Blog Archives
Reawaken: Finding Hope, Purpose, and Joy Through Life’s Unexpected Journey
Reawaken is Richard E. Poulin III’s account of how his family’s adventurous, carefully planned life changed after his daughter, Rylae-Ann, developed unexplained medical episodes. Poulin begins with his and his wife Judy’s multicultural childhoods, teaching careers, and years of travel before moving into the book’s central story: their search for the cause of Rylae-Ann’s symptoms. That search leads to a diagnosis of aromatic L-amino acid decarboxylase deficiency, an extraordinarily rare genetic disorder, and eventually to an experimental gene therapy trial in Taiwan. The result is part family memoir, part medical odyssey, and part caregiver field guide.
Poulin writes with an open, personable voice that suits the story well. He’s candid about fear, denial, exhaustion, financial pressure, and even the envy he felt while watching other families celebrate milestones that seemed unreachable for his daughter. His humor keeps those admissions from becoming overwhelming, whether he’s describing airport mishaps, hospital bureaucracy, or therapy sessions conducted over Rylae-Ann’s enthusiastic protests. Judy emerges as the family’s steady engine, while relatives, caregivers, educators, clinicians, and researchers gradually form the wider “Team Rylae.” That attention to collective effort gives the memoir much of its warmth.
The book is especially affecting when it concentrates on small, observable changes. Rylae-Ann sitting independently, selecting a picture in a familiar book, throwing a fork, speaking her first words, and taking a few unsteady steps carry more emotional force than broad statements about perseverance. Poulin’s background as an educator also gives the later chapters practical substance. His discussions of scaffolding, play, sleep, communication supports, and the family’s caregiver lifestyle framework show how therapy became part of ordinary routines. Brief sidebars on medicine, science, history, travel, and culture add context, though their frequency and the repetition of a few motivational ideas occasionally slow the story’s momentum.
I recommend Reawaken to parents and caregivers of children with rare diseases, disabilities, or developmental delays. They’ll recognize the difficult decisions, relentless research, improvised routines, and strange mix of grief and celebration that can shape caregiving. Educators, therapists, healthcare professionals, and rare-disease advocates will also find a useful reminder that families bring vital knowledge to clinical and educational partnerships. Above all, this is a hopeful account of a child gaining access to movement, language, learning, and a fuller life, and of a family turning that experience into advocacy for others.
Pages: 291 | ASIN : B0HB2NQP28
Everybody Lies: The History, Science, and Practice of Deception Detection
Stephen John Komorek’s Everybody Lies is an ambitious and deeply researched journey into how human beings conceal the truth and how investigators learn to find it. Komorek moves from ancient trials and the first lie-detection machines to behavioral science, intelligence work, and digital deception. What makes this broad history compelling is the personal authority behind it. His experiences in military intelligence, federal training, and private investigations give the book a grounded voice, while his curiosity about why people lie keeps the subject human.
I especially enjoyed the book’s intellectual honesty. Komorek treats microexpressions as signs of concealed emotion, not automatic proof of lying, and he explains that a polygraph measures arousal. Again and again, he returns to the importance of baselines, behavioral clusters, context, culture, corroboration, and competing explanations. That restraint gives the science real weight. The reader isn’t handed a bag of clever tricks, but a disciplined way to observe behavior without letting confidence outrun evidence.
The centerpiece is the Komorek Method, a five-phase framework built around baseline observation, interference mapping, stress sequencing, behavioral compression, and precision elicitation. It’s detailed enough to show how each phase supports the next, yet clear about the training required to apply it responsibly. I found the method most persuasive when Komorek described it as a structure for locating pressure points in an account. His insistence on graded confidence, ethical limits, and post-interview assessment makes the framework feel practical, careful, and refreshingly accountable.
The case studies give the book its strongest narrative momentum. The betrayals of Aldrich Ames, Robert Hanssen, and Ana Montes reveal how institutional trust, narrow assumptions, and scattered evidence can shelter deception for years. The later investigations, “The Billion-Dollar Lie” and “Two Places at Once,” bring the method into close focus through financial records, timelines, witness credibility, self-contradiction, and claims that expand when questioned. These chapters show that the decisive evidence is often sitting in plain sight, waiting for someone patient enough to connect it.
At nearly six hundred pages, Everybody Lies feels less like a quick guide than a complete course in disciplined inquiry. Chapter objectives, professional notes, tables, and key takeaways make that depth manageable, while Komorek’s conversational voice keeps the material connected to real people and real consequences. I finished it more observant, but also more cautious about mistaking intuition for knowledge. Everybody Lies transforms the search for truth from a gut feeling into a disciplined, humane, and remarkably powerful way of seeing.
Pages: 597 | ASIN : B0HGRC6M6Y
Acceptance is Not Surrender
Brokenness Becomes Beautiful is more than a collection of poetry and reflections; it is an intimate journey through loss, healing, self-acceptance, and the quiet courage of becoming someone new. What does the title Brokenness Becomes Beautiful mean to you personally?
To me, Brokenness Becomes Beautiful is about learning that what has been broken does not have to be hidden.
After my stroke, many parts of my life changed — my body, my speech, my confidence, and the way I saw myself. For a long time, I thought recovery meant trying to return to the person I had been before. Gradually, I began to understand that perhaps I was not meant to go back.
The title reflects that shift. Brokenness can leave scars, but those scars can also become part of something meaningful. Beauty, for me, is not about becoming perfect again. It is about accepting the fragments, carrying them with honesty, and discovering that a different life can still hold purpose, dignity, and hope.
What has living with aphasia taught you about language and communication?
Aphasia has taught me that communication is much larger than words.
Before my stroke, I rarely thought about speaking. Words simply came. After aphasia, even a simple sentence could become difficult. I might know exactly what I wanted to say but be unable to find the words to express it.
That experience has changed my perspective about communication. I have learnt that we communicate through pauses, gestures, expressions, writing, silence, patience, and simply being present with another person.
It has also taught me how important it is to give someone time. When a person with aphasia struggles to speak, it does not mean there is nothing inside. The thoughts and emotions are still there. Sometimes they simply need another way — and a little more time — to come through.
What does self-acceptance mean when someone is adjusting to changes they never chose?
Self-acceptance does not mean that I have to like everything that happened to me.
I did not choose my stroke. I did not choose aphasia, weakness, dependence, or the many changes that followed. There are still moments when I miss the person I once was and the things that once came easily.
For me, self-acceptance means no longer fighting every part of the person I have become.
It is recognising my limitations without allowing them to define my entire life. It is giving myself permission to grieve what was lost while also remaining open to what may still be possible.
Acceptance is not surrender. It is making peace with reality so that I can continue moving forward from where I am, rather than spending my life wishing I were somewhere else.
How has sharing your experience publicly affected your own understanding of recovery?
Sharing my experience has made me realise that recovery is much more complicated than I once imagined.
When I first began writing about my stroke, I was trying to make sense of what had happened to me. But when other stroke survivors, people with aphasia, caregivers, and families began responding to my words, I started to see that many of the emotions I thought were mine alone were shared by others.
Their stories have changed my understanding of recovery.
I no longer see recovery simply as getting stronger, speaking better, or reaching a particular milestone. Recovery can also mean learning to live with uncertainty, rebuilding relationships, finding confidence again, discovering purpose, and accepting that progress is rarely a straight line.
By sharing my journey publicly, I have also had to look at my own experience more deeply. Writing and speaking about what happened forced me to confront emotions I might otherwise have kept buried — grief, frustration, fear, vulnerability, and the struggle to understand who I was becoming. It also made me pay more attention to my mental and emotional well-being, not just my physical recovery.
Over time, I came to understand that healing also means learning how to live with those emotions, rather than pretending they are not there.
Writing has become a way of witnessing my recovery rather than measuring it. I can see that I am still changing, still learning, and still becoming.
Perhaps that is what recovery means to me now: not returning to who I was, but continuing to discover who I can become.
Author Links: GoodReads | X (Twitter) | Facebook | Instagram | Website | Amazon
These poems were not written to offer easy answers. They were born out of searching — through days of questioning, nights of reflection, and the slow, often difficult process of growth. In this collection, Terence explores what happens when life breaks us in quiet, unexpected ways, and how those moments of fracture can become the very places where truth, healing, and transformation begin.
Moving through themes of self-discovery, self-awareness, self-acceptance, self-love, self-healing, self-care, self-growth, and self-empowerment, Brokenness Becomes Beautiful does not turn away from pain or hide behind polished illusions. Instead, it creates a brave and compassionate space where vulnerability is honoured, honesty becomes strength, and becoming is seen as its own kind of beauty.
This is a book for anyone who has ever felt wounded, lost, or uncertain, yet continues to move forward one small step at a time. Gentle yet powerful, Brokenness Becomes Beautiful reminds readers that even in brokenness, something new and beautiful is already taking shape.
Alchemy of Adversity – How Emotional Intelligence Transforms Trauma Into Leadership Strength
Sarah Staley’s Alchemy of Adversity is a hybrid of memoir, trauma-informed leadership study, and practical guide to emotional intelligence. Drawing on the accident that killed her husband, Sean, and left her with severe injuries, Staley examines how traumatic experience can influence judgment, relationships, workplace behavior, and leadership. The book’s argument is carefully qualified: “Adversity does not automatically create strength”. Growth, she contends, emerges through the deliberate integration of experience. Its five-part structure reflects that process, progressing from personal devastation through neuroscience and emotional development to organizational practice and renewed purpose.
The memoir sections give the book its emotional authority. Staley describes the accident, hospitalization, grief, physical recovery, and responsibility of raising her young son, Eli, with directness and considerable sensory detail. Her image of the “gray world,” a period when color remained visible but had lost emotional meaning, conveys the numbing effects of trauma with unusual precision. These chapters also trace the uneven nature of recovery through therapy, gratitude, family support, work, and the gradual restoration of agency. The epilogue, which follows her relationship with Cody and the family life they build, provides a fitting conclusion to this personal narrative by showing a life broad enough to contain grief, gratitude, memory, and new love at once.
The book’s analytical center connects Staley’s experience to research on the amygdala, prefrontal cortex, memory, nervous-system regulation, post-traumatic growth, and the window of tolerance. Staley then converts those concepts into the ALCHEMY framework and the four emotional-intelligence domains of self-awareness, self-regulation, social awareness, and relationship management. Case studies involving a grieving leader named Chris, organizational crises, and Satya Nadella’s leadership at Microsoft widen the book’s scope beyond individual recovery. Reflection questions, regulation exercises, narrative-reframing practices, and the four organizational pillars of safety, trustworthiness, choice, and empowerment make the later chapters particularly useful for managers and teams. The material’s recurring formulations give it the cadence of a leadership seminar, reinforcing its main principles while occasionally slowing the narrative momentum.
Staley’s strongest contribution is her treatment of emotional intelligence as an embodied discipline shaped by both pain and practice. “Self-awareness didn’t make me perfect. It made me present,” she writes, a statement that captures the book’s practical ethic. Leadership here means remaining regulated under pressure, recognizing distress beneath performance, preserving accountability without humiliation, and creating conditions in which people retain agency. Alchemy of Adversity offers leaders, trauma survivors, coaches, and organizational-development professionals an accessible framework for understanding how personal healing can affect entire systems. Its blend of intimate testimony, research, and workplace application presents leadership as a human responsibility grounded in awareness, ethical power, and sustained relational care.
Pages: 311 | ASIN : B0GQQ32QXL
Sharing My Story
In Turning Fertile, you share your difficult journey through infertility and medical complications as you learned to listen to your body and ultimately became a mother. What made you decide to tell your infertility journey as a memoir?
I chose to write Turning Fertile as a memoir because infertility often happens in silence. During my own journey, I searched for stories that felt honest, vulnerable, and unfiltered — stories that didn’t just describe medical procedures, but the emotional weight behind them. I couldn’t find many.
I realized that if I wanted a book that spoke to the loneliness, the fear, the hope, and the small victories that shape this experience, I would have to write it myself.
Sharing my story became a way to reclaim my voice after years of feeling like my body was being spoken for by test results, scans, and protocols. I wanted women to see themselves in a narrative that doesn’t shy away from the difficult parts, but still finds strength and meaning in them.
How did you decide how much of the medical experience to share?
I included the medical details that shaped my emotional reality — not every number or chart, but the moments that changed how I understood my body.
Repeated IUIs, the unexpected IVF cycle, ovarian hyperstimulation, surgery, and the tubal pregnancy were not just medical events; they were turning points in my life. Each one carried fear, confusion, and hope, and leaving them out would have made the story incomplete.
My goal was to strike a balance: enough detail for readers to understand the physical intensity of infertility treatments, but not so much that the memoir felt like a medical textbook. I wanted readers to feel what I felt — the waiting rooms, the injections, the ultrasounds — without overwhelming them.
Who did you imagine speaking to in the “Dear Reader” passages?
Whenever I wrote “Dear Reader,” I imagined someone sitting across from me who was going through the same emotional storm — someone exhausted, scared, hopeful, and unsure of what tomorrow might bring.
I pictured a woman who had just received a difficult test result, or who was silently grieving a failed cycle, or who was trying to stay strong for her partner while feeling fragile inside.
Those passages were my way of reaching out and saying: You are not alone. I see you. I’ve been where you are.
They became the emotional heartbeat of the book — a conversation between two people who may never meet, but share a deeply human experience.
What do you hope partners, family members, and friends will learn from your experiences?
I hope they learn that infertility is not just a medical condition — it is an emotional landscape that affects every part of a person’s life.
Partners may see the procedures and medications, but they don’t always see the quiet moments of grief, the self‑doubt, or the fear of disappointing the people they love. Family members and friends may offer advice or encouragement, but sometimes what people need most is simply understanding and patience.
I hope my story helps loved ones recognize that support is not about fixing anything — it’s about showing up, listening without judgment, and respecting the emotional complexity of the journey.
If this memoir teaches anything, I hope it teaches compassion.
Author Links: GoodReads | Instagram | Amazon
Sonali carried hers like a locked diary. Then, one ordinary morning, her seven-year-old son lifted a violin to his chin, drew a single trembling note into the air — and something she had kept closed for years finally cracked open.
Turning Fertile is the story of the woman behind that note.
A girl whose ambition burned so brightly she stopped hearing her own body. A diagnosis that named years of quiet signs she’d ignored. And then the long, unmapped country of waiting — where time is no longer measured in days, but in heartbeats, held breaths, and prayers whispered in bathroom silence.
This is a book about hope that refuses to die. About the question every woman has asked in the quiet of a waiting room — why not me? — and the slow, hard-won discovery that the question itself is a form of love.
Written as an intimate conversation — Dear Reader, yes, you — it reaches straight to the woman sitting somewhere right now with her own version of that silence, and tells her the one thing she most needs to hear.
This book will not be gentle with the truth. But it will be gentle with you.
The Girl in the Polka Dot Dress
Connecting the Dots takes a new look at RFK’s murder, moving from the physical evidence inside the Ambassador Hotel pantry to theories involving a possible second gunman and a wider network of participants. How did your understanding of the case change between beginning the investigation and completing the book?
My investigation started with the firm foundation of the RFK Autopsy Report by Dr Thomas Noguchi. I was directed to it by Dr Cyril Wecht. I have great respect and admiration for brave and expert professionals such as Wecht, Noguchi and Dino Brugioni (the CIA photographic expert). Then I examined as many of RFK’s enemies and political opponents as I could find. There were many. I realized early that RFK’s assassination was due to purely domestic motives and did not involve Russians or Cubans. My attention was drawn to the KKK when I researched Thane Eugene Cesar’s political leanings. I came to the conclusion that the Girl in the Polka Dot Dress clearly was there and could not understand why the LAPD were so intent on denying and covering up her existence.
What standards did you use to decide which pieces of physical or testimonial evidence deserved the greatest weight?
The evidence that appeals to an average person’s common sense deserves the most attention. The number of bullet impacts being greater than the capacity of Sirhan’s gun is easy to understand and easy to demonstrate and cross check. Once the LAPD single gunman story is demolished other explanations become more credible. The direction of Sirhan’s shots that injured 5 people were similar and completely different to the direction of the 4 shots at RFK.
What do the newly accessible government records add to our understanding of how authorities investigated Kennedy’s assassination?
RFK’s autopsy photos, declassified in April 2025 confirmed and well illustrated what was in Noguchi’s autopsy report. Many of the FBI telex messages gave insight into actions and opinions of the FBI.
What evidence would you most like to see discovered, released, or independently reexamined, and do you believe modern forensic methods could resolve any of the remaining disputes surrounding the assassination?
It would be great to find a stash of Jamie Scott Enyart’s photos taken in the Kitchen Pantry. Unfortunately, much evidence was destroyed. Many witnesses have passed away. It would be interesting if Steve DuBois, Nina Roman or even Sirhan Sirhan (all still alive) would recognize the girl in the polka dot dress from their distant memories when shown various photographs.
If all the newsreel footage and other photographs from the ballroom could be reexamined and the girl in the polka dot dress or Sirhan’s presence detected, that would be great.
Following a January 2025 Executive Order by President Trump, the federal government began a massive release of previously classified materials.
This book sets out the facts of the case that the second gunman was Thane Eugene Cesar and that Cesar’s shots were the shots that fatally wounded RFK.
This book does not argue that Sirhan Sirhan was innocent. He was intercepted by Karl Uecker amongst others. Sirhan seriously wounded 5 people with his attempts to kill RFK.
While the book does attempt to draw out the other possible conspirators it is not dogmatic in it’s approach.
Peeling the Layers of an Onion
Crushed Azaleas gathers fragments of an international childhood into an intimate memoir about belonging, family wounds, cultural identity, music, and learning to understand the people who shaped us. The memoir unfolds through self-contained memories rather than a strictly chronological narrative. Why did that structure feel right for your story?
I chose the form of self-contained memories, or vignette-like scenes (as I refer to them in my introduction) because it was the only way to convey the beauty and power of each memory, and also the absence of a unifying theme linking these memories into a coherent whole. Longer chapters like “Roman New Year’s” and “A Monsoon Tale” present somewhat of a contrast because they portray entire worlds where festive and colorful surroundings take center stage.
Music appears throughout the memoir as an important emotional language. What has music allowed you to express or understand that words sometimes cannot?
Any answer to this question will be incomplete because you are asking me to describe a place beyond words. Toward the end of my chapter titled “Seeking a Spiritual Path,” I describe what listening to music does for me. It creates a sanctuary, a space beyond time where love received is perceived as light, a place of mystery, a home for my soul.
What was most difficult about writing honestly about people you loved while also acknowledging the pain within those relationships?
Writing this memoir has been like peeling the layers of an onion. Each layer has brought pain with it, and also a deeper insight. It has been an inward journey. Early on I decided to bare my soul to the reader and to show the beauty and pain inherent in loving relationships. In family, we are at our most loving and most vulnerable. I found resonance and affirmation in reading Thomas Moore’s “Care of the Soul” where he states “Family is a sometimes comforting, sometimes devastating, house of memory.”
After spending so much of the memoir searching for belonging, where do you believe our deepest sense of home ultimately comes from?
In answer to this question, I would like to quote a concept from Zen practice called “turning one’s light around.” It teaches that one’s true light (wisdom) isn’t waiting at the end of a long journey, it has been always at one’s own doorstep (within) if one simply stops looking outward. I lean towards this inward journey at the end of my first chapter titled Origins: “Maybe the way back home is to find the most intimate part of me, a part stretched thin by memory. A part that is beautiful, mysterious, and fragile, sustained by a love of dreams and origins.”
Author Links: GoodReads | Website
Born in Washington, D.C., and raised across Japan, the United Kingdom, Italy, and India, Moulik grew up amid constant motion—an outsider everywhere, yet belonging nowhere. Told through vivid vignettes, his memories capture the wonder of postwar cities, the rituals of diplomatic life, and the friendships that shaped a wandering childhood.
But beneath the cosmopolitan surface lies a more fragile world: a demanding father whose approval must be earned, a mother struggling with deep depression, and a boy searching for refuge in music, memory, and the cultures around him.
Evocative, intimate, and deeply reflective, Crushed Azaleas explores the quiet complexities of identity, family, and belonging—resonating with anyone who has ever lived between cultures or questioned where “home” truly lies.
Brokenness Becomes Beautiful: Inspiring Pieces of Poetry
Terence Ang’s Brokenness Becomes Beautiful is an intimate collection of poetry and personal reflection shaped by his recovery from a stroke and his experience of aphasia. Its eight chapters trace a thoughtful progression from self-discovery to self-empowerment, giving the book the feeling of a guided inner journey. Ang writes with openness about a body that has changed, words that no longer arrive easily, and the difficult work of meeting the person he’s becoming. The result is tender, candid, and deeply attentive to the small acts of courage that recovery requires.
The poems are spare and accessible, often building their meaning through images drawn from nature and everyday life. A cracked vase still holds flowers, a seed grows while hidden underground, and a tiny flame contains the possibility of transformation. Mirrors, wounds, rivers, stars, and light return throughout the collection, gathering emotional weight as the book unfolds. These familiar objects become a language for experiences that can be hard to name, allowing Ang to speak about grief, patience, self-worth, and hope with striking clarity.
Each group of poems is followed by a longer reflection that brings Ang’s lived experience into sharper focus. Here he writes plainly about frustration, vulnerability, physical limitations, and the loss of his former fluency. He also shows how writing has given him another way to listen to himself and reach other people. The contrast between the compact poems and the conversational reflections works especially well, creating a rhythm of feeling, pause, and understanding. Aphasia is part of the book’s very texture, making each act of expression feel deliberate and earned.
This is a companion for readers rebuilding a life, identity, or sense of possibility after an unexpected change. Ang’s encouragement feels personal because it grows from ongoing struggle, not distant hindsight. He understands that healing can mean taking one better step, finding one clearer word, setting one necessary boundary, or simply refusing to disappear. Brokenness Becomes Beautiful offers a warm, honest vision of wholeness as something spacious enough to include every scar. Terence Ang turns the language of brokenness into a new vocabulary for beauty, courage, and becoming.
Pages: 136 | ASIN : B0HC87NGHP
