Biographies & Memoirs

The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity

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NOW AVAILABLE _ Digitally remastered, and on CD for the first time

Read by the leaderAmazon.com Review
With the basic principle that creative expression is the natural direction of life, Julia Cameron and Mark Bryan lead you through a comprehensive twelve-week program to recover your creativity from a variety of blocks, including limiting beliefs, dread, self-sabotage, jealousy, guilt, addictions, and additional inhibiting forces, replacing them with artistic confidence and productivity.

This book links creativity to spirituality by showing how to connect with the creative energies of the universe, and has, in the four years since its publication, spawned a remarkable number of support groups for artists dedicated to practicing the exercises it contains.

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Letters On Demonology and Witchcraft

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This is an EXACT reproduction of a book published before 1923. This IS NOT an OCR’d book with weird characters, introduced typographical errors, and in a state words. This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant inscription, etc. that were either part of the original manufactured article, or were introduced by the scanning process. We judge this work is culturally vital, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you delight in this valuable book.

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Slow Love: How I Lost My Job, Put On My Pajamas & Found Happiness

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• ISBN13: 9781934633311
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.

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From the beloved leader Dominique Browning, a humorous and moving book about losing a job and winning a life. In November 2007, ex- editor in chief of House & Garden magazine Dominique Browning veteran what thousands have since veteran. She lost her job. Overnight, her driven, purpose-filled days vanished. With her children leaving home and a long relationship ending, the structure of her days disappeared. She fell into a panic of loss but establish humor despite everything, learning a deeper joy than any she had ever known. It was a life she had not sought, but one that offered pleasures and surprises she didn’t know she lacked.

Slow Like is about wearing your nightdress to the farmers’ market, packing up a beloved home and moving to a more rural setting, building time to play the piano and go kayaking, reinventing yourself, and not cutting corners when it comes to like, muffins, or farming. This elegant, graceful—and yet amusing—book inspires us to dance in the kitchen and seize new directions.

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Wives of the Signers

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This past reprint of a 1912 work describes persons women who, alongside their husbands, veteran the trials and triumphs of the struggle for independence and the challenge of building a new nat

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Like Me: Confessions of a Heartland Country Singer

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• ISBN13: 9780307378866
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.

Product Description
Chely Wright, singer, songwriter, country composition star, writes in this moving, telling memoir about her life and her career; about growing up in America’s heartland, the youngest of three children; about barely remembering a time when she didn’t know she was different.
 
She writes about her parents, putting down roots in their twenties in the farming town of Wellsville, Kansas, Ancient Glory flying atop the poles on the town’s manicured lawns, and being raised to judge that hard work, honesty, and determination would take her far.
 
She writes of building up her mind at a young age to become a country composition star, knowing then that her feelings and crushes on girls were “sinful” and hoping and praying that she would somehow be “fixed.” (“Dear God, please don’t let me be gay. I promise not to lie. I promise not to steal. I promise to permanently judge in you . . . Please take it away.”)
 
We see her, high school homecoming queen, heading out on her own at seventeen and landing a job as a featured singer on the Ozark Jubilee (the show that ongoing Brenda Lee, Red Foley, and Porter Wagoner), being cast in Country Composition U.S.A., doing four live shows a day, and—after only a few months in Nashville—her dream coming right, performing on the stage of the Grand Ole Opry . . .
 
She describes writing and singing her own songs for producers who’d learned and recorded the likes of Reba McEntire, Shania Twain, and Toby Keith, who heard in her composition something special and signed her to a record contract, releasing her first baby book and sending her out on the road on her first bus tour . . . She writes of sacrificing all for a shot at success that would come a couple of years later with her first hit single, “Shut Up And Drive” . . . her songs (from her fourth baby book, Single White Female) climbing the Billboard chart for twenty-nine weeks, arresting the #1 spot . . . 
 
She writes about the friends she made along the way—Vince Gill, Brad Paisley, and others—writing songs, recording and touring together, some of the friendships developing into romantic attachments that did not end happily . . . Keeping the truth of who she was clutched deep inside, trying to snub it in a world she longed to be a part of—and now was—a world in which country composition stars had never been, could not be, openly gay . . .
 
She writes of the very real prospect of losing everything she’d worked so hard to make . . . doing her best to have a real life—her best not excellent enough . . .
 
And in the face of everything she did to keep herself afloat, she writes about how the vortex of success and hiding who she was took its toll: her life, a tangled mess she didn’t see coming, didn’t want to; and, finally, finding the guts to untangle herself from the image of the country composition star she’d become, an image steeped in long-standing ideals and notions about who—and what—a country artist is, and what their fans expect them to be . . .
 
I am a songwriter,” she writes. “I am a singer of my songs—and I have a tale to tell. As I’ve traveled this path that has delivered me to where I am today, my monument of thanks, paying honor to God, remains. I will do all I can with what I have been agreed . . .”
 
Like Me is fearless, inspiring, right.
 

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The Power of a Praying Wife

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Every wife who desires a deeper, more meaningful relationship with her spouse is sure to appreciate Stormie’s candor and encouragement in this practical book. By focusing on 30 different areas, women can take in every aspect of their spouse’s lives with prayer, including security in work and finances; health and physical protection; spiritual and emotional might; fears and emotions; faith and the future; sexuality and communication; and fatherhood, leadership and choice-building.Amazon.com Review
The trials and pressures of modern life can make the prospect of a fulfilled, meaningful marriage seem impossible. In The Power of a Praying Wife, well loved Christian leader and speaker Stormie Omartian pinpoints common marital struggles and reveals the miraculous way that disciplined prayer can alleviate sadness and sustain unity. According to Omartian, a marriage’s success depends upon “laying down all aver to power in and of yourself, and relying on God’s power to transform you, your spouse, your circumstances, and your marriage.” Omartian attributes the success of her own 25-year marriage to dedicated prayer for every area–but point–of her spouse’s life; from his finances and his work to his integrity and his temptations. Each chapter offers insight into areas that are especially vital to men, followed by “power tools” (inspiring, topical Scripture) to guide one’s prayer life and transform a woman’s mind with regard to her spouse. This practical read will encourage women to trust God to change their spouse, and undoubtedly refocus one’s perspective on God’s power rather than one’s own personal quandary. –Jill Heatherly

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I Am Not Myself These Days: A Memoir

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I Am Not Myself These Days follows a glittering journey through Manhattan’s dark underbelly — a shocking and surreal world where alter egos reign and subsist (barely) on dark wit and chemicals…a tragic romantic comedy where one starts by rooting for the survival of the relationship and ends by hoping a name simply survives. Kilmer-Purcell is a terrifically gifted new literary voice who straddles the apportion between ridiculousness and normalcy, and stitches them together with surprising humor and lonely poignancy. As Booklist raved “as tart and amusing as a Noel Coward play, for Kilmer-Purcell is especially excellent at dialogue, and, as in Coward’s best plays, under the comedy lies the sad truth that even at our best, we are all weak, fallible fools. Again and again in this rich, adventure-filled book, Kilmer-Purcell illustrates the truth of Blake’s proverb, ‘The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.’”

Amazon.com Review
I Am Not Myself These Days is Josh Kilmer-Purcell’s outrageously intimate memoir of a young man living a double life in the heady days and nights of mid-’90s New York City. As we follow Kilmer-Purcell through alcohol-fueled nights and a like affair with Jack, a crack-addicted male escort, he offers up an alternative universe where normal is “a Normal Rockwell painting that, if you leaned in close, would learn is made up entirely of misfits.”

By day, Josh drudges off to a Soho-based publicity firm where he makes ad campaigns for corporate clients. At night, he dons live goldfish to perfect the look of Aqua, a 7-foot-tall award-winning drag queen who trolls gay clubs in search of her next drink/one night stand. In between, he spends his time trying to erect a stable, loving relationship with a name whose beeping pager is a constant reminder of the pair’s nearly inevitable fate. Yet even as Josh’s escapades get increasingly absurd, Kilmer-Purcell is permanently there to remind us that the tale we’re reading is real, and that fundamental human emotions and desires are essentially universal. In the end, everyone just wants to be loved and to fit in somewhere. And while the lesson may seem hokey at times, Kilmer-Purcell’s sharp wit rescues the memoir from apt an exaggerated sob tale:

The night before any major holiday is permanently a blockbuster night at gay clubs. Thousands… across the city fortifying themselves for long trips home where they’ll be met with awkward silences, stilted conversations and cousins with whom they’d experimented with decades ago.

From start to end, I Am Not Myself These Days is an extraordinary journey into an incredible life. To be a glide on the wall is an adventure that should not be missed. –Gisele Toueg

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Chinese Cinderella: The True Story of an Unwanted Daughter

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• ISBN13: 9780440228653
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.

Product Description
A riveting memoir of a girl’s painful coming-of-age in a wealthy Chinese family tree during the 1940s.

A Chinese proverb says, “Falling leaves return to their roots.” In Chinese Cinderella, Adeline Yen Mah returns to her roots to tell the tale of her painful childhood and her essential triumph and courage in the face of despair. Adeline’s affluent, powerful family tree considers her terrible luck after her mother dies giving birth to her. Life does not get any simpler when her father remarries. She and her siblings are subjected to the disdain of her stepmother, while her stepbrother and stepsister are spoiled. Although Adeline wins prizes at school, they are not enough to compensate for what she really yearns for — the like and understanding of her family tree.

Following the success of the critically acclaimed adult bestseller Falling Leaves, this memoir is a moving telling of the classic Cinderella tale, with Adeline Yen Mah providing her own courageous voice.Amazon.com Review
Chinese Cinderella is the perfect title for Adeline Yen Mah’s compelling autobiography in which, like the fairy-tale maiden, her childhood was ruled by a cruel stepmother. “Fifth Younger Sister” or “Wu Mei,” as Yen Mah was called, is only an infant when her father remarries after her mother’s death. As the youngest of her five siblings, Wu Mei suffers the worst at the hands of her stepmother Niang. She is denied carfare, frequently forgotten at school at the end of the day, and whipped for daring to attend a classmate’s birthday party against Niang’s wishes. Her father even forgets the spelling of her name when filling out her school enrollment record. In her loneliness, Wu Mei turns to books for company: “I was alone with my beloved books. What bliss! To be left in peace with Cordelia, Regan, Gonoril, and Lear himself–characters more real than my family tree… What happiness! What comfort!” Even though Wu Mei is repeatedly stirred up to grades above persons of her peers, it is only when she wins an international play-writing contest in high school that her father finally takes notice and grants her wish to attend college in England. Despite her parent’s heartbreaking neglect, she eventually becomes a doctor and realizes her dream of being a writer.

Teens, with their passionate convictions and strong sense of honest play, will be immediately enveloped in the yucky injustice of Adeline Yen Mah’s tale. A perfect glossary, past notes on the state of Chinese society and politics during Yen Mah’s childhood, and the legend of the original Chinese Cinderella round out this stirring testimony to the might of human character and the power of education. (Ages 10 to 15) –Jennifer Hubert

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Whatever It Takes: Geoffrey Canada’s Quest to Change Harlem and America

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• ISBN13: 9780547247960
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.

Product Description

That was the question that Geoffrey Canada establish himself asking. What would it take to change the lives of poor children–not one by one, through heroic interventions and occasional miracles, but in huge numbers, and in a way that could be replicated nationwide? The question led him to make the Harlem Children’s Zone, a ninety-seven-block laboratory in central Harlem where he is hard new and sometimes controversial thoughts about poverty in America. His conclusion: if you want poor kids to be able to compete with their middle-class peers, you need to change everything in their lives–their schools, their neighborhoods, even the child-rearing practices of their parents.

Whatever It Takes is a tour de force of reporting, an inspired portrait not only of Geoffrey Canada but also of the parents and children in Harlem who are struggling to better their lives, regularly against fantastic odds. Carefully researched and deeply distressing, this is a send off from inside the most daring and potentially transformative social conduct experiment of our time.

About the Leader
Paul Tough is an editor at the New York Times Magazine and one of America’s foremost writers on poverty, education, and the achievement gap. His reporting on Geoffrey Canada and the Harlem Children’s Zone originally appeared as a Times Magazine take in tale. He lives with his wife in New York City.

Questions for Paul Tough

Amazon.com: What makes Geoffrey Canada’s approach to educating poor city kids different than the many reforms that have come before?

Tough: Geoff is taking a much more comprehensive approach than earlier reformers. His premise is that kids in neighborhoods like Harlem face so many disadvantages–poorly run schools, poorly educated parents, treacherous streets–that it doesn’t make sense to tackle just one or two of persons problems and snub the rest. And so he has made, in the Harlem Children’s Zone, an integrated set of programs that support the neighborhood’s children from cradle to college, in school and out of school.

Amazon.com: This is a fleeting book about a long tale. How did you find a way to tell the tale of such a intricate, long-term transformation?

Tough: When I set out to write this book, my main goal was to tell an engaging tale, to find characters and moments and conflicts that would reflect the changes that were going on in Harlem. I wanted to present Geoff Canada more as a protagonist in a drama than as a static theme of a biography. And in that respect, I got lucky in my choice of theme, because during the years I spent reporting on his work, Geoff was in the middle of some major transformations, both personal and organizational. I was also lucky to find a variety of additional characters in Harlem, from teachers and administrators to students and parents, who really opened up to me, language candidly and eloquently about their own hopes and fears for their children and their futures. With their help, I reflect I was able to make the book not just an account of some vital new thoughts in poverty and education, but a human tale as well.

Amazon.com: You’ve spent much of the past five years reporting in Harlem. Beyond the school successes, do you see differences between the parts of the city within the Children’s Zone and nearby neighborhoods where the program hasn’t expanded yet?

Tough: Harlem as a whole has improved a fantastic deal over the last decade–a process that Geoffrey Canada can take some credit for, though there were plenty of additional people and forces that played a role. On a block-by-block level, though, it’s not permanently possible to see the difference between a street that is in the zone and one that’s outside of it. The most vital changes in the zone are going on out of view, inside schools and apartments and housing projects, where children are, for the first time, learning the skills they need to make it.

Amazon.com: Barack Obama has said that he would replicate the Harlem Children’s Zone in 20 additional cities. Have any additional organizations begun to follow Canada’s model in additional places, or are they waiting to see how it goes (or waiting for Obama to be elected)?

Tough: There is a tremendous amount of interest right now in Geoffrey Canada’s work among people effective in education and philanthropy and social-service non-profits. And there are fledgling zone projects in a handful of cities, all drawing upon the Harlem Children’s Zone to some degree. But there’s nothing yet happening on the scale that Obama has proposed. I do reflect people are waiting to see what Obama does. Will he take the steps necessary to place his replication plot into effect?

Amazon.com: How much of its effectiveness depends on Canada himself? Can you model him, as well as his program?

Tough: He’s a unique guy. His personal tale–born in poverty in the South Bronx, growing up around drugs and violence, then building it out of the ghetto and winding up at Harvard–was what gave him the passion and the commitment to make the Harlem Children’s Zone in the face of copious obstacles and widespread skepticism. So it’s probably right that no one else could have built the first zone. But I reflect this next stage, the process of expanding the zone model around the country, will require leaders of a different type–people who are passionate about the mission of improving the lives of poor children, of course, but more importantly people who are very all ears on results and how to achieve them. Persons people may be rare, but they’re out there.

Amazon.com: Finally, how are Champion and Cheryl [a young couple who went through the Zone's Baby College in the book] doing?

Tough: They’re doing pretty well! They’re still struggling with all the issues that most young adults in Harlem struggle with, like finding affordable housing and a decent job. But they’re committed to their son, Champion Jr., and to the new parenting techniques they learned in Baby College. They’re determined to do whatever it takes to give Champion Jr. a shot at a very different kind of future than they were able to imagine for themselves, growing up.

Questions for Geoffrey Canada

Amazon.com: How do you change the culture of a neighborhood while keeping its local values?

Canada: We are not changing Harlem’s culture–we are effective to provide an alternative to the toxic well loved culture and street culture that elevate violence and anti-social behavior. When you are a frightened kid, all this tough-guy stuff is very seductive. We are effective with people from the community to provide safe, enriching, and engaging environments for children so they can renovate just like their middle-class peers. By encompassing an entire neighborhood, we hope to reach a tipping point where the dominant culture is one that explicitly and implicitly moves children toward success.

Amazon.com: You say in the book, “It is my fundamental belief that the folk who care about public education the most, who really want to see it work, are destroying it.” Can you clarify what you mean by that? Have you been able to change any of persons minds through your work?

Canada: First, let me say that I judge school staff–particularly teachers–perform one of the most vital jobs in our country, and many of them are the most dedicated, hard-effective professionals I know. I judge it is absolutely scandalous that they are not paid more and agreed more respect as professionals. That said, I judge our country’s education bureaucracy has become calcified and resistant to change–and we are in dire need of change. When education self-interest groups defend practices that get in the way of improving schools for the sake of children, then I am absolutely opposed to them.

I judge that the successes we are having in Harlem are beginning to turn some heads in this country, and building people realize that things are not hopeless–that we adults can improve student achievement at a much-larger scale than we have been doing. It’s obvious that the system that got us here is not the one that is going to get us out. So everyone is going to have to re-evaluate their roles, their assumptions and their positions. I reflect that has begun, but we are not there yet as a country.

Amazon.com: The tale in the book ends in the summer of 2007. What has happened in your work, especially at Promise College, in the past year?

Canada: This past literary year was very encouraging and it really seemed like the school started to coalesce. The most obvious sign of that were the scores on the citywide math exam at our middle school, which had been the school with the most challenges. This past spring, 97 percent of the eighth graders were at or above grade level. For an area like Harlem, that is incredible, particularly since these were kids that were randomly selected by lottery from the neighborhood, were massively behind, and were with us for just three years. So we are very optimistic about the future of our kids.

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Angela’s Ashes: A Memoir

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• ISBN13: 9780684842677
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.

Product Description
“When I look back on my childhood I marvel how I managed to survive at all. It was, of course, a miserable childhood: the pleased childhood is hardly worth your while. Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood.”

So starts the luminous memoir of Frank McCourt, born in Depression-era Brooklyn to recent Irish immigrants and raised in the slums of Limerick, Ireland. Frank’s mother, Angela, has no money to feed the children since Frank’s father, Malachy, rarely works, and when he does he drinks his wages. Yet Malachy — vexing, irresponsible and beguiling — does nurture in Frank an appetite for the one thing he can provide: a tale. Frank lives for his father’s tales of Cuchulain, who saved Ireland, and of the Angel on the Seventh Step, who brings his mother babies.

Perhaps it is tale that accounts for Frank’s survival. Wearing rags for diapers, begging a pig’s head for Christmas dinner and gathering coal from the roadside to light a fire, Frank endures poverty, near-starvation and the casual cruelty of relatives and neighbors — yet lives to tell his tale with eloquence, exuberance and remarkable forgiveness.

Angela’s Ashes, imbued on every page with Frank McCourt’s astounding humor and compassion, is a glorious book that bears all the inscription of a classic.Amazon.com Review
Frank McCourt’s haunting memoir takes on new life when the leader reads from his Pulitzer Prize-winning book. Recounting scenes from his childhood in New York City and Limerick, Ireland, McCourt paints a brutal yet poignant picture of his early days when there was rarely enough food on the table, and boots and coats were a luxury. In a enjoyable Irish voice that regularly lends a gentle humor to the unimaginable, the leader remembers his wayward yet adoring father who was forever drinking what small money the family tree had. He recounts the painful loss of his siblings to avoidable sickness and hunger, a proud mother cut-rate to begging for charity, and the stink of the sewage-strewn streets that ran outside the front door. As McCourt approaches adolescence, he discovers the bring shame on of poverty and the beauty of Shakespeare, the mystery of sex and the unforgiving power of the Irish Catholic Church. This powerful and heart-rending tribute to the resiliency and determination of youth is populated with memorable characters and moments, and McCourt’s interpretation of the narrative and the voices it contains will place listeners laughing through their tears.

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