Split from Reality

What happens when you realize the foundation of everything you knew about yourself and life in general is shattered? How do you cope when it’s found that your own mind, and even reality itself, is playing tricks on you? Is it even possible to adapt to a bizarre, unforgiving, and even horrifying mindscape?

These challenging questions and others will be explored in this book. This autobiography tells a tale of a young man as he struggles to function in life while experiencing very unusual circumstances. The tale explains his experience while battling some of the most disturbing psychotic thoughts.

This is a story of wonder, extreme challenges, and eventual plateau into some form of success. This book not only demonstrates the problems and stressors common with the illness called schizophrenia but also highlights methods, techniques, and useful solutions to some of the most challenging and slippery mental conundrums that one might encounter during psychosis.

My Family's Godly Road

“For God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him.”
– John 3:17

To get to the Heavenly Father…
You must believe in Jesus…
That he lived and died for you.
No matter the religious road you go down, you must accept Jesus as your savior…

This book chronicles the many roles the author played within the church and how her journey impacted the lives of those around her. From Sunday school teacher to Usher, and eventually marrying a preacher, her dedication to her faith and community is woven throughout her story. It also serves as a heartfelt tribute to her family, including her grandson Malachi, who became a deacon, and her granddaughter Delisia, whose solo performances touched the congregation. Through her experiences, the book highlights the profound life lessons that the church instilled in her and her loved ones.

Thoughts Expressed Through the Written Word

This literary work is the product of my personal activity in the effort of lifelong self-expression. Self-expression can be accomplished through a number of manners, including all forms of art, music and performance. My form of expression is through the written word. As I experience the varied performance arts of others, I appreciate the message and communication of the artist and ultimately experience self-growth.  Some individuals are driven to self-identify and as Dale Carnegie stated, “Self-expression is the dominant necessity of human nature.” I started writing when I was twelve years old.

This work expresses the intellectual, emotional, and personal growth I have experienced over a period of fifty-five years. As stated by Oprah Winfrey, “If we’re really committed to growth, we never stop discovering new dimensions of self and self-expression”. My two previous literary works, Grinnin’ Like a Jenny Eatin’ Saw Briars and Let Me Tell You a Story, published by Austin Macauley involve the communication of events and experiences in my life. As stated by Pearl S. Buck, “Self-expression must pass into communication for its fulfilment”. For this reason, I have chosen to fulfil my literary work through the writing and publication of this book.

Growth, Modernity and the Nations of Wealth

Eric Humphrey and Dwight Semler present a new theory explaining the mysterious historical emergence of modern economic growth and its even more baffling offspring, modernity. Noticeable changes in material life began less than three centuries ago, but previous theoretical accounts have failed to explain their arrival. Thinkers assumed modern wealth and morality were the universal standard driving human history. They assumed modern rights and riches were natural and normal. In this way they thought of such things as ends rooted in human nature, rather than deriving them as consequences from a historical, nonmodern baseline. Misdirected, they set out to liberate the imprisoned modern homunculus who “caused modernity” through moral education and economic institutions. Modernity became an “awareness problem.” Yet this high-maintenance modern self and its ever-growing needs are a consequence of modern processes rather than their cause. Consequently, theorists of the modern world produced comically omnipotent notions of human agency. Marxists and developmental economists saw modernity as a moral or material self-realization project, requiring only a liberator or engineer. But when their God-of-Genesis model failed the facts, they overreacted and defaulted to its alter ego—humans were passive leaves in the wind of history. Modernity thus oscillates between a chosen destiny and a given fate. With modernity represented as a historical fate, all pretense of a grand theoretical view vanishes in thick description of one damn thing after another, and the historian’s rote chronology replaces any theoretical causality, as a specific description of a particular falling rock replaces a general theory of gravity.

Understanding the modern world and how it came to be, argue the authors, is less a matter of facts than of the foundational assumptions used to link facts together into robust and coherent theories. We must un-assume our modern selves and give poverty and illiberality their just historical due. With better and more scientifically consistent assumptions, they argue, the old facts of history can be seen in a new way. Then the solution to understanding the most puzzling and abnormal of human events, the modern world itself, turns out to be hiding in plain sight.

Consideraciones psicoanalíticas sobre diarios de Marion Milner

Este libro trata sobre un momento en la vida de los diarios de Marion Milner, quien fue una destacada psicoanalista y amiga de Donald Winnicott. Lo que este libro intenta establecer es una interpretación desde dos perspectivas del psicoanálisis: primero, la clásica freudiana y luego, la intersubjetiva. Aprenderá más sobre su vida, su obra y también sobre las formas de pensamiento respecto a lo que se puede decir sobre el psicoanálisis contemporáneo.

Finding May

And there she sat. Legs crossed with eyes straight as an arrow.

The sun slipped inches at a mile behind Snow Recreation Center on the eleventh of October, two thousand and two. John met May in the hustle of his happy, full life. Pausing the daily exercising. Exchanging numbers and smiles, the two briefly tucked away from time. Centrum to Eastern Michigan’s heart, ideation began blooming. Tracing began—Finding May and John adoring each other’s warmth inside—if only for two minutes.

Two minutes that day, seconds later next month as John reached a suicidal breaking point, and months forward into 2004.

The girl he was destined to barely know. A Monet-traced beauty. Kind. Sweetly adorable. A thousand budding, poetic lines incapable of capturing May’s immediate place in John’s mind. She’d try to save his life with these two minutes, and later eleven seconds, of her time. A northern star streaking across the Vanilla Sky.

Life Threads – A Memoir

The core of this illuminating memoir consists of threads of consistency and learning that have emerged through Carol’s life experiences. We learn, as she and her sister Linda did, of the constructive optimism of their parents and how that mindset underlies successfully facing life’s struggles. Mistakes can be overcome. The burdens lift. Life is meant for living.With well-balanced sensitivity and striking honesty, she frankly reveals the false starts in her career and her love life and how things worked out in the end. We gain perspective, as she did, through spirited tales of her life experiences.Heart-wrenching events mix with moments of light, hope, and relief. Even the death of loved ones, people, and dogs doesn’t have to be a downward pull, as Carol learned from her dad.Carol has found that angels have an impact on our experiences, too. Although she has never seen an angel, her dogs saw several one evening.Her experiences in finally finding and settling into her career, her love life, and several events that didn’t seem significant, and some that did, all seem to fit together to form those surfacing life threads.

My Name Is My Soul

To have a name is to have a soul (Ɔkra), and to have a soul is to exist as a conscious living being. Meaning, every soul has a day of ascendency (Krada) as an extrinsic agency with a unique name (Kradzin) and characteristic attributes leading to a spiritual life during adulthood.

As an extrinsic phenomenon, the soul survives death not as a human being, but rather as a spiritual personality called Ɔsaman. It is this posthumous abstract personality (Ɔsaman) that is recalled by name and remembered periodically by the Akan and kindred African peoples.

Far from being ancestor worship, the ancestors are rather remembered (Nkai) in all matters of state. That is, the Akan recall and remember their resurrected dead (Nsamanfo) and the Ancestors (Nananom Nsamanfo) as though they were still living members of the community.

Indeed, Africans worship souls, but it is the eternal souls of God, the Abosom (Gods and Goddesses), that Africans and Black diasporic Africans worship directly as custodians of the world at the behest of God.

Free Reading of the Gospel of the Essenes

The Essenes were one of the most influential sects in Jewish society during the time of Jesus of Nazareth. He himself, along with his relative John the Baptist, practised Essene traditions. Their way of life continued within Christianity for many centuries. Long concealed by Christian exegetes, the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, or Qumran Scrolls, has brought the Essenes back to the centre of many studies.

The dramatic impact of Rome’s occupation of the Middle East (since 63 B.C.) led to a renewed focus on the ancient prophecy of the coming of a liberating Messiah. The greatest threat to the Jewish world was the clash of civilisations between pagan Imperial Rome and Mosaic traditions. It is within this context—and within the Essene precepts regarding the interpretation of the law, both divine and secular—that the birth of Christianity is rooted.

Muslim School Dropout

Muslim School Dropout is the uproariously honest semi-autobiographical life of Amir Yass, a gay Persian Muslim who traded Quran recitations for comedy sets under Hollywood lights.

Growing up in a conservative Iranian-American family, Amir was the golden child—until he dropped out of Islamic school, came out of the closet, and discovered that prayer rugs and punchlines don’t always mix. From awkward mosque moments to wild West Hollywood nights, Amir takes readers on a whirlwind journey through identity, faith, and finding your voice when you’re caught between worlds.

With razor-sharp humor and heartfelt vulnerability, Muslim School Dropout is a coming-of-age tale for anyone who’s ever felt like the ultimate outsider—and learned to turn that into their superpower.

The Walls of Villa Fatema

The Walls of Villa Fatema follows the unexpected journey of an American girl who finds herself a guest in a traditional Moroccan family’s home in Casablanca, the port city made famous by the classic film starring Humphrey Bogart.

By turns humorous and unsettling, this memoir by Avery Russell captures Alice’s struggle to navigate – and sometimes ignore – the complexities of a sex-segregated society.

Rich in detail and cultural insight, the book offers an intimate glimpse into the lives of women in 1960s Morocco and explores the tension and fascination that arise when two very different worlds collide.

Juglar de Pueblo

Un viaje increíble donde el comercio se mezcla con la picardía, la miseria con el ingenio, y la inocencia se pierde entre ferias, estafas y ruletas.

A través de la mirada curiosa de un joven aprendiz de comerciante, Juglar de Pueblo nos sumerge en las entrañas del mundo ambulante de los comerciantes de las ferias del ayer, revelando una fauna de personajes memorables: ruleteros, cocineras, culebreros, falsificadores y soñadores.

Escrito con humor, ternura y una aguda crítica social, este relato oral convertido en crónica vibrante retrata el alma popular de un comunidad que sobrevive a punta de astucia, sudor y esperanza.

Contado como se habla en la calle y con la memoria de quien lo vivió todo, este libro no embellece ni esconde nada. Porque a veces, la mejor literatura es la que no se inventa, si no la que se recuerda.

Una novela entrañable, callejera y profundamente humana.