Capture and early days.

When his mother dies, a little boy is angry at his loss but does everything he can to hold onto the memory of her scent, her voice, and the special things she did for him, even as he tries to help his father and grandmother cope.

When Natalie Zeleznikar was diagnosed with breast cancer, the plan was a double mastectomy and a couple months to recovery. Her reality was eight total hospitalizations after nearly dying--not of cancer but of sepsis. The Scars You Can't See follows Natalie's journey of struggle and survival.

We're born, we live and then we die. It's said that death is the only certainty in life. How very true. This epic volume was never intended for publication and began as scribbled notes that transformed into pages. Chapter after chapter then flowed with such ease. Many can choose to struggle on and survive as best they can though I've finally concluded I'm no longer that strong though my humorous nature seems to spur me on. Life has lost its meaning in my mind and the chore of living in a world as vicious as this one has always been is painful, too agonizing to contemplate any further. After a lifetime of torment and brutality, my existence has no further meaning. I feel broken... degraded... and cannot seem to rise above the mire and become what society expects me to be any longer. My childhood is still so easily recalled though I have no wish to enlarge on my adult years any more than I have. In my own comical manner, I do not want to create a 'Fifty Shades of Pink' in any way, shape or form. Neither am I looking for sympathy. I am what I am. A manic depressive individual with a strange, sometimes cutting dry wit, who has always been beaten down into believing he has no place in the social order of today and certainly no right to a conscious existence. I do exist in my past simply because I have no other way to gauge a life by. If ever there was a plan behind this torment then it's end goal is now in sight. I absolutely adore this planet we live on but despite my continual mental anguish, some aspects of humanity have made me realise that I no longer wish to remain here. Tyranny is abound in all the places I have looked. Cruelty, crime, lies, greed and injustice appear to be everywhere. I'm lost upon a sea of anguish and despair from distant history, unable to land upon solid ground and discover any sense of peace and tranquillity, honesty or kindness. That old battle of good versus evil rages on in every society on the planet and especially within my mind. One thought, a conclusion and a way out, echoes across my consciousness, hour after hour, day after day and with no respite in sight: We're born, we live and we die. Why prolong the inevitable?

In a valuable resource for anyone coping with the death of a loved one, a former physician and recent widower guides the bereaved through the grief process and explains how to live after the death of a spouse, openly sharing the situations and feelings he encountered while grieving. Original.

The death of a child at any age, shatters the parent's heart and causes a complicated grief which never goes away. Dr. Sue Hamby found the murdered body of her only child, Russ, on March 21, 2013, and started on a difficult and painful grief journey. She realized she would never get over the death of her child but had to learn to absorb the loss into her life until it became a part of who she was. Because of her faith in God, her mourning was eventually transformed into joy and her scars became stars. In her book, she touches the depths of your heart and soul by sharing her traumatic grief journey and how her painful scars of grief, bitterness, and brokenness were turned into stars for God's glory. Her story offers hope and healing to those who are struggling with grief and learning how to navigate the grief journey, using God as their GPS. "I have read Dr. Sue Hamby's Turning Your Scars into Stars in one sitting. I couldn't put it down once I started reading the book. This semi-autobiographical narration by Dr. Hamby is a must read for all people, especially people who think that they are alone, depressed, hopeless and helpless." Girija S. Chintapalli, MD Retired Psychiatrist "Her story of how the LORD changed her life through that God-breathed message is a must read for anyone who has lost a loved one." Dan Kirkley, President Hope for the Hungry "Turning Your Scars into Stars is spiritually inspiring and full of truth. It is very well written in such a manner that will not only appeal to multiple victims of tragedies but a wide generational audience. " Michael K. Sweeney, Director of Investigations and Law Enforcement Development INTERNATIONAL JUSTICE MISSION (IJM)

Torture is an open secret in Chicago. Nobody in power wants to acknowledge this grim reality, but everyone knows it happens—and that the torturers are the police. Three to five new claims are submitted to the Torture Inquiry and Relief Commission of Illinois each week. Four hundred cases are currently pending investigation. Between 1972 and 1991, at least 125 black suspects were tortured by Chicago police officers working under former Police Commander Jon Burge. As the more recent revelations from the Homan Square “black site” show, that brutal period is far from a historical anomaly. For more than fifty years, police officers who took an oath to protect and serve have instead beaten, electrocuted, suffocated, and raped hundreds—perhaps thousands—of Chicago residents. In The Torture Letters, Laurence Ralph chronicles the history of torture in Chicago, the burgeoning activist movement against police violence, and the American public’s complicity in perpetuating torture at home and abroad. Engaging with a long tradition of epistolary meditations on racism in the United States, from James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time to Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me, Ralph offers in this book a collection of open letters written to protesters, victims, students, and others. Through these moving, questing, enraged letters, Ralph bears witness to police violence that began in Burge’s Area Two and follows the city’s networks of torture to the global War on Terror. From Vietnam to Geneva to Guantanamo Bay—Ralph’s story extends as far as the legacy of American imperialism. Combining insights from fourteen years of research on torture with testimonies of victims of police violence, retired officers, lawyers, and protesters, this is a powerful indictment of police violence and a fierce challenge to all Americans to demand an end to the systems that support it. With compassion and careful skill, Ralph uncovers the tangled connections among law enforcement, the political machine, and the courts in Chicago, amplifying the voices of torture victims who are still with us—and lending a voice to those long deceased.

21 surgeries by age 13. Years in the hospital. Verbal and physical bullying from schoolmates. Multiple miscarriages as a young wife. The death of a child. A debilitating progressive disease. Riveting pain. Abandonment. Unwanted divorce... Vaneetha begged God for grace that would deliver her. But God offered something better: his sustaining grace.

This collection of essays is a confessional, stylistic account (in the Joan Didion tradition) of coming of age in the Bronx alongside the birth and evolution of hip-hop culture. This collection presents a mosaic of seminal figures in hip-hop, documentary essays exploring the social decay of hip-hop, and a substantial element of memoir, as well as observations on the generational issues of urban America. With a foreword by acclaimed poet Saul Williams, Scars exposes the motivations and aspirations of a culture whose spiritual centre was the Bronx.