Not your typical book about grief, the redbird sings the song of hope is the perfect telling of what grieving people wish others knew. Kandy Noles Stevens unapologetically explains what isn’t always helpful to the bereaved, but does so with grace and wit. Through her personal stories, she provides practical ideas of how to bring comfort to those who are hurting. In an engaging Southern style, Kandy writes about real people (including some pretty colorful ones) who have loved her family in their darkest days. Infused in every page are hope-filled words of God’s faithfulness, including the sending of one redbird when her family needed it the most.

Since the mid-1990s, Taiwan’s unique brand of Mandopop (Mandarin Chinese–language pop music) has dictated the musical tastes of the mainland and the rest of Chinese-speaking Asia. Cries of Joy, Songs of Sorrow explores Mandopop’s surprisingly complex cultural implications in Taiwan and the PRC, where it has established new gender roles, created a vocabulary to express individualism, and introduced transnational culture to a country that had closed its doors to the world for twenty years. In his early chapters, Marc L. Moskowitz provides the historical background necessary to understand the contemporary Mandopop scene, beginning with the birth of Chinese popular music in the East Asian jazz Mecca of 1920s Shanghai. A brief overview of alternative musical genres in the PRC such as Beijing rock and revolutionary opera is included. The section concludes with a look at the manner in which Taiwan’s musical ethos has influenced the mainland’s music industry and how Mandopop has brought Western music and cultural values to the PRC. This leads to a discussion of Taiwan pop’s exceptional hybridity, beginning with foreign influences during the colonial period under the Dutch and Japanese and continuing with the country’s political, cultural, and economic alliance with the U.S. Moskowitz addresses the resulting wealth of transnational musical influences from the rest of East Asia and the U.S. and Taiwan pop’s appeal to audiences in both the PRC and Taiwan. In doing so, he explores how Mandopop’s "songs of sorrow," with their ubiquitous themes of loneliness and isolation, engage a range of emotional expression that resonates strongly in the PRC. Later chapters examine the construction of male and female identities in Mandopop and look at the widespread condemnation of the genre by critics. Drawing on analyses and data from earlier chapters (including interviews with dozens of performers, song writers, and lay people in Taipei and Shanghai), Moskowitz attempts to answer the question: Why, if the music is as bad as some assert, is it so central to the lives of the largest population in the world? To answer, he highlights Mandopop’s important contribution as a poetic lament that simultaneously embraces and protests modern life. Cries of Joy, Songs of Sorrow is a highly readable introduction to an important but understudied East Asian phenomenon. It will find a ready audience among scholars and students of Chinese and Taiwanese popular culture as well as musicologists studying transnational music flows and non-Western popular music.

People everywhere are facing difficult situations and they need to know how to cope with the frustration and other overwhelming emotions that accompany any uncertain situation. This book of hope from Tammy interweaves third-person stories and letters of people who needed--and found--encouragement. We're not alone in our fight . . . in our struggles ... in our loneliness...or in our questions. Other people are going through tough times too, and are pressing on through the storms. It's usually easier for us to press on when we see that others have gone before us and have found joy again. We often need others to stand in the gap for us, when we cannot stand on our own during those difficult times. If we look--if we watch, we'll see and notice that we are never alone. When it's more then we can bear--Jesus stands in those gaps for us. He is able. Give it to God and let Him put your life back together again!

A healing book for those in the wake of life’s devastating storms. We can never plan for the unexpected turns of this life that sometimes lead to great personal suffering. Sometimes that suffering can overshadow everything and threaten to pull us under. Nancy Guthrie knows what it is to be plunged into life’s abyss. Framing her own story of staggering loss and soaring hope with the biblical story of Job, she takes you by the hand and guides you on a pathway through pain—straight to the heart of God. Holding On to Hope offers an uplifting perspective, not only for those experiencing monumental loss, but for anyone going through difficulty and failure. (Includes an 8-week study on the book of Job for readers who want to dig deeper into what the Bible says about dealing with suffering and grief.)

Kofi Awoonor, one of Ghana’s most accomplished poets, had for almost half a century committed himself to teaching, political engagement, and the literary arts. The one constant that guided and shaped his many occupations and roles in life was poetry. The Promise of Hope is a beautifully edited collection of some of Awoonor’s most arresting work spanning almost fifty years. Selected and edited by Awoonor’s friend and colleague Kofi Anyidoho, himself a prominent poet and academic in Ghana, The Promise of Hope contains much of Awoonor’s most recent unpublished poetry, along with many of his anthologized and classic poems. This engaging volume serves as a fitting contribution to the inaugural cohort of books in the African Poetry Book Series.

Thirst, a collection of forty-three new poems from Pulitzer Prize-winner Mary Oliver, introduces two new directions in the poet's work. Grappling with grief at the death of her beloved partner of over forty years, she strives to experience sorrow as a path to spiritual progress, grief as part of loving and not its end. And within these pages she chronicles for the frst time her discovery of faith, without abandoning the love of the physical world that has been a hallmark of her work for four decades.

The Bible tells Christians not to grieve as the world grieves and to rejoice in their sufferings. Yet when author Kevin Ott lost his mother unexpectedly in 2010, he sank into a wintry depression. When life seemed the darkest, something surprising happened. While exploring eighteen C. S. Lewis books and thirteen U2 albums, he experienced tremendous “stabs of joy”—the unusual heaven-birthed joy that Lewis wrote about—in the midst of grief. This revelation not only pulled Kevin out of depression, it forever changed the way he experienced the love and joy of Christ. In Shadowlands and Songs of Light, you will:Learn fascinating details about C. S. Lewis, discover his unique definition of joy, understand how to apply his revelations about joy to suffering, and learn to recognize and cooperate with God’s strategic use of joy.Enjoy a grand tour of U2’s discography, with a special emphasis on their exploration of joy and suffering.Clearly understand, from the perspective of music theory explained in common terms, why the music of U2 is so emotionally powerful and how it serves as a perfect analogy for Lewis’s concepts of joy and the Christian ability to rejoice in suffering.Find inspiration from the personal stories of U2, especially the tragedies that engulfed their youth in Dublin, and see how they worked through that grief and discovered a joy that has kept the band together for over thirty-five years.When the out-of-control nature of the world and your weaknesses throw you off-balance, you can experience God’s grandeur and joy— discovering heaven’s perspective until it becomes your instinctive, default vantage point every day.

A fearless young woman from a small African village starts a revolution against an American oil company in this sweeping, inspiring novel from the New York Times bestselling author of Behold the Dreamers. ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New York Times, People • ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, Esquire, Good Housekeeping, The Christian Science Monitor, Marie Claire, Ms. magazine, BookPage, Kirkus Reviews “Mbue reaches for the moon and, by the novel’s end, has it firmly held in her hand.”—NPR We should have known the end was near. So begins Imbolo Mbue’s powerful second novel, How Beautiful We Were. Set in the fictional African village of Kosawa, it tells of a people living in fear amid environmental degradation wrought by an American oil company. Pipeline spills have rendered farmlands infertile. Children are dying from drinking toxic water. Promises of cleanup and financial reparations to the villagers are made—and ignored. The country’s government, led by a brazen dictator, exists to serve its own interests. Left with few choices, the people of Kosawa decide to fight back. Their struggle will last for decades and come at a steep price. Told from the perspective of a generation of children and the family of a girl named Thula who grows up to become a revolutionary, How Beautiful We Were is a masterful exploration of what happens when the reckless drive for profit, coupled with the ghost of colonialism, comes up against one community’s determination to hold on to its ancestral land and a young woman’s willingness to sacrifice everything for the sake of her people’s freedom.