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Like an Aegean zephyr, Marlena de Blasi’s breathless, poetic voice caresses us and carries us along in swooping currents though her newest adventure in the Tuscan region of Italy. Picking up where her previous memoirs (Tuscan Secrets, among others) leave off, Antonia and Her Daughters begins with de Blasi and her husband, Fernando, contemplating their new home in Orvieto. Now that the renovations to their home at 34 via del Duomo are complete, she has lost the solitude and silence in which to write her books, so she sets off to find a quiet pensione in the countryside where she can work in peace, with weekly visits from Fernando.

Soon after she arrives at the guest house, de Blasi meets Antonia, the matriarch of a large family, set in her ways and suspicious of outsiders. Antonia is “startlingly beautiful,” but “if a cold fish could speak, it would have her voice.” While de Blasi at first wonders just what kind of life she has stumbled into, Antonia’s daughters, Filippa and Luce, welcome de Blasi warmly, seducing her with their winsome stories of life with Antonia.

Very slowly, Antonia warms to de Blasi, welcoming her to meals, walking through the countryside in search of wild herbs and regaling her with story after story. “We’d throw open the windows to the night, swaddle the rising bread with quilts against the breeze and . . . Antonia would tell us things. Things we’d forgotten or would never understand about food, about men, about the panacea of bitter weeds.”

Eventually, de Blasi and Antonia grow so close that they walk arm in arm over the hills and through the woods. “Up the hill, back down the hill. As she bends her head down nearer to mine, I incline towards Antonia’s shoulder and we are a triangle, one side shorter than the other, making our way up the slope of the white road.”

De Blasi’s vivacious, seductive and gorgeous voice radiantly evokes the haunting beauty of the Tuscan region, as well as the deep friendship that evolves between her and Antonia.

Like an Aegean zephyr, Marlena de Blasi’s breathless, poetic voice caresses us and carries us along in swooping currents though her newest adventure in the Tuscan region of Italy. Picking up where her previous memoirs (Tuscan Secrets, among others) leave off, Antonia and Her Daughters

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Art Gelien certainly understood the elusive nature of stardom. He was struggling to become a professional ice skater when he was put through the star-making machinery of the 1950s. Renamed Tab Hunter, and promoted as the Sigh Guy, the blonde and handsome heartthrob lived a double life. Publicly, he dated the likes of Debbie Reynolds and Natalie Wood; privately, he romanced actor Anthony Perkins and famed figure skater Ronnie Robertson. Written by Hunter and Eddie Muller, Tab Hunter Confidential: The Making of a Movie Star has been hyped as a gay tell-all, but it is at its best in examining the 1950s era and recounting the myriad incarnations of Hunter’s career. There were huge films (notably, Battle Cry), live TV appearances, a TV series, forgotten Z-grade horror flicks, dinner theater and, via John Waters’ outrageous Polyester, a revival as a cult film star (opposite leading lady -transvestite, Divine).

As for coming out of the closet: by his own admission, Hunter long dodged and even lied about his sexual orientation. (In my own 1985 interview with Hunter, he not only said he was straight, but also claimed he’d like a date with then-hot TV leading lady Linda Evans.) So why now? Figure, at age 74, it’s a good career move.

When not writing about movies, Los Angeles-based journalist Pat H. Broeske likes to watch them.

Art Gelien certainly understood the elusive nature of stardom. He was struggling to become a professional ice skater when he was put through the star-making machinery of the 1950s. Renamed Tab Hunter, and promoted as the Sigh Guy, the blonde and handsome heartthrob lived a…

Wilderness survival skills, it turns out, offer dubious strategies for a young girl negotiating her parents’ divorce. Keep your bags packed, Leigh Newman learns, and your mouth shut. “Can’t lives on won’t street,” her Alaskan father tells the 8-year-old Leigh, when she grows tired of gutting salmon or scared of a black bear rustling in their fishing camp. Newman’s sparkling new memoir Still Points North questions how useful these survival skills are in the lower 48, or for an adult negotiating intimacy.

After the divorce, young Leigh spends her school years living with her mother in Baltimore, attending a tony private girls’ school her mother insists her father pay for. Her mother works multiple jobs and claims poverty, but has a compulsion to buy unnecessary and expensive things. Leigh can’t figure out how to make friends (until alcohol—every awkward teenager’s friend—helps her find boyfriends), and is homesick for Alaska. And yet back in Anchorage, her father’s new marriage, complete with two young half-brothers, seems to shut Leigh out. Newman beautifully captures the mute and confused feelings of a child who has no way to articulate the pain she’s experiencing as she navigates the split worlds of her parents.

Her memoir is similarly split between two worlds: in this case, childhood and adulthood. Newman’s emotional impasse as an adult echoes her Alaskan childhood. She can survive anything—Russian mafia bars, Nepalese tigers, even a stint reviewing fantasy honeymoon locations as her own marriage breaks up. What she can’t figure out how to do is settle down and unpack her bags. Leaving her husband after only three months of marriage precipitates a crisis of past and present. The second half of the memoir careens between childhood memories and adult experiences, mirroring the psychological breakdown that leads Newman to breakthrough. Learning how to live rather than simply survive is a slow and rewarding process, for both writer and reader.

Despite its serious subject, Still Points North is adventurous and funny, leavened with a dose of pragmatic Alaskan humor. The salmon, propeller planes and mosquitoes of Alaska offer readers of this book a fresh and welcome spin on the dysfunctional family memoir.

Wilderness survival skills, it turns out, offer dubious strategies for a young girl negotiating her parents’ divorce. Keep your bags packed, Leigh Newman learns, and your mouth shut. “Can’t lives on won’t street,” her Alaskan father tells the 8-year-old Leigh, when she grows tired of…

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With more than 300 million books in print in 51 languages, Sidney Sheldon is an international phenomenon. His fast-moving yarns boast exotic locales, intrigue, romance, murder (lots of mysterious deaths), feisty heroines and determined heroes. In a Sheldon novel, the central character perseveres. In his own life, Sheldon has done likewise, which makes his autobiography, The Other Side of Me, such an entertaining and inspiring read. The former Sidney Schechtel who changed his name for a gig as announcer of an amateur talent contest acted on his dreams. Mind you, countless “big breaks” led to . . . nothing. Often disappointed, sometimes depressed, Sheldon nevertheless kept at it. He grew up with warring parents; his father’s varying jobs kept the family on the move (if the family had a crest, Sheldon jokes, it would have featured a moving van). His own assorted career pursuits took Sheldon from coast to coast. In New York, he was a movie usher while struggling as a songwriter; in L.A. he worked a hotel switchboard while trying for studio jobs. The turning point was a call from the office of producer David O. Selznick: could Sheldon do a 30-page synopsis of a 400-page novel, within eight hours? A hunt-and-peck typist with no transportation, Sheldon took the bus across town, picked up the novel and got the job done. He was a studio reader, dashed off B-movie scripts, wrote for golden-era MGM (winning a screenwriting Oscar for The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer), became a Broadway playwright. Segueing to television, he created and produced “The Patty Duke Show” and “I Dream of Jeannie.” He took an old, unsold script and turned it into the 1970 novel The Naked Face. Reviews were OK; sales weren’t. At one book signing he sold a single copy. Still, he’d discovered his forte. The Other Side of Me includes starry names, colorful locales and much suspense. Our only complaint: it wraps up too quickly. Biographer Pat H. Broeske has covered Hollywood for several newspaper and magazines.

With more than 300 million books in print in 51 languages, Sidney Sheldon is an international phenomenon. His fast-moving yarns boast exotic locales, intrigue, romance, murder (lots of mysterious deaths), feisty heroines and determined heroes. In a Sheldon novel, the central character perseveres. In his…
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In March of 1992 Aleksandar Hemon came to Chicago on what was supposed to be a month-long cultural exchange. During that month his native Sarajevo came under siege, and the war that he and his city had been wishing away came thundering home. Hemon, then 27, decided not to return. He stayed in Chicago, worked odd jobs and began writing stories in English, a language of which he had only an imperfect grasp. Eight years later he published his first collection of short stories, and eight years after that he published a novel, The Lazarus Project, that had the critics swooning and made him a finalist for the National Book Award. Along the way, Hemon published a number of autobiographical essays, many of them in The New Yorker, and it’s those pieces that are collected in The Book of My Lives.

As with his fiction, the essays here—though originally written as freestanding pieces—work together as a set of interlocking stories. In his careful, occasionally idiosyncratic prose, Hemon works his familiar theme of displacement, as experienced by those whom the forces of history (or, in the tragic final story, of biology) have yanked out of their old lives. The stories are set mostly in Sarajevo and Chicago, and they focus mostly on individual components of his lives in one or both of those cities: rambling walks, soccer matches, chess games, pet dogs, borscht. They give a vivid sense both of the texture of the two cities and of the pain, and eventual joy, Hemon felt in abandoning one for the other.

By turns sardonic and forlorn, Hemon’s tales illustrate the absurdity of war (the story of a beloved professor who became a genocidal nationalist is especially chilling), the enigma of arrival and the tragedy of finding your most cherished plans crushed by an onslaught of inhuman forces.

In March of 1992 Aleksandar Hemon came to Chicago on what was supposed to be a month-long cultural exchange. During that month his native Sarajevo came under siege, and the war that he and his city had been wishing away came thundering home. Hemon, then…

As a teenager, Elizabeth Scarboro pictured herself as an international journalist, moving from one country to another, and from one boyfriend to the next. Then one summer she met Stephen, a friend of a friend who was older than his years, with a happy-go-lucky attitude toward life and living with cystic fibrosis, and her dreams vanished as she fell slowly, raggedly and wholeheartedly in love with him.

From the beginning, Scarboro resisted her feelings for this man with a life expectancy of 30 years whose medical condition lurked always in the background. After high school, she set off for the University of Chicago, and he headed off in the opposite direction to Berkeley. As she writes, “We were supposed to be setting out. Whatever we did, we were not supposed to compromise for relationships. . . . I had ambitions and the urge to experience all kinds of freedom, and the last thing I wanted to be was a girl following some guy around.” In the end, however, Stephen’s illness called her bluff, and she realized that, compared to Stephen, “most things would be there [later]. If I wanted him, I had to hurry up.”

In My Foreign Cities, Scarboro invites us to accompany her on every mile of her joyous, often terrifying, sad and exalted journey of love. A natural storyteller, she brings vividly to life her struggles both to protect Stephen, who has a “lightness about him,” and to keep him at her side as long as she can so that they can embrace life to its fullest. She leads us down the path where his medical condition consumes every waking minute of their lives—including a lung transplant, its results and Stephen’s eventual decline—and shares her agony, her joy, her anger and her indecision with us.

In the end, Scarboro hardly feels sorry for herself or the young man who died too soon: “This was what we wanted, to live out being together for as long as we could. It’s hard to explain—the life was difficult but not lacking.”

As a teenager, Elizabeth Scarboro pictured herself as an international journalist, moving from one country to another, and from one boyfriend to the next. Then one summer she met Stephen, a friend of a friend who was older than his years, with a happy-go-lucky attitude…

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Jacob’s story may sound familiar. After a healthy babyhood, he began to change as his second birthday approached. His speech slowed and then stopped. He ignored his peers and parents. He developed unusual obsessive patterns, gazing at sunlight, waving his hands. He was eventually diagnosed, as you might have guessed, with autism. And so entered experts for speech development, motor skills, life skills. They announced to mother Kristine Barnett that Jacob would never read. In fact, he’d be lucky to tie his shoes.

Yet Barnett was not convinced by the experts. She paid attention to the way her son loved alphabet cards, to his interest in the sky, and wondered, why are we paying attention to what he can’t do rather than what he can do? And then she decided—against the advice of his educators and her husband—to prepare Jacob for mainstream kindergarten herself.

The rest of Jacob’s story spills forth like a fairy tale: He stops many disruptive behaviors, embraces his giftedness, finds friends, responds to his parents and begins attending college at the tender age of 9. While his remarkable trajectory may be discouraging to families of severely autistic children who have not made the same strides, the real pleasure of The Spark does not lie in Jacob’s story alone but in his mother’s unwavering view that each child has tremendous promise, an innate spark, which can be ignited and nurtured by perceptive parents.

Barnett’s devotion to her son will stir readers to take a closer look at their own children and loved ones, as will her singular focus on providing meaningful experiences for her boy. After a day of therapy, she packs up the then-silent Jacob, drives out to the countryside, turns on the radio and dances with him under the stars. The two share a popsicle while sitting on the hood of the car. She writes, “Indulging the senses isn’t a luxury, but a necessity. We have to walk barefoot in the grass. . . . We have to lie on our backs and feel the sun on our faces.” These experiences open us up to our very humanity. In this way, Barnett’s inspiring story is really relevant to all of us.

Jacob’s story may sound familiar. After a healthy babyhood, he began to change as his second birthday approached. His speech slowed and then stopped. He ignored his peers and parents. He developed unusual obsessive patterns, gazing at sunlight, waving his hands. He was eventually diagnosed,…

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By all appearances, Rod Dreher had a wonderful life. He had a successful career as a journalist; his writing appeared in The Dallas Morning News, The New York Post and The American Conservative; and he had published a book as well. But Dreher felt an emptiness in his life when his younger sister, Ruthie Leming, was diagnosed with terminal cancer at age 40. Suddenly, Dreher felt the tug of his hometown: St. Francisville, Louisiana, a small community whose residents were rallying around Ruthie in her time of need. So Dreher took his wife and three children and moved home to help care for his sister and reconnect with his roots.

Ruthie Leming’s life may not have been as glamorous as her brother’s, but in many ways, Dreher finds it more meaningful. She was a popular schoolteacher, a loving mother of three and a devoted wife to her high school sweetheart. While her brother fled their town of 1,700 people, Ruthie stayed home. Her energy and enthusiasm touched people’s lives, and when she got sick, they responded with caring and love.

“Ruthie transfigured this town in my eyes,” Dreher writes. “Her suffering and death made me see the good that I couldn’t see before. The same communal bonds that appeared to me as chains all those years ago had become my Louisiana family’s lifelines.” Yet coming home to the town—and the family—he left behind isn’t always easy; resentments linger, and some wounds heal more quickly than others.

The Little Way of Ruthie Leming reminds us of the importance of love, faith and family. And while it deals in death, this book shows us that it is, indeed, a wonderful life.

By all appearances, Rod Dreher had a wonderful life. He had a successful career as a journalist; his writing appeared in The Dallas Morning News, The New York Post and The American Conservative; and he had published a book as well. But Dreher felt an…

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Billy Crystal remembers his 1950s childhood Like his stand-up comedy and his on-screen characters, Billy Crystal’s autobiographical 700 Sundays exudes warmth, sentiment and sweetly colorful details. The man who remains everybody’s favorite Oscar host (eight times and, we hope, still counting), based this book on his award-winning one-man Broadway play. It’s the second book for Crystal, who previously wrote a children’s book, I Already Know I Love You (HarperCollins, 2004), in anticipation of becoming a grandfather. 700 Sundays was written to celebrate what came before the early years of his life, spent in Long Beach, Long Island, which not only inspired his love of family, but also his love of comedy, music (particularly jazz), baseball and movies.

Crystal once said that when he goes on stage, “I hear the members of my family in my head a lot . . . I see them and feel them.” 700 Sundays explores that influence specifically, the parents who fostered his early interest in performing (he was just a tyke when he began “working” the living room) and relatives like his uncle, Milt Gabler, who started Commodore Records, America’s first independent jazz label. As for Crystal’s dad, Jack, he ran the Commodore Music Shop, a fixture on 52nd Street and Lexington Avenue, and also produced jazz concerts. With two jobs, he could only spend Sundays with the family. By Crystal’s calculation, they spent 700 Sundays together; he was just 15 when his father died of a heart attack.

Crystal’s trip down memory lane is very much a 1950s saga, with its recollections of the young Crystal glued to the TV set, watching the men who would become his comedic icons among them, Sid Caesar (Crystal calls him “the greatest comedian to ever grace television”), Ernie Kovacs, Steve Allen and Jack Benny and sitting in Yankee Stadium, basking in the glory of baseball great Mickey Mantle.

Crystal revels in the life-changing Sunday of May 30, 1956, when his dad took him to his very first Yankees game. Thus was born a lifelong passion which triggered young Crystal’s hopes of becoming a ballplayer. The avid Yankees fan went on to produce the acclaimed HBO movie 61, about the rivalry between Mantle and Roger Maris. (Crystal also happens to own one of the Mick’s baseball gloves for which he anted up $239,000.) Then there’s his passion for jazz, which was inevitable, really, considering the Who’s Who of jazz greats who paraded in and out of the family home and businesses among them, Gene Krupa, Eddie Condon and Billie Holiday. In fact, it was Crystal’s Uncle Milt who recorded Holiday’s now-legendary and haunting “Strange Fruit” (about lynching) on his Commodore label. And it was Holiday who took the young Crystal to his very first film, the Western, Shane. (Remember the ending, where the little boy runs after his cowboy-hero crying, “Shane . . . come back . . .”? At that point, says Crystal, Holiday whispered in his ear, “He ain’t never coming back.”) Crystal once said that his early experiences with jazz artists had an impact on his comedic improvisation. As he explained to an interviewer for National Public Radio, “I think when I feel I’m at my best is when I’m on stage, and it’s my version of jazz because it’s just riffing or something.” 700 Sundays recounts other influences and significant moments in time. Like the time his dad brought home an album entitled, “Bill Cosby Is a Very Funny Fellow, Right!” The 14-year-old Crystal was so enthralled that he memorized the routine and performed it in a school show. (“Is that stealing? In Hollywood, they call that an homage.”) Then there was the time he saw his first Broadway show starring the multitalented Sammy Davis Jr. Crystal became a major fan, not anticipating he’d one day open for Sammy, or that they would later become friends. And surely, he didn’t think he’d one day be incorporating a Sammy impression into his stand-up routine. Nor did he know, way back when, the impact that family would have on his life and career. As 700 Sundays warmly illustrates, he knows now. Author and Hollywood journalist Pat H. Broeske is rooting for Crystal to return as the host of the Oscars.

Billy Crystal remembers his 1950s childhood Like his stand-up comedy and his on-screen characters, Billy Crystal's autobiographical 700 Sundays exudes warmth, sentiment and sweetly colorful details. The man who remains everybody's favorite Oscar host (eight times and, we hope, still counting), based this book on…
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Sean Wilsey grew up rich, pampered, privileged. Home was 800 feet above San Francisco, in a luxury apartment with the kind of view you see on postcards. Early mornings, young Sean and his parents took walks in matching blue jumpsuits with white piping. Their lives, like the scenic splendor out their high-rise windows, seemed perfect. It was an illusion. Wilsey’s engrossing memoir, Oh the Glory of It All, is about surviving a childhood that was all but destroyed by childish adults.

Years later, the adult Wilsey today an editor at McSweeney’s Quarterly realized there had been warning signs. But as children are wont to do, he allowed them to be obscured by his desperate love for his (selfish) parents and their larger than life personas. He was especially devoted to his society columnist mother, who looked like Marilyn Monroe and hosted to-die-for salons attended by the likes of Joan Baez, Gloria Steinem, Black Panthers, Daniel Ellsberg and others who toured the cultural zeitgeist. As for dad, he was a self-made millionaire (the butter and egg business) who would leave his more famous wife for her (younger) best friend. Up until his parents’ split, young Wilsey never even heard them fight.

Theirs was a loud, ugly, headline-making divorce. It was Dallas and Dynasty and Danielle Steel come to life, recalled Wilsey, who became one of those ping-pong children, shuttling back and forth between houses and lives and festering anger. (His drama queen mother once urged him to join her in committing suicide.) Recounted in vivid detail and dialogue, with observations both painful and humorous, especially involving Wilsey’s callous stepmother, this memoir is about great wealth, great loss and personal and creative redemption. It’s also about coming to terms with reality and responsibility. After shrinks, private schools, drug abuse and other desperate cries for parental approval, Wilsey reaches a crossroads while in a cell at juvenile hall. To turn his life around he examines where he’s been and why. The resulting emotional catharsis triggered this book, with its cast of colorful characters, its divine locales and a theme that resonates. Pat H. Broeske is a Southern California-based journalist and biographer.

Sean Wilsey grew up rich, pampered, privileged. Home was 800 feet above San Francisco, in a luxury apartment with the kind of view you see on postcards. Early mornings, young Sean and his parents took walks in matching blue jumpsuits with white piping. Their lives,…

As daughters, do we become echoes of our mothers and grandmothers? And if our mothers failed us as role models, are we doomed to fail in the same way? These are the haunting central questions of With or Without You by Domenica Ruta, lifting it above other recent examples of the dysfunctional “mommy and me” memoir.

Nikki grows up working class in Danvers, Massachusetts, in a rickety house on the river she shares with her mother, Kathi, and her Sicilian grandmother. Kathi is a drug user and dealer with pretensions toward art, a mother who would keep her daughter home from school to watch the Godfather trilogy on TV. The opening sequence of the book sets up the mother-daughter dynamic beautifully: Kathi drags her young daughter along while she bashes in the windshield of another woman’s car. “Don’t look at Mummy right now, OK?” Kathi asks.

But Nikki does look. What she sees and experiences as a child—drugs, abuse, neglect—she learns to repress. It didn’t happen. This is how she survives: by compulsively cleaning her mother’s house, organizing its chaos and blotting out the adults cutting lines of drugs on the coffee table. Kathi’s aspirations for her daughter eventually provide an escape hatch: scholarships to boarding school, a liberal arts college and an MFA program. But cutting ties with her toxic mother doesn’t free Nikki from Kathi’s echoing influence. It’s only after freeing herself from her own alcoholism that Nikki—now Domenica—begins to remember and process her childhood.

Memory is as central a theme as mothers in With or Without You. The storyline is episodic, flashing back and forth between scenes and characters and timelines. This can feel awkward in the early pages until Ruta’s method becomes clear: In sobriety, her memories of childhood and Kathi emerge in fragments. Because it acknowledges these gaps in memory, this memoir feels honest, like it has hit a bedrock truth—that we both love and hate our mothers, and that this ambivalence lingers long after we’ve left them.

“Write me a letter,” Kathi asks her daughter. In this stunning new memoir, Domenica Ruta writes a love letter to the woman she had to leave behind in order to live.

As daughters, do we become echoes of our mothers and grandmothers? And if our mothers failed us as role models, are we doomed to fail in the same way? These are the haunting central questions of With or Without You by Domenica Ruta, lifting it…

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In her memoir, The Still Point of the Turning World, Emily Rapp steps into the very center of the horror all parents dread: the death of a child. She doesn’t document her son Ronan’s death from Tay-Sachs disease symptom by symptom, but she maps the progress of her own sorrow as she seeks to accept his fate. As she cares for a baby who is slowly, inexorably dying, she finds counsel in the words of poets, writers, spiritual leaders and philosophers who have faced the unthinkable and survived more or less intact.

Rapp is truthful, which makes her story both wrenching and refreshing to read. She shares no platitudes or explanations—just the raw emotions of parents whose child would, as Rapp describes, “gradually regress into a vegetative state within the span of one year. . . . This slow fade would progress to his likely death before the age of three.” She faces the big questions head on: Will she meet Ronan in the afterlife? Does his small life matter at all? But she also faces the mundane struggles: Should she and her husband prolong his life with a feeding tube or other interventions? Does it matter what they feed him? What kind of therapy will keep him comfortable?

Grief, Rapp learns, is neither predictable nor logical. Seeking answers from C.S. Lewis, Emily Dickinson, T.S. Eliot, as well as Buddhism, Christianity and other sources, she recognizes that her own intensely personal experience is no less important for being hers alone. She sees that Ronan himself is precious, a whole person whom she loves, not for his future achievements, but for who he is now. Rapp writes, “We made him, we loved him, end of story. . . . I reminded myself that unconditional love asks nothing back; being Ronan’s mom was my giant, painful opportunity to learn this. What I was being asked to do felt both entirely instinctive and completely impossible . . . to love my child without limits or expectations.”

Emily Rapp’s willingness to share these philosophical, emotional and practical issues makes this book particularly helpful for parents facing similar struggles. However, all parents would benefit from the reminder to love their children for who they are, not who we hope they will become.

In her memoir, The Still Point of the Turning World, Emily Rapp steps into the very center of the horror all parents dread: the death of a child. She doesn’t document her son Ronan’s death from Tay-Sachs disease symptom by symptom, but she maps the…

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After years of living a life of plenty in Lexington, Kentucky, Lisa Samson and her 18-year-old daughter, Ty, decided to take a mission trip to Swaziland, in Africa. They believed the trip would be one of faith and outreach, but little did they know the ways in which they would be tested and stretched. In a land where poverty and death are abundant, Lisa and Ty face the AIDS crisis headon, finding strength and hope in God’s unending love and compassion. Love Mercy reads as both a memoir and a spiritual diary, chronicling Lisa and Ty’s journey into both the heart of Africa and also into Christ’s teachings and principles. It is a story of sorrow, but also one of enlightenment. The truths exposed in this book can be distressing at times, but by battling hardships they might not have been exposed to on North American soil, Lisa and Ty are able to see the world through new eyes—and redefine what it means to “love thy neighbor” on a global scale. This is a must-read for anyone who considers him- or herself a follower of Christ, or who has ever pondered spreading the gospel abroad. This motherdaughter duo reinforces the hope that even in the darkest corners of the Earth, God’s light and love burn bright.

After years of living a life of plenty in Lexington, Kentucky, Lisa Samson and her 18-year-old daughter, Ty, decided to take a mission trip to Swaziland, in Africa. They believed the trip would be one of faith and outreach, but little did they know the…

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