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Sisters in the Storm
Sisters in the Storm: For Moms of Mentally Ill Adult Children by Linda Hoff is a book about the author’s struggles as the mother of a son diagnosed with chronic paranoid schizophrenia. Hoff offers encouragement to other mothers facing a similar situation dealing with a mentally ill adult child, providing support, advice, and resources. In this book, the author shares the lessons she learned and insights gained from her personal journey to help other parents discover ways to cope, find acceptance, and reclaim their own lives.
This is an inspiring and informative book to read for anyone with a family member or friend who struggles with mental illness. Linda Hoff provides valuable tools to live a better, more joyful life despite the difficult battles faced. There is great comfort in knowing that we are not alone and that many others understand what we are going through. I liked that each chapter in the book began with a few lines of poetry, and each chapter ended with a visualization journey.
The inclusion of the author’s personal stories (or stories from friends or acquaintances), which were used to illustrate the author’s points, allowed me to connect with Hoff. For example, a very significant point that the author highlighted was the importance of learning to not allow her own mental health and well-being to suffer due to her child’s mental illness. My favorite chapter in the book was the one about living a joyful life with the twelve elements of hope, forgiveness, gratitude, compassion, reverence, generosity, energy and vitality, listening, laughter, love, cheerful enthusiasm, and inner peace, with actionable to-do lists and mediation exercises. I appreciated that the author gave suggestions that she learned from her specific experience and provided information about additional resources where readers can find help for their own personal situations.
One style element in the book’s formatting was to repeat sections of text like in a magazine article style. This method is effective in highlighting important points in writing. However, I felt, at times, it was overused. With so much fantastic information in this supportive book, I can understand why it was hard for the author to decide what key pieces to highlight.
Sisters in the Storm: For Moms of Mentally Ill Adult Children is a heartwarming book for mothers that take on the burden of trying to shoulder everything. It can be an overwhelming experience, and having a book like this to read and look back at gives them the knowledge they are not alone.
Pages: 422 | ASIN : B09VLHL2DG
What It Takes To Survive
University on Watch is your true story detailing the obstacles you faced in academia and how you were forced to overcome your disabilities while facing bias and ignorance from people at the university. Why was this an important book for you to write?
I fell in love when I was in college in New London with language. If I was ever going to put process the trauma and move towards healing I needed to recapture the events in the book through the very words that were so precious to me years ago.
What were some ideas that were important for you to explore in this book?
The impact of a major mental health disorder on a person’s life. Specifically, for young people alone and isolated from supports, and other vulnerable people. They needed to know what it takes to survive, and the various threatening intersections there are in the health and healing.
What is one thing you hope readers take away from your book?
Always keep in mind your behavior and the goals that you are setting out to accomplish. The behavior has a direct impact on us and the outcomes in life. Sometimes, without doing everything we can do to keep moving is all we have to hold on to in our darkest hours.
You are a Licensed Clinical Social Worker. Has your time helped others informed the development of your book?
Without the clinical language, I wouldn’t’ be convinced I had what it took to write the book. Prior to healing and becoming a social worker, I had only one lens through to see the world. Back then, I also felt a certain way about my grip on the world (shame, guilt, all of it). The point is without a whole new way of understanding the world, what else was I offering but a closed-off and a non-illuminating text.
Author Links: GoodReads | Amazon
Mr. Peters will travel across New York State, visiting friends, loved ones, and old schoolmates from his High School days at Wales. Through his journey, Jacques will undergo another transformation while contesting the admission decision to the very end, putting his health and life at risk forever.
University on Watch
![University on Watch: Crisis in the Academy (J Peters Autobiography) by [J Peters]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51aPRoWJAfL.jpg)
University on Watch: Crisis in the Academy by J Peters is a unique reading experience. It is the author’s true story of what he endured going through the world of academia and how he was forced to overcome his disabilities AND the biases and ignorance of those at the university to achieve his education goals.
It is a stunning examination of those dark things that should not be tolerated or accepted on any level, but ones we all know occur when backs are turned or no one is looking. More than that, it is the story of hope. Of how we can achieve our dreams no matter the obstacles thrown in our way. Despite the almost horrific exposure of academia’s underbelly people choose to ignore, this tell all confession is a message of inspiration for those with disabilities and mental health issues. Author J Peters wrote University On Watch after enduring a major crisis at New London University. It took ten long years for him to come to terms with what happened there. No, I won’t spoil that for you with this review. During that time he took a closer look at who he was and who he wanted to be. J Peters has since gone on to become a rhetoric scholar and, in his own words, a person living with schizophrenia.
This book is written in a straightforward manner, both open and easy to follow. J Peters pulls no punches in his recounting of his time at the university. His book is a journey of self-discovery that will engage your emotions on a deep level. If you don’t walk away questioning the how and why of this scenario you may need to go back and reread it. University on Watch is unlike anything you will read. Do yourself a favor- walk a mile in J. Peters’ shoes.
Pages: 150 | ASIN: B07NP2891M
University on Watch: Crisis in the Academy – Book Trailer
University on Watch is a story about youthful hope, yearning for more, and triumph over failures and mistakes beyond our own control and doing. The book is a native story to New York state, but couldn’t be more otherworldly, at times supernatural and grippingly suspenseful as the book unfolds. The crisis in the academy, or New London University, is one that goes to the very epicenter of higher learning and education. This crisis is also conjectured, created by the mind of Jacques Peters, a student rejected from the graduate school in English at New London University.
Jacques Peters will do everything in his power to uncover the reason for his rejection from graduate school. Meta-power, a word Jacques Peters believes is behind the root of power in the English department and the reason for his rejection becomes the point of departure for a quest into the very root of power in New London. During this quest, Jacques stops at nothing to hold university officials, department offices, and the community accountable for terminating his education prematurely.
Mr. Peters will travel across New York State, visiting friends, loved ones, and old schoolmates from his High School days at Wales. Through his journey, Jacques will undergo another transformation while contesting the admission decision to the very end, putting his health and life at risk forever.
Max Happiness
Schizophrenia is a mental illness that affects thoughts, emotions and even behavior. It’s severity is achieved gradually with symptoms that include hallucinations, altered reality and even disorganized thinking among others. Often when it is believed that the patient will be a danger to his or herself and others, they are institutionalized so the condition can be stabilized.
Max Happiness, written in first person narrative, is a series of thoughts as they run through the character’s mind. This character is schizophrenic and therefore presents many different ideas in quick succession. This presentation of thought provides insight into how people with this condition think and feel if they are misunderstood. As a person looking in from the outside, one would be compelled to quickly dispel any fantasies or notions that do not conform to reality. However, from this text it is clear that the approach used to do this matters quite a bit. The person in this book talks about how his ‘abilities’ albeit imagined have had him committed.
This book by Ali Ismail is enlightening, but not in an informational booklet kind of way. It is enlightening in that it gives the reader first hand experience of a schizophrenic’s train of thought. This is meant as an advocacy exercise for people with this condition. To raise awareness and shine a light on their plight. They really do believe the things they utter so there is need for some sensitivity when interacting with them. From the way the thoughts are structured, it is clear that this character is an otherwise sober individual.
The author has done well to introduce the character first before introducing the condition they suffer from. I think this gives the reader time to endear themselves to the character before they can start to sympathize. The author has also done a good job of making the prose so confusing and discombobulating that one feels like they are reading an anagram. The spontaneity of speech and thought is quite complicated. This provides a truly accurate picture of the patient’s thought process.
This book is a good effort towards advocacy for schizophrenia. However, it does require a bit of an edit. For example, use the right ‘there/their’ and so on. For such a short book, these little mistakes really do stand out.
Otherwise, this is worth taking the twenty minutes or so that you would need to read the contents. It is also worth the one minute it will take to recommend it to someone. It would be nice to expand it a little more to provide a more wholesome picture of the life of the character. This is just one day in the life.
Pages: 6 | ASIN: B07N2RHTW5
Darkness in the Mirror
Ondie Reid, a schizophrenic who is finally living a normal, productive life with the help of medication, finds her world once again spiraling out of control when her daughter’s father, whom she is trying to win back, begins sleeping with her younger sister. Original.
LITERARY TITAN 