Like a well-crafted stage play, Just Passin' Thru delivers one suspenseful scene after another. But in this historic setting — a store on the Appalachian Trail called Mountain Crossings — the characters who show up are no fictional creations. They are the real-life stars of the author’s new life as a backpack-purging, canteen-selling, hostel-running, bandage-taping, lost-child finding, argument-settling, romance-fixing, chili-making man of many faces. Like any good drama, there are the good guys (and gals) and the weirdos, too. Some show up once (and that’s enough), and some appear again and again. Some are friends, and some dangerous. But all are united by two things: the author’s story-capturing talent, and whatever it is that lures them to attempt (or conquer) a 2,200-mile path that climbs and plummets from Georgia to Maine.

When I decided to write this autobiography, a strange feeling overcame me, wondering why I should reveal my innermost and carefully protected memories that had lain dormant for so many years and expose them now to the world. However, others kept encouraging me to share my saga of growing up during very difficult times in the world, as well as personal circumstances of instability in which I often felt like I was walking about in a haze. Jokes about blondes being dumb might have applied at times but do blondes really have more fun? I leave that to you, dear reader, to decide. This haze finally forced me to use an undeveloped creativity I never knew I had that led to amazing, unexpected and unusual events, and changed the direction of my life completely. My hope is that upon reading this, no matter how difficult and unfair life is or may seem to be, such moments can serve as stepping stones that force us to become creative in making make a life that becomes more exciting and worthwhile. We have the gift of life and there truly is no time like the present to hope and achieve for something better, whether young or elderly. Some of my finest accomplishments took place later in life. However, this book would never have been written without the help of others. Memories of loved ones who have passed on who taught and guided me out of a labyrinth of despair at times will forever remain in my heart as my greatest treasures. They are as live to me today in my memory as when they were here.

Between the eighteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, countless African Americans passed as white, leaving behind families and friends, roots and community. It was, as Allyson Hobbs writes, a chosen exile, a separation from one racial identity and the leap into another. This revelatory history of passing explores the possibilities and challenges that racial indeterminacy presented to men and women living in a country obsessed with racial distinctions. It also tells a tale of loss. As racial relations in America have evolved so has the significance of passing. To pass as white in the antebellum South was to escape the shackles of slavery. After emancipation, many African Americans came to regard passing as a form of betrayal, a selling of one’s birthright. When the initially hopeful period of Reconstruction proved short-lived, passing became an opportunity to defy Jim Crow and strike out on one’s own. Although black Americans who adopted white identities reaped benefits of expanded opportunity and mobility, Hobbs helps us to recognize and understand the grief, loneliness, and isolation that accompanied—and often outweighed—these rewards. By the dawning of the civil rights era, more and more racially mixed Americans felt the loss of kin and community was too much to bear, that it was time to “pass out” and embrace a black identity. Although recent decades have witnessed an increasingly multiracial society and a growing acceptance of hybridity, the problem of race and identity remains at the center of public debate and emotionally fraught personal decisions.

After receiving the devastating news that she would have to receive a lumpectomy in order to remove a tumor, Marci goes under the knife in hopes that the tumor will be benign. While the tumor is removed and it is not cancerous, the worst is only yet to come. Her health drastically declines due to this (her thirteenth surgery) Several deadly complications arise- a painful hematoma, pulmonary embolism and appendicitis. As she undergoes emergency surgery for appendicitis, she almost dies due to complications of having two surgeries so close together.This is just the beginning of a life and death struggle for Marci. Her health declines and she is diagnosed with the incurable disease of Gastroparesis, a chronic illness that has developed through all of her medical issues. This disorder means her stomach cannot tolerate food or drink, and she finds herself being rushed to the emergency room every week for IV fluids as her health continues to deteriorate.Now too sick to work and living alone, Marci is convinced her time on earth has come to an end. As she prepares for hospice care, she receives an outpouring of love and support by friends and family, including angelic visits from her deceased father. They give her the strength to fight for her life.Overwhelming trials continue for Marci, and at one point she loses consciousness and falls, striking her head. Her spirit goes to heaven and meets the Savior. She wants to stay, but the Savior tells her she must return and finish her second book "Just Passing Through On My Way To Heaven". Join Marci on her journey of faith, hope, and miracles amidst great adversity as she places her life and trust in the Lord's hands.

Harlem Renaissance author Nella Larsen (1891 –1964) published just two novels and three short stories in her lifetime, but achieved lasting literary acclaim. Her classic novel Passing first appeared in 1926.

Sojourneris an Old French word with jour--day--at its heart. It reminds us of our transience and of the inexorable passage of time. It reminds us that we do not own this world but that we are merely passing through. It reminds us that God's time is not our time. Fans of Margaret Guenther will welcome this salty and wise collection of reflections on her life journey her childhood in Kansas City, her college days, her career, her travels, and her slow awakening to transience of all things. This writer and spiritual director looks back over the nearly eight decades of her life, tackling themes of childhood, friendship, moving, the magic of words, heaven, spirituality in cyberspace, asking the right questions, and things never to do again. Readers of Holy Listening, On Holy Ground, My Soul in Silence Waits, At Home in the World, and The Practice of Prayer will delight in this book of fresh, humorous insights.

In this updated and revised edition of Just Passing Through: A German American Family Saga, first published in 2011, the author tells the story of several generations of his unique but dysfunctional family spanning over a hundred years including the two world wars. Peter Zell was eight years old when World War II ended and in a prologue entitled A German - American Childhood recounts his boyhood experiences that included the apocalyptic firebombing of his hometown of Stuttgart by the western Allies, the postwar occupation of Germany, and his family’s emigration to America. The book centers on the author’s mother, whom her children called Mutti, and her ordeal during the Nazi era for having been married to a Jew, the son of prosperous Frankfurt business owners, with whom she had two children. With anti-Semitism on the rise in Germany, her husband decided to emigrate to America but Mutti chose to remain behind to take care of her ailing father. The couple had an amicable divorce and while her ex-husband took their son with him, their daughter remained with Mutti in Germany. Under the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, mother and daughter now found themselves classified as non-Aryans which meant that Mutti could not remarry while their teenage daughter, being half Jewish, was put in dire jeopardy of her life. At this point Mutti’s older brother, himself a dedicated National Socialist, proposed an unconventional solution that ensured her survival. Following his advice, she had more children, fathered by so-called Aryans, who were eventually all brought to America. The book follows the lives of the five siblings, all half-brothers and half-sisters, and their difficult relationships with each other as each seeks to achieve his or her version of the American Dream.