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A college student is gangraped, and her two roommates feel responsible for not protecting her. In solidarity, both friends get tattoos to match the victim's distinctive ink. She gives birth to a son Zane, and best friend Lark adopts the baby. The three young women conspire never to reveal Zane's true history, but seventeen years later, a stranger recognizes the tattoo. He stalks mother and son, causing the family's lies to unravel. Was the stranger a witness to the rape or in fact one of the assailants?
Serita is a 55-year-old woman with bipolar disorder who goes off her meds to become a more interesting person and find love. Standing six-feet tall, the overweight yet vivacious redhead commands attention, charming all who meet her. Effects of mania and medication withdrawal exhilarate her, but her joy is tempered by increasingly erratic behavior as she descends into her disease. The day Serita finds true love, a crisis threatens her job, relationships, and eventually her life. Serita must stabilize her thoughts and behavior in order to survive, but she balks because stability means resuming her meds, and she despairs at becoming emotionally blunted again. Maybe if she remains off meds a little longer, she can save the day and savor true love...
Christine Norris hits emotional bottom after two young cousins are removed from her care due to her 'lesbian lifestyle.' She descends into self-destruction, but a wise older neighbor and the neighbor's adult son Seth inspire Chris to become a teacher and later, guardian to the developmentally delayed Seth. Chris falls in love with Delilah and finds her voice as a wife, a teacher, and advocate for children in need of a loving home. Set in rural East Texas, Chris and firebrand Delilah overcome violence, racism, and homophobia to create their own diverse, loving family.
Self-help is big business, but alas, not always a scientific one. Self-help books, websites, and movies abound and are important sources of psychological advice for millions of Americans. But how can you sift through them to find the ones that work? Self-Help That Works is an indispensable guide that enables readers to identify effective self-help materials and distinguish them from those that are potentially misleading or even harmful. Six scientist-practitioners bring careful research, expertise, and a dozen national studies to the task of choosing and recommending self-help resources. Designed for both laypersons and mental-health professionals, this book critically reviews multiple types...
Why doesn't self-help help? Cultural critic Micki McGee puts forward this paradoxical question as she looks at a world where the market for self-improvement products--books, audiotapes, and extreme makeovers--is exploding, and there seems to be no end in sight. Rather than seeing narcissism at the root of the self-help craze, as others have contended, McGee shows a nation relying on self-help culture for advice on how to cope in an increasingly volatile and competitive work world. Self-Help, Inc. reveals how makeover culture traps Americans in endless cycles of self-invention and overwork as they struggle to stay ahead of a rapidly restructuring economic order. A lucid and fascinating treatment of the modern obsession with work and self-improvement, this lively book will strike a chord with its acute diagnosis of the self-help trap and its sharp suggestions for how we can address the alienating conditions of modern work and family life.
What are the functions of optimism in modern societies? How is hope culturally transmitted? What values and attitudes does it reflect? This book explores how and why powerful institutions propagate 'cultures of optimism' in different domains, such as politics, work, the family, religion and psychotherapy.
The subtitle reads: Based on the highly acclaimed national survey of more than 500 mental health professionals' ratings of 1,000 self-help books. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
Understanding instead of lamenting the popularity of self-help books Based on a reading of more than three hundred self-help books, Sandra K. Dolby examines this remarkably popular genre to define "self-help" in a way that's compelling to academics and lay readers alike. Self-Help Books also offers an interpretation of why these books are so popular, arguing that they continue the well-established American penchant for self-education, they articulate problems of daily life and their supposed solutions, and that they present their content in a form and style that is accessible rather than arcane. Using tools associated with folklore studies, Dolby then examines how the genre makes use of stories, aphorisms, and a worldview that is at once traditional and contemporary. The overarching premise of the study is that self-help books, much like fairy tales, take traditional materials, especially stories and ideas, and recast them into extended essays that people happily read, think about, try to apply, and then set aside when a new embodiment of the genre comes along.
The Button Therapy Book is a practical cognitive counseling manual for mental health professionals and a psychological self-help book designed to: Help you identify, modify, and eliminate your Buttons that trigger stress and distress in your life. Help you identify potentially troublesome cognitions related to your thinking styles such as "black and white thinking"; should messages such as "I should do everything perfectly"; self-defeating core beliefs such as "I am a victim of life's circumstances"; and defense mechanisms such as denial and rationalization. Includes the Cognitive Self-Assessment Inventory (CSAI) to help you identify your troublesome cognitions and Buttons. Includes the Moti...
Hannah Dyer’s crazy mother was abusive and an alcoholic. At the age of sixty she adopted an infant, and now that she’s dead, Hannah must raise the child. But fighting the effects of severe burns sustained in childhood may be all that Hannah can manage. Defined and alienated by both emotional and physical scars, Hannah fears that she might be abusive and crazy, too. Burden of Breath alternates between the intervening years since the fire and the present as Hannah struggles to separate from her mother’s crippling influence - even from the grave. Anger and isolation force Hannah to confront her emotional and physical damage, and she transforms her life in ways she could never have imagined.