This project was originally designed as a teaching tool to be used by parents, teachers, students, and other professionals who have the wonderful opportunity to work with kids with special needs. It gives a personal perspective about the difficulties that students face in school and social situations. It is the perfect preparation tool for creating a welcoming environment for all learners. Ideally, dedicated teachers utilize this tool to become comfortable welcoming students with special needs into a general education classroom. The teaching tips in the back and the stories throughout can be used as disability awareness training for all of the students in the classroom. This book is written with the hope of decreasing the difficulties encountered by students with and without disabilities in social and academic interactions.

Daniel Lutz, at 31, has proven himself stronger than he imagined. He tells the story of his transformation from victim to survivor in his book, My Karma, My Fault. Born in Germany in 1979, Daniel moved to Finland as a toddler, where his parents joined the Hare Krishna movement. When he was 5, his family moved to the Hare Krishna community in Almviks Gård, Sweden, where they settled into a converted storage container with no insulation, running water, or toilet, and an entirely foreign lifestyle that got them up every day at 4 a.m. for temple services and gave them new Sanskrit names. Soon after, Daniel, now Devavrata, and his then 7-year-old sister were enrolled in the community's boarding school. That's when Daniel's nightmare began. Without realizing it, his parents had placed him in the care of a sadistic pedophile teacher, and Daniel spent the next 3 years of his life being sexually and physically assaulted. Threatened and silenced, young Daniel's behavior deteriorated, and his family was asked to leave the community. Daniel and his family moved back to the Hare Krishna temple in Finland, where, after brief attendance at a local public school, Daniel was sent alone to the Hare Krishna boarding school in Mayapur, India. There, Daniel was again subjected to sexual and physical abuse, this time at the hands of older students. My Karma, My Fault takes us through the rest of Daniel's anguished childhood and teenage years, probes his innocent faith and the loss of it, and brings us into his adulthood, where he finally finds normalcy and at least a measure of peace. It took Daniel years to get to the point where he could write this book and two years to compose it. It is not the story of a victim but of one who has survived.

Frankie Valen's autobiography, "Chasing An Illusive Dream," is a story that contains the drama and pathos that inspired the old cliché, "Truth is stranger than fiction." This story of a pop-singer is about fame and the loss of it, separation from family and children, and a dramatic return to the Lord. "Frankie's story is a story of rags to riches to rags that started back in 1967 but left him with an enduring celebrity status." Linda Stinnett, Derby, KS Informer. This book will help give the reader his family history, and the story of the mistakes and accomplishments he made, and the incredible journey he took. His feelings of rejection at every turn, the constant fear of never being accepted or good enough to make a difference, and yet he experienced fame and fortune, later becoming a gospel recording artist, and traveling with his concert pianist wife Phyllis nationwide for over 18 years in a full-time music ministry. This book attempts to answer such questions such as: Is Frankie related to the famous Mallory/Duracell battery family? Is Frankie related to the singer Richie Valens? Was Daniel Boone Frankie's cousin? Does Frankie share a grandmother with the famous Lucille Ball? What about Frankie being related to the Piper Cub airplane family? Because Frankie never became a major recording artist, it took years of hard work and dedication for him to try and become a household name. Frankie has decided to become very transparent in his desire to reveal his heart to his readers on every page.

Storms roll in and out of our lives... it might be a broken relationship, a job loss, an illness, or worse, the death of a loved one. So how do we find a rainbow when we are on such a dark journey? This book shares how one family chose to see the rainbows in their lives. Are you ready to find the rainbows in your life? When Ann and her husband walked into the doctor's office, they were prepared to hear the worst. Randy had been battling with cancer for a long time and they knew that there was a possibility that the latest treatment hadn't been successful. They were right. And on a fateful day Randy said goodbye to his loved ones and went to be with the Lord. As Ann and her children mourned the loss of their husband and father, they began to see that perhaps things were not as bleak as they first seemed and that perhaps, with the help of a loving community and family, they might emerge from this storm strong and full of light. Almost any family can point to a date when their family, in some way or another, changed forever. For Ann Asprey's family, that day was July 21, 2004. Rainbows in the Storm chronicles her family's journey since that day through the severe illness of a loved one and all the trials, tears and unexpected triumphs discovered in her family's storm.

Mining the rich Venetian archives, especially the unusually detailed records of Venice's own branch of the Roman Inquisition, Guido Ruggiero provides a strikingly new and provocative interpretation of the end of the Renaissance in Italy. In this boldly structured work, he develops five narrative accounts of individual encounters with the Inquisition that illustrate the double-edged metaphor of how passions were both bound by late Renaissance society and were seen in turn as binding people. In this way new perspectives are opened on magic, witchcraft, love, marriage, gender, and discipline at the level of the community and beyond. Witches, courtesans, prostitutes, women healers, nobles, Cardinals, and renegade priests and monks speak from these pages describing their lives, beliefs, hopes, fears, and lies. With an imaginative flair for storytelling and impeccable scholarship, Ruggiero exposes the rich complexity of the culture and poetics of the everyday at the end of the Renaissance and illuminates a previously unexplored chapter in Italian history.

When the author and his wife first met, life was a big blank canvas ready to be painted. After a trip down the aisle, the purchase of the first home together and the adoption of a dog to test the waters before wading into the pool of parenthood, life started to become more about to-do lists and conformity. Their big dreams together began to start with the phrase Someday we will With time no longer on their side, someday became today when they decided to leave everything behind and move 3,963 miles to London, England, to learn more about the world, themselves, their marriage, and what can happen when you find the courage to take a chance and do something great. On the surface, Wearing Wellies: A Year of Life & Love in London is the story of chasing lifelong dreams of queuing for Wimbledon tickets, greeting friends with kisses on both cheeks, close and personal encounters with the Queen, weekend trips to Paris, Italian cooking schools, and walks through the Cotswolds while wearing wellie boots with a dog named Sydney. But the story is really about life-changing relationships that the author and his wife make along the way with new friends who did not dress like them, sound like them, or think like them.