The Mentoring Mom: 11 Ways to Model Christ for Your Child

Over the years, Hollywood movies have stamped on the layman’s mind an image of a typical American family as a rubber band stretched by stressors of self-centeredness and unbridled individualism. This stamp is particularly lasting in case of teen folk. As we read Jackie Kendall’s The Mentoring Mom (New Hope Publishers, Alabama, 2006), the Hollywood’s stamp is washed away and the American family appears in a new light-that of love, care, and trust. Surely you would need a mentoring mom.

Jackie Kendall addresses caring mothers in her book, sharing the eleven images (what she calls stamps) she imprinted on her children’s lives-images that model Christ- to help them grow up in God’s image. Kendall tells simple, true nonfiction stories from her own family life and asks the readers ‘Questions for Reflection’ at the end of each chapter. It is her excellent writing style, lively humor, and prodigy of construing thoughts in the most beautiful sentences that makes her book a wonderful gift to moms and everyone else.

The Mentoring Mom carries invaluable lessons: loving the Lord by way of loving fellow human beings, the difference between mere learning the word ‘God’ and knowing God intimately, and above all, the true spirit of a real family. An indelible lesson of the book, of course, is the vitality of ‘wholesome grief’. In Kendall’s words: tears do not bring back the one who has died, but tears do bring us back to the life that must be lived without the ones who have died.

As an author Jackie Kendall’s words work wonders. The reason is not hard to figure: you can actually feel the persons, she tells of, in their own voices as if the author has a miraculous force by which she transforms herself into the soul of the one she is talking about. You can identify your life’s instances with Kendall family’s history of love and benevolence. This is indeed an achievement.

Jackie Kendall’s book is a must read because we all need Kendall’s wisdom’s light to arrive safely at our destiny of peace.

ISBN: 1596690054

Availability

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1596690054/ref=pd_sxp_grid_i_2_0/103-8318986-2752659?ie=UTF8

http://product.ebay.com/The-Mentoring-Mom_ISBN_1596690054_W0QQfvcsZ1388QQsoprZ50863574

Author Website: http://www.jackiekendall.com/

Human Species and Beyond

The rather effusive start of Rajesh Singh’s Human Species and Beyond (Synergy Books, Texas, 2006) sets the reader on precarious footing while grappling with the metaphysical codes that come riveting at him/her from the very first page. With no preface or foreword, Singh’s book starts brusquely with the assumption that man is suffering in his present stage of existence on account of his ignorance. The author comes a long way off his assertion through an intelligently designed argument to conclude what adherents of metaphysical schools of thought have long been insinuating-the unity of being.

It would be hard to cogently deny the intelligent connections that Sing makes in his discussion of the orders manifest in scientific discoveries in the fields of cosmology, quantum physics, evolutionary biology, and the philosophy of consciousness. A thorough understanding of the hidden order, and the message implied, are vital to guide the human species straight to its destiny. Rajesh Singh urges on humans to bridle their consciousness and steer their efforts towards the noumenal signpost or else suffer the anxiety that is not at all their true lot. The upshot of the book is a more purposeful growth and, for this, the need for redesigning our institutions.

So what leaves the reader at odds while coming to terms with Singh’s reconciliation of Rig Veda and Biblical allusions at the cosmic harmony and man’s current level of consciousness? Perhaps more than one point. First of all is Singh’s use of language, a web of long and intricately crafted sentences that adds to the complexity and associated disorder among the author’s meanings, especially when the book is aiming at presenting a concise view of epistemological concepts. Then the issue of conformism sets in. The concepts of cosmic psyche, cosmic self, cosmic being, cosmic consciousness, supramentalhood, and several others that the author has employed in his argument are more in line with a conformist thinking pattern and the skeptic has in stock at least one deep frown over Singh’s arbitrariness of divisions such as seven fields (and still one Grand Unified Field), seven kingdoms, seven oceans of energy (of which Agni is born), seven oceans of human biology (corresponding to seven plexi), and so on.

Singh’s discussion in Human Species and Beyond is undoubtedly intelligent, interesting, and thought-provoking. The author’s caliber stands on high grounds and his emphasis on the teleological order of existence is meant for salvation and peace. Whether one agrees with him or not is an issue aside; first, Human Species and Beyond is to be read, reread, and understood. For minds of serious and philosophical liking, Human Species and Beyond is commendable plus.

ISBN: 0976498170

Availability

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0976498170/sr=8-2/qid=1153398749/ref=sr_1_2/102-7080352-9805722?ie=UTF8
http://www.overstock.com/cgi-bin/d2.cgi?PAGE=PRODUCT&PROD_ID=2012928&cid=64664&fp=F

Miracle of Miracles

The most effective aspect of Mina Nevisa’s Miracle of Miracles (Long Wood Communications, USA, 2004) is the personal voice of a woman who stood against the forceful captivity of thinking foisted by fundamentalist Muslims. All the pains, this devout Christian woman details, stood in her path of freedom from the reckless talons of Islamic laws hunting for the religious converts in Iran. Mina’s escape is indeed a living miracle that sends shivers through the hearts of many who do not yet know what it means to shun Islam in a fundamentalist Muslim country.

In her quest for freedom of thought and belief, Mina lost her friends to death by torture at the hands of Islamic authorities; her family to shackles of prejudiced hatred, and her first ever child to death before birth. It was a Pyrrhic victory for her, but her faith in Christ redeemed her from the dread of slavishly following something she did not choose. Miracle of Miracles is a touching account of her persistence in pursuit of what she believes the true path of salvation.

Mina’s account of her experiences is followed by an addendum at the end of the book that criticizes sharply the logical flaws of Islam’s basic teachings and tenets. She exposes the darkness incumbent on the developed world by the arrogant ideologies of Islamic fundamentalists and justifies her claims by instances from history.

Two features of the book pose a challenge to the reader’s faculty of reason. First, the account of several miracles that touched Mina’s life and those of her friends, family, and acquaintances, appear either contrived or just another interpretation of reality. For a nonbeliever, this certainly is a serious drawback of Mina’s work. Then there is the last part of the book, which acts counter to the whole mode of reading the author’s realistic account of Islamic barbarism. Mina directly addresses the readers urging on them to convert to Christian faith. Not only does this sound too preachy and unwanted in a book of mature discussion but also tames the bright image of the author’s personality. Perhaps, Mina could not subdue her emotions while thinking of ways to let people out of the claws of fundamentalist Muslims.

ISBN: 188392846X

Availability

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/188392846X/qid=1151413324/sr=11-1/ref=sr_11_1/104-8660832-0394306?n=283155

http://www.renewed-life.com/shop/index.cfm?fuseaction=customer.product&product_code=TOCM-188392846X&category_code=M05

Touch of Christ Ministries: http://touchofchrist.net/

Mayday! : A Physician as Patient

‘Stand tall-think tall’ was the advice of Allan Lohaus’s physical therapist, as Dr. Lohuas was wanting in spirit while having just caught the road to convalescence. Earlier came in Dr. Lohuas’s life course a painful period of intestinal surgeries and dependency on medical aid. As he came out of the nearly helpless anguish, memories of pain and distress became the subject matter of his short book May Day! A Physician as Patient (Synergy Books, Texas, 2006).

Allan Lohuas himself was moved by the agony of his mother, a cancer patient, and he decided to become a doctor. Becoming a gynecologist was sparked by his observation of mothers losing their lives to death in the process of creation. ‘Salvaging infant life’ was the spirit behind the choice. All went well till his late adolescence when abdominal pain struck him. Later a boat accident reserved him a place in hospital for months demanding patience and endurance. No doubt, the doctor’s mettle was down as he witnessed his own decline.

The psychological scars, however, that came with Dr. Lohuas’s condition were deeper. A sudden reversal in social roles brings its shock. In Dr. Lohuas’s case, the shock was stronger since it threw him into a writhing thing looking for someone who he himself was supposed to be. Enduring the pangs of silently watching a doctor operate on you is the crux of Dr. Lohuas’s story. The stages of healing are always looking the patient’s way; only the latter must keep hope: with family, friends, and memories of the good old days.

Physical healing is not the only point in Mayday! As Dr. Lohuas finds during his illness, the spirit needs as much care as the diseased body. The doctor cum patient turned to prayer and feeling a superior being when his courage to cope with the pain started to yield. In the end, we read him drawing parallels between his regaining health and the Resurrection. It’s this walking out of a nearly dead state that makes our patient a voice of hope.

First-hand experience gives Dr. Lohuas’s voice a genuine sound and his autobiographical nonfiction story is moving and strengthening. The great thing is that the convalescent doctor regains his humor. We do hear him calling his stool a ‘bomb’.

ISBN: 0975592297

Availability

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0975592297/ref=pd_rhf_p_1/104-0919357-4219163?%5Fencoding=UTF8&v=glance&n=283155

http://www.shop.com/op/aprod-p35558709-k24-g4-~Mayday!+:+A+Physician+as+Patient+-nover?sourceid=13

http://search.barnesandnoble.com/bookSearch/isbnInquiry.asp?r=1&isbn=0975592297

Islam Revealed: A Christian Arab’s View of Islam

When a Muslim scholar Ahmed Deedat claimed before the audience in Birmingham Hall, England, that Jesus promised his followers the coming of his successor, Muhammad, it was Dr. Anis A. Shorrosh who challenged Mr. Deedat to a debate on the divinity of Jesus. Two debates then ensued between the two religious scholars. The second, centered on the topic ‘Is Jesus God?’ resulted in a setback to the Muslim veteran. Dr. Shorrosh’s book Islam Revealed: A Christian Arab’s View of Islam (Thomas Nelson Inc, Tennesse, 1988) is inspired by this experience.

With a foreword by Dr. Adrian Rogers, Islam Revealed is divided into two main parts. The first part presents an overview of Islam as a religion, the life of Muhammad, Islamic convictions on Jesus and crucifixion, and the validity of Quran versus Bible. Dr. Shorrosh brings to light the turbulent life of Islam’s last prophet touching on his polygamy, alleged holy wars, literacy, and strategies adopted to expand his circle of influence. Startling secrets are revealed by the Christian Doctor of Ministries as he refers to some unspoken-of historical happenings. Comparing Muhammad’s life with that of Jesus, the author attempts to prove the divinity of the latter. Interesting connections are revealed between Quran and earlier Arabic texts; connections that challenge the divine claim to Islam’s most revered book.

The second part of the book presents the readers with main points from the arguments of both debaters and rebuttals of both sides. While both show logical slips in their arguments against refuting each other’s position, Dr. Shorrosh maintains his composure and a greater degree of reason against his Muslim contestant. Questions for thought about God, Jesus, and crucifixion add to the flavor of this interesting religious debate.

Islam Revealed carries endnotes, bibliography, and a glossary of Arabic terms with English meanings makes it easy for a Non-Arab to apprehend the points taken up in Dr. Shorrosh’s arguments.

ISBN: 0840730152

Availability

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0840730152/ref=pd_rhf_p_1/104-6851046-4483969?%5Fencoding=UTF8&v=glance&n=283155


http://gallery.bcentral.com/GID4906989P3273607-Closeout-Items/Islam-Books/Islam-Revealed-A-Christian-Arabs-View-of-Islam.aspx

http://www.musichristian.com/sys/product.php?PRODUCT=85920

Pain Free for Life: The 6-Week Cure for Chronic Pain--Without Surgery or Drugs

Mind-body interaction has long been the topic of arguments in philosophy and science. Psychosomatic approach to painful symptoms is well known among physicians and psychotherapists. Doctor Scott Brady has, for the first time, designed a six-week cure for chronic pain ascribed usually to physical causes but rooted in reality in a patient’s history of repressed negative emotions. He gives an account of it in his book Pian Free for Life: The 6-Week Cure for Chronic Pain--Without Surgery or Drugs (Center Street, New York, 2006), co-authored with William Proctor.

Dr. Brady coins the term Autonomic Overload Syndrome (AOS) to describe the symptoms of physical pain, insomnia, and skin conditions like psoriasis arising from repressed emotions like anger, guilt, shame, frustration, and fear. Physical manifestations of AOS are varied and have been frequently ascribed to herniated disks, fibromyalgia, and other bodily conditions. Dr. Brady relates them to emotional overload of the mind’s unconscious part and advises on how to keep pain away by following his mind-body-spirit healing program. The six-week program includes harnessing a disturbed unconscious by practices of relaxation and fathoming repression of the past, and providing an outlet for this mental monster to flee via techniques like depth journaling and biofeedback.

By describing pain-prone personality types and asking assessment questions, Dr. Brady helps his readers judge their own situation and vulnerability to AOS. His book is encouraging in that it boosts the pain-prone soul’s confidence by asserting the fact that conscious part of our mind is stronger than the unconscious. While this defies the Freudian psychoanalytic approach to illness, a new hope of healing without surgery and chemotherapy is sparkled through Dr. Brady’s research: pain is controllable by will and insight.

The book ends with Dr. Brady’s answers to questions arising in the minds of his readers. He recounts how he recovered from chronic pain by tending to the urges of his mind. Certainly, his work is a landmark in motivating pain-sufferers to step on the path of healing with greater confidence, courage, and independence.

ISBN: 0446577618

Availability:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0446577618/sr=8-2/qid=1149772960/ref=pd_bbs_2/102-5576569-1316164?%5Fencoding=UTF8

http://www.allbookstores.com/book/0446577618/William_Proctor/Pain_Free_For_Life.html

Brady Institute Homepage: http://www.bradyinstitute.com/

Sleeping on Potatoes

‘Sleeping on Potatoes is the metaphor for the bumpy and lumpy ride I had in my formative years,’ Dr. Carl Nomura explains in the preface to his debut publication Sleeping on Potatoes: A Lumpy Adventure from Manzanar to the Corporate Tower (Erasmus Books, Washington, 2003). Nomura then extends this metaphor into a vivified mosaic of his life’s experiences by bringing them to view through the eyes of a child and all the way up to a person with aspirations.

Starting informally with his mother Mizuko’s story, a Japanese woman who married Nomura’s father because ‘she heard that in America everyone was tall’, Dr. Nomura creates a series of true, non-fictional, real life stories that border on the line between short story and personal essay. Reliving in linguistic light the hardship of poverty, a heartless father, the humiliation of being forced to move into relocation centers during the Second World War, and the travails of disease and bereavement, Nomura throws his readers into a joyous shock with the amazing optimism of his attitude and his lively humor that arises spontaneously from the interaction of situation and language. One instance is from his school days: ‘we thought her name (Sister Perpetual) fitted her because she beat us perpetually’. Certainly not to overlook the fun of fishing and poker, and giving smoking up for good when an angry woman comes inches from your face and calls you a ‘polluting pig.’

Though a doctor of philosophy in Solid State Physics, and an important figure in the corporate world of technology, it is Nomura’s flair of seeing things as matter of course that lures one to appreciate his magnanimity. Not going a braggart, he opens a window to the philosophy of life-contentment, be it a doctorate in physics and excellence in management of small businesses, or using a bathroom 200 feet away from his bed in a trailer. Life is joy if you have your guts tuned to its frequency of vicissitudes.

Marking Sleeping on Potatoes as a book to amuse would be a reader’s pitfall. It is a book enormous in its scope, though not in its volume (250 pages). By no means is this the adventurous story of a single person, reflecting on his past. It is the story of many characters that endured and fought against social injustice and untoward circumstances-from women like Mizuko and Louise, to the sufferers in relocation centers, and the motherless litter of cats who were lucky enough to make it to Nomura’s house. His heart touching memories of Mox, the neighbor’s dog, harbor all the richness and beauty of life. Nomura traces the causes of discontent in marital life, discusses issues associated with terminal illness, and informs on linguistic and the cultural relativism of English and Japanese native speakers.

Now in his eighties, retired and coping with prostate cancer, Nomura’s lumpy ride has not come to a pause. It is bumping all along with new interest in learning and doing things and new ways of adding to the richness of his life. With his new wife, children and grandchildren, pets, garden, books, and the untamed freshness of mind, Dr. Carl Nomura lives as if he is immortal.

ISBN: 0970194730

Availability

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0970194730/sr=8-1/qid=1149137311/ref=pd_bbs_1/002-9767278-4152866?%5Fencoding=UTF8

http://www.yuricareport.com/Erasmus%20Books/SleepingOnPotatoes.html

Book Overview: http://www.sleepingonpotatoes.com/

O’Connor’s Federal Rules: Civil Trials 2005

Michael C. Smith is an attorney with The Roth Law Firm in Marshall, Texas, where he specializes in product liability, and complex commercial and patent litigation in federal and state courts. Smith has served as chairman of the Local Rules Advisory Committee for the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas since 2000 and is president of the Eastern District of Texas Bar Association. He has updated O’Connor’s Federal Rules: Civil Trials 2005 published by Jones McClure Publishing, Texas, 2005. It is a bulky tome (1200 pages) whose intended readership comprises lawyers and judges.

Smith’s book is a rulebook on procedure in federal courts, divided into ten main sections, which exhaustively deal with all the aspects of trials in civil courts. Half of the book’s volume details commentaries on the framework of procedures that are to be legally followed in a civil court. The commentaries deal with introduction to the Federal Rules, various considerations on part of attorneys and plaintiffs, proofs and evidences, judgment factors, hearings and pleadings, and all contained within and related to such issues.

The rest of the book deals with MultiDistrict Litigation Rules, Federal Rules (of Civil Procedures, Evidences, and Appellate Procedures), Code and Constitution of the United States, Advisory Committee Notes to Rules, the Hague Convention on Service Abroad, and eventually with Timetables followed in civil court procedures.

The author has taken care to refer district judges as the ‘district court’ and parties as ‘it’, presenting them as corporations (which they often are). This certainly has helped him make a gender-neutral voice.

An index categorizing the major topics with detailed sub-headings, alphabetically, has been added to facilitate topic search.

In sum, Smith’s Civil Trials guide is the law-professional’s complete source for advice and knowledge on every aspect of civil trials in the U.S.

ISBN: 1884554962

Availability

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1884554962/ref=pd_rhf_p_1/104-1196110-6435960?%5Fencoding=UTF8&v=glance&n=283155

Author’s Website: http://mcsmith.blogs.com/about.html

Envy of the Gods: If The Reward Were Right

Envy of the Gods (Bridgeway Books, Texas, 2006) is the first in Andrea Savitch’s trilogy of fiction. Set in the medieval world of Raalek, the tale gives an account of power-hungry Duke Atan Ishtba whose recklessness could not be checked by any means until the arrival of beautiful and willful Raphela. In 316 pages, Andrea Savitch circumscribes the peak period of the lives of her two main characters with sensuality and power as her motifs.

Savitch’s work has the desirable quality needed for every work of fiction, a smooth and fluent narration. Her use of language is creative and there are no verbal barriers in the reader’s progress with the book. Letting the reader know in the first page that the story of the Duke is told on the first night each spring readily induces the ambience of folklore. The story of the young Duke’s craving for power and Raphela’s passion for conquering him hooks the reader from the first few chapters.

Then the unwieldiness of the novel’s plot starts hovering over the mind. Little description of the Castle Cordan, the characters, and the social world, the emptiness of events and their causal unrelatedness all render the tale incapable of a deeper impact. Accounts of punishment and subsequent compassion are highly incompatible with the outlines of characters. The author’s unending concern with Mahtso’s chain bothers. Before late, the interaction of characters assumes a mechanical air that seems to linger until the meeting of Raphela and Nabus at the end, a scene touching in its unaffectedness.

The transformation of Atan into a man from a beast and Raphela’s victory in standing by her love of knowledge give something of a plot to Savitch’s tale. The title stays unthought of. It is the Absence of Gods that needs to be dealt with. The story of Svaitch’s ‘legends of power’ is not over and in the coming ventures a convincing conclusion can be hoped for.


Availability

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1933538112/qid=1147871700/sr=11-1/ref=sr_11_1/104-6228281-5223923?n=283155

Author’s Website http://www.authorsden.com/wwwraalekcom

ISBN: 1933538112

Double Blank

Double Blank

Drugs, lies, murders, and hunt for the culprit at the root-a typical crime story everyone has been watching for decades. This time Yasmina Khadra sets the scene in Algeria with his (or her, if you would) political thriller Double Blank (Toby Press, Connecticut, 2005). We now know Khadra is the nom de plume of Mohammed Moulessehoul, an Algerian army officer whose books breach the underpinnings of violence in Algeria. It is easy to see where a modern political thriller like Double Blank ends up-at the doorstep of a crooked businessman cum politician. And Khadra gets us way up there.

Double Blank tells of police superintendent, Mr. Llob, who is set to track the hand behind a series of murders involving puppets in the drug market and the red-light district. Things get to a little higher level as clues point to a conspiracy theory living in a diskette. There is little new in the 140 pages of killings and investigation except its Algerian setting. You are watching Law and Order with some added action and subtracted coherence of plot.

Khadra’s book is a prey to many weaknesses. It is supposed to be a novel but the mode of narration is typical of a short story. The voice of the narrator in present has unnaturalness hard to put up with, especially in a story with events that certainly have taken place in the past. There is little true action in the story and the most blatant murders happen in two sentences. Lack of description leaves a very poor mental picture of the scenes. Characters too are extremely ill-defined and character development seems a thing alien to the author’s concern.

The most fatal slump of Double Blank is, perhaps, the quirky employment of humor throughout the telling of events. Superintendent Llob’s voice sounds detached from its inner care for peace by constantly gushing out twisted quips, many of which are too idiosyncratic to be appreciated. Clumsy experimenting it language and slack exaggeration for the sake of humor nullifies the effect of Khadra’s tale. In general, Double Blank falls too very short of a novel. It sounds like a story you try to get involved in as a reader and always find yourself far behind where you started.

ISBN: 1592641199

Availability

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1592641199/sr=8-4/qid=1146890579/ref=sr_1_4/104-4299122-1619947?%5Fencoding=UTF8

http://www.smarter.com/books-1/product/double_blank-480167/?source=inktomi_books480167

Your Healing Diet: A Quick Guide to Reversing Psoriasis and Chronic Diseases with Healing Foods

The impetus for writing a book against psoriasis came from Deirdre Earls’ own long and painful encounter with the skin condition. The dietitian from Texas chose a more natural way of tackling her problem by healing with diet instead of chemotherapy. Her book Your Healing Diet (BookSurge Publishing, South Carolina, 2006) gives dietary advice on coping with problems, including psoriasis, resulting from noxious food.

Though Earls’ book is a short one, mere 62 pages, it offers a simple and clear explanation of the anatomy of psoriasis and other diseased conditions in terms of food intake and digestion. Particularly informative and interesting are the author’s description of human body’s acid/alkaline balance, nutritional value of different food species, and comparison of natural versus processed food items. The facts sum up to the uncommon but wholesome principle of ‘healing from the inside out’ rather than ‘healing only the symptoms from the outside in’.

Earls puts forth her three central healing principles: diet, positive outlook, and outdoor activity. The brunt of her dietary commendation stands on fresh vegetarian food, discouraging flesh, fat, and artificial snacks. She shares her own culinary chart with the readers, caring for taste, which, to her, comes after good health.

The real value of her work is latent in the power of motivation her words stir up in the reader. The many side effects of drugs are the horror of a patient. Knowledge of our natural nutritional treasure is essential to each and every person who is having health problems of any sort. Earls’ short book comes close to achieving this aim.

For Americans, or those visiting here, Your healing Diet is of practical guidance in that it has a list of stores where food of value can be purchased. Whether one is home or traveling, Earls’ book is a good guide to better eating.


ISBN: 1419617079

Availability

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1419617079/ref=pd_rhf_p_1/102-7375182-1703301?%5Fencoding=UTF8&v=glance&n=283155

Author Website: http://www.yourhealingdiet.net/pages/1/index.htm

Dakhmeh

Naveed Nori is an author’s pseudonym now getting to be known for his novel Dakhmeh (Toby Press, USA, 2003). Noori’s work is disturbing, antirevolutionary, and almost deliriously scornful toward Islamic totalitarianism in post revolutionary Iran.

Dakhmeh is the story of a young, irreligious man, Arash whose nostalgic compulsion drives him back to Iran, his home country that his family fled during the war of Islamic Revolution. The misery of post revolutionary Iranian life shatters his idealistic picture of life in his country and he ends up as a political prisoner somewhere between sanity and madness.

From the first page, the text of the book hits the reader as poorly written, egotistical, and sloppy. The story lacks a clear point and character development is null. Narration is mostly incoherent with alternating first person and omniscient modes, both abruptly truncating. Too much of personal pique shows on every page till the end. Even conversation between the vaguely portrayed characters feel like formal interviews, all leading to a prefigured viewpoint.

Certainly the author has plucked a significant string in the history of politics and societal transformation. His (?) criticism of media and cruel treatment of all creatures outside the fundamentalist’s circle are of appeal to the humanistic mind. Still, Noori fails badly as a novelist. The motives of his (?) protagonist are diffused and Arash’s obsession with socio political change is utterly boring. Lack of meaning in the protagonist’s experiences is disappointingly manifest. His vindictive bitterness pours out on leaders and historical figures alike, childishly with little thought or coherence of ideas. The intended audience of the author is also hard to imagine.

In general, Dakhmeh is a frumpy text of sloppily worked political history and social dilapidation. After Arash contracts a prostitute, we read him asking himself ‘Where was I heading?’ A reader’s wish might well be ‘If only the author had asked himself (?) the same question before setting out to write this book.’

ISBN: 190288177X

Availability

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/190288177X/ref=sr_11_1/103-3586972-1229420?%5Fencoding=UTF8
http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?isbn=190288177X

Chains Around the Grass

Naomi Ragen is an international bestseller novelist, a writer of and about the core of human life. Chains Around the Grass (The Toby Press, USA, 2003) is the book Ms. Ragen says that she became an author to write. Setting the story of a poor Jewish family in the heart of America, Naomi Ragen calls for a revision of attitudes shaped by the sickness of reckless capitalism and its people who have turned into machines fuelled with business.

The novel’s prologue is captivating. Through the eyes of the moment, little Sara Markowitz is shown sitting in humility in her rich uncle’s house with her mother Ruth and brother Jesse out for the funeral of her father David Markowitz. Pursuing the old American dream of a well-off future, David never realizes the greater need of familial love that is showering him all along and the lives of his family chug along the uncertain paths of the business world. With the loss of David the family slumps into an indefinable channel of struggle against the demands of the society and its own integrity.

Chains Around the Grass is one of the semantically richest works carrying a number of issues. Sick capitalist values are questioned in the suffering of widowed Ruth and her children with several close, rich, relatives. The dilemma of a poor minority’s identity under social pressure speaks in Ruth’s resentment of changing Jesse’s family name to ‘Marks’. What underlies insanity is illustrated cogently in Jesse’s character. Sara’s character embodies the process of personality development under early childhood traumas. The best explored is, perhaps, gender inequality prevailing in the social world, best instantiated in Sara’s feelings of hatred towards her own brother.

Naomi Ragen’s striking symbolism in her novel’s situations is the quality of her work that best complements other merits. The heaven of idealized life is shattered to ‘chips flying away under time’s relentless chisel’. When they were united and beautiful like young lush grass, they were out of reach on account of ‘chains’ around them. One set of ‘ropes’ is replaced with another and the dream of catching your life’s beauty is never actualized until you see your life’s time ending abruptly like a dream. Naomi Ragen is at her best in justice with her characters. Reality comes to them as they finally learn to ‘measure their life with the right yardstick’. Through Ruth’s faith, we all know that a purely humanistic relationship is possible if we know the beauty of our inner self. It is an illustration of Eric Fromm’s humanistic psychoanalysis; a story as real as reading one’s own mind.

With all its beauty of language and elements of realistic fiction, Chains Around the Grass carries a problem as a book. The title and the prologue are suggestive of Sara as being the protagonist. It is through Sara’s eyes that the tenderness of life and monsters of fear are revealed to us but Sara’s character is treated scantily as compared to that of her parents and her brother Jesse. Essentially it is the story of Ruth’s life. Her figure could have given a better illustrative title and prologue.

ISBN: 1902881826

Availability

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1902881826/sr=8-1/qid=1145592177/ref=pd_bbs_1/104-8372197-3161517?%5Fencoding=UTF8

http://www.ecampus.com/book/1902881532


Author’s Website: http://naomiragen.com/

Three 1-Act Plays

The second volume of Tom Anselmo plays Three 1-Act Plays (Red Brindle Press, New York, 2006) is not a series like the first one Gail’s Place by virtue of the same protagonist and unity of place, but by the common motif resolution of self’s internal conflicts. As Anselmo puts it in his preface to the plays ‘I write about people who are on the verge of self-discovery’, the book causes the conflicts in an individual’s mind peep through the voice of the leading characters. As the person in the story discovers his or her own suppressed urges, values of familial love, commitment, and obligation undergo critical scanning.

The plays begin with Matt and Sara, set in a resort, in which the protagonists consciously deny themselves aspects of their personalities that society might find obnoxious. Matt gives up speaking in company to evade any awkwardness on account of his stuttering. Sara is a self-restrainer, ashamed of her aunt’s showy manners practiced for winning men’s affection. Their need and struggle for self-acceptance bring them together on common grounds. The theme of the play symbolically comes out to be the victory of human understanding over flirtatious ostentation in any meaningful relationship.

Getting deeper to the core of the conflict is The Voices, a play in which two different impulses of Cathy, the heroine, are personified characters. The issue at hand is Cathy’s suspicion of Steve in regard to his sincerity to Ellie, Cathy’s friend and Steve’s girlfriend. Cathy has seen Steve with another young woman in way that makes her inner voices contend for keeping or revealing the incident to Ellie. The first voice presses on retaining the secret for the sake of intimacy while the second one is resolved on squaring things at the surface for the sake of making relationships better. Anselmo presented the conflict in Gail’s Place. Only this time both impulses are vis-à-vis, sweeping dust off the true nature of social reality: is social reality there as matter of course, or is it created when one impulse gets over the others to seize the self? The author leaves the question open to the audience, to be taken up by their own inner voices.

Summing up the argument between the inner voices in the third play Penny is again Gail Stanza, heroine of Anselmo’s trilogy of 2-act plays Gail’s Place. Eponymous Penny is Gail’s sister in law who has continued pampering her husband Robby despite his repeated indulgence in gambling. As Penny asks Gail for help with their debt, Gail reacts crossly to Penny’s blind devotion to her husband in the name of love. The dialogue between Gail, Ron, and Penny brings out the issue of familial obligation versus common sense. The underlying question is whether sympathy should be furthered or checked when one’s peace of mind is knuckling under it.

Anselmo’s plays renovate the tradition of serious drama by invoking a debate over the limitations of social norms and individual obligation to follow them. The scope of his discussion is multifold, pertinent to matters of family, sense, obligation, spontaneity of one’s self, and discovery of new ways of existing against the modus vivendi.

Anselmo’s Three 1-Act Plays is the thoughtful mind’s donut.

ISBN: 0977079422

Availability:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0977079422/ref=pd_rhf_p_2/002-3689637-3607238?n=283155&no=%2A&s=books&v=glance

Gail’s Place: A Trilogy of Plays in Two Acts

Thomas Hardy didactically preserved his Tess, a young woman who attempted to be honest in her intimate relationship by revealing her secret, and thus ended at the gallows. Tom Anselmo takes care to let his Gail clinch a footing in both her inner and social worlds as she unveils the mask of falsity in relationships. Anselmo’s first volume of plays is a trilogy of two-act plays by the title Gail’s Place (Red Brindle Press, New York, 2006). While each plays stands on its own plot, central to all is Gail Stanza’s character, a woman who is bent on reconciling her inner self with that of her social role by cracking secrets that tend to stifle one’s individuality and true identity.

The opening play Secret Burdens centers Gail Stanza at the heart of their party in the honor of their friends’ marriage anniversary. While Lily attributes her marriage’s success to care in keeping secrets from the spouse, as do Mark and Evelyn, Gail is disposed nearly in excess to resurrect past grievances so as to ensure calm in the future. Gail’s character has no hint of sullenness about her and so the audience is likely to appreciate her assertiveness as the moral implications of it unfold.

Clues starts as a detective drama with Evelyn Harper lying in coma in the hospital. Gail’s speculations about Mark are turning into reality and the question of responsibility arises from the depth of Gail’s character. We meet Gail’s inner self, personified, and conversing with Gail over shutting down of vital human sensibilities. Gail’s self-conscious speech makes her a lovable character: ‘I have the distinguished honor of being a big-mouth.’ And her pride in her truthfulness is an impetus to secretive sufferers like Margaret: ‘I’m glad I don’t have the kind of ties that turn us into moral pretzels.’ As Gail scatters the shards of hypocrisy for good, Lily sees her own inner self, clad in a shroud, rising and walking. Anselmo’s genius shows, not tells, how to connect with your being’s center.

The third play The Place moves the argument closer into Gail’s home as her husband Ron finds himself at odds with his inner self against his colleague’s promotion grounded on Ron’s support. Carl is suspected of sexual harassment of one of his students. Again it is Gail who goads her husband to act in harmony with his inner voice. Gail’s personified, abstract, self finds a mate in form of Ron’s resurrected center. Alongside we see the false consciousness of Lynn, Carl’s wife, who accepts compromise as matter of course.

Anselmo has fixed the familiar signboard of serious drama in the history of modern literature. With no foul language, no hip-hop mania, conscientious protagonists, and character-driven situations, Anselmo’s plays speak the truth about the nature of secrets, their implications, and behavioral significance.

The serious subject matter and ease of writing style place Anselmo’s book among lovable reads.

ISBN: 0977079414

Availability

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0977079414/qid=1144838070/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/103-9724660-3863057?s=books&v=glance&n=283155

Author Website: http://www.tomanselmo.com/index.html

Heaven’s Witness

In the vista are two authors, Joseph Telushkin and Allen Estrin, who have joined heads to chill the breath of mystery nuts with their paranormal psychological thriller Heaven’s Witness (Toby Press, Connecticut, USA, 2004). The prologue of this 462 pages, hardbound, chiller sets one’s curiosity on heels in a second and keeps the reader’s breath stranded for a pretty good while.

To call Heaven’s’ Witness a unique thriller of its kind would be overlooking an overwhelming number of thriller books and movies. Those Indian flick maniacs are long familiar with the ‘transmigration of soul’ belief and even in Hollywood it is not a novel idea. Heaven’s Witnes's specialty is the way it has attempted to reconcile the age-old idea of soul survival with the partially explored realm of paranormal psychology.

In the novel, we meet Robin Norris, a young actress of twenty-five, who is taken in deep hypnotic trance by a psychiatrist Jordan Geller. In a state of regression, Robin assumes the identity of a seventeen-year old girl Beverly Casper and describes a horrifying murder scene of the teenager, a murder that took place seven years prior to Robin’s birth. Who can resist leaping up! The story thus proceeds in the usual suspense movie style with a series of murders of teenage girls, each killing followed by a message to the parents from the Messenger, the serial killer. Suspects get shifting in the reader’s mind and the protagonists run themselves in deeper trouble before finally coming up with the Messenger’s real identity.

Two things undermine the novel’s take over. First, the question killer who? is answered nearly in full by the time we read a little more than half of the book. Second, the curiosity about why is quenched at nearly the same time. What is worse is that the main hook in the story Is Robin’s account an instance of reincarnation or a rationally possible revival of suppressed memory? is left unresolved at the end. The effect is like being cheated.

There are weaknesses that are all too obtrusive. Dr. Geller’s hypnotic skills working on Robin are almost cartoonish. Lack of character development is the book’s Achilles Heel. The element of romance in the story is little more than dead and we look at a passive, talking-only hero. The situations are not effectively experienced from any single character’s eyes and a feeling of detachment from the whole tale prevails through most of the book’s’ length. Perhaps it is what comes off when you try to gather thirty-two years of mystery in two weeks of the narration’s span.

In spite of all the weaknesses, Heaven’s Witness has some convincingly appreciable qualities. Deviant psychiatrist Geoffrey Bolton’s belief things just don’t happen, there’s a reason is a conviction that strengthens Dr. Geller’s case of pursuing his view of reality with genuine force. The need to deviate from the stereotyped and clichéd has found firm footing in the story’s framework. Still more significant is the psychological peep into the depths of some common diseased products of life: the panic-stricken writer whose real disease is the degradation of audience’s taste of comedy, the porn-obsessed young man whose root problem is low self-esteem on account of his homely figure, and the mother-hating young woman who is the victim of her domineering mother’s hard-shelled feminism.

Heaven’s Witness is a nice read but not hypnotically riveting.



ISBN: 1592640915
Availability

http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?isbn=1592640915

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1592640915/ref=ase_thetobypress-20/103-2282091-6541424

Slow Dancing at Death’s Door: Helping Your Parent Through the Last Stages of Life

It is impressive to see that a woman, Amy C. Baker, from the corporate world has stepped forward to show us our deepest human value: the need for serving our departing generation. Her book Slow Dancing at Death’s Door (Life Journey/Cook International, Colorado, 2006) incarnates a healthy form of what has been called ‘Survivor’s Syndrome’. Amy Baker exhausts her experience of anger, frustration, loneliness, and grief, that are the lot of so many aging members of our ‘Sandwich Generation’, and comes out with an enlightening lesson: forgiving for not knowing better.

Losing her mother to cancer and father to Hepatitis C, Amy Baker recounts what it feels like losing your loved ones and how best you can play your role of a caring child, at the same time a spouse, a parent, a responsible employee, and many temporary roles that one is obliged to take in life. That business world has not calcified her human spirit shows in Baker’s account of all she did for her dying parents to claim her success as a humane being. That she is an intelligent writer is evident from the warmth and energy of emotion that saturate her expression throughout the book.

As Amy Baker maturely embellishes her passages with good-hearted humor, the gravity of a subject like death (and that of one’s own parents) has no chance to oppress or offend the reader. However, Baker does more than that. With her faith, she illustrates the falsity of our perfection-seeking attitude towards life, thus showing us the importance to shed our slough of self-centeredness while at the same time not overlooking the need to take care of ourselves in order to be able to care for our parents. The emphasis is on growth not only in flesh and blood but more so in human spirit. On the practical side, we can see advice on hospice, management of ailing parents, and legal matters pertaining to inheritance, estate panning, and wills.

The nonconformist reader might frown over Baker’s frequent resort to biblical quotes, which are seen as the source of inspiration and divine power. This does become a bit obtrusive, especially at end of the book, where the author discusses preserving family history for future generations. Nevertheless, the spontaneity of her account of her parents’ death holds high her attempt to ‘light beacons of hope’ in her reader’s heart. The touching beauty of Amy Baker’s tapestry of words in paying homage to her late parents is heart winning. She is one writer who emerges victorious from her situation as a caring survivor.

ISBN: 0781442621

Availability

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0781442621/002-0762099-9752030?v=glance&n=283155

http://www.powells.com/biblio?show=TRADE%20PAPER:NEW:0781442621:13.99#synopses_and_reviews

http://www.allbookstores.com/book/0781442621/Slow_Dancing_At_Death

Author’s Website http://www.amycbaker.com/

Dressed in Fiction

Starting with a discussion of the centrality of fashion in dress to human behavior, independent scholar Clair Hughes takes a look at the employment of dress in select English fiction in her book Dressed in Fiction (Berg Publishers, Oxford-New York, 2006). Clair’s work is a confluence of literary criticism and critical description of scenes of dress in a group of English fictional texts written over a period of about 200 years, from early eighteenth to the late twentieth century.

As the author admits beforehand, most of her discussion in the book is of fashionable, middle or upper class clothes; the reason being that dress of the underclass varies little until the advent of the mass market. The novels chosen for the bulk of the discussion range from Daniel Defoe’s Roxana to Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth, and the author sums up the topic in a quick glance at fiction from Samuel Richardson’s Pamela to Anita Brookner’s Hotel Du Lac.

While Clair Hughes makes women’s dress the core of her consideration, she does not fail to relate the ideas of gender, color of the dress, technical terms for costumes, and the excess or absence of dress references. Thus an interest in history and society is at once sated through the medium of clothing. Literary criticism shows in the author’s ingenious foray of the exploration of how fiction authors’ employment of dress and its accessories can illuminate the structure of that text. Ultimately, human values of the specific social world that existed at the time of the text’s creation are researched.

Supplementing the book’s discussion are paintings or engravings of nearly the same date as the text in view, imparting a general image of the period and its particular style of dress. This is a merit of the book that counts.

Dressed in Fiction has its shortcomings. Devoting an appreciable amount of space to history and stories of the fictional works, it fails at places to relate strongly the employment of dress with the main frame of the novel’s plot. An intrinsic connection of situations taken up for explanation with the dress described does not always seem valid.

Endnotes, a bibliography, and an index at the end of the book give an academically professional touch to it.

In its entirety, Dressed in Fiction is an experimental work following the lines of Gillian Beer’s 1989 book Arguing with the Past. It opens up a topic for critical discussion to be fathomed by future studies.

ISBN: 1845201728

Availability

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1845201728/sr=8-1/qid=1143386870/ref=pd_bbs_1/103-9167745-6114234?%5Fencoding=UTF8

http://www.walmart.com/catalog/product.do?product_id=4229839

http://www.booksamillion.com/ncom/books?pid=1845201728

The Feel the Fear Guide to Lasting Love

The subject of a successful love relationship has been tried to banality in innumerable publications. While most of them might be out in the print for making bucks, Susan Jeffers’ latest book The Feel the Fear Guide to Lasting Love (Jeffers Press, California, 2005) is one winning endeavor of showing the path to a lasting love life. Jeffers, who has been titled with ‘the Queen of Self-Help’, presents secret lessons of love that make one’s person lovable rather than tiring oneself out in finding an ideal mate. It teaches how to be the ideal mate.

The conversational style of Susan Jeffers befriends the reader since the first page. Her openness inspires when she confesses that her meaningful knowledge of love did not come from her university degrees but from her personal experience of marriage, divorce, dating, and remarrying. Thus she discovered the higher purpose of love, becoming a more loving person, and she generously shares it with her readers.

Jeffers makes the important distinction between ‘selfish love’ and ‘real love’. She peeps into the politics of relationships and redefines power as control over one’s own actions and reactions and not as controlling others. Revealing the vitality of communication to the happiness of a relationship, Jeffers speaks about maintaining a happy sex life well into the advance age. Impact of problems related to children and in-laws, money, and betrayal of trust are taken up and cogently resolved in the light of self-purification.

Perhaps the most significant aspect of Susan Jeffers’ book is her advice on seeing beyond the stereotyped concept of ideal love that permanently blocks our way to happiness. For example the picture of love as carved in the traditional way of thought by characters of long-adored fairy tales and literature of romance. Hence the humbug of love at first sight and other clichés. Shaking us out of the inertia of stereotyped gender roles, the author stresses nurturing essential human qualities of strength, assertiveness, rationality, protection, and so on. Her question ‘Find one reason not to end the war between the sexes’ stuns the rational mind.

Redundancy does show in the book. There is repetition. Nevertheless, The Feel the Fear Guide to Lasting Love does not bore and as a whole remains enjoyable. Words of wisdom from great brains give each chapter a lovely start. No denying that Jeffers’ book is valid in all relationships and not restricted to romance or sexual life. It creates an openness that leads straight to the diseased root of unhealthy relationships. Its audience encircles all who have anything to do with any sort of human relationship.

ISBN: 0974577693

Availability

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0974577693/qid=1142416572/sr=11-1/ref=sr_11_1/104-6750870-4307155?n=283155

http://www.ecampus.com/book/0974577693

Author Website: www.susanjeffers.com/

The 4 Realities of Success During and After College

Here is a self-help/how to book that tells college students about all the things they must take care of in order to be mate with success. Published by Authorhouse, (Indiana, 2005) Bob Roth’s The 4 Realities of Success During and After College is a guide for college students, recent graduates, and young adults, showing how to achieve success by a stepwise pursuit of the four realities of success. These are:

1. You can be more successful in college
2. It takes an effective job search to land the job you want
3. You can be more effective in your job search
4. Going out on your own shouldn’t be a rude awakening

Roth takes the pains to present his readers with 62 chapters, 7 appendices, a bibliography, and an index all that would leave no point practically counting in a successful career. The book offers advice on organizational skills as a student, intelligent job-hunting, fixing a stance in one’s first job, and living as an individual. There is enough information and advice on each point the author lists.

With all the advice and lists of innumerable things to care for, The 4 Realities of Success During and After College underwhelms as a book. A lot of repetition and redundancy is obtrusively thwarting the reader’s attempt to get along with it. Points are given patchy descriptions instead of full-fledged elaboration, resulting in a jumpy feeling. The reader is constantly stuffed with points and steps to follow and no passage is devoted to let him participate in the field being explored. A preachy tone is seen in which a voice constantly haunts you to do or avoid certain things. More importantly, three fourth of the book tells you ‘what to do or avoid’ but not ‘how to bring this about’. Part four (Going out on your own shouldn’t be a rude awakening) is more practicable and wisely construed than the other three realities where countless things are to be done without having any idea how to be motivated in their direction. In any case, the individual has to lose most (if not all) of his self if he follows half of what he is being led to. It’s like ‘be yourself or gain success.’

One thing, perhaps the only one that captures the interest and conveys wisdom is inclusion of quotes from really successful figures like R.W. Emerson, Oscar Wilde, Benjamin Franklin, Frank Tyger, and so on. One such from Albert Schweitzer reads ‘I do not believe that we can put into anyone ideas which are not in him already.’

ISBN: 1420844709

Availability

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1420844709/ref=sr_11_1/102-2041641-8032950?%5Fencoding=UTF8
http://www.authorhouse.com/BookStore/ItemDetail~bookid~30550.aspx

The Dark and Bloody Ground

Hailing from Jenkins in Southeastern Kentucky, Roberta Webb worked as a psychiatric nursing supervisor, continued her nursing at the University of Virginia, and worked for a short time on the first atomic bomb as a minute technician. Now, living in Texas, she has embarked on a writing career with her debut novel The Dark and Bloody Ground (TurnKey Press, Texas, 2006), a historical saga of a Kentucky family through its five generations.

The story starts with Morgan Collier’s irresistible fascination with the wild highs of Kentucky. As he settles there with his family, a full-fledged adventure lived in the open ensues with all the richness of natural vitalism. Adaptation to the wild, action against enemies both natural and human, and the harmony of love and force all constitute the history of life lived in and with the wild. Morgan’s progeny is fostered ahead in his daughter Sarah giving birth to Amy, she in turn becoming the mother of Ben Cantrell and the grandmother of Ben’s son Thomas. Zooming in on characters across generations, the author skillfully pilots an omniscient voice.

Webb’s experience of history contributes immensely to the realism of her novel’s story: the Bessemer’s Process for purifying steel, the Yamaha Pianos of the Japanese, details of mining and construction, and the craft of winemaking make an imagery of high appeal to evocation. Kentucky is slowly unmasked as the ‘dark and bloody ground’ where a wild innocence sheltered its inhabitants as early as 1840 until the arrival of investment for mining and Levi Cantrell’s obsession with making money and until after the Second World War. With the advent of capital and people, Levi’s lust for wealth drags him into bootlegging, and murder while the town is ravaged by competitiveness, theft, and worthlessness of man. The care for one’s family falls servile before satiating the masses’ craving for moonshine. The cracks widen and the Cantrell family is torn between losing their blood to war and keeping their faith in Mother Nature. A plot of its kind!

To involve the reader head over heels, Webb hooks the reader up on the supernatural trait of Ben Cantrell and his son Thomas. Both have got cat eyes, and in the words of Levi Cantrell ‘…cats have nine lives.’ Webb’s symbolism certainly conveys the power of nature in human life. To side with the wild is to survive in the eternally fierce world no matter what form wildness assumes. And hence we find Thomas Cantrell breathing his life while his peers enter their graves. Crueler is the case of Wesley Adams who is on a curse by Lettie Mullins, whose son he killed, that haunts her mind as he fears for the lives of his own sons.

The Dark and Bloody Ground is tout in its plot. It outstrips tautology except in the reminders that the old mountain people still looked healthy and beautiful despite their age. A couple of chapters are overly descriptive, exceeding plot and character, and zooming in on labor employed to urbanize Kentucky. But most of the 24 chapters are beautifully written. And at the end of the book you cannot help asking, with a sigh, Sarah Collier’s question, ‘How could a place so beautiful witness so many tragedies?’

ISBN: 1-933538-08-2

Availability

http://www.robertawebbauthor.com/

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1933538082/sr=8-1/qid=1141749235/ref=sr_1_1/103-4586751-4404639?%5Fencoding=UTF8

http://bookpros.com/bp_pages/bp_ap_release.php?book_id=19

Unscrambled Eggs

If a book is short and carries choice verse, few would leave it to a second sitting. Miami author Nadia brown instantiates this assertion in her first book of poetry Unscrambled Eggs (Publish America, Baltimore, 2005). A collection of sixty poems, Unscrambled Eggs is an artistic pluck in the floating stillness of mundane thought. A daring, dissenting return to self-respect is the upshot of Miss Brown’s poetry.

The individual poems in the book are short, each centered closely on a distinct point. Tone varies from aspiring to confessional, though never leaving the self-conscious position of a deserving soul in the broad social milieu. Themes explored are more humanistic, less illusory or sentimental, and crucial to one’s self-esteem. Social injustice in Sea of Poor (in a country of gold and ledger, lies a sea of poor), self-respect in The Lesson Learned (Yet I exceed, your scant recognition) an urge on poet’s art to be more than mere words in Liquid Muse (what good are handsome metaphors, when profoundness eludes your pen), the nature of skin-deep, lie-loving love in Unforeseen Affair (it was not maliciousness, that hastened you away, but truth), and many vital issues are taken up in a mere 70 pages.

Unscrambled Eggs defies the conventional, the prejudiced, and whets the human spirit with determination, hope, unyielding fidelity to one’s purpose, and confession of one’s own fallibilities. There is a strong penchant for a purpose in life, at times growing morose. But the poetess never fails in keeping hold of the softness that opens the reader’s unbiased ear. This is achievement.

The degree of freedom with which the themes involve us is maintained in the lack of absence of end rhymes, reinforcing the mode of free, unprejudiced writing. Alliteration is not ardently employed and rhythm solely bears the characterization of verse. Nevertheless, the balance is secured. Cadence is not perfect but melodious and smooth. A quality that cannot go unappreciated is the feeling of fullness in each and every poem; no brusque truncations.

The crux of Miss Brown’s book is enmeshed in two poems sparkling with brilliance. Suppose glances wistfully at the irreversibility of time and its damage.

‘imagine life as a chalkboard
where errors are erased’

And certainly, the title poem Unscrambled Eggs pictures the ‘holes of the size of mountains’ each of us has in his or her life. How assiduously we try to refill them, the task is no easier than unscrambling eggs.

‘but when will I learn
I can no more unscramble eggs
Than change the past’

Unscrambled Eggs is a gift to poetry lovers.

ISBN: 1-4137-8169-1

Availability

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1413781691/ref=sr_11_1/103-0439889-6193453?%5Fencoding=UTF8

http://www.publishamerica.com/

http://nadiabrown.com/

Positive Energy

Veteran psychiatrist Dr. Judith Orloff ventures to spotlight practical Energy Psychiatry, her expertise, a blend of traditional medicine and subtle energies of body and mind in her latest book Positive Energy (Three Rivers Press, New York, 2005). Grounded mainly in the deep-rooted mystical traditions, Energy Psychiatry is a scientific transformation of abstract energy principles for the treatment of a range of everyday problems like anxiety, maladjustment, mood swings, sexual discontent, and the general stresses of life. That makes Positive Energy a book for almost everyone.

Dr. Orloff divides her book in two parts: Building your Energy and Creating Positive Relationships and Combating Energy Vampires. The first part offers seven prescriptions each showing a window to utilizing and boosting one’s subtle energy resources. The second part involves three prescriptions on creating positive relationships, tackling energy-draining people (the Energy Vampires) and tuning in to the abundance of joy all around. Personal experience and stories of her patients make an interesting vista of healing with positivism. What attracts more, perhaps, is the voice of celebrities like Jamie Lee Curtis, Larry King, Shirley Maclaine, and others commenting on their encounters with energy-draining situations. The essence of Dr. Orloff’s advice is her emphasis on staying in the Now that can be procured by some simple exercises, meditations, and mantra.

Given all the good points of the book, Positive Energy has its slack slots. The subject matter is not free of serious speculation. Myths of flowers blooming on the statue of a goddess in South Korea and intuitive premonitions of energy-sensitive people raise doubts. Some of the personal stories are redundant and sound like thrumming on the same string. The narrative mode too feels rather preachy with repetitive reminders of ‘I’ll teach you’, ‘I’ll show you’, ‘You’ll learn’ and so on. Above all, it is the view of existence through the hazy Lens of Energy that puts the author’s viewpoint to question.

A reference guide, brief overview, and an index aid the reader with choice passages.

Positive Energy’s interested readership is wide and varied. For a Type A person, it is a thing to seek. For a hard-shelled scientist, it is one to answer.

ISBN: 1-4000-8216-1

Availability

http://drjudithorloff.com/

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1400082161/ref=pd_kar_gw_1/104-2557843-3385568?n=283155

Amaranth

The distinguishing merit of Michael Ehrenreich’s first novel Amaranth (iUniverse Inc, Nebraska, 2005) is its striking modern realism. A rich imagery of modern city environment, modes of life, and tearing stresses of disease and ugliness make Ehrenreich’s literary fiction a 21st century classic.

Amaranth bears a mature plot. The first 50 pages reveal so much that it’s hard to anticipate the thematic passages as something still on their way. But more comes than one can anticipate. One can tell from the start that the story is nucleated around disease and ugliness, both physical and beyond. Dr. Bing Denton is a surgeon with magic hands who is struggling to save his professional life by putting up with the ugliness of surgical procedures and his family life by trying to be a husband and a father. Standing at the dichotomy of hurting and healing, Dr. Denton finds his teenage daughter, Liza, pregnant in a drug-induced coma. The surgeon extraordinaire has a mind left that presses on itself to remember any of his wife’s friends who might tell him how to reach her and tell her about their child. So much for the sickness of life!

The issue raised in the novel is the quest of beauty by one engulfed in a hollow of ugliness. True beauty must be found and at once since ugliness is contagious as flu. The latter spreads through individuals while the former sweeps generations. And so we meet Ehrenreich’s symbol of beauty amid the sickness, the artistic Deborah who is going to lose her breasts and beauty to cancer. How she heals is the modern-day miracle, the amaranth, of Ehrenreich’s work. As one approaches the end, it gets harder to take the eyes off the spell woven in print. Spiritual self is probed with the lancet of words, an art peculiar to the author’s own experience in medicine.

The feeling of continuity in the narrative is one thing a good novel needs. In Amaranth the absence of page breaks and numbering or naming of chapters attains this, at least in part.

Amaranth’s audience is a mature, thoughtful, sensible adult who is ill at ease with the horrors of disease and ugly attitudes, a heart that seeks beauty in its pure form.

ISB: 0-595-36992-8

Availability

http://iuniverse.com/bookstore/book_detail.asp?isbn=0-595-36992-8

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0595369928/sr=8-15/qid=1139831604/ref=sr_1_15/104-8928828-5973567?%5Fencoding=UTF8

Hidden Grace

Twenty years of Dr. Garland Roper’s experience as a psychotherapist have consummated in the from of a deeply disturbing, insightful, and healing book ‘Hidden Grace’ (Cliffside Press at OMNI, Maine, 2005). A literary novel, a psychological study of psychosexual torture and depression, a case against inhuman foster neglect, and a life-giving look at one woman’s courage in the face of brutal abuse, the merit of ‘Hidden Grace’ is hard to encapsulate in a single instance.

We meet old Grace Albright who revisits her middle-aged therapist Dr. Carl Wilder, a struggling modern-day Sisyphus wrestling with his ‘rock’ of confidence as a therapist, to help her write a book about their therapy. Dr. Wilder narrates memories of Grace’s writings telling, in her words, the story of her early life in foster houses. As Grace opens the chapters of extreme sadistic torture at the hands of her foster families, Dr. Wilder’s depressive view of his own life transforms positively. Together the therapist and the patient rise from their tombs and become living persons in their own flesh, no more given into the torture of slavery.

‘Hidden Grace’ may well be seen as a detective story in literary style. Grace’s unwillingness to speak of her torture kindles the curiosity from the prologue and keeps the flame aglow till the very end of the book. The development of her character, her self-concept as a sinner against herself, challenges notions of established moral concepts. The distinction between sinner and victim of sin is diffused until Grace makes Dr. Wilder (and the reader) see the light.

The language of Gar Roper’s narrative is anything but professional. More important is the narrative device, a combination of first person in Grace and Dr. Wilder’s voices, and Grace’s writings. Events are seen at once through the eyes of both the doctor and her patient. This chimes in with the theme of the novel, a story of participant roles integral to the therapy in question. The discovery and revival of the innocent and loving Grace is accomplished through the written word. That of Dr. Wilder follows and, who knows, of how many eyes and minds.

The impact of Grace’s indelible character is reinforced by the title page. The young girl on the left has face and eyes looking through you. Her beauty is indescribable and her terrors poignant, her sufferings violent enough to tear one apart. And yet Dr. Roper makes such a loving picture of her ripe age that Grace Albright becomes a symbol of convalescence.

The epilogue and author’s note reveal a few facts about the book, concluding with some inspiring words, which might sound rather tame in the face of the novel’s powerful hang over.

Hidden Grace is for us, lovers of beauty, courage, and truth.

ISBN: 0-9768276-0-3

Availability

http://omnilearning.org/HiddenGrace.html
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0976827603/qid=1139477886/sr=2-1/ref=pd_bbs_b_2_1/102-4044683-0948909?s=books&v=glance&n=283155

Scars of the Square Needle

Dick Boucher is a Franco-American who gets himself caught in an alienating Navy venture as he tries to save himself being drafted for the army against Vietnam. What follows is enigmatic, humorous, satirical, and adventurous in Pierre R. Beaumier’s ‘Scars of the Square Needle' (Outskirts Press, Denver, 2005).

Beaumier’s anti-war fiction, a roman a clef, is hard to classify as a novel (who insists?) or a short story (there are over 200 pages). So that leaves one with a ‘protracted story’. Boucher’s character typifies the alienation of an army consign who once had a relationship with art. As the war ends, Boucher finds himself across invisible bars, parting him from the purity of peace. The plot is intelligently woven, though a little more intricately.

Humor tops the attractions of this story (should I?). Use of alliteration is frequent and it reinforces the effect: ‘big belly bobbing up and down’, ‘a beaky pinkish nose rose from…’ Beaumier’s fast tempo of narration baffles at times. You know it’s based on a first-hand account of Vietnam War, so you are looking for a strong personal voice. But that is lacking and you get instead a diffuse hum of many voices. Characters keep busting in and there are a few women on the scene popping up from nowhere to console the shivering Boucher after his nightmares. Most of these disappear brusquely.

Beaumier is likely to attract a large male audience, guys who love to hear about guns and rough language of the military. The actions scenes are thrilling; life runs far from a bed of roses, no matter how much the protagonist hankers after it. What’s precious about the end is that knowing the real scars of Boucher’s life proves far easier than all the babble about the ‘Square Needle’.

ISBN: 1-59800-002-0

Availability

http://www.outskirtspress.com/cgi/webpage.cgi?ISBN=1598000020
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1598000020/qid=1138890071/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/002-1429089-8205637?s=books&v=glance&n=283155

Overcoming Runaway Blood Sugar

Dennis Pollock, author, evangelist, and the founder of Spirit of Grace Ministries, offers practical help for hypoglycemic, diabetics, people fighting fatigue and mood swings, the weight-conscious, and the general health-conscious reader in his recent book ‘Overcoming Runaway Blood Sugar’ (Harvest House Publishers, Oregon, 2006). Two qualities of Pollock’s publication distinguish its merit: informative and motivating.

In the foreword to Pollock’s book, Dr. Lee A. Brock defines runaway blood sugar as ‘uncontrolled serum glucose levels’. Pollock shares his own experience of the breakdown of blood sugar system and how he managed to subdue this giant. The informative part of the book has much to convey: two types of diabetes, three big problems of an average American’s health (sedentary lifestyle, diet, weight), common misconceptions about diets, high-carb versus low-carb food, and simple but important strategies to cope with blood sugar conditions.

More important perhaps is the motivational aspect of the book. As it goes in Pollock’s words ‘When it comes to making behavioral changes, motivation isn’t merely important; it is everything!’ By discussing three fronts of the situation (Diet, Exercise, and Weight), the health-conscious reader is thrown into resistance against blood sugar problems. It’s here that the author draws on his own experience as a diabetic to show that one can build power and self-control while enjoying life by shedding the riffraff in diet and lifestyle. Accomplishing so much in a mere 200 pages is indeed extraordinary.

Pollock’s book has adornments. There are short informative sidebars through most of the chapters. The nutritional value of different food items, proper ways of exercising, experiments with blood sugar victims, and interesting facts about food and habits are all included in a healthy mode. It’s a remarkable feature of a book that essentially takes a medical problem but interests the reader like fiction. Three appendices conclude the book: Spiritual Motivation, Sample Meals, and Low-carb Recipes of popular choice meals.

Overcoming Runaway Blood Sugar is for all readers, a must for those in battle with blood sugar illness.

ISBN: 0-7396-1721-7

Availability

http://www.harvesthousepublishers.com/books_nonfictionbook.cfm?ProductID=6917217
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0736917217/sr=1-1/qid=1139154334/ref=pd_bbs_1/102-4369681-4998524?%5Fencoding=UTF8

For Sarah

Is life a broken promise? A rusty chain? What about a bubble of fear inflated by an innocent kid who grew up to remember it was always there, all around? More questions make their way into debutant author Annie Harmon’s first work of fiction ‘For Sarah’ (Publish America, Baltimore, 2005).

‘For Sarah’ laces several first-person stories of Lee sisters (Angela, Samantha, Rachel, Amber, Jessica, Ash, and Tia) who fight the way of their life out of the horrors of an abusive stepfather. The impact of Harmon’s powerful narration combines with her psychological insight to explore a woman’s many forms of fear that is the fruit of an insecure childhood. As the girls turn into runaways, one by one, their adult lives fall a prey to worse calamities from unhealthy relationships and alcoholism, to attempted suicide and murder, and delusional psychosis in Ashlee (who is the writer of letters to Sarah). While their lives strive to reconcile with peace, the Lee sisters fathom the meaning of strength and weakness.

Harmon’s book is exactly the kind of work that hooks the reader from its prologue to the last word. Every single page is breathtaking; each and every sentence adorable. Harmon’s emotional narrative is a living, breathing story of woman seen through many eyes-those of the Lee sisters, Bridgette (friend of Lee sisters), Nicole (Ashlee’s daughter), Mica (Jessica’s daughter), and the mother of Lee sisters. One can see a daughter, a mother, a sister, a wife, a friend, and a woman living against and with men. And the picture is complete.

In the tradition of masterpieces, ‘For Sarah’ weaves a plot that ends with the last word of the narrative. Annie Harmon, in her author’s note, speaks of the tentative placement of the book in the category of fiction. It closely approaches an epistolary novel but has a mixed flavor of story collection, biography, and monologue. Ashlee’s letters to Sarah, a name she cannot assign to a specific person, produces the mist in the ambience of Harmon’s world. The reader joins hands with Ashlee in finding who Sarah is. The final answer is at once startling and cogent.

The end of the book incorporates a couple of nonfiction pages, those of ‘Questions for Discussion’ in which Harmon repeats the questions already bubbling up in the reader’s mind. The two most significant ones being ‘Why Tia is not allowed a story through the whole book?’ and ‘Who is Sarah?’

‘For Sarah’ is a touching book, raising tenderness and tears, and fortifying one against the shocks of hatred and rage. It is a book for every one who knows a mother, a sister, a wife, a daughter, a friend, and a woman. And who doesn’t?

ISBN: 1-4137-7010-X

Availability

http://www.amazon.com/

http://www.publishamerica.com/

Apart from You

Leonore H. Dvorkin gives us a complex character, Elizabeth Nye, a 20-year-old student, developed along the lines of Jane Austen’s Emma. Only the latter was an unconsciously self-deceiving fool, while Elizabeth is always conscious to her selfish advances in love. Dvorkin’s novel Apart from You (Wildside Press, 2000) is yet another work of fiction that explores the mystery of love, though certainly not just another one. A 28-chapter account of Elizabeth’s five-week love relationship with Brian Petersen, a graduate teaching assistant, Apart from You gradually reveals the presence of many undesirable things in a web of relationships: lies, deceptions, betrayals, infidelities, jealousies, transgressions, and rivalries. No wonder the reader might find Elizabeth’s character self-contradictory. She hates her father’s infidelities but engages Brian in a nearly identical situation, given that she is engaged to the absent Alan Abrams while she involves herself with the naïve and unwitting Brian, who is ignorant of Alan’s existence. The deal between Elizabeth and Alan that they’ll have complete sexual freedom as long as they are apart imparts a momentum to Elizabeth’s character that gradually reveals her two greatest powers: her strength of reason and her open-minded generosity.

Growing up indignant regarding her father’s infidelity and jealous of her younger sister’s coquetry, Elizabeth starts as a hazy image of a young woman with domestic diligence and a craving for privacy. As her relationship with Brian proceeds, her character sheds its blurredness and stands clear as a cloudless sky in contrast to Brian’s own mist of conservatism. A frustrated and sentimental virgin until his encounter with Elizabeth, Brian believes himself incapable of the sort of dishonesty Elizabeth practices with him until just before she leaves him to return to Alan. In the end, Elizabeth forces Brian to recognize that under the right circumstances, he too might break with conventions of morality, as she and Alan have done. Elizabeth’s return to Alan has rich implications of real love and honesty, which are rarities in this story. Elizabeth loves Brian, and he loves her, but she cannot let him keep her forever, as she has already committed herself to Alan. In the final chapters, the truth comes as a shock to Brian, but Elizabeth’s careful reasoning masterfully defuses its threat. Elizabeth becomes a woman standing on her own feet and Brian becomes a man who will eventually allow her to do so.

Apart From You is tightly written, closely developed around one central theme. However, Dvorkin also touches on the dilemma of homosexuality. Elizabeth’s ‘sympathetic sex’ with her gay friend Stevie is one instance of it. Descriptions of Donnie and her lesbian roommate Jean sound insignificant until it is revealed what an important part Donnie played in Brian’s life and what brutality Jean survived. For a while, the story feels as though it’s digressing from its plot, till the central conflict resurges with greater force in the twentieth chapter.

A wealth of minor and cameo characters adds greatly to the depth of the novel: the beautiful widowed neighbor of Elizabeth’s parents, Brian’s deceased parents and his two very different sisters, sundry university professors, Stevie’s French lover, Brian’s beloved cat, and numerous others. Together, these side characters compel readers to ponder their own views on a variety of subjects: death, domestic violence, women’s changing roles in society, loneliness, the madness of war, the importance of animals in our lives, and much more.

The final lessons one hits upon at the end of the story are moving and profound: Love is wealth, and great wealth can be a burden. Playing with emotions is folly because they are stronger than one’s wits. Above all, it’s love, and not possession, that gives lasting happiness.

Like her nonfiction book 'Why I’m Glad I had Breast Cancer' (Wildside Press, 2005), Dvorkin’s narration of the story is smooth and touching. Bits of humor surface now and again as well. An unusual feature is that the reader is allowed to view almost every event through more than a single pair of eyes, hence the objectivity that forms the wormhole to comprehension.

Of course, it is an adult novel. While sex is integral to the novel’s plot, gratuitous sex is nowhere seen in the book, and each and every sex scene beautifully drives the story ahead to its climax.

To read the first chapter of the novel, see the Dvorkin website: http://www.dvorkin.com/

ISBN: 1-58715-074-3

Availability:
http://www.amazon.com/
http://www.buy.com/
http://www.wildsidepress.com/
_______________________________________________________________

http://www.wildsidepress.com/product.asp?itemid=183
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1587150743/qid=1137916182/sr=8-2/ref=sr_8_xs_ap_i2_xgl14/102-2389124-1515334?n=507846&s=books&v=glance

Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ

Daniel Goleman needs no introduction. The former senior editor of ‘Psychology Today’ is widely known for his Vital Lies, Simple Truths and The Meditative Mind. His groundbreaking bestseller Emotional Intelligence ( Bantam Books, New York, 1995) is yet another landmark in the world of applied psychology. It extracts years of research on human emotions and their behavioral significance to emerge as a lovable book.

Goleman’s approach, as his typical, is demonstratively scientific with a natural appeal to common sense; case studies are nearly fictionalized for the reader’s interest, followed by explanations to answer the questions popping up in the reader’s mind. ‘Emotional Intelligence’ is thus essentially a solution-oriented work. By making explicit the biological nature of emotions-anxiety, fear, anger, and joy- it gets to the roots of problems raised by emotional immaturity. The approach is fruitful since problems whose roots are known are half-solved.

The book carries five main parts: The Emotional Brain (biological basis of emotions), The Nature of Emotional Intelligence, Emotional Intelligence Applied (emotions, behavior, and relationships), Windows of Opportunities (relearning emotions), and Emotional Literacy (educating people’s emotions). Appendices and explanatory notes make it a comprehensive edition.

Goleman regards amygdala, the almond-shaped structure above the brainstem, as the seat of all emotions, as contrasted with the ‘thinking brain’-the neocortex. In all cases of our emotional fits, the amygdala hijacks the brain; in a few cases the thinking brain gets time/chance to check the impulse. To refine our personalities of maladaptive emotional tantrums-that lead to problems small as a raging beat to fatal as suicide or murder-we need to strengthen our thinking brain. That this is possible, and experimentally demonstrated, is the crux of the book. Goleman tells of basic emotional skills like self-awareness; identifying, expressing and managing feelings; impulse control and delaying gratification; and handling stress and anxiety. These come from ‘emotional education’, which, according to the author, means not to avoid conflict completely but to resolve it intelligently before it spirals into a fight. And thus we come to know about the ‘Resolving Conflict Creativity Program.’ Goleman effectively epitomizes the point of ‘Emotional Intelligence’ in Erasmus’s quote: ‘The main hope of a nation lies in the proper education of its youth.’

With a number of interesting, exciting, pleasing, depressing, and surprising instances from real life, and some great quotes of wisdom, Emotional Intelligence is for everyone who has emotions and needs to know their intelligent use.

ISBN: 0553375067

Availability: http://www.amazon.com/Emotional-Intelligence-Matter-More-Than/dp/0553375067