Life of the Party Girl

Life of the Party Girl is a raw and inspiring debut memoir of a top wedding planner reflecting on the moments that define us as human beings, both the traumatic and fantastic.

The author and subject, Megan Estrada, isn’t your typical wedding planner. She is tattooed, assertive, stylish, and doesn’t take no for an answer. She is reflective and decisive, in bringing a fresh and unique perspective to the special events industry. Estrada is a trailblazer in the event industry and harnesses her past experiences to create momentous occasions.

Before Megan Estrada became a nationally recognized wedding and event planner, she spent forty-years navigating a life of unexpected circumstances, one that was dictated by a twisted series of trauma and celebration. From enduring a school shooting, an unsuccessful suicide attempt, and a difficult marriage, to landing a record deal, becoming a mother of two, and leading the special events industry through the Covid-19 pandemic, Life of the Party Girl follows Estrada’s journey to self-worth and self-discovery.

Life on Ice

Ever wonder what life is like on a touring ice-skating show? How many people travel with the show, how do you pack two fifty-pound suitcases with a year’s worth of clothes, shoes, and supplies? Do you pay your own hotel and transportation? Speaking of pay, what do they pay? How do you cook in a hotel room? And who is hooking up with whom? This semi autobiography is a humorous look into the world of a traveling show about how to live this type of life on the road. It is a coming-of-age story where quirky characters become family, fall into and out of bed—I mean love—go on adventures, and grow up.

Lillian: A True Story of Multiple Personality Disorder

For most of us, the varied parts of our personalities are woven together and unified by our memories. But what happens when we have no memories? What happens when the components of memory (facts, feelings, and body states) are split apart and no longer relate to each other?

When this story began more than 40 years ago, doctors and psychiatrists were mystified by patients with more than one personality. The diagnosis at the time was Multiple Personality Disorder. Lillian was afflicted with this condition owing to severe abuse during her childhood. Her mind held each trauma separately. Each personality took over her body, developing a life and personality of its own.

Lillian’s aunt, Jean, became friends with 22 personalities. She played hide and seek with four-year-old Mary, taught five-year-old Amy to write, shopped for undergarments with Robin Jean, and communicated endlessly with each of the others. In the process, each personality revealed its beginnings. Over time, each personality revealed its own memories of their trauma and eventually became integrated.

This is an exquisite and beautifully written story of poverty, transgenerational abuse, mental illness, and the healing power of love, science, and spirituality.

As one reader puts it: “You will laugh, cry, turn away and come back again to its compelling truth.”

Mikey Speaks Out

On the day of my birth, my mother had already decided that she wanted to give me away. She had made this decision even though she had not yet known the extent of the problems that would confront me. As it turned out, there were many, including the fact that I was not born a beautiful baby.

Actually, I was considered to be quite ugly, disfigured by a cleft lip and palate that left a gaping hole in the middle of my face. In addition, I was born deaf, covered with bruises, and showed signs of haemophilia, an ancient life-threatening hereditary bleeding disorder.

I longed to be hugged, kissed, and cuddled in my mother’s arms, but that was not about to happen. Instead, I spent months in a hospital crib, as I recovered from complicated facial surgery. Following the surgery, I was placed in a dark room of a foster home, and left to languish in loneliness for several months.

On a dark snowy night, shortly before Christmas, a man and woman arrived at the home of my foster parents. They had driven five hundred miles through a blizzard, and requested to see me… see me! No one had ever before asked to see me! My only previous visits away from the foster home were trips to the hospital for painful medical procedures.

Mourning Bands On

Mourning Bands On is an accessible journey into the hypersensitive world of today’s American law enforcement. The reader is brought into the law enforcement world through an introduction to the history, function, and development of the American police model. With an understanding of policing’s role in American society, the reader is then immersed into the raucous and contentious cultural upheaval which American policing is currently experiencing.

Using well-known examples, the reader is challenged to consider how American culture is affected by critical incidents and the portrayal of those events in our media intensive world. The reader will review the cases in the deaths of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd, as well as others. The cases are presented as a narrative of events supported by the findings and legal conclusions of the U.S. Department of Justice, Federal Bureau of Investigation. Each incident is reviewed with a view of how the incident effected American society and brought change to American culture and thus policing.

The reader will experience how American policing has changed through legislative, societal, and cultural pressure resulting from the reviewed critical incidents. With an appetite for more, the reader is encouraged to further explore the relationship between societal norms and American policing.

The work concludes with a final challenge to the reader. How do we, as a society, reform American policing to move forward after this unprecedented period of cultural change? The author offers several possible reforms to enact, what can you add to the conversation?

My Mameleh: A Memoir

It was late, dark and cold. The little band of travelers were huddled together on the bench of an old train hoping to escape the tightening Nazi noose. Suddenly, they heard the conductor’s loud voice, “Vos papiers, s'il vous plaît!” (Papers, please!). My mother’s identity card had been stamped not once, but twice with the word, “Juif.” She knew that her life and that of her friends now rested in the palms of a stranger, a government official whose job it was to hand them over to the Germans. 

This is one of the many miraculous escapes found throughout this book. It is a story of survival, not just from the Holocaust, but from old world poverty, broken love and a tenuous peace in order to finally achieve the “American Dream.” 

On a Pilgrimage with Augustine’s Confessions

In his ground-breaking work The Confessions, Augustine of Hippo (AD 343-430), a prominent theologian and philosopher of early Christianity, paved the way for self-disclosure and the art of writing one’s life story. In On a Pilgrimage with Augustine’s Confessions, Dr. Blom delves into Augustine’s role as both protagonist and reflective narrator, portraying him as Christianity’s original existential hero.

Blom draws parallels between Augustine’s journey and that of the wanton prodigal son, viewing Augustine’s address to God as the voice of an ‘everyday man’ struggling to find his way home – a spiritual homecoming. By masterfully weaving together Jungian archetypal psychology, mythology, biblical interpretations, and autobiography, Blom invites the reader to embark on a captivating journey that bridges the gap between Augustine’s musings and meditations from the fifth century and the present day.

On a Pilgrimage with Augustine’s Confessions offers a fresh perspective on a timeless classic, making it an essential read for anyone seeking to explore the depths of the human soul and the enduring relevance of Augustine’s wisdom.

Reconsidering Medicine

This is an original book on the philosophy of medicine. It considers philosophy of medicine as a subdiscipline of philosophy of science. This volume is grounded on an epistemological bottom-up account that arises from the clinical situation, the epidemiologic, and the resulting public health account. It is not a review of the literature, and it is not intended to frame the debates, or to analyze and compare the various number of viewpoints.

Medicine is the human activity, which begins by a linguistic act that identifies the negative norms of health: it begins with a first distinction that splits biological processes into three conventional parts, normal, abnormal and pathologic. Neither of them is a natural kind. Being abnormal is intrinsically bad and admits of degrees, while being pathologic is dichotomous. Being normal is factitious and counterfactual much the same as frictionless planes in physics. Leaving apart the ethical aspects, this book endeavors to uncover the implicit conceptual network, the chief junctures of medicine, should they be found, and their articulations with clinical and community medicine. It results that medicine is pervaded with dichotomous concepts such as scientific vs pragmatic discourse, function and malfunction, abnormal and pathologic, needs and wants, causation and explanation, clinical vs community-oriented care, physical vs psychiatric diseases, mental illness vs deviancy, and so on. Medical thinking has two dimensions intrinsically interweaved, namely a constant amalgam and admixture of biological and normative aspects, so that this essential hybrid nature of the grammar of medicine endorses opposite approaches, naturalistic or normativist, biological or value-laden, realist or instrumental, reductionist or holistic, phenomenological or analytic.

Reflections Before the Blessed Sacrament

Kneeling before Jesus in the tabernacle or being exposed on the altar is a magnificent gift of God. Aware of our sinfulness and the need to draw ever closer to Jesus, who did so much for us, we hope to show Him during these few minutes of prayer how much we love Him. However, being human, and despite our intent to focus on Him and nothing else, we often find our minds wandering or distracted only to suddenly realize we forgot where we were and what we wanted to do.

One way of trying to maintain our attention solely on Jesus is to use a reflection prepared ahead of time in a devotional book. In this humble book you will find a series of reflections, homilies given by the author over the years, to help you to offer yourself more fully every day, and especially when you are in Jesus’ presence in the Eucharist.

Refrigerator Door

Refrigerator Door!

How one household item became the epicenter for cherished memories.

The refrigerator door – that communal billboard found in every home. Covered in photos, mementos, report cards, and takeout menus, this humble appliance takes on far greater meaning. It becomes a tapestry of everything important to a family.

In Refrigerator Door, author and father Thom reminisces on the refrigerator door of his childhood. This mosaic of fading photos and fridge magnets shaped his upbringing and brought his family together. Now Thom passes along the tradition to his own children, reminding them that even an ordinary door can be transformed into something extraordinary with the memories we choose to display.

Join Thom on this heartwarming journey that reveals how a refrigerator door quietly yet profoundly chronicles the story of a family. More than just a surface for sticking homework assignments and takeout menus, it is a celebration of all that gives our fast-paced lives meaning.

Revelations

From 1846 to the present day, the Vatican has maintained quite the same message brought forth from Heaven by different messengers across time and across vast distances and continents. This message echoes the gravest of admonitions and calls mankind to convert and find refuge through the knowledge of the truth, which today threatens the very basis of world peace...

Today, in 2022, the message of La Salette, La Fraudais, Tilly, Fatima, Garabandal, Akita and Medjugorje, and their secrets take a meaning of the greatest importance, as the admonitions brought forth by the Blessed Virgin Mary warn of a cataclysmic global disaster which has now become imminent. The Church’s apprehension of frightening the masses, inspired inaction and Rome’s decision to silence – founded more on fear than on caution – led millions of faithful to the darkness of ignorance and, therefore, to a lack of necessary conversion, prayers and intercession for peace. This book proposes unveiling the light and, thus, asking humanity to respond to the call of a warm and loving mother who merely seeks the salvation of her children.

Rooting Out Violence

Life and death are merged in the terror of unrelenting global violence. Rooting Out Violence describes a model, ‘Healthy Sensory-Emotional Integration,’ with the scope to help adults assess the human capacity for violence in themselves, in members of their communities, as well as, in leaders of their countries. The book provides a violence prevention model to mitigate trauma and human rights violations throughout our lifespans and throughout the world. Healthy Sensory-Emotional Integration is a public health model that is understandable and achievable globally.

The manuscript identifies how blind-sighted we have been historically by not emphasizing the number one variable in the capacity to commit a violent crime; for funding violence prevention in institutional siloes, such as, corrections and child protection programs, when the inner nature of each of us counts; and excluding comprehensive research on preventing trauma, not just funding treatment strategies.