As a child Julie was close to her father. More friend than parent, he would belt her into their tiny car and they'd punch through yellow lights, scarf down candy bars before supper and had their own way of making fun of Julie's mother in a secret language of eye-rolling. She adored her father for his exuberance, and pitied him when he broke down in suicidal desperation. But as she neared 10, a darker side emerged... This is a powerful and compelling memoir of growing up with a schizophrenic father.

"This book was written for you, the caregiver of someone afflicted with Alzheimer's disease ... [It] chronicles my own experiences while caring for my dad through his affliction with Alzheimer's disease and a stroke."--Page ix.

Are we responsible for the well-being of our neighbors and our friends and family? Obeying the command of God is detrimental in our efforts to reap, eternal life. I have attempted to share my efforts from personal experiences through the power of the Holy Spirit guiding my actions. The Psalm, in 37:25, says, I have been young, and now am old; Yet I have not seen the righteous forsaken, Nor his descendants begging bread (NKJV). The author, Andrew Earl Stafford, took years to chronicle his experiences for over seventy years as he interprets how the Holy Spirit guided him to be a leader to his family, community, and nation in sharing the presence of God in our everyday lives. Andrew became aware of the presence of God at an early age as he observed how God protected and provided for his mother, Maezell, who in the 1940s, turned down welfare because she viewed it as a trap to create dependence, rather than an opportunity to succeed. Four boys and one girl to raise, Maezell was told by the welfare department that she could not own a car because it was considered a luxury. Well, Maezells response was that, she needed a car to transport her children to school, besides, she worked at a laundry until she retired. Their father, Clifford, after leaving the navy, had no choice but to try and earn a living playing baseball in the, Old Negro Baseball Leagues. His absence from the family created a situation of divorce. Though they face possible economic challenges, Maezells goal was to make sure all of her children finished high school. They all did, and most with honors and all with perfect attendances. Andrews book covers his struggles in poverty, racism, family, society, and in the realm of spiritual warfare. Although you walk through the valley of the shadow of death, theres no reason to fear evil. Andrew learned firsthand how God will empower each of us to make this world a better place to live if we are willing to wait on him.

There are and always have been ways of escaping one's own past. But there are some who have never had this chance: the children of prominent Nazis. On one hand they have the memories of the nice, kind man who was their father, on the other they are confronted with the facts of history: with the madness, the murders, the personal purgatory. The Leberts, father and son, spoke at an interval of forty years - 1959 and 1999 - to these men and women who bore a tainted name and were crushed by the burden of the past: Gudrun Himmler - 75, runs a network for old Nazis in Munich, denies her father did anything wrong; Martin Boorman (junior) - 70, believes his father was a monster; Etta Goring - 70, will hear no bad word about her father; Nicholas Frank (father was in charge of Auschwitz) believes his father was the incarnation of evil. The result is a series of snapshots of rare intensity and a demonstration of how these destinies have more to do with the twenty-first century than many would care to think.

My Father's Keeper is the moving story of Jonathan Silin, a gay man in midlife who learned to care for his elderly parents as a series of life-threatening illnesses forced them to make the difficult transition from being independent to being reliant on their son. Their new needs and unrelenting demands brought them into intimate daily contact and radically transformed what had been a difficult and emotionally fraught relationship. My Father's Keeper chronicles the unexpected ways in which the ideas and skills Silin acquired as an early childhood educator, a specialist in life span development, and a compassionate witness to the devastation of the HIV/AIDS crisis came together with his interest in human psychology to deeply inform his thinking about the dramatic changes in his family's life and increasingly influence his role as his father's (and mother's) keeper. Through the months and years of his parents' decline, Silin reflects on their history as a family, recalling the pain of his father's psychological struggles through midlife and the uneasy, imperfect process of accepting his son as a gay man and accepting his son's partner into the family. My Father's Keeper is a book about beginnings and endings, loss and redemption, the ethics of intervention, and the pressing needs of two extremely vulnerable populations.

Former army sharpshooter Jake Coleman has nothing more in mind than a little relief from a hot, Texas-summer night when he jumps on his bike and heads to a biker bar in search of a cold beer. But when he encounters a three-against-one fight right outside the bar door, he steps in to improve the odds for an outnumbered stranger. What Jake doesn’t know is that the man he’s just helped is none other than Diego Santiago, vice-president of the Houston based, Los Patrons Motorcycle Club. An impressed and grateful Santiago befriends Jake and mentors him as he works to meet the requirements of a prospective member of Los Patrons. Jake finally accepted as a “full patch member,” finds something he’s been searching for all his life; brotherhood. As he embarks on the life of a Los Patrons brother, Jake falls in love with an intoxicating woman, and rapidly rises up the club’s ranks, discovering something chilling about himself…that no act is too grim or violent for him to perform, if it’s in service of those he has come to call his brothers. God Forgives - Patrons Repay Written with a knife-edge authenticity, M.C. – I Am My Brother’s Keeper catapults readers into the dark and dangerous netherworld of a big city motorcycle club.

A Strictly Biblical Perspective Ministries Inc. has strategically designed a biblical cognitive character-based training curriculum. It is designed to equip pastors, chaplains, and faith-based instructors with insight for preparing reentry volunteers as mentors to be matched with returning citizens upon their release from prison or while incarcerated. The curriculum is designed with six modules to assist faith-based volunteers in developing a biblical perspective into God's fourfold purpose for their lives: relationships, character development, service, and reproduction. The fifth module is designed to address the spiritual warfare that ministry leaders and faith-based volunteers will encounter in mentoring the "returning citizen population." The final module is designed to assist ministry leaders and faith-based volunteers in understanding how to assist returning citizens in overcoming the effects of alcohol and drug addiction. This course will build the capacity of members within the faith-based community to minister to returning citizens in restoration from crime and addiction. The curriculum is designed to enhance the quality of care to the "ex offender population" by producing spiritually mature mentors walking in close fellowship with God. The curriculum is extremely comprehensive and highly interactive and will assist volunteers in developing a functional understanding of their roles in mentoring returning citizens through the use of scriptures, a series of individual and small group exercises.

Malachi Jackson has a choice. He can go to college and get a good education, or he can join the neighborhood gang. If he joins the gang, he can make some quick money, but there are consequences for joining a gang. He ends up seeing his life come to full term through the eyes of a mortician who gets to bury a lot of the neighborhood gang members and those caught up in the senseless killings that result from being in a gang. Will Malachi be his brothers keeper or his brothers killer? The ending will shock you!

In a memoir that’s equal parts love story, investigation, and racial reckoning, Munemo unravels and interrogates her whiteness, a shocking secret, and her family’s history. When interracial romance novels written by her long-dead father landed on Julia McKenzie Munemo’s kitchen table, she—a white woman—had been married to a black man for six years and their first son was a toddler. Out of shame about her father’s secret career as a writer of “slavery porn,” she hid the books from herself, and from her growing mixed-race family, for more than a decade. But then, with police shootings of African American men more and more in the public eye, she realized that understanding her own legacy was the only way to begin to understand her country.

Just as before, these poems reflect my thoughts upon my own experiences as well as my observations on the experiences we all encounter at each phase of our lives. Many of these poems, unlike the first effort, are more recent, and therefore image events closer to the present. This time, too, the poems are less chronological, whereas I felt the first poems should remain mostly in the order in which they were written over fifty years. I do not see poems as sad so much as thoughtful and reflective commentaries, very often wry and tongue-in-cheek. The poems in this book are mostly like that.