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Sarah's Diary: An unflinchingly honest account of one family's struggle with depression
By Sarah Griffin. 2007
'I was fourteen when I found my Dad trying to commit suicide in the garage. Sounds shocking doesn't it? But…
that was part of me, part of living with my Dad'Sarah's Diary is the very personal diary of Sarah Griffin - an ordinary teenage girl learning to deal with the ups and downs of family life. On the outside hers was like any other family, but behind closed doors lay a sad and lonely secret. Sarah's Dad had depression -- a condition we've all heard of but seldom discuss. Beautifully written, brutally honest, Sarah's story is compelling reading.A Quiet Word: Lobbying, Crony Capitalism and Broken Politics in Britain
By Tamasin Cave, Andy Rowell. 2014
Q. What’s worth £2,000,000,000, answers to no-one and operates out of public sight? A. Britain’s influence industry The corporate takeover…
of democracy is no conspiracy theory – it’s happening, and it affects every aspect of our lives: the food we eat, the places we live, the temperature of our planet, how we spend our money and how our money is spent for us. And much more. A Quiet Word shows just how effectively the voice of public interest is being drowned out by the word in the ear from the professional persuaders of the lobbying industry. And if you’ve never heard about them, that’s because the most effective lobbying goes unnoticed. A Quiet Word shines the brightest of lights into one of the darkest and least-understood corners of our political culture. It is essential, urgent, authoritative reading for anyone interested in our democracy and where this country is heading. And by showing how influence is constructed, it puts power back in your hands.Please Don't Cry: A family torn apart by grief. An incredible act of love.
By Jane Plume. 2014
'I’m glad I could do her this one last favour. If it had been the other way round, I know…
Gina would have done the same for me.’Jane and Gina were the best of friends. When Gina’s husband Shaun was diagnosed with terminal cancer in 2009, Jane vowed to do everything she could to help her best mate and her two small sons through the awful time to come. But things were about to take a tragic turn for the worse. In 2010, Gina was killed in a shock car crash. Though devastated by her own grief, Jane knew that Gina needed her now more than ever – to help with the boys she had left behind. And after cancer claimed Shaun's life, Jane stepped in to care for the two orphans, becoming the mother her best friend could no longer be.This is the moving true story behind an incredible act of love.Our Billie
By Ian Clayton. 2010
'An astonishing work' - Joanne HarrisEvery parent's worst nightmare became a reality for Ian Clayton. On a short holiday break…
in Hay-on-Wye he took his nine-year-old twins canoeing, and in a freak accident his daughter Billie was drowned. In a remarkably frank and vivid way Clayton describes what happened on that spring day, his desperate attempts to save his two children, and then what it felt like two years later to come face to face with the men who hired out the canoe.But Our Billie is not a story of bitterness and recrimination. Instead it's the story of how a family attempts to come to terms with something which makes no sense at all. Through his memories of Billie and his wonderfully affectionate portrait of the small town in Yorkshire where the family has lived for generations, he weaves a story of loss and remembering, of gratitude and forgiveness.Openhearted: Eighty Years of Love, Loss, Laughter and Letting Go
By Ann Ingle. 2021
SHORTLISTED FOR TWO IRISH BOOK AWARDS'Something they don't tell you about getting older is that you fall. Oh, you hear…
about it in passing, of course, "She had a fall, poor thing". Falling is not something you ever think about as a younger woman. You think about falling in love . . .'At 20 Londoner Ann Ingle fell madly in love with an Irish fellow she met on holiday in Cornwall. At the church to arrange their shotgun wedding she discovered that he hadn't even told her his real name.Sixty-odd years later Ann looks back on that first glorious fall and in a series of essays considers what she has learned from the life that followed - bringing eight children into the world, their father's years of mental illness and tragic death at 40, being a cash-strapped single mother in 1980s Dublin, coming into her own in her middle years - going to college, working and writing, and continuing to evolve and learn into her ninth decade, even as she accepts the realities of being 'old'.Candid about everything that matters - love, sex, heartbreak, money, class, religion, mental health, rearing children (and letting them go), reading and writing, ageing - Open-Hearted is a compelling story about living life in a spirit of curiosity and delight and with a willingness to look for good in others._________________________________'By some distance the most courageous, most poignant, most life-affirming memoir I've read in the last twenty years and more' Paul Howard'Genuinely inspirational. I LOVE ANN INGLE' Marian Keyes'What a beautiful openhearted, at times broken-hearted memoir ... honest, funny, searingly direct, a wonderful voice ... remarkable' Joe Duffy'Really beautiful. Searingly honest, astonishingly frank and very, very funny' Maia DunphyOne Last Goodbye: Sometimes only a mother's love can help end the pain
By Kay Gilderdale. 2011
Watching her child die is the hardest thing a mother can ever do. But for Kay Gilderdale, saying a final…
goodbye to her only daughter Lynn was exceptionally painful: she'd played a part in her death.Lynn was just 14 when she was struck down by the crippling disease ME, leaving her paralysed and in constant agony. Over the next 17 years, she became desperate to escape her miserable existence, even begging her mum to help her die. So, one night, when Kay found Lynn attempting suicide, she was forced to make an impossible decision. Continue watching her child suffer or help her end the pain?Eventually, fighting her every instinct, Kay helped her precious daughter take a fatal overdose. But while Lynn was finally free, her mother faced a fresh agony - a possible lifetime behind bars. The highly controversial trial that followed opened a fierce public debate on assisted suicide. Is it murder or mercy?Here, in her heartbreaking story, Kay reveals the harrowing truth behind the headlines and the desperate lengths a mother will go to for the love of a child.One Day at a Time: A Memoir
By Susan Lewis. 2011
She was only nine when her world fell apart. The struggle to understand took a lifetime.In 1960s Bristol, Susan's family…
was like any other with its joys and frustrations, and fierce loyalties. Then tragedy struck and left a legacy that was to last a lifetime.Susan was only nine when her mother died. A year later she was sent away to school. She didn't want to go, and didn't understand why she had to. In her struggle to cope with an uncertain world - a world where nothing seemed to make sense any more - she pushed away the one person she loved best, her father. It wasn't until adulthood beckoned that she realised that, in order to turn their relationship around, she had to learn to love - and trust - again.The Death Class: A True Story About Life
By Erika Hayasaki. 2014
The poignant, “powerful” (The Boston Globe) look at how to appreciate life from an extraordinary professor who teaches about death:…
“Poetic passages and assorted revelations you’ll likely not forget” (Chicago Tribune).Why does a college course on death have a three-year waiting list? When nurse Norma Bowe decided to teach a course on death at a college in New Jersey, she never expected it to be popular. But year after year students crowd into her classroom, and the reason is clear: Norma’s “death class” is really about how to make the most of what poet Mary Oliver famously called our “one wild and precious life.”Under the guise of discussions about last wills and last breaths and visits to cemeteries and crematoriums, Norma teaches her students to find grace in one another. In The Death Class, award-winning journalist Erika Hayasaki followed Norma for more than four years, showing how she steers four extraordinary students from their tormented families and neighborhoods toward happiness: she rescues one young woman from her suicidal mother, helps a young man manage his schizophrenic brother, and inspires another to leave his gang life behind. Through this unorthodox class on death, Norma helps kids who are barely hanging on to understand not only the value of their own lives, but also the secret of fulfillment: to throw yourself into helping others. Hayasaki’s expert reporting and literary prose bring Norma’s wisdom out of the classroom, transforming it into an inspiring lesson for all. In the end, Norma’s very own life—and how she lives it—is the lecture that sticks. “Readers will come away struck by Bowe’s compassion—and by the unexpectedly life-affirming messages of courage that spring from her students’ harrowing experiences” (Entertainment Weekly).Escaping the Housing Trap: The Strong Towns Response to the Housing Crisis
By Charles L. Marohn Jr., Daniel Herriges. 2024
Housing is an investment. Investment prices must go up. Housing is shelter. When the price of shelter goes up, people…
experience distress.This is the housing trap. It’s time to escape. In Escaping the Housing Trap: The Strong Towns Solution to the Housing Crisis, renowned urbanists Charles (Chuck) Marohn and Daniel Herriges introduce a first-of-its-kind discussion of the tension between housing as a financial product and housing as shelter. This is the key insight that’s been missing from the Housing Crisis Conversation; and the insight that can help cities fight back against the crisis from the bottom-up.This book offers a serious, yet accessible, history of housing policy in the United States and explains how it led us to this point in time: where we face a market that is rigged against people who, only a few decades ago, could have been homeowners or stable, long-term rentals. Only local change, on a neighborhood or city-wide scale, can begin to restore balance to the housing market. Escaping the Housing Trap is the must-read resource for everyone with a stake in the future of housing in America—and that means everyone. Readers will find: Discussions of housing as an investment and how the country's neighborhoods are being transformed by the introduction of large amounts of investment Explorations of housing as shelter, including discussions of zoning policy and NIMBYism A comprehensive overview of the Strong Towns approach to solving the American housing crisisThe Politics of Public Fund Investing: How to Modify Wall Street to Fit Main Street
By Ben Finkelstein. 2006
Until now, there has never been a book to help public fund managers direct fixed-income portfolios while simultaneously balancing politics,…
or the need to preserve principal, with economics, or the need to optimize income. The Politics of Public Fund Investing approaches public fund management from the lay perspective, providing much-needed guidance to modify Wall Street strategies to serve the needs of Main Street. If you manage a public fund, if you are an elected official, or if you oversee a portfolio for a foundation or an endowment, you know the traditional money management strategy used every day on Wall Street doesn't necessarily apply to your situation. For you, investing isn't simply about economics. Wall Street strategies do not take into account election cycles, political risk factors, or the unique performance assessments public funds must undergo. When Wall Street builds a portfolio, it doesn't need to consider the opinions and desires of a wide variety of constituents, and the management of the portfolio's performance doesn't carry the same level of career risk. This groundbreaking book is the first resource ever available to the stewards of public fund investing entrusted with the responsibility to make financial decisions in this unique environment. The Politics of Public Fund Investing shows readers how to evaluate and measure their funds' performance through specific techniques, standards, and procedures. It begins by addressing the key differences between Wall Street and Main Street, explaining which methods of Wall Street are unsuited to public fund management and why. The book provides a framework for moving from a static investment policy to a dynamic investment plan, making the important distinction between what is "legal" in terms of policy and what is "suitable" in terms of the objectives of the stakeholders. The book goes on to propose exceptional and beneficial insights into appraising a fund's performance along with providing a four-step process to build a politically correct portfolio. Finally, it shows how to be safe and optimize income within the constraints of acceptable risk. Based on years of experience and invaluable research, The Politics of Public Fund Investing is an innovative, compelling, and much-needed guide to navigating the complex territory where the political environment meets public investing.NEW YORK TIMES and WALL STREET JOURNAL BESTSELLERThe former FDIC chairwoman, and one of the first people to acknowledge the…
full risk of subprime loans, offers a unique perspective on the financial crisis.Appointed by George W. Bush as the chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) in 2006, Sheila Bair witnessed the origins of the financial crisis and in 2008 became—along with Hank Paulson, Ben Bernanke, and Timothy Geithner—one of the key public servants trying to repair the damage to the global economy. Bull by the Horns is her remarkable and refreshingly honest account of that contentious time and the struggle for reform that followed and continues to this day.Briefly Perfectly Human: Making an Authentic Life by Getting Real About the End
By Alua Arthur. 2024
A deeply transformative memoir that reframes how we think about death and how it can help us lead better, more…
fulfilling and authentic lives, from America’s most visible death doula."A truly unique, inspiring perspective on the time we have, what we do with it, and how we let go of this world.... There is no one I'd trust more to guide me through an understanding of death, and how it informs life." — Jodi Picoult, New York Times bestselling author of Mad Honey and The Book of Two Ways"Briefly Perfectly Human is a beautiful, raw, light-bringing experience. Alua's voice is shimmering, singular, and pulses with humor, vulnerability, insight, and refreshing candor.... Be prepared for it to grab you, hold you tight, and raise the roof on the power of human connection." — Tembi Locke, author of From Scratch: A Memoir of Love, Sicily, and Finding HomeFor her clients and everyone who has been inspired by her humanity, Alua Arthur is a friend at the end of the world. As our country’s leading death doula, she’s spreading a transformative message: thinking about your death—whether imminent or not—will breathe wild, new potential into your life.Warm, generous, and funny AF, Alua supports and helps manage end-of-life care on many levels. The business matters, medical directives, memorial planning; but also honoring the quiet moments, when monitors are beeping and loved ones have stepped out to get some air—or maybe not shown up at all—and her clients become deeply contemplative and want to talk. Aching, unfinished business often emerges. Alua has been present for thousands of these sacred moments—when regrets, fears, secret joys, hidden affairs, and dim realities are finally said aloud. When this happens, Alua focuses her attention at the pulsing center of her clients’ anguish and creates space for them, and sometimes their loved ones, to find peace.This has had a profound effect on Alua, who was already no stranger to death’s periphery. Her family fled a murderous coup d’état in Ghana in the 1980s. She has suffered major, debilitating depressions. And her dear friend and brother-in-law died of lymphoma. Advocating for him in his final months is what led Alua to her life’s calling. She knows firsthand the power of bearing witness and telling the truth about life’s painful complexities, because they do not disappear when you look the other way. They wait for you.Briefly Perfectly Human is a life-changing, soul-gathering debut, by a writer whose empathy, tenderness, and wisdom shimmers on the page. Alua Arthur combines intimate storytelling with a passionate appeal for loving, courageous end-of-life care—what she calls “death embrace.” Hers is a powerful testament to getting in touch with something deeper in our lives, by embracing the fact of our own mortality. “Hold that truth in your mind,” Alua says, “and wondrous things will begin to grow around it.”This textbook provides an introduction to cultural policy in the US, enabling both students and practitioners to understand how government…
impacts the arts and culture.Starting with an historical overview of why and how the US developed a national cultural policy, the book goes on to trace the contemporary system of national, state, and local arts and cultural agencies through which that policy is put into practice. Readers are provided both in-depth frameworks for conceptualizing how government regulation and provision shape the arts and culture and carefully illustrated examples of cultural policy in action. Covering critical issues in US cultural policy such as the Culture Wars, culture-led development and gentrification, and field-wide data and research capacities, the book builds a bridge between theory, practice, and politics in the arts and culture. This new edition includes enhanced visualizations and policy maps, expanded policy labs, and a new section on cultural policy during COVID-19.The result is a text that is essential reading for students and reflective practitioners of arts and cultural management and administration.The Mercy Papers: A Memoir of Three Weeks
By Robin Romm. 2009
When Robin Romm's The Mother Garden was published, The New York Times Book Review called her "a close-up magician," saying,…
"hers is the oldest kind [of magic] we know: the ordinary incantation of words and stories to help us navigate the darkness and finally to hold the end at bay." In her searing memoir The Mercy Papers, Romm uses this magic to expand the weeks before her mother's death into a story about a daughter in the moments before and after loss. With a striking mix of humor and honesty, Romm ushers us into a world where an obstinate hospice nurse tries to heal through pamphlets and a yelping grandfather squirrels away money in a shoe-shine kit. Untrained dogs scamper about as strangers and friends rally around death, offering sympathy as they clamor for attention. The pillbox turns quickly into a metaphor for order; questions about medication turn to musings about God. The mundane and spiritual melt together as Romm reveals the sharp truths that lurk around every corner and captures, with great passion, the awe, fear, and fury of a daughter losing her mother. The Mercy Papers was started in the midst of heartbreak, and not originally intended for an audience. The result is a raw, unsentimental book that reverberates with humanity. Robin Romm has created a tribute to family and an indelible portrait that will speak to anyone who has ever loved and lost.The Removers: A Memoir
By Andrew Meredith. 2014
“A darkly funny memoir about family reckonings” (O, The Oprah Magazine)—the story of a young man who, by handling the…
dead, makes peace with the living.Andrew Meredith’s father, a literature professor at La Salle University, was fired after unspecified allegations of sexual misconduct. It’s a transgression that resulted in such long-lasting familial despair that Andrew cannot forgive him. In the wake of the scandal, he frantically treads water, stuck in a kind of suspended adolescence—falling in and out of school, moving blindly from one half-hearted relationship to the next. When Andrew is forced to move back home to his childhood neighborhood in Northeast Philadelphia and take a job alongside his father as a “remover,” the name for those unseen, unsung men whose charge it is to take away the dead from their last rooms, he begins to see his father not through the lens of a wronged and resentful child, but through that of a sympathetic, imperfect man.Called “artful” and “compelling” by Thomas Lynch in The Wall Street Journal, Meredith’s poetic voice is as unforgettable as his story, and “he tucks his bittersweet childhood memories between tales of removals as carefully as the death certificates he slips between the bodies he picks up and the stretcher-like contraption that transports each body to the waiting vehicle” (Minneapolis Star-Tribune). “Potent” (Publishers Weekly), and “ultimately rewarding” (The Boston Globe), The Removers is a searing, coming-of-age memoir with “lyrical language and strong sense of place” (The Philadelphia Inquirer).Did I Ever Tell You?: A Memoir
By Genevieve Kingston. 2024
THE MOST EXTRAORDINARY, LIFE-AFFIRMING MEMOIR YOU WILL EVER READ ABOUT THE POWER OF LOVE.Did I Ever Tell You? reads like…
a novel but is an unforgettable true story. Genevieve (Gwen) Kingston was just eleven years old when her mother passed away, leaving behind a chest filled with gifts and letters to celebrate the milestones of Gwen&’s life and each of her birthdays until age thirty. When Did I Ever Tell You? opens, just three packages remain: engagement, marriage, and first baby. Tracing Gwen&’s coming-of-age, the book reveals a treasure hunt, with each gift and letter unveiling more about her mother, her family, and—ultimately—herself. Like Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner and The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch, Did I Ever Tell You? is a riveting book filled with unexpected twists and powerful life lessons. Through her mother&’s fierce and courageous love, Gwen was granted the tools not only to move through grief but to cherish life. For as her mother says in one of her letters: &“love is stronger than death.&”Good Grief
By Brianna Pastor. 2024
“Brianna Pastor is by far one of my favorite new writers. Good Grief is a powerful testament that shows how…
hard the past can be and that overcoming it is possible. If you want to feel seen and deeply moved, read Good Grief. Brianna Pastor has unparalleled talent, let the power of her writing guide you to a better life.”—yung pueblo, #1 New York Times bestselling authorAn expanded edition with over forty brand-new poems of the bestselling poetry collection Good Grief by Brianna PastorWhen Brianna Pastor released her self-published poetry collection, Good Grief, she was blown away by the outpouring of support from people who reached out and said, “Yes. Me too.” For anyone who has struggled with questions of identity or coped with serious emotional issues, including grief, trauma, anxiety, and depression, this collection will help you find hope on the other side.we don’t know how long our pain will last. we assume that because it hurts now, it is probably going to hurt tomorrow. it may even hurt the next day. perhaps it will get worse. but we sleep, and you see, and we do this marvelous thing in our sleep—we mend. And tomorrow is not always what we thought it would be.—from Good GriefAs Long as You Need: Permission to Grieve
By J. S. Park. 2024
"A heartfelt invitation for grieving readers...An excellent resource for those working their way through loss." —Publishers Weekly, Starred ReviewVeteran hospital…
chaplain to the sick, dying, and bereaved, J.S. Park offers you both the permission and the process for how to grieve and heal at your own pace.In As Long As You Need, J.S. offers an honest and unrushed engagement with grief, decoding four types of grieving—spiritual, mental, physical, and relational—and offering compassionate self-care and soul-care along the way.If you are struggling to process loss, pain, or grief from the last few years or the last few minutes, J.S. is an experienced and deeply empathetic listener and grief catcher who has held the pain and questions of thousands of patients. While social and cultural narratives about grief are dominated by "letting go, moving on, or turning the page" in his nearly decade of service as a chaplain at a major hospital with a designated level one trauma center J.S. understands firsthand how rushing or suppressing grief only adds a suffocating layer of pain on top of the original wound.From his unique window into the stories of the ill, injured, dying, and their families, J.S. offers you:Permission to dismantle all too common myths about grief and replace them with a guilt-free and unrushed approach to navigating your losses.Encouragement for how entering grief, rather than avoiding it, leads to a hard but meaningful holding of your loss.Empathy and hope if you are struggling with a crisis of faith in the midst of grief.Recognition that grief spans a wide narrative of loss: loss of future, faith, mental health, worth, autonomy, connection, and loved ones.Affirmation that your grief is your own. While the DNA of grief might be universal to the human condition, how you experience and process grief is unique to you. From the ER to deliveries to deathbeds across every sort of illness and injury imaginable, J.S. Park has provided meaningful counseling for people in all walks of life and death. Now, through his book he wants to assure you that, while everybody else might rush past your pain, grief is the voice that says, take as long as you need.Corporate Social Responsibility and Governance: Stakeholders, Management and Organizational Performance in the European Union (Routledge Studies in Corporate Governance)
By Panagiotis Dimitropoulos, Efthalia Elia Chatzigianni. 2022
Corporate social responsibility (CSR) has developed into a crucial corporate and organizational issue around the world. It has been incorporated…
into various sectors and countries, and includes many types of activities and dimensions. It is a common notion that organizations are more inclined today to broaden and shift their performance focus from short-term goals towards long-term social, environmental, and value-added perspectives.Under the framework of corporate governance, organizations and companies are motivated to promote fairness, transparency, ethics, and accountability in their transactions, while concurrently maintaining enhanced standards of governance. This means that organizations and corporations must align their activities with community aspirations which is an issue falling within the sphere of CSR. Increased attention has been placed on the organizations regarding their approach towards the needs of various stakeholders. However, a crucial issue that this book attempts to address is the association, intersection, and inter-relationship between governance and CSR within the EU region, which are not adequately established in the existing literature. The book will show that governance and CSR are highly connected. With the purpose of studying the association of CSR with legal, managerial and empirical aspects of governance in corporations and not-for-profit organizations, in various sectors of the economy, the book also intends to provide useful policy implications, as well as to offer constructive directions for future research. This book will be of value to researchers, academics, practitioners, policymakers, and students in the fields of CRS and governance, organizational theory, marketing management, business ethics and human resource management.The Private Sector's Role in Disasters: Leveraging the Private Sector in Emergency Management
By Alessandra Jerolleman, John J. Kiefer. 2016
This book examines the role of the private sector in emergency management and how that role is changing through private…
sector intersections with government, government agencies, and the public sectors in all phases of emergency management. It particularly focuses on the areas in which government regulations and guidelines promote or encourage priv