Memoirs from a Stormy Passage shares the story of author Mandy Innis's life with her son, Storm, describing a passage of her life that brought great pain but also great joy. After years of wanting a child and three failed in vitro fertilization attempts, she managed to naturally conceive and give birth to a son. After three precious months of happiness at the long-anticipated gift of Storm, Mandy and her husband faced devastating heartbreak when they learned their son was blind. But before she could adjust to her son's blindness, more medical conditions were diagnosed, all in the midst of their disintegrating marriage. Even so, Mandy didn't allow herself to wallow in self-pity, as her maternal instincts demanded that she step up to the challenge of doing what was best for her son. An inner knowledge told her there would be worse to come, and her son would need as much help as she could give. Storm was blind, the only word he could say was mum, and he couldn't walk unaided because his legs were failing him. Even so, he loved unconditionally, laughed loudly and showed Mandy how to live in the moment, to stop and listen. She now shares their story, as well as the ways in which a small, semi-rural town welcomed them, supported Mandy in her endeavour to help her son, and brought happiness to mother and child.

In this engaging book, Eric Van Young traces the political, economic, and social development of Mexico through the crucial one hundred years of its remarkable transition from a relatively prosperous Spanish colony to a violently unstable republic marked by economic stagnation, political confrontation, and burgeoning efforts at modernization. Featuring primary sources from figures of the period, Van Young discusses the political instability of the period—internal warfare, military uprisings, intermittent dictatorships, sharp conflicts among political groupings—and attributes them to a belief by political actors in the fundamental lack of legitimacy in central government institutions after the sweeping away of the Bourbon imperial structure and its replacement first with a very short-lived Mexican empire followed by a series of increasingly authoritarian aspirational republican constitutions.