
File Size : 52,6 Mb
Release : 2016-10-18
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9781780289335

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Backbone by David H. Wagner Pdf

A practical, step-by-step guide to help men know themselves deeply, root out weaknesses, enhance strengths, and upgrade their experience of life So many self-help books encourage men to get in touch with their feminine side if they truly want to embrace change. This book blows this theory out of the water, enabling men to transform themselves entirely—to find their mission; to live a life of strength, wisdom, and honor—while working with their positive masculinity instead of against it. Straight talking, down-to-earth, and humorous life coach David Wagner addresses the challenges that modern men typically face. He asks the reader to join him in a series of profound self-examination exercises and questions covering life purpose, male identity, spirituality, self-limitation, sexuality, relationships, fatherhood, and more. Every chapter offers practical advice and also includes observations and examples from David's own life as well as insights gained from the many clients and men's groups he has worked with over the years. Combining no-nonsense wisdom with brutally honest exercises, Backbone is the ultimate man's handbook to understanding himself, his purpose, his passion, and his power.

Author : Gwen Allen
Publisher : MIT Press
Page : 377 pages
File Size : 41,9 Mb
Release : 2015-08-21
Category : Art
ISBN : 9780262528412

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Artists' Magazines by Gwen Allen Pdf

How artists' magazines, in all their ephemerality, materiality, and temporary intensity, challenged mainstream art criticism and the gallery system. During the 1960s and 1970s, magazines became an important new site of artistic practice, functioning as an alternative exhibition space for the dematerialized practices of conceptual art. Artists created works expressly for these mass-produced, hand-editioned pages, using the ephemerality and the materiality of the magazine to challenge the conventions of both artistic medium and gallery. In Artists' Magazines, Gwen Allen looks at the most important of these magazines in their heyday (the 1960s to the 1980s) and compiles a comprehensive, illustrated directory of hundreds of others. Among the magazines Allen examines are Aspen (1965–1971), a multimedia magazine in a box—issues included Super-8 films, flexi-disc records, critical writings, artists' postage stamps, and collectible chapbooks; Avalanche (1970-1976), which expressed the countercultural character of the emerging SoHo art community through its interviews and artist-designed contributions; and Real Life (1979-1994), published by Thomas Lawson and Susan Morgan as a forum for the Pictures generation. These and the other magazines Allen examines expressed their differences from mainstream media in both form and content: they cast their homemade, do-it-yourself quality against the slickness of an Artforum, and they created work that defied the formalist orthodoxy of the day. Artists' Magazines, featuring abundant color illustrations of magazine covers and content, offers an essential guide to a little-explored medium.

Author : Suzanne Alderson
Publisher : Random House
Page : 320 pages
File Size : 51,6 Mb
Release : 2020-10-01
Category : Family & Relationships
ISBN : 9781473580749

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Never Let Go by Suzanne Alderson Pdf

How to help your child with mental illness through partnering, not parenting. Never Let Go is a supportive and practical guide for parents looking after a child with a mental illness. Suzanne Alderson understands the agonising struggle of bringing a child back from the brink of suicide, having spent three years supporting her own daughter through recovery. Her method of ‘partnering, not parenting’ has now helped thousands of other parents through her charity, Parenting Mental Health. Combining Suzanne's honest personal experience with expert input from psychologists, this book provides parents with the methods and knowledge they need to support, shield and strengthen their child as they progress towards recovery. Chapters include a background to the mental health epidemic, why a new method of parenting is crucial, how to change your thinking about mental health and practical advice on solutions to daily problems including accepting the new normal, dealing with others, and looking after yourself as well as your child.

Author : Jessica J. Lee
Publisher : Virago Press
Page : 284 pages
File Size : 43,9 Mb
Release : 2018-04-05
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 0349008337

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Turning by Jessica J. Lee Pdf

'The water slips over me like cool silk. The intimacy of touch uninhibited, rising around my legs, over my waist, up to my collarbone. When I throw back my head and relax, the lake runs into my ears. The sound of it is a muffled roar, the vibration of the body amplified by water, every sound felt as if in slow motion . . .' Summer swimming . . . but Jessica Lee - Canadian, Chinese and British - swims through all four seasons and especially loves the winter. 'I long for the ice. The sharp cut of freezing water on my feet. The immeasurable black of the lake at its coldest. Swimming then means cold, and pain, and elation.' At the age of twenty-eight, Jessica Lee, who grew up in Canada and lived in London, finds herself in Berlin. Alone. Lonely, with lowered spirits thanks to some family history and a broken heart, she is there, ostensibly, to write a thesis. And though that is what she does daily, what increasingly occupies her is swimming. So she makes a decision that she believes will win her back her confidence and independence: she will swim fifty-two of the lakes around Berlin, no matter what the weather or season. She is aware that this particular landscape is not without its own ghosts and history. This is the story of a beautiful obsession: of the thrill of a still, turquoise lake, of cracking the ice before submerging, of floating under blue skies, of tangled weeds and murkiness, of cool, fresh, spring swimming - of facing past fears of near drowning and of breaking free. When she completes her year of swimming Jessica finds she has new strength, and she has also found friends and has gained some understanding of how the landscape both haunts and holds us. This book is for everyone who loves swimming, who wishes they could push themselves beyond caution, who understands the deep pleasure of using their body's strength, who knows what it is to allow oneself to abandon all thought and float home to the surface.