A Flower for God: A Memoir


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Dog Flowers


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A daughter returns home to the Navajo reservation to retrace her mother’s life in a memoir that is both a narrative and an archive of one family’s troubled history. “A candid and achingly fractured memoir of [Geller’s] mother, her family, her Navajo heritage and her own journey to self-discovery and acceptance.”—Ms. SHORTLISTED FOR: The Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize, The Jim Deva Prize for Writing That Provokes • ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: Esquire, She Reads When Danielle Geller’s mother dies of alcohol withdrawal during an attempt to get sober, Geller returns to Florida and finds her mother’s life packed into eight suitcases. Most were filled with clothes, except for the last one, which contained diaries, photos, and letters, a few undeveloped disposable cameras, dried sage, jewelry, and the bandana her mother wore on days she skipped a hair wash. Geller, an archivist and a writer, uses these pieces of her mother’s life to try and understand her mother’s relationship to home, and their shared need to leave it. Geller embarks on a journey where she confronts her family's history and the decisions that she herself had been forced to make while growing up, a journey that will end at her mother's home: the Navajo reservation. Dog Flowers is an arresting, photo-lingual memoir that masterfully weaves together images and text to examine mothers and mothering, sisters and caretaking, and colonized bodies. Exploring loss and inheritance, beauty and balance, Danielle Geller pays homage to our pasts, traditions, and heritage, to the families we are given and the families we choose.




The Rose Hotel


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In this searing memoir, Rahimeh Andalibian struggles to make sense of two brutal crimes: a rape, avenged by her father, and a murder, of which her beloved oldest brother stands accused. Her journey, eloquently and intimately told, is a tribute to the resilience of families everywhere. Andalibian takes us first into her family's tranquil, jasmine-scented days of prosperity in Mashhad. Iran, where she and her brothers grow up in luxury at the Rose Hotel, owned by her father. In the aftermath of hte 1979 revolution the family is forced to flee: first to the safety of a mansion in Tehran, next to a squalid one-room flat in London, and finally to California, where they discover they are not free from the weight of their own secrets. Caught between their parents' traditional values and their desire to embrace and American way of life, Andalibian and her brothers struggle to find peace in the wake of tragedy. In the tradition of The Kite Runner, House of Sand and Fog, and Reading Lolita in Tehran, this is a universal story of healing and rebirth. From the Trade Paperback edition.




Please, Don't Send Me Flowers


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From divorce, to coming out, to cancer, Lianne Saffer tells an honest and hilarious account of her last 15 years. In it, she describes the often-painful discovery of her own resilience and the process of learning to trust herself along the way. Lianne's engaging storytelling weaves in the themes of small-town religious family upbringing, redefining modern femininity, and navigating life's complexities. Despite the heavy topics, her fierce reflections and lessons are grounded in vulnerability and the perfect dose of humor. Lianne's story has you alternating between laughing and crying and it's a must-read for anyone who has ever considered sending someone flowers. A note from the author: I wrote this book in hopes of opening up conversation around challenges in relationships, sexuality, religion, and cancer. I wrote it to help people feel validated, seen, challenged, and heard. I wrote it because I knew nothing about what these situations really felt like until they happened to me, despite knowing that they were happening all around me. Still, nobody was talking about them. I wrote it because I wish I had read it years ago. I wrote it in hopes that somewhere within its pages, people would see a glimpse of themselves and feel less alone and less afraid. You will see your mother, your sister, your daughter, and your friends through the vulnerability in these pages. Reading this book feels like you are watching a movie unfold. It is raw and unfiltered- leaving you laughing, crying, celebrating big love, and celebrating the expanse of the human experience.




Flower Children


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'A work of stunning lyricism and intense originality' (Mary Gordon, author of Pearl). From an award-winning short story writer comes this spare, lively, moving novel, quickly embraced by critics and readers, portraying the strangely celebrated and unsupervised childhood of four hippie offspring in the 1970's and 80's. Based on the author's own upbringing, Flower Children tells the story of four children growing up in rural Pennsylvania, impossibly at odds with their surroundings. In time, as the sheltered utopia their parents have created begins to collapse, the children long for structure and restraint-and all their parents have avoided.




Garden Maker


Book Description

Much more than a how-to flower gardening book (though you will learn how to), Garden Maker is for those who want to grow beautiful things that reflect the glory and majesty of the Creator and bring a little bit of heaven down to earth. From the beginning God made a garden, so it’s no surprise if you feel closer to Him with your hands in the dirt and the sun on your back. There is something profoundly soul-satisfying about creating and cultivating beauty. If you long to experience more splendor in your life, you can grow some of your very own. Join kindred spirit Christie Purifoy as she helps you unearth the simple delights of growing garden flowers, from preparing and planning to creating beautiful bouquets and other arrangements. Lavishly photographed and lovingly written, this all-seasons guide invites you to discover the innumerable joys and wonders to be found in the flower garden.




An Act of God


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***An Act of God (previously published as The Last Testament: A Memoir) is now a major Broadway show starring Jim Parsons (The Big Bang Theory) and directed by Joe Mantello (Wicked)*** Over the course of his long and distinguished career, God has literally seen it all. And not just seen. In fact, the multitalented deity has played a pivotal role in many major events, including the Creation of the universe, the entirety of world history, and the successful transitioning of American Idol into the post–Simon Cowell era. Sometimes preachy, sometimes holier-than-thou, but always lively, An Act of God is the ultimate celebrity autobiography.




Waste


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The MacArthur grant–winning environmental justice activist’s riveting memoir of a life fighting for a cleaner future for America’s most vulnerable A Smithsonian Magazine Top Ten Best Science Book of 2020 Catherine Coleman Flowers, a 2020 MacArthur “genius,” grew up in Lowndes County, Alabama, a place that’s been called “Bloody Lowndes” because of its violent, racist history. Once the epicenter of the voting rights struggle, today it’s Ground Zero for a new movement that is also Flowers’s life’s work—a fight to ensure human dignity through a right most Americans take for granted: basic sanitation. Too many people, especially the rural poor, lack an affordable means of disposing cleanly of the waste from their toilets and, as a consequence, live amid filth. Flowers calls this America’s dirty secret. In this “powerful and moving book” (Booklist), she tells the story of systemic class, racial, and geographic prejudice that foster Third World conditions not just in Alabama, but across America, in Appalachia, Central California, coastal Florida, Alaska, the urban Midwest, and on Native American reservations in the West. In this inspiring story of the evolution of an activist, from country girl to student civil rights organizer to environmental justice champion at Bryan Stevenson’s Equal Justice Initiative, Flowers shows how sanitation is becoming too big a problem to ignore as climate change brings sewage to more backyards—not only those of poor minorities.




Firefly Lane


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From the New York Times bestselling author Kristin Hannah comes a powerful novel of love, loss, and the magic of friendship. . . . now a #1 Netflix series! In the turbulent summer of 1974, Kate Mularkey has accepted her place at the bottom of the eighth-grade social food chain. Then, to her amazement, the "coolest girl in the world" moves in across the street and wants to be her friend. Tully Hart seems to have it all---beauty, brains, ambition. On the surface they are as opposite as two people can be: Kate, doomed to be forever uncool, with a loving family who mortifies her at every turn. Tully, steeped in glamour and mystery, but with a secret that is destroying her. They make a pact to be best friends forever; by summer's end they've become TullyandKate. Inseparable. So begins Kristin Hannah's magnificent new novel. Spanning more than three decades and playing out across the ever-changing face of the Pacific Northwest, Firefly Lane is the poignant, powerful story of two women and the friendship that becomes the bulkhead of their lives. From the beginning, Tully is desperate to prove her worth to the world. Abandoned by her mother at an early age, she longs to be loved unconditionally. In the glittering, big-hair era of the eighties, she looks to men to fill the void in her soul. But in the buttoned-down nineties, it is television news that captivates her. She will follow her own blind ambition to New York and around the globe, finding fame and success . . . and loneliness. Kate knows early on that her life will be nothing special. Throughout college, she pretends to be driven by a need for success, but all she really wants is to fall in love and have children and live an ordinary life. In her own quiet way, Kate is as driven as Tully. What she doesn't know is how being a wife and mother will change her . . . how she'll lose sight of who she once was, and what she once wanted. And how much she'll envy her famous best friend. . . . For thirty years, Tully and Kate buoy each other through life, weathering the storms of friendship---jealousy, anger, hurt, resentment. They think they've survived it all until a single act of betrayal tears them apart . . . and puts their courage and friendship to the ultimate test. Firefly Lane is for anyone who ever drank Boone's Farm apple wine while listening to Abba or Fleetwood Mac. More than a coming-of-age novel, it's the story of a generation of women who were both blessed and cursed by choices. It's about promises and secrets and betrayals. And ultimately, about the one person who really, truly knows you---and knows what has the power to hurt you . . . and heal you. Firefly Lane is a story you'll never forget . . . one you'll want to pass on to your best friend.




Deciphering the Golden Flower One Secret at a Time


Book Description

Semple reveals the techniques behind "The Secret of the Golden Flower"--an extraordinary statement about the inevitability of karma and the obstacles one must overcome in the quest for self-realization.