Strength in What Remains: A Journey of Remembrance and Forgiveness

Strength in What Remains: A Journey of Remembrance and Forgiveness Review

Strength in What Remains: A Journey of Remembrance and Forgiveness Feature

• ISBN13: 9780739383377
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Strength in What Remains: A Journey of Remembrance and Forgiveness Overview

Tracy Kidder, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and author of the bestsellers The Soul of a New Machine, House, and the enduring classic Mountains Beyond Mountains, has been described by the Baltimore Sun as the “master of the non-fiction narrative.” In this new book, Kidder gives us the superb story of a hero for our time. Strength in What Remains is a wonderfully written, inspiring account of one man’s remarkable American journey and of the ordinary people who helped him–a brilliant testament to the power of will and of second chances.

Deo arrives in America from Burundi in search of a new life. Having survived a civil war and genocide, plagued by horrific dreams, he lands at JFK airport with two hundred dollars, no English, and no contacts. He ekes out a precarious existence delivering groceries, living in Central Park, and learning English by reading dictionaries in bookstores. Then Deo begins to meet the strangers who will change his life, pointing him eventually in the direction of Columbia University, medical school, and a life devoted to healing. Kidder breaks new ground in telling this unforgettable story as he travels with Deo back over a turbulent life in search of meaning and forgiveness.

An extraordinary writer, Tracy Kidder once again shows us what it means to be fully human by telling a story about the heroism inherent in ordinary people, a story about a life based on hope.


From the Hardcover edition.

Strength in What Remains: A Journey of Remembrance and Forgiveness Specifications

Amazon Best of the Month, September 2009:Strength in What Remains is an unlikely story about an unreasonable man. Deo was a young medical student who fled the genocidal civil war in Burundi in 1994 for the uncertainty of New York City. Against absurd odds--he arrived with little money and less English and slept in Central Park while delivering groceries for starvation wages--his own ambition and a few kind New Yorkers led him to Columbia University and, beyond that, to medical school and American citizenship. That his rise followed a familiar immigrant's path to success doesn't make it any less remarkable, but what gives Deo's story its particular power is that becoming an American citizen did not erase his connection to Burundi, in either his memory or his dreams for the future. Writing with the same modest but dogged empathy that made his recent Mountains Beyond Mountains (about Deo's colleague and mentor, Dr. Paul Farmer) a modern classic, Tracy Kidder follows Deo back to Burundi, where he recalls the horrors of his narrow escape from the war and begins to build a medical clinic where none had been before. Deo's terrible journey makes his story a hard one to tell; his tirelessly hopeful but clear-eyed efforts make it a gripping and inspiring one to read. --Tom Nissley

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Amazon Exclusive: Tracy Kidder on Strength in What Remains

Strength in What Remains is the story of Deogratias, a young man from the central African nation of Burundi. In 1993, through no fault of his own, he was forced onto a terrifying journey, a journey that split his life in two. First he made a six-months-long escape, on foot, from ethnic violence in Burundi and from genocide in Rwanda. Then, in a strange twist of fate, he was, as it were, transported to New York City, where it sometimes seemed that his travails had only just begun.

I met Deo by chance 6 years ago. When I first heard his story, I had one simple thought: I would not have survived. I hoped in part to reproduce that feeling as I retold his story. I also hoped to humanize what, to most westerners anyway, is a mysterious, little-known part of the world. We hear about mass slaughter in distant countries and we imagine that murder and mayhem define those locales. Deo’s story opens up one of those places into a comprehensible landscape—and also opens up a part of New York that is designed to be invisible, the service entrances of the upper East Side, the camping sites that homeless people use in Central Park. But above all, I think, this is a book about coming to terms with memories. How can a person deal with memories like Deo’s, tormenting memories, memories with a distinctly ungovernable quality?

In the first part of Strength In What Remains, I recount Deo’s story. In the second part, I tell about going back with him to the stations of his life, in New York and Burundi. So the story that I tell isn’t only about the memories that Deo related to me. It’s also about seeing him overtaken by memories—again and again, and sometimes acutely. But Deo didn’t take me to Burundi just to show me around. Giving me a tour of his past was incidental to what he was up to in the present and the future. His story has a denoument that even now amazes me.

Deo is an American citizen. He doesn’t have to go back to Burundi. But he has returned continually and keeps on returning, and, amid the postwar wreckage, with the help of friends and family, he has created a clinic and public health system, free to those who can’t pay, in a rural village—part of a beginning, Deo dreams, of a new Burundi.

This facility was a pile of rocks when I visited the site in the summer of 2006. By the fall of 2008, it had become a medical center with several new buildings, a trained professional staff, and a fully stocked pharmacy. In its first year of operation it treated 21,000 different patients. (The organization that Deo founded and that sponsors and operates this facility is called Village Health Works.)

Deo was very young when he went through his long travail. Several strangers helped to save him from death and despair in Burundi and New York. So did sheer courage and pluck, and also Columbia University, which he attended as an undergraduate. But when it’s come to dealing with the burden of his memories, the public health system and clinic that he founded has been the nearest thing to a solution. In the end, it’s neither forgetting the past nor dwelling on the past that has worked for him. For him the answer has been remembering and acting. I once asked Deo why he had studied philosophy at Columbia. He told me, "I wanted to understand what had happened to me." In the end, he received what most students of philosophy receive—not answers, but more questions. As I was trying to describe his effort to build a clinic, I found myself writing: "Deo had discovered a way to quiet the questions he’d been asking at Columbia. That is, he saw there might be an answer for what troubled him most about the world, an answer that lay in his hands, indeed in his memory. You had to do something."—Tracy Kidder

(Photo © Gabriel Amadeus Cooney)

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It's Not About the Bike: My Journey Back to Life

It's Not About the Bike: My Journey Back to Life Review

It's Not About the Bike: My Journey Back to Life Feature

• ISBN13: 9780425179611
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It's Not About the Bike: My Journey Back to Life Overview

The #1 New York Times bestseller with legs as strong as its author's.

Lance Armstrong is one of the most talked about- and inspirational-sports figures of all time. He was Sports Illustrated 's 2002 Sportsman of the Year-and now, after his record-shattering string of Tour de France victories, some are proclaiming him the greatest athlete of all time.

This is the book in which he shares his journey through triumph, tragedy, transformation, and transcendence. It is the story of a world-famous cyclist and his fight against cancer.

It's Not About the Bike: My Journey Back to Life Specifications

People around the world have found inspiration in the story of Lance Armstrong--a world-class athlete nearly struck down by cancer, only to recover and win the Tour de France, the multiday bicycle race famous for its grueling intensity. Armstrong is a thoroughgoing Texan jock, and the changes brought to his life by his illness are startling and powerful, but he's just not interested in wearing a hero suit. While his vocabulary is a bit on the he-man side (highest compliment to his wife: "she's a stud"), his actions will melt the most hard-bitten souls: a cancer foundation and benefit bike ride, his astonishing commitment to training that got him past countless hurdles, loyalty to the people and corporations that never gave up on him. There's serious medical detail here, which may not be for the faint of heart; from chemo to surgical procedures to his wife's in vitro fertilization, you won't be spared a single x-ray, IV drip, or unfortunate side effect. Athletes and coaches everywhere will benefit from the same extraordinary detail provided about his training sessions--every aching tendon, every rainy afternoon, and every small triumph during his long recovery is here in living color. It's Not About the Bike is the perfect title for this book about life, death, illness, family, setbacks, and triumphs, but not especially about the bike. --Jill Lightner

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The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness

The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness Review

The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness Feature

• ISBN13: 9781401309442
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The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness Overview

Elyn Saks is a success by any measure: she’s an endowed professor at the prestigious University of Southern California Gould School of Law. She has managed to achieve this in spite of being diagnosed as schizophrenic and given a "grave" prognosis -- and suffering the effects of her illness throughout her life.

Saks was only eight, and living an otherwise idyllic childhood in sunny 1960s Miami, when her first symptoms appeared in the form of obsessions and night terrors. But it was not until she reached Oxford University as a Marshall Scholar that her first full-blown episode, complete with voices in her head and terrifying suicidal fantasies, forced her into a psychiatric hospital.

Saks would later attend Yale Law School where one night, during her first term, she had a breakdown that left her singing on the roof of the law school library at midnight. She was taken to the emergency room, force-fed antipsychotic medication, and tied hand-and-foot to the cold metal of a hospital bed. She spent the next five months in a psychiatric ward.

So began Saks’s long war with her own internal demons and the equally powerful forces of stigma. Today she is a chaired professor of law who researches and writes about the rights of the mentally ill. She is married to a wonderful man.

In The Center Cannot Hold, Elyn Saks discusses frankly and movingly the paranoia, the inability to tell imaginary fears from real ones, and the voices in her head insisting she do terrible things, as well as the many obstacles she overcame to become the woman she is today. It is destined to become a classic in the genre.

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Breaking Night: A Memoir of Forgiveness, Survival, and My Journey from Homeless to Harvard

Breaking Night: A Memoir of Forgiveness, Survival, and My Journey from Homeless to Harvard Review

Breaking Night: A Memoir of Forgiveness, Survival, and My Journey from Homeless to Harvard Overview

"Breaking Night reads more like an adventure story than an addiction-morality tale. It's a white-knuckle account of survival. . . . By age 6, Murray knew how to mainline drugs (though she never took them) and how to care for her strung-out parents. She showed uncanny maturity, even as a child, and later managed to avoid that malady of teenagers and memoir writers, self-pity. . . . Murray's stoicism has been hard-earned; it serves her well as a writer. Breaking Night itself is full of heart, without a sliver of ice, and deeply moving." (The New York Times Book Review)

"Liz Murray shows us that the human spirit has infinite ability to grow and can never be limited by circumstance. Breaking Night is a beautifully written, heartfelt memoir that will change the way you look your community, the obstacles in your own life and the American Dream. An inspiration, a must read." (Robert Redford)

"[Liz Murray] reminds us that the greatest acts of love and failure can occur side by side; that isolation and loss can give way to accomplishment and promise. She offers the awesome hope that, regardless of its past, a life can go beyond endurance and reach for triumph. She leave us with the memory of a child who clung to and refused to surrender the dignity of her soul." (Andrew Bridge, author of the New York Times bestseller Hope's Boy)

"As much as it is a memoir, Breaking Night is a primer on how poverty and drug abuse create a heartbreaking underclass of children, one that goes largely unnoticed. By the truly uplifting ending, Liz Murray has shown us the worst, and the very best, of America." (Haven Kimmel, author of A Girl Named Zippy and She Got Up Off the Couch)

In the vein of The Glass Castle, Breaking Night is the stunning memoir of a young woman who at age fifteen was living on the streets, and who eventually made it into Harvard.

Liz Murray was born to loving but drug-addicted parents in the Bronx. In school she was taunted for her dirty clothing and lice-infested hair, eventually skipping so many classes that she was put into a girls' home. At age fifteen, Liz found herself on the streets when her family finally unraveled. She learned to scrape by, foraging for food and riding subways all night to have a warm place to sleep.

When Liz's mother died of AIDS, she decided to take control of her own destiny and go back to high school, often completing her assignments in the hallways and subway stations where she slept. Liz squeezed four years of high school into two, while homeless; won a New York Times scholarship; and made it into the Ivy League. Breaking Night is an unforgettable and beautifully written story of one young woman's indomitable spirit to survive and prevail, against all odds.

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Enrique's Journey

Enrique's Journey Review

If you are not sure why theres such a big debate over immigration reform, this book will give you a glimpse at why a family may choose to migrate to the U.S. This book was an easy read, I couldn't put it down. The journey some immigrants take is dangerous, even deadly and yet some people live in such poor conditions, that they risk their own lives in search of jobs in the U.S. I highly recommend this book.

Enrique's Journey Feature

• ISBN13: 9780812971781
• Condition: New
• Notes: BRAND NEW FROM PUBLISHER! BUY WITH CONFIDENCE, Over one million books sold! 98% Positive feedback. Compare our books, prices and service to the competition. 100% Satisfaction Guaranteed

Enrique's Journey Overview

In this astonishing true story, award-winning journalist Sonia Nazario recounts the unforgettable odyssey of a Honduran boy who braves unimaginable hardship and peril to reach his mother in the United States.
When Enrique is five years old, his mother, Lourdes, too poor to feed her children, leaves Honduras to work in the United States. The move allows her to send money back home to Enrique so he can eat better and go to school past the third grade.
Lourdes promises Enrique she will return quickly. But she struggles in America. Years pass. He begs for his mother to come back. Without her, he becomes lonely and troubled. When she calls, Lourdes tells him to be patient. Enrique despairs of ever seeing her again. After eleven years apart, he decides he will go find her.
Enrique sets off alone from Tegucigalpa, with little more than a slip of paper bearing his mother’s North Carolina telephone number. Without money, he will make the dangerous and illegal trek up the length of Mexico the only way he can–clinging to the sides and tops of freight trains.
With gritty determination and a deep longing to be by his mother’s side, Enrique travels through hostile, unknown worlds. Each step of the way through Mexico, he and other migrants, many of them children, are hunted like animals. Gangsters control the tops of the trains. Bandits rob and kill migrants up and down the tracks. Corrupt cops all along the route are out to fleece and deport them. To evade Mexican police and immigration authorities, they must jump onto and off the moving boxcars they call El Tren de la Muerte–The Train of Death. Enrique pushes forward using his wit, courage, and hope–and the kindness of strangers. It is an epic journey, one thousands of immigrant children make each year to find their mothers in the United States.
Based on the Los Angeles Times newspaper series that won two Pulitzer Prizes, one for feature writing and another for feature photography, Enrique’s Journey is the timeless story of families torn apart, the yearning to be together again, and a boy who will risk his life to find the mother he loves.



From the Hardcover edition.

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A Global Life: My Journey Among Rich and Poor, from Sydney to Wall Street to the World Bank

A Global Life: My Journey Among Rich and Poor, from Sydney to Wall Street to the World Bank Review

Before the reader sits down with Mr. Wolfensohn's book he is best advised to be well-rested because in addition to a fascinating autobiography they are also receiving a forum on international development and global relations, a primer on business, and an introduction to the personal and professional psychological machinations of interpersonal/organizational relationships. Jeffrey Goldstein, one of Wolfensohn's first hires at his investment firm in the 1980s, described Wolfensohn as being "a sponge" during the time they were building Jim's business but judging from his humble childhood in Sydney, Australia to his movement into the highest echelons of power, Wolfensohn also has to be viewed as a laser guided torpedo constantly locking onto new targets be they in business, development, or in the arts. The book paints a picture of a self-assured almost cocky young boy who finds himself, at the outset, getting his head "dunked" by a farmhand into a bucket of lime and who later upon making the Australian Olympic team as a fencer is dismissed by a young autograph seeker who states, "Oh don't worry about him, he's only a fencer." This pattern of challenge and personal reassessment is sprinkled throughout his life. After applying to Oxford (rejected) and failing to receive an appointment as a Rhodes Scholar, Wolfensohn took what was behind door number three, Harvard Business School, and that to paraphrase Frost, "Made all the difference." After that Wolfensohn slammed down onto a personal gas pedal that led to Europe, Wall Street, two terms as the president of the World Bank, an appointment as the Special Envoy to the Gaza Disengagement in addition to numerous corporate boards and the chairmanship of both Carnegie Hall and the Kennedy Center. At four-hundred and forty-four pages the reader's time is well spent and he will come away feeling about this book in much the same way that one of his mentors, Julius Stone, wrote on his Harvard application that Wolfensohn possessed, "Indefinable attributes."

A Global Life: My Journey Among Rich and Poor, from Sydney to Wall Street to the World Bank Feature

• ISBN13: 9781586482558
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A Global Life: My Journey Among Rich and Poor, from Sydney to Wall Street to the World Bank Overview

The autobiography of the larger-than-life, visionary financier and humanitarian who led the World Bank through one of its most intense and tumultuous decades in the struggle against global poverty.

As president of the World Bank for a decade, James Wolfensohn tackled world poverty with a passion and energy that made him a uniquely important figure in a fundamental arena of change. Using a lifetime of experience in the banking sector, he carved a distinct path in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Europe for the institution that serves as the major lender to the world's poor.

In A Global Life, Wolfensohn tells his astonishing life story in his own words. A man of surpassing imagination and drive, he became an Olympic fencer and a prominent banker in London and New York. An Australian, he navigated Wall Street with uncommon skill. Chairman of Carnegie Hall and the Kennedy Center for many years, he is also an amateur cellist. But it was his tenure at the World Bank that made him an international force. While at the helm of this controversial institution, Wolfensohn motivated, schemed, charmed, and bullied all the constituencies at his command to broaden the distribution of the world's wealth. Now he bluntly assesses his successes and failures, reflecting on the causes of continuing poverty.

Much more than a business story, this is a deeply reflective account of a fascinating career and personality.

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Nomad: From Islam to America: A Personal Journey Through the Clash of Civilizations

Nomad: From Islam to America: A Personal Journey Through the Clash of Civilizations Review

Ayaan Hirsi is quite the famous lady, now in exile in the USA, after being born in Somalia, moving to Saudi Arabia, then the Sudan, Ethiopia, and finally Holland. AND, that's why she has given her newest biography the title NOMAD. After moving to Holland and claming falsely she required asylum for being a wanted woman in Somalia for her political views, she gained money, an education, Dutch citizenship, then was elected to the Dutch parliment. She helped Theo Van Gogh write his last film "Submission", which ended up getting him killed, and making Ayaan an overnight world celebrity. After the Dutch government found out she lied for asylum, her citizenship was renounced. Somewhere in there she wrote her famous book INFIDEL, which i have not read. I cant address the comments made elsewhere about this book, that it reads like INFIDEL revisited. In NOMAD, she spends a lot of time explaining her family, and why and how ISLAM and Somalian Culture has destroyed their lives. Ayaan Hirsi herself renounced ISLAM and all religion, in favor of the "western" Enlightenment philosophy. For her, being an atheist is the only modern, educated way to live. In her Weltanshauung, all cultures fall short of western culture, if they dont adopt this ideology. Much of the opening of the book she spends either vilifying her family, or painting them as martyrs to the Islamic culture, and Somali clan culture, they belong to.

In that first part, she explains about her father's warlord lifestyle, her family's constant moving, and her lack of roots. Her life is sad, as her brother became a street thug and drunk, her sister committed suicide, and her parents disowned her for her anti-Islamic stance. She got back together with her father as he laid dying, and kept in contact with her clan thru a cousin in Europe. She's a strong advocate for women's rights, especially in Islamic culture. (and personally, I cant fault her there.) However, when she talks about faith and religion in general, her renunciation of ISLAM has a lot of anger behind it. This is typical of victums of spiritual abuse. She equates faith with superstition, and lack of education, even if she mostly lets this fall into the lap of Islam. Global condemnation of all religions is typical of spiritual abuse victums. In the other parts of the book, she writes at great length about the situation for new immigrants with great insight, even humor. Examining the cycle of demand for luxury, the debt incured from borrowing to support luxury spending, and the endless payments due to the interest charges, are not a problem confined to third world immigrants. Thats a basic problem with western lending practices, with the USA being 7 trillion in debt ourselves from this behavior. Some of her insights are not as linked to african immigrants, as she thinks. For that matter, women around the world have been treated like 2nd class citizens since human culture began. Again, she bemoans this as an Islamic problem, but its a problem all women share. Her bitterness resulting from her upbringing as a submissive female in a male dominated Islamic culture, remains only a matter of degree. Nevertheless, she does bring up honor killings and child brides as part of the Islamic culture, altho her attention is devoted more toward gential mutation and forced marriage, since that was her experience.


The biggest problem someone from contemporary American culture will have with this book, is her attacks on Islam grate against the liberal, Politically Correct assumption that "ISLAM" means "Peace". (It actually means "Submission".) IT's amazing how people who've never studied the Koran, will automatically defend an Islamic person's intolerance for any critique of their culture, e.g. the "cartoon" protests a few years ago. However, a crusifix in a jar of urine displayed as art, shouldnt offend any christian, unless they hate freedom of expression. This book ought to have us asking if tolerance includes tolerating intolerance. Right now, our culture haw many problems in critising Islamic behavior, no doubt out of fear of further terrorist attacks. Freedom of speech demands courage. Ask the dead reporters, translaters, etc who bring us the truth about modern Islamic culture. If this book has one strong point to make, it's that we cant afford to hide behind this false stance of "religious equality", when Islam commands complete obedience to its tenants, with jews and christians marked as infidels worthy of death. While we try to justify our cowardness towards confrontation with the fatwa condemning Imans, we end up with terrorism masked as Holy Jihad. This is Ayaan's message in a nutshell. I dont see it as Anti-Islamic, as much as her plea for the western "enlightenment" worldview that permits scientific, modern examination of the Bible, to be permitted for the Koran. If the Koran were studied in the light of modern principles of equality and liberty, Ayaan argues that the injunctions against women in the Koran, or Jihad as anti-semetic, anti-christian persuit, might start to be scientifically examined, and abandoned. Using the inhumanity she saw in her family as her living example, and the pain she suffered thruout her life because of her culture's teachings, Ayaan wishes the Muslim mind could be opened. This hope is explored in the end of her book. There the lifestyles of 3rd world cultures is vividly painted, in the hopes that globalization, and investment of resources by the "wealthy west" might bring education, and with it a western mindset, into the parts of the world where female genitals mutilation, lack of education, and the Burka, enslave women to a degree just not known here.

Ayaan Hirsi's views are too easily dismissed, or worse, used by the far right and fundamentalist Christians, as reason to "nation build" Islamic country, especially those with resources like Iraq. Even tho I believe Ayaan wrote this book with good intentions, her constant derogitory remarks about Islam, and Sub-Saharan muslim culture made her a high price target. (She requires 24 hour a day bodyguards). An informed dialogue between Islam and its opponents if far overdue. A bit of tolerance for criticism on the part of Islam, might take this whole world Jihad movement down a notch. IF you are willing to read what Islam does to the average muslim woman outside the USA, then this would be the book to read. For that matter, if you want to know how Western Europe is dealing with the influx of sub Saharan Africans and middle eastern Muslims into their culture, then this is ALSO a good book to read. Our daily news headlines become more understandable, once we explore the complexity of these issues. We need to become self informed consumers of the news, including the news found in books like Ayaan's. If we become able to accept the lack of women's rights in third world or Muslim countries, then we have lost the hopes that Globalization holds...GLOBAL EQUALITY, GLOBAL LIBERTY, and GLOBAL SIBLING-HOOD for all people. My only real beef with this book, is that Ayaan Harsi holds too much hope in the idealism of 18th century philosophers to cure the culture of islamic countries, a philosophy she does so little to explain. Likewise, Ayaan might have done more to quote the Koran's injunctions against women. A subjective view of life comes with the territory of biography, tho its a small price to pay for an honest appraisal of the type of culture totally foreign to Americans. Informed discussions can only occur, when we allow ourselves to see both sides of an issue, without hiding behind left wing/ right wing propaganda. Reading Ayaan's work, and an unexpurged Koran, is as good a place to start as any.

Nomad: From Islam to America: A Personal Journey Through the Clash of Civilizations Feature

• ISBN13: 9781439157312
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Nomad: From Islam to America: A Personal Journey Through the Clash of Civilizations Overview

"This woman is a major hero of our time." —Richard Dawkins

Ayaan Hirsi Ali captured the world’s attention with Infidel, her compelling coming-of-age memoir, which spent thirty-one weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. Now, in Nomad, Hirsi Ali tells of coming to America to build a new life, an ocean away from the death threats made to her by European Islamists, the strife she witnessed, and the inner conflict she suffered. It is the story of her physical journey to freedom and, more crucially, her emotional journey to freedom—her transition from a tribal mind-set that restricts women’s every thought and action to a life as a free and equal citizen in an open society. Through stories of the challenges she has faced, she shows the difficulty of reconciling the contradictions of Islam with Western values.

In these pages Hirsi Ali recounts the many turns her life took after she broke with her family, and how she struggled to throw off restrictive superstitions and misconceptions that initially hobbled her ability to assimilate into Western society. She writes movingly of her reconciliation, on his deathbed, with her devout father, who had disowned her when she renounced Islam after 9/11, as well as with her mother and cousins in Somalia and in Europe.

Nomad is a portrait of a family torn apart by the clash of civilizations. But it is also a touching, uplifting, and often funny account of one woman’s discovery of today’s America. While Hirsi Ali loves much of what she encounters, she fears we are repeating the European mistake of underestimating radical Islam. She calls on key institutions of the West—including universities, the feminist movement, and the Christian churches—to enact specific, innovative remedies that would help other Muslim immigrants to overcome the challenges she has experienced and to resist the fatal allure of fundamentalism and terrorism.

This is Hirsi Ali’s intellectual coming-of-age, a memoir that conveys her philosophy as well as her experiences, and that also conveys an urgent message and mission—to inform the West of the extent of the threat from Islam, both from outside and from within our open societies. A celebration of free speech and democracy, Nomad is an important contribution to the history of ideas, but above all a rousing call to action.

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Rome Sweet Home: Our Journey to Catholicism

Rome Sweet Home: Our Journey to Catholicism Review

Loved the book, it is very educational but also interesting; as it gives the personal story of 2 converts to the Catholic Church. I learned so much from them and it solidified my faith even more. I highly recommend it for those seeking bible based facts re. the Catholic Faith in an autobiographical format from 2 ordinary people.

Rome Sweet Home: Our Journey to Catholicism Feature

• ISBN13: 9780898704785
• Condition: USED - Very Good
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Rome Sweet Home: Our Journey to Catholicism Overview

The well-known and very popular Catholic couple, Scott and Kimberly Hahn, have been constantly travelling and speaking all over North America for the last few years about their conversion to the Catholic Church. Now these two outstanding Catholic apologists tell in their own words about the incredible spiritual journey that led them to embrace Catholicism. Scott Hahn was a Presbyterian minister, the top student in his seminary class, a brilliant Scripture scholar, and militantly anti-Catholic ... until he reluctantly began to discover that his "enemy" had all the right answers. Kimberly, also a top-notch theology student in the seminary, is the daughter of a well-known Protestant minister, and went through a tremendous "dark night of the soul" after Scott converted to Catholicism.

Their conversion story and love for the Church has captured the hearts and minds of thousands of lukewarm Catholics and brought them back into an active participation in the Church. They have also influenced countless conversions to Catholicism among their friends and others who have heard their powerful testimony.

Written with simplicity, charity, grace and wit, the Hahns' deep love and knowledge of Christ and of Scripture is evident and contagious throughout their story. Their love of truth and of neighbor is equally evident, and their theological focus on the great importance of the family, both biological and spiritual, will be a source of inspiration for all readers.

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The Dance of the Dissident Daughter: A Woman's Journey from Christian Tradition to the Sacred Feminine

The Dance of the Dissident Daughter: A Woman's Journey from Christian Tradition to the Sacred Feminine Review

Snake medicine is the power of transmutation. It is the energy of wholeness, cosmic consciousness, and the ability to experience anything willingly and without resistance. This willingness to experience is extremely courageous, as it brings into question many if not all of the "things that we know".
It is the knowledge that all things are equal in creation, and that those things which might be experienced or regarded as poison (both physicaly and spititualy) can be integrated and transmuted if one has the proper state of mind.
This medicine teaches you on a personal level that you are a universal being. Through accepting all aspects of your life, you can bring about the transmutation of the fire medicine. This fire energy, when functioning on the material plane, creates passion, desire, procreation, and physical vitality. On the emotional plane, it becomes ambition, creation, resolution, and dreams. On the mental plane, it becomes intellect, power, charisma, and leadership. When Snake energy reaches the spiritual plane, it becomes wisdom, understandig, wholeness, and connection to the Divine.
This is heavy magic, but remember, magic is no more than a change in consciousness.
Sue Monk Kidd appears to be well on her way to acheiving her personal goal of becoming a whole and healthy being. What astounds me is that she put it down in writing for the whole world to see and let the change in the course of her life happen both privately and publicly.
We should all have such courage.

The Dance of the Dissident Daughter: A Woman's Journey from Christian Tradition to the Sacred Feminine Overview

The acclaimed spiritual memoir from the author of The Secret Life of Bees

I was amazed to find that I had no idea how to unfold my spiritual life in a feminine way. I was surprised and, in fact, a little terrified when I found myself in the middle of a feminist spiritual reawakening.

Sue Monk was a "conventionally religious, churchgoing woman, a traditional wife and mother" with a thriving career as a Christian writer until she began to question her role as a woman in her culture, her family, and her church. From a jarring encounter with sexism in a suburban drugstore to monastery retreats and rituals in the caves of Crete, Kidd takes readers through the fear, anger, healing, and transformation of her awakening. Retaining a meaningful connection "with the deep song of Christianity," she opens the door for traditional Christian women to discover a spirituality that speaks directly to them and provides inspiring wisdom for all who struggle to embrace their full humanity.

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