Set among the Malibu mansions and Hollywood rock clubs of California's southland, Never Break the Chain finds Tim Green's grief over the loss of his father spinning into an obsessive quest to track down the wayward mother who deserted him almost three decades before. It's a journey that, like Believe in Me before it, sends Green venturing deep into the heart of the rock and roll jungle. Opening a few months after the end of Believe in Me, Never Break the Chain lands Green in the oceanfront Malibu compound of British guitarist Blake Saunders, who's just hired him to pen an authorized biography of his floundering, formerly-huge arena rock band. Even as the highly combustible Saunders' son Mal-recently installed as the band's new lead singer-and daughter Jane offer him distorted reflections of himself, Green's efforts to retrace his mother's steps through LA's rock and roll underworld propel him toward a cathartic confrontation. The revelations to come challenge every answer he once thought he possessed to the most fundamental question of all: who is Tim Green? Equal parts family drama, literate thriller, and peek behind the curtain of an aging rock band, Never Break the Chain is ultimately a story about families-the ones we're born into, and the ones we create. Praise for Never Break the Chain: "Rock writer Jason Warburg ties up some loose ends with his latest Tim Green novel, Never Break the Chain. His charming protagonist is still threading the road to self-knowledge by poetically and amusingly examining the lives of others in this tale of excess and success. Best of all, a turn in the story resolves the mystery of who Tim Green really is. It's the magic of music that takes us there, along with Warburg's very entertaining style." -- Viola Weinberg, Poet Laureate emerita of Sacramento & former KZAP FM News Director "A beautiful book... Never Break the Chain is a novel about family life and the ties that bind people together. It is not easy to write about music and the life of musicians in a convincing way, but Jason Warburg never misses a beat. Warburg understands how music can play a major part in the staging posts of people's lives." -- Greg Spawton, co-founder & songwriter, Big Big Train

In Liberty's Chain, David N. Gellman shows how the Jay family, abolitionists and slaveholders alike, embodied the contradictions of the revolutionary age. The Jays of New York were a preeminent founding family. John Jay, diplomat, Supreme Court justice, and coauthor of the Federalist Papers, and his children and grandchildren helped chart the course of the Early American Republic. Liberty's Chain forges a new path for thinking about slavery and the nation's founding. John Jay served as the inaugural president of a pioneering antislavery society. His descendants, especially his son William Jay and his grandson John Jay II, embraced radical abolitionism in the nineteenth century, the cause most likely to rend the nation. The scorn of their elite peers—and racist mobs—did not deter their commitment to end southern slavery and to combat northern injustice. John Jay's personal dealings with African Americans ranged from callousness to caring. Across the generations, even as prominent Jays decried human servitude, enslaved people and formerly enslaved people served in Jay households. Abbe, Clarinda, Caesar Valentine, Zilpah Montgomery, and others lived difficult, often isolated, lives that tested their courage and the Jay family's principles. The personal and the political intersect in this saga, as Gellman charts American values transmitted and transformed from the colonial and revolutionary eras to the Civil War, Reconstruction, and beyond. The Jays, as well as those who served them, demonstrated the elusiveness and the vitality of liberty's legacy. This remarkable family story forces us to grapple with what we mean by patriotism, conservatism, and radicalism. Their story speaks directly to our own divided times.

The family can be viewed as one of the links in a “golden chain” connecting individuals, the private sphere, civil society, and the democratic state; as potentially an important source of energy for social activity; and as the primary institution that socializes and diffuses the values and norms that are of fundamental importance for civil society. Yet much of the literature on civil society pays very little attention to the complex relations between civil society and the family. These two spheres constitute a central element in democratic development and culture and form a counterweight to some of the most distressing aspects of modernity, such as the excessive privatization of home life and the unceasing work-and-spend routines. This volume offers historical perspectives on the role of families and their members in the processes of a liberal and democratic civil society, the question of boundaries and intersections of the private and public domains, and the interventions of state institutions.

When desperate family circumstances in Colombia send young Mari and her sisters to an orphanage for adoption, her biological family thought they would have a better life in America. However, no one could have anticipated the awful reality that awaited them, shattering all images of the American dream. Terrifying living conditions and appalling abuse drove Mari down a dark path to violent outbursts, anger management issues, promiscuity, and drug addiction in an attempt to find an escape any way possible. In spite of these overwhelming circumstances, she changed the course of her life and, through God’s love, not only found herself but the strength and faith to break the chains of abuse.

A Boston Globe Best Poetry Book of 2011 Winner of the 2011 Griffin Poetry Prize Winner of the 2011 Poetry Now Award Seamus Heaney's new collection elicits continuities and solidarities, between husband and wife, child and parent, then and now, inside an intently remembered present—the stepping stones of the day, the weight and heft of what is passed from hand to hand, lifted and lowered. Human Chain also broaches larger questions of transmission, of lifelines to the inherited past. There are newly minted versions of anonymous early Irish lyrics, poems that stand at the crossroads of oral and written, and other "hermit songs" that weigh equally in their balance the craft of scribe and the poet's early calling as scholar. A remarkable sequence entitled "Route 101" plots the descent into the underworld in the Aeneid against single moments in the arc of a life, from a 1950s childhood to the birth of a first grandchild. Other poems display a Virgilian pietas for the dead—friends, neighbors, family—that is yet wholly and movingly vernacular. Human Chain also includes a poetic "herbal" adapted from the Breton poet Guillevic—lyrics as delicate as ferns, which puzzle briefly over the world of things and landscapes that exclude human speech, while affirming the interconnectedness of phenomena, as of a self-sufficiency in which we too are included.

When Mom gets cancer all of the family's routines are disrupted, but with surgery, chemotherapy, radiation and rest, she eventually gets well enough to do the things they did before she got sick.