When his mother forgets to kiss him goodnight, Leon can't keep from speculating about the reason why.

How Do You Forgive a Parent Who Has Failed You? One summer, Melissa Cistaro’s mother stepped into her baby-blue Dodge Dart and drove away, leaving behind Melissa and her brothers. Rarely seeing their mother as they were growing up, they blamed themselves for her leaving, turning to each other for support and seeking out often destructive ways to cope with living without their mom. Decades later, with children of her own, Melissa finds herself in Olympia, Washington, as her mother is dying. She has just days to find out what happened that summer and to confront the unthinkable fear that a “leaving gene” might be lying dormant inside of her. She knew she came from a long line of mothers who left their children. But when Melissa stumbles across a folder titled “Letters Never Sent” tucked away in her mother’s filing cabinet, she begins to feel the wreckage of her mother’s painful journey, before and after she abandoned her family. Alternating between Melissa’s tumultuous coming-of-age and her mother’s final days, Without My Mother is a haunting yet ultimately uplifting story of one woman’s quest to discover how our parents’ choices impact our own and how we can survive those choices to forge our own paths.

From Tortured to Almost Free: A Psychiatric Therapist’s Life with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder is the story of the author’s horrific struggle with severe OCD at a time when little to nothing was known about this macabre, debilitating mental illness. Honest, unwavering, and raw, the author takes the reader along as she struggles to make it through a day, a day in which ordinary things such as cigarette butts, classroom closets, and the starting of an automobile engine create terror. Twenty years later, this same author, now a therapist to others with this horrible disorder, is armed with knowledge and techniques and the realization that how OCD behaves has everything to do with the underlying beliefs one holds of oneself. Changing these beliefs often is essential for getting well. Sharing with her readers all she has learned, the author provides a hands-on course in what gut-wrenching, severe OCD looks like and what it takes to get well. Essential reading for those who struggle with OCD and for all who are determined to help them.

First Published in 1992. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

An ordinary man who has accomplished extraordinary feats in life - Kenneth Raupp relates the story of intimate love, supreme sadness, humor, valor and fox hole religion laid bare as never before.

This book is based upon the cruelty that the Devils Knights inflicts on innocents. How ones determination and drive can overcome adversities. That at the end of the long dark tunnel, theres still hope.

Revisiting the Twentieth Century, as the title suggests, is a collection of the author's experiences from his childhood in St. Paul, Minnesota, to those of him and his family before their move to New Jersey from North Carolina in 1955. The story covers amusing anecdotes he experienced in his student years, in a variety of summer laboring jobs, his early days with 3M in St. Paul, his bachelor life in New York, the courtship of his wife, their life in the High Point, NC and his job as salesman and sales manager. These anecdotes illustrate what life was like during this period which was marked by two shooting world wars, a depression and the threat of nuclear destruction. Against this background of international tumult, a great transformation in lifestyle occurred in the United States. At the beginning of the story, no one in his neighborhood has a car or a radio. Even the telephone and the record player were of recent origin. Families or churches took care of relatives and the poor went to the poorhouse . The work week was sixty hours and payment for over-time was unheard of. Unions were fighting to improve the working man's lot in life, but were in their infancy. Neighborhood interdependency disappeared as the automobile shrunk distances and people achieved greater mobility. The change in lifestyle that occurred in this brief period seem somewhat unique in our history.