Mildred E. Stanard penned over one-hundred inspirational poems during her lifetime. Her poetry captures key insights into life and motivates the reader to reflect on their own lifes journey and learnings. These fun-to-read, reflective, and inspirational poems provide something for everyone in the family. Topics include love, humor, friendship, children, stress, words with God and more. Mildred grew up during the depression era and lived in several small Midwestern towns as a girl. She married and started a family in the city of Chicago, later moving to the Chicago suburb of Villa Park.

Friendship is usually seen as a vital part of most people's lives in the West. From our friends, we hope to derive emotional support, advice and material help in times of need. In this pioneering book, basic assumptions about friendship are examined from a cross-cultural point of view. Is friendship only a western conception or is it possible to identify friends in such places as Papua New Guinea, Kenya, China, and Brazil? In seeking to answer this question, contributors also explore what friendship means closer to home, from the bar to the office, and address the following:* Are friendships voluntary?* Should friends be distinguished sharply from relatives?* Do work and friendship mix?* Does friendship support or subvert the social order?* How is friendship shaped by the nature of the person, gender, and the relationship between private and public life?* How is friendship affected when morality is compromised by self-interest?This book represents one of the few major attempts to deal with friendship from a comparative perspective. In achieving this aim, it demonstrates the culture-bound nature of many assumptions concerning one of the most basic building-blocks of western social relationships. More importantly, it signposts the future of social relations in many parts of the world, where older social bonds based on kinship or proximity are being challenged by flexible ties forged when people move within local, national and increasingly global networks of social relations.

Follow God's process for growth and learn how you can benefit from life's challenging experiences with this book by bestselling inspirational author T.D. Jakes. In this insightful book, #1 New York Times bestselling author T.D. Jakes wrestles with the age-old questions: Why do the righteous suffer? Where is God in all the injustice? In his most personal offering yet, Bishop Jakes tells crushing stories from his own journey-the painful experience of learning his young teenage daughter was pregnant, the agony of watching his mother succumb to Alzheimer's, and the shock and helplessness he felt when his son had a heart attack. Bishop Jakes wants to encourage you that God uses difficult, crushing experiences to prepare you for unexpected blessings. If you are faithful through suffering, you will be surprised by God's joy, comforted by His peace, and fulfilled with His purpose. Crushing will inspire you to have hope, even in your most difficult moments. If you trust in God and lean on Him during setbacks, He will lead you through.

Four Eyes, Knock Knees and Nappy Hair is a completed collection of 50 life stories taken directly from my childhood, adolescence and teen years. I want everyone who reads this book to say, " I too have a story to tell and Im going to let my voice be heard." I want this book to empower others in the way that it has empowered me, by embracing who I am today, yesterday and tomorrow and having no regrets. I challenge you to remember your past, learn from it and use these lessons as footprints toward your reality. Thank you for sharing mine.

Over the course of his stellar writing life, Peter Carey has explored his homeland of Australia in such highly acclaimed novels as Oscar and Lucinda, True History of the Kelly Gang and Amnesia. Writing at the peak of his powers, Carey takes us on an unforgettable journey that maps his homeland's secrets in this extraordinary new novel. Wildly inventive, funny and profoundly moving, A Long Way from Home opens in 1953 with the arrival of the tiny, handsome Titch Bobs, his beautiful doll of a wife, Irene, and their two children in the small town of Bacchus Marsh. Titch is the best car salesman in southeastern Australia. Irene loves her husband, and loves to drive fast. Together they enter the Redex Trial, a brutal endurance race around the ancient continent, over roads no car is designed to survive. With them is their neighbour and navigator, Willie Bachhuber, a quiz show champion and failed school teacher who calls the turns and creek crossings on a map that will lead them, without warning, away from the white Australia they all know so well. Just like the novel, Peter Carey's new masterpiece, begins in one way and takes you somewhere you never thought you'd be. Often funny, the book is also and always a page-turner, surprising you with history these characters never even knew themselves. Its profound reckoning with Australia's brutal treatment of the continent's aboriginal people will also resonate strongly with Canadian readers.