Life, Love, and Misery


Book Description

A collection of poems and writings that apply to all parts of life, and all moods. It draws you in and makes you think about your own life. A great inspiration.




Misery Loves Company


Book Description

Don’t tell me it’s terrifying. Terrify me. Filled with grief, Jules Belleno rarely leaves the house since her husband’s death while on duty as a police officer. Other than the reviews Jules writes on her blog, she has little contact with the outside world. But one day when she ventures out to the local grocery store, Jules bumps into a fellow customer . . . and recognizes him as her favorite author, Patrick Reagan. Jules gushes and thoroughly embarrasses herself before Regan graciously talks with her. And that’s the last thing she remembers—until she wakes up in a strange room with a splitting headache. She’s been kidnapped. And what she discovers will change everything she believed about her husband’s death . . . her career . . . and her faith.




Misery and Company


Book Description

In a kind of social tour of sympathy, Candace Clark reveals that the emotional experience we call sympathy has a history, logic, and life of its own. Although sympathy may seem to be a natural, reflexive reaction, people are not born knowing when, for whom, and in what circumstances sympathy is appropriate. Rather, they learn elaborate, highly specific rules—different rules for men than for women—that guide when to feel or display sympathy, when to claim it, and how to accept it. Using extensive interviews, cultural artifacts, and "intensive eavesdropping" in public places, such as hospitals and funeral parlors, as well as analyzing charity appeals, blues lyrics, greeting cards, novels, and media reports, Clark shows that we learn culturally prescribed rules that govern our expression of sympathy. "Clark's . . . research methods [are] inventive and her glimpses of U.S. life revealing. . . . And you have to love a social scientist so respectful of Miss Manners."—Clifford Orwin, Toronto Globe and Mail "Clark offers a thought-provoking and quite interesting etiquette of sympathy according to which we ought to act in order to preserve the sympathy credits we can call on in time of need."—Virginia Quarterly Review




Misery Bear's Guide to Love & Heartbreak


Book Description

Misery Bear is the saddest, loneliest, drunkest bear in the world. Nothing ever goes his way, he hates his life and he's always one swig of whisky away from oblivion. In Misery Bear's Guide to Love & Heartbreak, the furry critter shares his photos, stories, diary entries, poems, love letters, romantic recipes and doodles... All from the paw of a chronically depressed bear who just wants someone to love.




48 Days to the Work and Life You Love


Book Description

Learn how to discover your unique talents, establish a clear focus, and then find—or create—the appropriate application for purposeful and profitable work. 48 Days to the Work and Life You Love offers plenty of smart ideas for thriving in today’s changing workforce. This revised edition also includes fresh tips on career search and resume tools, interview skills, negotiating salaries, and more. According to financial expert Dave Ramsey, “Few categories of our lives define us and grow us spiritually, emotionally, relationally, and as people. Our work is one of those defining areas. Sadly, a ‘j-o-b’ is what most people settle for. But as Dan Miller so powerfully points out in 48 Days to the Work You Love, a calling lights up your life.” As a leading vocational thinker, New York Times–bestselling author Dan Miller helps readers better understand and organize their God-given skills, personality traits, values, dreams, and passions. In turn, they’ll see clear patterns form that point them toward successful career decisions. 48 Days to the Work and Life You Love is packed with modern insight and timeless wisdom and provides a step-by-step process for creating a Life Plan and translating it into meaningful, satisfying daily work. “Dan Miller was the catalyst for me finally starting the business that I had dreamed about for years. His coaching went far beyond what would normally be expected. I will be forever indebted to him!” —Patricia Smith, former executive vice president of Wyndham International and founder of The Smith Factor




Misery


Book Description

Did you ever bring the class hamster home and have it disappear down the mouse hole? Or strike out in the last half of the ninth with the bases loaded?... Do you remember how you felt the day you came home from school and found out your mother had just thrown away your grasshopper collection when she didn't even know you were collecting grasshoppers?These, and dozens of other miserable situations like them, are here depicted in deceptively simple line drawings with psychologically sensitive captions, in warm and nostalgic terms, turning misery then into warm laughter now.




What Matters Most


Book Description

Why are we here? What is the meaning of existence? What truly matters the most in life? To even begin to answer these questions, we must start by exploring our own internal ideals, values, and beliefs. Presenting the unique perspective of respected analyst and author James Hollis, Ph.D., What Matters Most helps readers learn to appreciate (even be amazed by) events unfolding within, even as the external world creates constant struggles.




The End of Love


Book Description

Western culture has endlessly represented the ways in which love miraculously erupts in people’s lives, the mythical moment in which one knows someone is destined for us, the feverish waiting for a phone call or an email, the thrill that runs down our spine at the mere thought of him or her. Yet, a culture that has so much to say about love is virtually silent on the no less mysterious moments when we avoid falling in love, where we fall out of love, when the one who kept us awake at night now leaves us indifferent, or when we hurry away from those who excited us a few months or even a few hours before. In The End of Love, Eva Illouz documents the multifarious ways in which relationships end. She argues that if modern love was once marked by the freedom to enter sexual and emotional bonds according to one’s will and choice, contemporary love has now become characterized by practices of non-choice, the freedom to withdraw from relationships. Illouz dubs this process by which relationships fade, evaporate, dissolve, and break down “unloving.” While sociology has classically focused on the formation of social bonds, The End of Love makes a powerful case for studying why and how social bonds collapse and dissolve. Particularly striking is the role that capitalism plays in practices of non-choice and “unloving.” The unmaking of social bonds, she argues, is connected to contemporary capitalism which is characterized by practices of non-commitment and non-choice, practices that enable the quick withdrawal from a transaction and the quick realignment of prices and the breaking of loyalties. Unloving and non-choice have in turn a profound impact on society and economics as they explain why people may be having fewer children, increasingly living alone, and having less sex. The End of Love presents a profound and original analysis of the effects of capitalism and consumer culture on personal relationships and of what the dissolution of personal relationships means for capitalism.




A Little in Love


Book Description

Inspired by Victor Hugo's classic, Les Miserables, A Little in Love beautifully conveys the heartbreaking story of street girl Eponine. Paris, 1832A girl lies alone in the darkness, clutching a letter to her heart. Eponine remembers being a child: her swing and the peach tree, and the baby brother she loved. But mostly she remembers being miserable. Taught to lie and cheat, and to hate the one girl, Cosette, who might have been her friend. Now, at sixteen, the two girls meet again, and Eponine has one more chance. But what is the price of friendship--the love of a boy?




Mount Misery


Book Description

From the Laws of Mount Misery: There are no laws in psychiatry. Now, from the author of the riotous, moving, bestselling classic, The House of God, comes a lacerating and brilliant novel of doctors and patients in a psychiatric hospital. Mount Misery is a prestigious facility set in the rolling green hills of New England, its country club atmosphere maintained by generous corporate contributions. Dr. Roy Basch (hero of The House of God) is lucky enough to train there *only to discover doctors caught up in the circus of competing psychiatric theories, and patients who are often there for one main reason: they've got good insurance. From the Laws of Mount Misery: Your colleagues will hurt you more than your patients. On rounds at Mount Misery, it's not always easy for Basch to tell the patients from the doctors: Errol Cabot, the drug cowboy whose practice provides him with guinea pigs for his imaginative prescription cocktails . . . Blair Heiler, the world expert on borderlines (a diagnosis that applies to just about everybody) . . . A. K. Lowell, née Aliyah K. Lowenschteiner, whose Freudian analytic technique is so razor sharp it prohibits her from actually speaking to patients . . . And Schlomo Dove, the loony, outlandish shrink accused of having sex with a beautiful, well-to-do female patient. From the Laws of Mount Misery: Psychiatrists specialize in their defects. For Basch the practice of psychiatry soon becomes a nightmare in which psychiatrists compete with one another to find the best ways to reduce human beings to blubbering drug-addled pods, or incite them to an extreme where excessive rage is the only rational response, or tie them up in Freudian knots. And all the while, the doctors seem less interested in their patients' mental health than in a host of other things *managed care insurance money, drug company research grants and kickbacks, and their own professional advancement. From the Laws of Mount Misery: In psychiatry, first comes treatment, then comes diagnosis. What The House of God did for doctoring the body, Mount Misery does for doctoring the mind. A practicing psychiatrist, Samuel Shem brings vivid authenticity and extraordinary storytelling gifts to this long-awaited sequel, to create a novel that is laugh-out-loud hilarious, terrifying, and provocative. Filled with biting irony and a wonderful sense of the absurd, Mount Misery tells you everything you'll never learn in therapy. And it's a hell of a lot funnier.