"This is a book I love."--Bret Lott, author of Jewel and Before We Get Started: A Practical Memoir of the Writer's Life From a Minnesota book award-winning author, an essay collection that explores what is most essential to him, from the difficult lives of jazz musicians, to trout fishing, to the shifting population and mores of suburbia. “Here’s the thing,” Richard Terrill writes. “There’s always the thing, isn’t there, and most often, not just one?” Terrill, an award-winning poet and memoirist, asks through this series of wide-ranging, funny, and sometimes gut-punchingly vulnerable essays, what is essential? Maybe trout fishing, the music of Bill Evans, or the whys of dog ownership. Maybe Yasujiro Ozu’s Tokyo Story, We Chat, a musician’s early hearing loss, and spying on the neighbors. Or maybe the coming apocalypse, almost getting lost in the woods, trespassing, town clean-up days, and the reason Miles Davis never listened to his own recordings. At times self-effacing and funny, at times outspoken and provocative, Terrill fixes a clear eye on the contradictions in our present moment. “We’re at that point in a journey where you know where you’re going, but you don’t know where you are,” he writes. “The destination should come anytime now.”

What if you have the chance to live three lives? Which one would you choose An answer to these thought-provoking questions is at the heart of the intriguing memoir, Essentially: Being Me in a Becoming World. It emerged as a rebirth from the ashes of a near-tragedy and life-defining experience of a single mother as she breaks the barrier of stigma and silence. In the book, the author craftily weaves her intensely personal journey and life-changing experiences as she grapples to find meaning and purpose in a trilogy of lives conflictedly interwoven in one destiny through first choices, second chances and everything in-between. Through the lenses of her personal experiences, she explores themes such as susceptibility, fighting addiction, and aloneness. The book is an open invitation to introspection, self-conversations and self-discovery through the turbulent storms and uncharted waters of the inevitability of change. I've learnt that we can only find our authentic selves in vulnerability and only when we find ourselves can we truly find and empower others.

Allan Sullivan wrote over forty works of popular fiction between 1890 and 1940; today it is difficult to find even one copy of many of these works. A well-known and widely read author in the first half of this century, Sullivan wrote thrillers, historical romance, children's stories, and novels set in the north (The Great Divide, The Fur Masters, Cariboo Road). Now there is no complete collection of his published works anywhere in the world. In this literary biography of Alan Sullivan, the author interweaves Sullivan's life story and his literary career. Drawing on published and unpublished material as well as on information supplied by Sullivan's four children, McLeod traces the influence on Sullivan's writings of his early years in Sault Ste. Marie and in mining and construction camps, of society life in Toronto, of visits to the Arctic and Europe, and residence on an English country estate. Sullivan is seen as a man whose essential characteristics are those of Canada, and whose literary work is parallelled by the paintings of the Group of Seven artists. His literary works are discussed and evaluated in the light of Sullivan's own and other Canadian critical theories. The bibliography provides a convenient listing of Sullivan's book-length publications. The volume will be of value to students of literature, but will also appeal to anyone interested in Canadian life and culture.

The guide presented here will help us gain a level of understanding about our own discomfiting emotions and the incomprehensible behavior of others to a remarkable degree. This work takes a bio-psycho-social perspective in combination with human development to devise a targeted therapy that is distinct from available practices today. DSA begins by calling attention to chronic baseline emotions originating in adversity. The author explains how to use the Developmental and Systems Approach (DSA) for the treatment of anxiety, depression, addictions, eating disorders, self-mutilation, and externalizing behavior. For the discerning reader, learning through DSA will fuel authentic interpersonal growth and can be lateralized to many areas of human endeavors. Whether it is chronic low mood, absence of belonging, treatment resistant addiction, disenchantment with work and school, or recurring relationship challenges, we require a more compelling solution to these issues. Furthermore, this is a parenting book for healthy child development. This is also a manual for any enterprise that requires high performance. This is a unique conception for the national security agencies and law enforcement to analyze the criminal mindset and terrorist impetus. It is time to empower the individual, the family, and our social world with the knowledge to establish authentic affiliations in the context of Interpersonal Connectivity 3.0; otherwise, we are Essentially Alone.

"Essentially a Mother argues that the law of pregnancy and motherhood has been overrun by sexist ideology. As Jennifer Hendricks documents, courts have shockingly held over the past half century that a pregnant woman's nine months of gestation hardly count in her claim to parent the child she bears, and that a man's brief moment of ejaculation matters more than a woman's labor. Armed with such dubious arguments, courts have stripped women of the right to an abortion, treated surrogate mothers as mere vessels with no moral rights to their offspring, and handed biological fathers-even those who became fathers through rape-automatic rights over women and their children. The law of pregnancy is now infected with a misogyny that has brought tragedy to innumerable women and even to many men who don't meet the traditional definition of a father. In this incisive and groundbreaking book, Hendricks argues that feminists must work to overthrow this skewed value system that subordinates women, devalues caregiving, and strips many of us of one of our most fundamental rights: the right to parent"--

In this brief and powerful book, Diana Fuss takes on the debate of pure essence versus social construct, engaging with the work of Luce Irigaray and Monique Wittig, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Houston Baker, and with the politics of gay identity.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1845.