Reverend Bonney Rega, a hospice chaplain and spiritual midwife, sits in vigil with people about to cross the great divide into the next level of existence. In this sacred space, her dying patients and their grieving families and friends have shared their most profound experiences.
In Everyday Miracles, she offers these true inspirational stories of departed souls who comfort their loved ones, and of angels and  spiritual guides who impart wisdom and humor. They lovingly teach and tease those who reach out to them. These soul-to-soul communications—encouraging personal transformation and a deeper understanding of the soul’s journey—illustrate the divine wit that infuses those who have passed on.
These tales of life beyond life are about ordinary people who’ve heard and seen their loved ones, inhaled their distinctive perfumes, and received information from dreams and waking visions. Rega includes her own stories in the collection, since she too has had extraordinary experiences. In Everyday Miracles, she shares remarkable stories of life after life—and sometimes life before life.

Whether we like to think about it or not, our nation’s culture is awash with negativity, incivility, insults, bickering, self-centeredness, violence, deaths, and hate groups. But there is a way to counteract these societal harms and resulting behaviors. In The Validation Plan, author James E. Pirkle, PhD, gives a thorough presentation and analysis of a plan he developed to help students find the good in each other.

Implemented in hundreds of classrooms in kindergarten through twelfth grade in many different countries, the Validation Program promotes responsible citizenship and sound character, while reinforcing academic achievement. Pirkle shows how validation can be defined as a curriculum program, an integrated language arts program, where each student is totally engaged in writing, reading, speaking, and listening. The Validation Plan outlines the positive reasons for using the program, and it details how to successfully carry it out in schools.

Pirkle describes how the Validation Program engages and connects students while building the foundations for solid character development, and he communicates how it also provides teachers with a way to build supportive and concrete relationships among all students, subsequently creating a favorable classroom climate and positive school-wide culture.

It is radiant in Leola’s kitchen. As the morning sun glows warm in the heart of her house—which is surrounded by a white picket fence—she makes her children breakfast. Happily married with many friends, Leola and her husband, Matt, are living the perfect suburban life. And they’re ready to try something new.

Leola convinces Matt to begin exploring lust-filled adventures with her, and they start going out to swingers’ clubs. They become regulars—and find that even something new and exciting can eventually turn routine. And then they meet Steve and Emma, a young couple just as interested in experimentation as they are. After their first passionate encounter, Leola comes up with what she thinks is an amazing idea. But what she cannot predict is how her fantasy will change everything about their lives.

In this erotic thriller, a suburban wife soon realizes that wanting more can be a dangerous choice as her past slowly comes back to haunt her.

Leadership is the most overanalyzed, thoroughly dissected, and utterly confused topic in business. In Leaders Open Doors, author Bill Treasurer helps lighten the leadership load by distilling that leaders are simply creators of opportunity for others. Using personal stories and anecdotes, Treasurer presents the idea of open-door leadership–that is, the responsibility that leaders have for noticing, identifying, and creating opportunities for the benefit of people, organizations, and society. Each chapter includes useful and specific tips that can immediately be put into practice.
Drawing on two decades of consulting experience, Treasurer introduces six unique opportunity doors:
the proving-ground door
the thought-shifting door
the door to a second chance
the doors you open for others
the door to personal transformation
the door to your open heart
Treasurer shows that leadership isn’t a complex and abstract concept. It’s a set of practices and ideals passed from one person to another, across organizations and generations. It is a tradition that makes people’s lives better by opening doors of opportunities for them to thrive, achieve, and lead.

Laurie Anderson believes in repeat performances, especially when it comes to marriage. Thankfully she finally got it right with her fifth husband, and is happily living on the back side of fifty in a town known for only one thing—its sins. Now she just wishes she could create a new pastime besides standing in front of a mirror and pulling her skin back so she can see her original jawline again.

Laurie is not alone. Her best friends—wacko Sally CJ, respectable Frances, and white-knight deprived Marcia—are dealing with jiggly butts, saggy breasts, and a potpourri of men with more problems than them. Sally CJ, whose thirty-four double Ds are not shrinking with age, believes sex is the magic elixir for all evils. Frances, who just ended a dead-end relationship, is approaching aging through wine and expensive face creams. Marcia, a widow who has the ability to attract guys with major character flaws, is unintentionally transforming into a nun. As the women search for their next relationship, they reflect on youthful escapades and eventually create rules to guide them through the unfamiliar territory of Internet and blind dating.

Menopausal Killer Sharks is an amusing, heartfelt tale centered around four middle-aged women who bravely face the third act of life with humor and, most importantly, each other.

Thirty-year-old Roger marks time by the gradual shifting of sunlight and shadows outside his Toronto high-rise apartment. As a freelance columnist, he makes about as much money as a twelve-year-old with a lawn-mowing business. With all his hopes riding on the novel he started eight years ago, Roger is clearly not in a hurry to do anything except dodge life’s ups and downs as much as he can.

While nurturing a crush on the cute girl at the local coffee shop, Roger notices a leaflet on the table advertising a psychic demonstration. Intrigued, he bribes three caffeine-loving buddies to accompany him to the show featuring Anya Dreamchaser, psychic extraordinaire. Anya turns out to be a fake, but the real surprise comes when Roger’s friend Karl begins displaying his own shockingly accurate psychic abilities. As the friends come to terms with what they have witnessed, they each embark on bizarre personal journeys of enlightenment that take one of them straight into a weird New Age cult and another into a confrontation with a maniacal Scottish churchman.

Crystal Balls is a comic tale about the adventures—and misadventures—of four friends who unwittingly change their lives forever after making the fateful decision to step out of their ordinary lives into an extraordinary psychic world.

A cross between Archie Bunker and Ralph Kramden, Ellie is an old-school New Yorker who has outlived his wife, his money, and his body. Angered and frustrated by his situation, he rejects all outside help (other than that of his youngest son) and sets out to prove he can still do it all by himself.

In Feet First, author Jamie Legon, Ellie’s son, narrates the humorous but cautionary tale through the minefield that is Ellie’s attempt at living alone at over ninety years of age. Incorporating facts and information about caregiving and elder issues, Jamie recalls the profound, disturbing, and enlightening experiences of caring for his father during Ellie’s last years of life. He also shares the lessons he learned along the way about loving, giving, and forgiving—even if those truths only became clear after the fact.

This memoir takes a humorous and realistic look at some of the challenges of the human condition, exploring a journey that produced feelings of guilt, fear, angst, and anger, but that, in the end, provided Jamie with a new perspective on the challenges and rewards of caring for aging parents.

It seems like only yesterday when five friends with separate dreams stood together at their graduation ceremony at Stanford, turned their tassels, and looked forward with optimism. But two decades later, Neva, Annette, Lauren, Tamara, and Heather have all experienced a reality much different than the dreams they once envisioned.

A troubled marriage and unexpected motherhood threatens to still Neva’s voice forever. Annette’s inability to conceive a child is challenging everything she knows to be true about herself. Lauren is weary from juggling her career, motherhood, and marriage. Tamara has abandoned the hope of a loving relationship in favor of an all-consuming career. But it is Heather who is in the worst trouble of all. A heartbreaking job loss sends her spiraling downward into darkness, and she attempts suicide. As she slips into a coma, the friends reunite at her bedside, forge a stronger friendship, and finally face hard truths about themselves.

In this poignant tale, the secret of each woman’s shattered dream is finally revealed, forcing each to embark on a unique journey to discover what beauty lies beyond the broken.

Teenage twins Lynx and Laurel Raven are on a mission. After being told by their grandmother that a family heirloom is missing, the twins head to their uncle’s house on the Gulf of Finland for a two-week stay, hoping to find the valuable stone tablet that their uncle supposedly snatched from her house. But when their cousin’s eccentric tutor gives Laurel a strange book to read and their aunt reveals that their ancestors were shamans, their search takes on a new sense of urgency.

The twins locate the tablet in their uncle’s office and manage to solve an ancient Finnish puzzle—which activates dormant technology and transports Laurel to Nodyynia, a world at war. As she struggles to survive, Lynx sets off to find her with the help of a Guardian shaman who is convinced Lynx is destined to destroy the Dark Shaman poised to awaken from a lengthy sleep stasis and seek revenge.

In this spellbinding fantasy, as the Guardians prepare for an invasion, a portal begins to open; it is up to Lynx to do whatever it takes to find his sister and stop an evil shaman before he destroys the universe.

James Earl Jones voicing Darth Vader in Star Wars had a set of pipes a radio news anchor in the 1970s might envy. CBS News legend Edward R. Murrow wrote in a style many radio news writers tried to copy. Their skills were honed over time. While few ever reach the stature of a Jones or Murrow, radio broadcasters rely on stations where they can develop these skills. In the seventies, one such place was WYEN-FM in Des Plaines, Illinois.

In The WYEN Experience, author Stew Cohen tells the story of this mom-and-pop radio station—106.7 on the dial—that opened in 1971 and was built on a genuine passion for radio. It flourished through the 1970s, stumbled in the early 1980s, and then sold to a new owner. He provides an insider’s look into the happenings of this station that entertained thousands with its music and announcers—including Ed Walters, the driving force behind WYEN; the lives of many of the talented broadcasters who worked here; Cohen’s personal coverage of some of the biggest stories of the time; and his interviews with some greats from the entertainment industry.

Cohen describes an era that lived with pay phones, typewriters, turntables, transistor radios, and boom boxes; in The WYEN Experience he brings to life to both the times and the radio station.

Medicine in the United States is big business. We spend 50 percent more on health care per capita than other developed countries, but a multitude of measures indicate that we are not getting health-care value for our money. In Too Big to Succeed, author Dr. Russell J. Andrews details why health care in America has become more expensive but less effective and outlines a new paradigm for health-care delivery.

Too Big to Succeed describes how American medicine is on an unsustainable course: costs are increasing while benefits are deteriorating in comparison with other developed nations. Beginning with the Hippocratic Oath and the the premedical student, Andrews traces the myriad ways in which the profit motive has infiltrated American medicine—including medical school training, current models of health-care delivery, medical professional societies, medical research, and medical drug and device development.

Presenting an insider’s look into the current crisis in health care, Andrews demonstrates that until both the physician and the patient return to the relationship that underlies medicine, physicians will not experience the joy of healing those who seek their help and patients will not appreciate that a good physician is a permanent part of their lives.

It is July of 1987, and Christof Douglas, president  of an entertainment company, which is part of a multinational conglomerate, has just arrived at his summer cottage to meet his wife, Katya, for much-needed respite when he receives two urgent messages from a Miss Kelso, who implies he knows her. But there is only one problem: Douglas has never heard of her—or so he thinks.

Douglas, who has been working incessantly ever since his daughter was killed years earlier, continues at a frenetic pace, even when he should be reconnecting with his wife. When a big deal suddenly falls through and Douglas learns that Kelso has been murdered, however, he finds himself in the midst of a homicide investigation where he soon discovers that Kelso is really his former fiancée, Maria Ladillya. When he finds out why Maria contacted him after all those years, Douglas must rely on his instincts—and fate—as he is unwittingly pulled into an illegal, international operation that exposes lies, revenge, and cover-ups.

In this espionage thriller, a broadcasting executive who is about to face loss like never before is consoled by a mysterious woman who encourages him to take a brave journey through his past, present, and future as he questions his true destiny.

It is July of 1987, and Christof Douglas, president  of an entertainment company, which is part of a multinational conglomerate, has just arrived at his summer cottage to meet his wife, Katya, for much-needed respite when he receives two urgent messages from a Miss Kelso, who implies he knows her. But there is only one problem: Douglas has never heard of her—or so he thinks.

Douglas, who has been working incessantly ever since his daughter was killed years earlier, continues at a frenetic pace, even when he should be reconnecting with his wife. When a big deal suddenly falls through and Douglas learns that Kelso has been murdered, however, he finds himself in the midst of a homicide investigation where he soon discovers that Kelso is really his former fiancée, Maria Ladillya. When he finds out why Maria contacted him after all those years, Douglas must rely on his instincts—and fate—as he is unwittingly pulled into an illegal, international operation that exposes lies, revenge, and cover-ups.

In this espionage thriller, a broadcasting executive who is about to face loss like never before is consoled by a mysterious woman who encourages him to take a brave journey through his past, present, and future as he questions his true destiny.

The moonlight sliced into the alleyway as twenty-one-year-old Kirk Miller opened his eyes and stared at the night sky. His head throbbed as the world spun gently. The cold, hard cement felt oddly soothing, but even with all the alcohol and drugs flowing through his veins, Kirk’s mind was still racing. It would be a year until he was told that those feelings were related to what professionals called a manic episode. Welcome to the world of bipolar disorder.

It is no secret that bipolar disorder is one of the most misunderstood and devastating mental disorders for the diagnosed and those who care for them. But what if there were a cure? In his compelling memoir, Miller details how he was diagnosed with the most severe form of bipolar disorder, was told he would never lead a normal life, and eventually refused to accept his fate. As he began a determined search for answers through research, educated guesses, and risks that nearly cost him his life, Miller shares how he stumbled onto a new method of treating his disorder that, remarkably, helped him achieve a full recovery.

Chaos to Cured shares the true story of one man’s courageous journey to finding a cure for bipolar disorder with the hope that everyone will one day have a second chance in life.

Nature’s School is both the intriguing story of the rise and fall of a town because of the influence of the Wabash River and a broader observation of the significant role of water in the chronicle of American history.

Peru, Indiana is usually defined by the rich circus heritage in its past, but the most significant history of the town lies in the relationship it has with the Wabash River, a story that has largely been forgotten. Nature’s School is a narrative that includes Native Americans, land speculation, the Wabash & Erie Canal, railroads, and changes in the Wabash River, weaving an absorbing tale about the settling of Peru, its destruction during the 1913 flood, and the consequences of misreading the role of humans within the natural landscape.