This moving and inspiring memoir tells the story of a single, heart-wrenching year in one family's life in which a son sustains a severe brain injury, a daughter is stricken by a degenerative muscle condition, another son is suspended from school for drug use, and a grandfather passes away. With sensitivity and honesty, the mother recounts the harrowing days of stresses and ceaseless worry within the family and reveals the importance of familial bonds in overcoming tragedy. More than an account of heartache, this story serves as a resource for other families coping with debilitating injuries and unexpected trauma.

Henry Gallagher is going to die. His liver is failing, and with each drink his chances of living past age thirty crumble around him. Over a chaotic two-year blur, he stumbles through inebriated nihilism strengthened with each self-destructive act, reveling in an unending parade of violence, blackouts, half-hearted AA meetings, psych ward stints, dangerous sexual encounters, suicidal behavior, and shattered relationships. Two events force Henry to look inward and face the disturbing truths left to fester for so many years, drenched in booze, but always staring up at him from the bottom of a whiskey bottle: during his darkest hour he receives an offer that threatens to change the trajectory of his life forever-and a mental diagnosis that, in Henry's mind, makes him more monster than man.In his highly personal and confessional style, Jack Moody's brutally honest and scathingly witty autobiographical debut novel follows the hero's journey of a man hurtling into the depths of addiction, mental illness, and self-destruction, while wrestling with his survival instinct and self-awareness that his journey will-inevitably soon, with his shield or on it-come to an end.

Makayla is like your average little girl. Growing up in Decatur Georgia with a loving family. Somewhere down the line between family drama and secrets that come out along side of other people that enter her life. She is the lone person to stand the trail of the murder of her family and a few others. She confides in a friend named Monica who knows way more about Makayla's life than Makayla herself.

"My Grandpa is my best friend. After Grandpa had a stroke, mom taught me the Smile-Reach-Speech Test. It's an easy way to know if someone may be having a stroke and that you should call 911 right away. I'm glad that's what we did because now Grandpa and I are back to doing fun stuff together." Anyone can have a stroke. With the Smile-Reach-Speech Test, parents and children will learn to recognize the signs of a stroke and call 911 right away. Knowing what to do in an emergency is just as important as learning to whistle or catch a ball. It's easy to learn. Just ask Grandpa. Grandpa's Crooked Smile includes games and activities to help your whole family learn the Smile-Reach-Speech Test.

Tela Geoffrey is a 10 year old girl who has one wish and that's to be beautiful. Tela believes that she would be beautiful if it weren't for her crooked smile. After being teased by her school crush, she later discovers the power behind I Am, self-acceptance, and faith. Infused with diary entries, trips to the nurse's office, recess discoveries, and more - you will be inspired to embrace God's design in your own life!

“This book is a refreshing story of great courage, revealing how one can embrace life in its entirety in order to live more fully and offering readers a depth of humanity we need badly in today’s world.” —Michael Finkelstein, MD, author of Slow Medicine How do you keep going when the doctors give you a 2% chance of survival? For Terri Tate, it was a blend of faith, perseverance, prescription-strength humor—and most of all, a heart that never quit. “I had to stop reproaching myself for not being able to adhere to any one system of treatment,” writes Terri. “I needed to create my own recipe for healing.” A Crooked Smile invites you to share Terri’s astonishing experiences through cancer diagnosis, multiple surgeries, and the labyrinth of modern health care. Most of all, her physical challenges compelled her to take a spiritual journey she could never have imagined. Writing with a mix of gentle wit and courageous vulnerability, Terri recounts her years of living in a crucible of inner growth—and shares her surprising adventures with unlooked-for helpers, shamanic guides, and unexpected openings to spiritual sources of wisdom and healing. “I do believe that our bodies possess self-healing mechanisms that we’re only beginning to tap,” writes Terri. “Whatever contributed to my survival, I am certain that something mystical beyond the medical was at work, and the final decision was out of my hands.” With A Crooked Smile, she shares an unforgettable story of perseverance, love, and the small miracles that can save our lives.

How do people come to live as they ought to live? Crooked Stalks seeks an answer to this enduring question in diverse practices of cultivation: in the moral horizons of development intervention, in the forms of virtue through which people may work upon their own desires, deeds, and habits, and in the material labors that turn inhabited worlds into environments for both moral and natural growth. Focusing on the colonial subjection and contemporary condition of the Piramalai Kallar caste—classified, condemned, and policed for decades as a “criminal tribe”—Anand Pandian argues that the work of cultivation in all of these senses has been essential to the pursuit of modernity in south India. Colonial engagements with the Kallars in the early twentieth century relied heavily upon agrarian strategies of moral reform, an approach that echoed longstanding imaginations of the rural cultivator as a morally cultivated being in Tamil literary, moral, and religious tradition. These intertwined histories profoundly shape how people of the community struggle with themselves as ethical subjects today. In vivid, inventive, and engaging prose, Pandian weaves together ethnographic encounters, archival investigations, and elements drawn from Tamil poetry, prose, and popular cinema. Tacking deftly between ploughed soils and plundered orchards, schoolroom lessons and stationhouse registers, household hearths and riverine dams, he reveals moral life in the postcolonial present as a palimpsest of traces inherited from multiple pasts. Pursuing these legacies through the fragmentary play of desire, dream, slander, and counsel, Pandian calls attention not only to the moral potential of ordinary existence, but also to the inescapable force of accident, chance, and failure in the making of ethical lives. Rarely are the moral coordinates of modern power sketched with such intimacy and delicacy.