35 Years Sober: From Drugs and Alcohol
Clean Delivered and On Fire, Book 1
Non-Fiction / Biographical - Recovery - Inspirational - Sobriety
Date Published: 9/21/2022
Showing posts with label biographical. Show all posts
Showing posts with label biographical. Show all posts
Tuesday, October 18, 2022
Wednesday, April 6, 2022
Life's Journey
Penelope, aged 9, and her family emigrate from the UK to Australia. This book covers her journey onboard the ship and her family's friendship with a Greek family. This friendship continues in Australia throughout their life's journey.
The book includes the life effects of being interfered with as a child, and the
ups and downs of adopting children. Along the way there is mystery, murder,
love and disappointment.
Patricia Gibbons keeps you intrigued and in wonder of what is to come.
An exciting read!
Thursday, April 22, 2021
Tiger Stripes
Memoir, Nonfiction, Mental Health
Date Published: April, 12th, 2021
Publisher: Hurn Publications
Four psychiatric wards
Three rehabs
Two jail cells
And a suicide attempt…
Hannah was told she would not make it to 25 with the way she was living. She had struggled with mental illness her entire life, but at 22 her demons came to a head at the grips of severe substance abuse, life-changing trauma, and two major deaths in her life.
Hannah’s struggles land her places no one ever hopes to grace; jail and psych wards lead her to the brink of death. Running out of options she’s left with two choices: live or die. This heart-wrenching memoir combines recovery with bittersweet romance told in a raw presentation that immerses the reader into the author’s dark state-of-mind in every page.
Tiger Stripes is going to add a valuable voice to the conversation about women’s mental health issues.
My review...
This is unsettling. I think it’s supposed to be. It most
certainly describes the life of an unsettled human being. Unsettled or lost?
Maybe both. I am sure Hannah felt that way many times. Although the substance
of this book might have been difficult to read, the writing style, the book
itself, was not. After completing this book, I went back to page one and reread
the first paragraph of every chapter. I think the struggle and a picture of her
life was even more visible. I am not suggesting you scan. You could never get
the full feel of this story without reading the whole book.
This is Hannah Renae’s first book. I hope it will be the last autobiography on codependence or at least that she has no problems as such anymore. Maybe she should continue to write and help people feel.
Thursday, August 20, 2020
Memoir of a Hockey Nobody
This post is part of a virtual book tour organized by Goddess Fish Promotions. Jerry Hack will be awarding a $20 Amazon/BN GC to a randomly drawn winner via rafflecopter during the tour. See below to sign up for the GIVEAWAY.
This is an "against all odds" tale of one man's journey from Vancouver, to all over Western Canada, California, The Yukon, and Alaska. Seemingly blocked at every turn, from managers who believed that someone who came from such humble beginnings couldn't be any good, to coaches who would rather see big names with bigger reputations. It's a story of tragedy, triumph and determination. A roller coaster ride with hilarious anecdotes of all the characters he met along the way.
This is a tale for those who dare to live their dream!
Sunday, April 7, 2019
Velvalee Dickinson
See below to read an excerpt and sign up for the GIVEAWAY
Velvalee Dickinson was born in Sacramento, California, graduated from Stanford University, married three times, and then in the early 1930s moved to New York City where she eventually opened her own exclusive doll shop on the prestigious Madison Avenue. It was there that she built her reputation as an expert in rare, antique, and foreign dolls. She traveled extensively around the country lecturing and exhibiting her dolls while building a wealthy clientele that included Hollywood stars, members of high society, and other collectors.
When medical bills started to accumulate because of her husband’s poor health and business started to fail with the onset of World War II, she accepted the role as a spy for the Imperial Japanese Government. By hiding coded messages in her correspondence about dolls, she was able to pass on to her Japanese contacts critical military information about the US warships. After surveilling Velvalee for over a year, the FBI arrested her and charged her with espionage and violation of censorship laws. She became the first American woman to face the death penalty on charges of spying for a wartime enemy.
Velvalee Dickinson: The “Doll Woman” Spy is a carefully researched glimpse into the “Doll Woman’s” life as a collector of dolls, and as the highest paid American woman who spied for the Imperial Japanese Government during World War II.
My Review
This is a
difficult book to describe; not a bad book at all, just hard to verbally
describe. Let me start out by saying that at first it was not what I expected.
I had in my convoluted brain that it would be more story like. A story about a woman
spy who liked dolls. And it was that. It is exactly what it says it is, biographical.
But as I continued through the book, I found that Barbara Casey had a way of
flowing from facts to an interesting piece of descriptive writing. Really sort
of back and forth, creating a nice flow for reading a non-fiction book.
The above may
well be the style of the author as I have not read her other books. It is better
researched than any dissertation. It is laid out beautifully. Every source,
every credit and an Index to die for. Being a retired librarian, I tend to go
to the back of the book first. I was overwhelmed at the work and organization.
This isn’t just well-written, it is a book which obviously involved a LOT of time
and work.
Having said
the above, I want to say that this book does encompass true crime, biography
and of course non-fiction. It is also a history lover’s read. The people and
the places as well as the instances are all here, but as I said earlier it
seems to flow well and read easily.
In looking
at previously published works by Barbara Casey I found all have very good
reviews. Obviously, a good author to check out.
Read an excerpt...
As intrigued as Eunice (Kennedy) was of these three women—Iva Toguri D’Aquino, Mildred Elizabeth Gillars, and Lilly Stein—Eunice was especially drawn to Velvalee Dickinson, now 56 years old and 29 years her senior—the former owner of a prestigious collectable doll shop on Madison Avenue in Manhattan who had been convicted of spying for the Japanese during the war. By the time Eunice met Velvalee, the “Doll Woman” had already been at Alderson a little over four years, spending her time writing letters to her brother, Oswald, and asking him to send her things like “bobbie pins,” reading the publication Cathedral Bulletin, learning how to play the electric organ, writing magazine articles, and reading books such as Citidal by A.J. Cronin and The Razors Edge by Somerset Maughan. She also took care of a yellow male cat “which will soon be a father,” she wrote to her brother.
It is ironic that on the very day Velvalee was given the maximum sentence of ten years in prison at Alderson and a $10,000 fine for violation of the censorship laws, J.P. Kennedy, Jr., son of ex-ambassador Joseph Kennedy and Eunice’s brother, was killed when a Navy bomber he was piloting exploded in flight. And only a year earlier, in August 1943, another brother, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, had been seriously injured by the Japanese in the Solomon Islands, an injury that caused him chronic back pain for the rest of his life.
Some speculate that Eunice felt sympathetic toward Velvalee because she, like Eunice, had graduated from Stanford University. In fact, by strange coincidence, Velvalee belatedly received her degree the same year that Eunice graduated from Stanford. Or maybe it was because she believed Velvalee’s story that it had been her husband, Lee, who spied for the Japanese and not her. So many of the women Eunice had met and counselled through her work in social services, after all, had gotten into trouble because of their controlling and manipulative husbands or boyfriends. Or it could have been that Velvalee had worked in social services for a time while living in San Francisco, an interest and passion that Eunice also shared.
AUTHOR Bio and Links:
In 2018 Barbara received the prestigious Albert Nelson Marquis Lifetime Achievement Award and Top Professional Award for her extensive experience and notable accomplishments in the field of publishing and other areas. Barbara lives on a mountain in Georgia with her husband, and three pets who adopted her: Benton, a hound-mix; Reese, a black cat; and Earl Gray, a gray cat and Reese’s best friend.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)