Rich and real, BMom is one woman's mosaic of love, life and loss, and of being found among the pieces. No one piece is a whole, yet all are precious, together a masterpiece, and each a gem. It's God restoring the shattered pieces of my life and my soul. His fingerprints are all over it. The reader will laugh and the reader will cry, and in that, we will become friends. BMom begins with my relinquishing my infant son into the hands of parents I couldn't know. It moves through the intervening years until he found me, on to our reunion, and beyond. Not only was I reunited with my son, I was reunited with myself. Interspersed are various interludes that speak of lessons learned, feelings finally understood and felt, and poetry written as part of my journey. BMom is entertaining and engaging, while occasionally making a point, to be taken or not, as the reader chooses. BMom is, above all else, a good read.

We are all still here, so our garden of memories will continue to grow. While we have lived very different lives for the past six or seven decades and seldom have the occasion to visit, we need only be together for a minute to know we are sisters who still love one another and we are still Mary's girls.

Presents oral histories and interviews of women who belong to Nation of Islam With vocal public figures such as Malcolm X, Elijah Muhammad, and Louis Farrakhan, the Nation of Islam often appears to be a male-centric religious movement, and over 60 years of scholarship have perpetuated that notion. Yet, women have been pivotal in the NOI's development, playing a major role in creating the public image that made it appealing and captivating. Women of the Nation draws on oral histories and interviews with approximately 100 women across several cities to provide an overview of women's historical contributions and their varied experiences of the NOI, including both its continuing community under Farrakhan and its offshoot into Sunni Islam under Imam W.D. Mohammed. The authors examine how women have interpreted and navigated the NOI's gender ideologies and practices, illuminating the experiences of African-American, Latina, and Native American women within the NOI and their changing roles within this patriarchal movement. The book argues that the Nation of Islam experience for women has been characterized by an expression of Islam sensitive to American cultural messages about race and gender, but also by gender and race ideals in the Islamic tradition. It offers the first exhaustive study of women's experiences in both the NOI and the W.D. Mohammed community.

Imagine beginning your life no longer than a table knife in a hospital that lacks even an incubator. Your premature body decides it has had enough, and your heart stops beating. Then a nurse breaths life back into you. Through the birthing process, a brain injury causes cerebral palsy, and normal body movements do not develop. Life is hard, and help is difficult to find. That is how Gail Johnson's life began in 1932. Her life is littered with miracles that came from decisions made by strong, passionate people. Through a combination of those decisions, surgeries, training, and perseverance, Gail has lived a full life. No Time to Quit takes you on a journey through many of the major challenges and events of her life. It shows that there truly is no time to quit.

I give all the glory to God, who helped me overcome abuse, divorce, depression, and loneliness. My story, similar to many other moms' stories, tells of how I struggled through rage, anxiety attacks, rejection, and isolation. God led me through it all to be the happy, content, and peaceful woman I am now. God helped me to forgive my ex and write this book, so that whoever reads it will be blessed.

In Dilemmas of Adulthood, Nancy Rosenberger investigates the nature of long-term resistance in a longitudinal study of more than fifty Japanese women over two decades. Between 25 and 35 years of age when first interviewed in 1993, the women represent a generation straddling the stable roles of post-war modernity and the risky but exciting possibilities of late modernity. By exploring the challenges they pose to cultural codes, Rosenberger builds a conceptual framework of long-term resistance that undergirds the struggles and successes of modern Japanese women. Her findings resonate with broader anthropological questions about how change happens in our global-local era and suggests a useful model with which to analyse ordinary lives in the late modern world. Rosenberger's analysis establishes long-term resistance as a vital type of social change in late modernity where the sway of media, global ideas, and friends vies strongly with the influence of family, school, and work. Women are at the nexus of these contradictions, dissatisfied with post-war normative roles in family, work, and leisure and yet-in Japan as elsewhere-committed to a search for self that shifts uneasily between self-actualization and selfishness. The women's rich narratives and conversations recount their ambivalent defiance of social norms and attempts to live diverse lives as acceptable adults. In an epilogue, their experiences are framed by the aftermath of the 2011 earthquake and tsunami, which is already shaping the future of their long-term resistance. Drawing on such theorists as Ortner, Ueno, the Comaroffs, Melucci, and Bourdieu, Rosenberger posits that long-term resistance is a process of tense, irregular, but insistent change that is characteristic of our era, hammered out in the in-between of local and global, past and future, the old virtues of womanhood and the new virtues of self-actualization. Her book is essential for anyone wishing to understand how Japanese women have manoeuvred their lives in the economic decline and pushed for individuation in the 1990s and 2000s.

What Is Driving Women to Drug Use is about pretreatment relapse triggers among women addicted to street drugs, prescription drugs, and alcohol. Women are affected by different pretreatment relapse triggers, contributing to repeated relapse. Dr. Richard Corker-Caulker provides insight for personal understanding into why women relapse and what you can do to help. Dr. Corker-Caulker describes women's pretreatment relapse triggers, as well as how to assess the triggers, identify, analyze, and take appropriate response to help through a qualitative therapy approach that he developed. This guide is a very useful tool to help respond to any person or love ones with addiction problems. Therapists, psychologists, doctors, drug courts, colleges, clinics, policy makers, and program managers working with addiction clients can learn how to focus treatment on pretreatment relapse triggers to prevent repeated relapse. Pretreatment relapse triggers using qualitative therapy approach for assessment, analysis, and planning intervention is a new direction in addiction treatment.

During the years of apartheid rule in South Africa, many women 'skipped' the country and fled into exile to evade harassment, detention, imprisonment and torture by state security forces. Leaving the country of their birth, many took calculated, though dangerous, risks to cross borders. Once in exile, sometimes for several decades, many experienced discrimination, danger, deprivations and the stresses associated with being a foreigner in a strange land. All lived with the distant yet distinct hope that they would one day be able to return to a liberated homeland.

In Prodigal Daughters, eighteen women tell their intensely personal stories of exile, re-imagining and reliving a past for the sake of fixing in memory narratives that would surely disappear in a country still struggling to shake off the shackles of racial inequality and oppression. Stories of being accepted or rejected in host countries, and equally stories of homecoming, read like bittersweet memories of survival, longing and intrigue. For many of these women, a life in exile enabled their growing realisation that apartheid was just one facet of oppression in the world. It connected with much broader struggles for justice and human rights.

South Africa has yet to fully appreciate the memories and records of life experienced in that `desert of exile', experiences that have helped society become what it is today.