Death Had Two Sons


Book Description

A father is forced to choose between two sons, a decision that haunts the family decades later Haim Kalinsky lies in an Israeli hospital, terminal lung cancer about to cut his life short. Across the street stands his son Daniel, unable to visit his dying father because of an excruciating decision Haim made during the Second World War. When the Nazis marched into Warsaw, Haim awaited the inevitable. After his wife was deported, the German soldiers returned, sending Haim and his two sons, Daniel and Shmuel, to one of the extermination camps. It was there that Haim was confronted with the unanswerable question by one of the camp guards as they disembarked from the trains: Which son will you choose to live? With only a moment to decide, Haim instinctively pulled Shmuel to him, condemning Daniel to die. Decades later, it is Daniel who has survived the brutality of the camps and Shmuel who has perished. Strangers to each other, Daniel faces tremendous internal conflict as he struggles to reconnect with his father in his dying days. In this haunting and powerful tale of a broken father-son relationship, we come to identify with Daniel’s long and tortuous journey back to his father.




When My Son Died... This Is My Story


Book Description

After my son Joey passed away in June of 2000, I struggled to find any books that gave me concrete ideas of how I could help myself through my grieving process. Many family members and friends gifted me books, but they all told the same story. Have faith, cherish the wonderful memories and so on. Of course all good advice, just superficial. Then a few years after my son died, I happened to be at my hairdresser's, when a woman came in. I knew her through our sons' sports. I also knew that her oldest son had also passed away after Joey. It was getting close to Christmas, so I asked her if they were planning on putting up a tree. Her answer floored me! She had two other teenaged children at home. She shared with me that after her older son died, her surviving children wanted nothing to do with Christmas, no tree, no lights, nothing! So as my heart broke for her, I began telling her how I and my family celebrated our first Christmas after Joey died, and how that became a new tradition that continues through today. After listening to my story, this mom told me that I had helped her more in the last fifteen minutes, than anyone else had up to this point. That was my light bulb moment! And the spark to write my book was ignited. In the first few chapters of my book, I do recount the day my son died, his viewing and his funeral. I also discuss the many other issues that have to be dealt with during the months afterward. Although sad, I felt that this was an important part of my grieving process. But in the chapters that follow, I describe all the positive actions we took that helped us to go on. I discuss new found hobbies, seeking professional help, medium readings, and even the many beautiful signs I feel my son sends us to let us know he is alright. So in addition to a journey filled with very specific steps I and my family took to survive, it is also a story of my spiritual journey. So if you or anyone you know has lost a child or loved one, I am confident that some idea or story in my book will help them.




Death and Taxes


Book Description

Teenage runaway slaves with superhuman powers, a Hessian giant, the most evil slave owners imaginable, and Benjamin Franklin: this story of the Revolution blends fact and fantasy in an imaginative reinterpretation of a critical time in American history.




Grief Is the Thing with Feathers


Book Description

Here he is, husband and father, scruffy romantic, a shambolic scholar--a man adrift in the wake of his wife's sudden, accidental death. And there are his two sons who like him struggle in their London apartment to face the unbearable sadness that has engulfed them. The father imagines a future of well-meaning visitors and emptiness, while the boys wander, savage and unsupervised. In this moment of violent despair they are visited by Crow--antagonist, trickster, goad, protector, therapist, and babysitter. This self-described "sentimental bird," at once wild and tender, who "finds humans dull except in grief," threatens to stay with the wounded family until they no longer need him. As weeks turn to months and the pain of loss lessens with the balm of memories, Crow's efforts are rewarded and the little unit of three begins to recover: Dad resumes his book about the poet Ted Hughes; the boys get on with it, grow up. Part novella, part polyphonic fable, part essay on grief, Max Porter's extraordinary debut combines compassion and bravura style to dazzling effect. Full of angular wit and profound truths, Grief Is the Thing with Feathers is a startlingly original and haunting debut by a significant new talent.




Life After the Death of My Son


Book Description

Shares a glimpse of the unspeakable pain, helplessness, frustration, and eventual healing that the author and his wife experienced since losing their son, offering comfort and connection to those walking similar paths. Original.




When Bad Things Happen to Good People


Book Description

Offers an inspirational and compassionate approach to understanding the problems of life, and argues that we should continue to believe in God's fairness.




Noe


Book Description

Written with clarity and grace, this memoir of an adolescent boy's four-year struggle with leukemia, his untimely death at sixteen, and the aftermath is presented from three perspectives. Using journals and recollection, Noe's father Phil Wolfson recalls the events chronologically. His son's chemotherapy journal offers a stricken teenager's private view of illness, his wrestling with such enormous stress while striving to live within the framework of "normal" expectations for adolescence. The third perspective derives from the author's realization that his intimate relationship with Noe continues after death. Channeling his son's spirit, the author writes in his place, sharing with readers a near-adult view of living with illness and losing the battle to survive it. Noe reveals the inner world of familial love and discord, Noe's own remarkable coping, and the extraordinary stress Noe's illness had on his younger brother. It describes the quest for emotional and spiritual support through therapy, contact with renowned alternative healers, and the use of the drug MDMA for enhancing relationships. With poignant descriptions of an assisted dying process, Noe moves beyond a model of bereavement to offer a reminder of love's transcendence.




The Death and Resurrection of the Beloved Son


Book Description

"The near sacrifice and miraculous restoration of a beloved son is a central but largely overlooked theme in both Judaism and Christianity. This book explores how this notion of child sacrifice constitutes an overlooked bond between the two religions."--




Censorship and Cultural Sensibility


Book Description

Debora Shuger offers a profoundly new history of early modern English censorship, one that bears centrally on issues still current: the rhetoric of ideological extremism, the use of defamation to ruin political opponents, the grounding of law in theological ethics, and the terrible fragility of public spheres. Starting from the question of why no one prior to the mid-1640s argued for free speech or a free press per se, Censorship and Cultural Sensibility surveys the texts against which Tudor-Stuart censorship aimed its biggest guns, which turn out not to be principled dissent but libels, conspiracy fantasies, and hate-speech. The book explores the laws that attempted to suppress such material, the cultural values that underwrote this regulation, and, finally, the very different framework of assumptions whose gradual adoption rendered censorship illegitimate.