How We Got Barb Back


Book Description

Margaret Hawkins spent her girlhood dazzled by her vivacious, high-achieving sister, Barb. Younger than Barb by eleven years, Margaret saw her sister as the star of her family. And no wonder. Barb's high school years were filled with achievement inside and outside of the classroom. After college, Barb married a charming young professor, Karim Shallal, and embraced living abroad with him, when he was offered a full professorship at Basra University in Iraq. That was in 1971. In three years, everything changed. As Margaret Hawkins writes in her new book, How We Got Barb Back: The Story of My Sister's Reawakening after 30 Years of Schizophrenia, "On a promising day in 1974, my family's life blew up. That was the day my beautiful, bright, and very American older sister returned from Iraq. Something had changed during those years she was gone, and the Barb we knew never really returned. That Barb had vanished, and though her husband tried to bring her home, she was already gone." Unimaginable as it might seem, for the next 32 years Barb went undiagnosed and untreated. How We Got Barb Back recounts the story of those years and the steps Margaret Hawkins took to bring her sister back from the depths of crippling mental illness. This story of sisterly love is both full of surprises and profoundly inspiring.




After Schizophrenia


Book Description

Schizophrenia affects more than 3 million American adults. Despite being classified as a severe mental illness, a brain disease that can be treated, it remains misunderstood. Schizophrenia still carries a stigma that too often devastates and silences families. For 30 years, Margaret Hawkins' sister Barb lived cloistered in her family home in suburban Chicago, a prisoner of undiagnosed schizophrenia. Hearing voices and paralyzed with fear, she was never evaluated, never treated, and refused to leave the house. After Schizophrenia is the story of Barb's descent into severe mental illness and the healing that has come only in recent years: after her parents' death when Margaret became her guardian. With uncanny grace and humor, Margaret chronicles her family's struggle with Barb's mental illness, the love that carried them through, and the virtual army of healthcare angels willing to come to Barb's aid. This is an extraordinary story of severe mental illness and the healing that is possible with prompt diagnosis, good drugs, good care, and a fierce belief in the power to get well.




Getting Even With Fran


Book Description

Cecilia was certain that nothing could ever induce her to attend her high school reunion. Thirty years after leaving St Agnes' Ladies College, she's a successful lawyer with no interest in ever seeing her nemesis, Fran, again. But when Cecilia's husband shatters her happy world, nothing is certain for Cecilia anymore. With the false bravado accompanying the shock of her relationship breakdown, Cecilia now views the reunion as the perfect opportunity to settle old scores with the schoolgirl bully who had tormented and humiliated her. But Cecilia is not the only one confronting demons old and new. Nellie is ill, but that's not the worst of it. Kerry is determined to lose weight once and for all, while Sharon is happily sleeping with a younger man and unhappily placing her mother in a nursing home. Barbara is newly divorced and facing the dating arena after a twenty-year hiatus, and Anne is dealing with the mother-in-law from hell and a tribe of children under her feet... And then there's Fran. The women must decide if they will get along, or get even. For anyone who's ever had a friend - or an enemy - Getting Even with Fran is a warm, engaging tale of letting go of the past and finding friendship when least expected.




My Story


Book Description

THE STORY OF THE GOEBEL FAMILY IS PROBABLY NOT AN EXCEPTIONAL TALE. EVEN THOUGH, I DO NOT CONSIDER MYSELF A STORY TELLER I WILL TRY TO TELL IT. I WILL START WITH MY GRANDPARENTS. I NEVER KNEW MY MOTHER'S FATHER (MY GRANDFATHER) BECAUSE HE DIED BEFORE I WAS BORN. HE APPARENTLY WAS AN INTERESTING MAN. THE INFORMATION I HAVE ABOUT MY GRAND FATHER, I RECEIVED FROM MY GRAND MOTHER, MY MOTHER, AND MY SISTER, THEY TOLD ME MANY STORIES ABOUT HIM AFTER MY MOTHER DIED MY SISTER SENT ME NEWSPAPER CLIPPINGS, WRITTEN NOTES, PICTURES, BOOKS, BIRTH RECORDS, ETC, THAT SHE FOUND, WITH MY MOTHER'S THINGS. THIS STORY CONTAINS THE INFORMATION THAT CAME FROM THE OLD NEWSPAPERS, SOME FROM THE RECORDS AND SOME ARE THE THINGS I REMEMBER MY MOTHER TELLING ME ABOUT HIM, MY GRANDFATHER'S NAME WAS AUGUST JOHANN ANDORAS PULS VON ROHR. AS HIS NAME INDICATES, HIS FAMILY WAS OF THE PRUSSIAN NOBILITY.




Latham’s Landing II: Return to Cairn Isle


Book Description

Latham’s Landing is a cursed island mansion that dwells like a sitting spider on a long clear lake in the Northeast. Red granite stones make its skeleton. Lights form at night in its windows, though the electricity there has been off for some time. Winding out from the isle is a long narrow stone bridge that snakes to a house of glass known as The Sea Room. On some nights, The Sea Room also lights up, burning like a pyre of Hell as Cairn Isle welcomes new victims. Winds tend to come up out of nowhere, becoming tempests of lightning and rough waves in mere minutes that overturn boats with childish ease. Time passes differently there, the hours slipping away like minutes. Stories of ghosts and disappearances abound, and it is hard to say what is truth and what comes from fear. For the isle wears an unspeakable menace like a permanent cloak, and none who come close enough to see anything—and live to tell about it—ever tell all that they have seen. Until now. Frustrated that Cairn Isle has claimed another new batch of victims, retired police Chief Stahl strikes back, buying the property and flooding Cairn Isle, stopping the killings. Yet black hissing shadows and worse haunt the island shore, venturing inland. People begin to disappear. Island survivor Barb, reporter Cheer, pastor Maryanne and even the psychic Jean Bane join with Stahl in an effort to destroy the evil forces of Cairn Isle at all costs.




I Could Be Killing You


Book Description

Take a journey through a life being put to death. Ride along with a serial killer as he tells all. Come inside and explore the darker side of your soul. As you ride along with beauty and brutality, love and lust, undying friendship and the art of death itself. You will have to come inside to find out for yourself. One thing is for sure, once you walk in his shoes, you will never be the same again.




High School Life


Book Description




The Book of Barb


Book Description

For the Barb in all of us—a guidebook for the kind and tragically uncool. While few people were surprised that the Netflix series Stranger Things was a smash hit, no one expected that one of the show’s minor characters, the nerdy, faithful underdog Barb, would break the internet. But Barb resonated with us—the chill, bespectacled BFF and her unjust abandonment hit a collective nerve. It turns out, in a world of Nancys, we are all Barb. Here we celebrate TV’s most relatable, and tragic, bestie. Get Barb’s hot tips on makeup and eyewear, as well as her do’s and don’ts of party attendance. Have you ever wondered what Barb keeps in her bag (hint: Trapper Keepers and Bazooka gum) and what she would put on her dream mixtape? And find out whether or not you really are a Barb (maybe you’re actually a Nancy, a Steve, or a Jonathan) with our “Which Hawkins High student are you?” quiz. With full-color illustrations throughout, The Book of Barb brings you inspiration from the ultimate wingwoman and trendsetting style icon—Barb has style tips, quotes, and life advice straight from the Upside Down.




Just Like Someone Without Mental Illness Only More So


Book Description

More than thirty years after the publication of his acclaimed memoir The Eden Express, Mark Vonnegut continues his story in this searingly funny, iconoclastic account of coping with mental illness, finding his calling, and learning that willpower isn’t nearly enough. Here is Mark’s life childhood as the son of a struggling writer, as well as the world after Mark was released from a mental hospital. At the late age of twenty-eight and after nineteen rejections, he is finally accepted to Harvard Medical School, where he gains purpose, a life, and some control over his condition. There are the manic episodes, during which he felt burdened with saving the world, juxtaposed against the real-world responsibilities of running a pediatric practice. Ultimately a tribute to the small, daily, and positive parts of a life interrupted by bipolar disorder, Just Like Someone Without Mental Illness Only More So is a wise, unsentimental, and inspiring book that will resonate with generations of readers.




The Wine Red Road


Book Description

When is a burning vehicle at the bottom of a ravine not a traffic accident but an attempt to cover up a murder? When the vehicle involved has been pushed into the ravine and the crispy critter who was the driver of the vehicle is discovered to have a gunshot hole in her head. And why are officers of the California Highway Patrol prime suspects in the murder? Only a jilted wife really knows the answer.