Saturday, March 3, 2012
Friday, March 2, 2012
"This is an intense memoir/autobiography, and brutally honest, " says Jackie
The story of a woman whose gift for finding purpose in life drives her to help others change their lives even as she struggles to accept and overcome her own past, born heroin addicted to a mother in prison. Her story proves we’re more than the sum of our parts, and there’s always a chance for redemption.
Sometimes, it takes a dive over the edge to find your center. Even Tough Girls Wear Tutus is about the courage and curiosity to create an authentic life with purpose and resilience, and what it takes to hold onto this courage.
Today Deborah tours women’s prisons to plant seeds of possibility and hope for others, and little by little, fulfilling her mission to change attitudes of secrecy and shame.
Deborah Jiang Stein is a writer and public speaker who devotes her work to women, men, and children in the margins of society. Founder of the nonprofit The unPrison Project to serve women in prisons, she’s at work on another memoir, a YA novel, and a collection of short stories.
Jackie says:
"This is an intense memoir/autobiography, and brutally honest. Stein always knew she was adopted, especially since she was the only brown member of her academic and nominally Jewish family. She had great difficulty bonding with her family and was a thrill seeking (and therefore a rather naughty) child, a loner to the bone.
During one preadolescent snoop through her parent's bedroom, she discovered a letter from her mother to a lawyer asking that Deborah's birth certificate be changed to erase the fact that she had been born in a prison. Already angry and rebellious by nature, this put her into a spiral of negative behavior for the next 20 years--drug addiction and trafficking, alcoholism, thief, larceny, and more. Somehow without getting caught, always without bonding to a single person, never revealing her secret.
When she finally hits bottom after a near death experience, she finds a therapist who makes sense to her, and confronts her adoptive parents about all the secrets. She and her adoptive mother begin to bond with each other, and their relationship grows.
But Deborah still longs to know more about her birth mother. At last, the penal system cooperates and she is allowed to tour the prison where she was born, even see the room she was born in, and is given her birth mother's files. She even makes contact with several members of her biological family, including a a half brother.
The story doesn't stop there. Deborah goes on to write about, then publicly speak about, and to, women in prison, telling them how she finally overcame her past and found a way to love and life, and so can they. She has created The unPrison Project: Freedom on the Inside, a nonprofit to serve the 150,000 incarcerated women in the U.S., and the 2.3 million under age children with a parent in prison. The project advocates for education, mental and emotional wellness, and addiction rehabilitation."
During one preadolescent snoop through her parent's bedroom, she discovered a letter from her mother to a lawyer asking that Deborah's birth certificate be changed to erase the fact that she had been born in a prison. Already angry and rebellious by nature, this put her into a spiral of negative behavior for the next 20 years--drug addiction and trafficking, alcoholism, thief, larceny, and more. Somehow without getting caught, always without bonding to a single person, never revealing her secret.
When she finally hits bottom after a near death experience, she finds a therapist who makes sense to her, and confronts her adoptive parents about all the secrets. She and her adoptive mother begin to bond with each other, and their relationship grows.
But Deborah still longs to know more about her birth mother. At last, the penal system cooperates and she is allowed to tour the prison where she was born, even see the room she was born in, and is given her birth mother's files. She even makes contact with several members of her biological family, including a a half brother.
The story doesn't stop there. Deborah goes on to write about, then publicly speak about, and to, women in prison, telling them how she finally overcame her past and found a way to love and life, and so can they. She has created The unPrison Project: Freedom on the Inside, a nonprofit to serve the 150,000 incarcerated women in the U.S., and the 2.3 million under age children with a parent in prison. The project advocates for education, mental and emotional wellness, and addiction rehabilitation."
"From the minute Tess sets foot on the doomed ship, this is the kind of novel you simply cannot put down and cannot forget.”--Tatiana de Rosnay, author of Sarah's Key and A Secret Kept
Just in time for the centennial anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic comes a vivid, romantic, and relentlessly compelling historical novel about a spirited young woman who survives the disaster only to find herself embroiled in the media frenzy left in the wake of the tragedy.
Tess, an aspiring seamstress, thinks she's had an incredibly lucky break when she is hired by famous designer Lady Lucile Duff Gordon to be a personal maid on the Titanic's doomed voyage. Once on board, Tess catches the eye of two men, one a roughly-hewn but kind sailor and the other an enigmatic Chicago millionaire. But on the fourth night, disaster strikes.
Amidst the chaos and desperate urging of two very different suitors, Tess is one of the last people allowed on a lifeboat. Tess’s sailor also manages to survive unharmed, witness to Lady Duff Gordon’s questionable actions during the tragedy. Others—including the gallant Midwestern tycoon—are not so lucky.
On dry land, rumors about the survivors begin to circulate, and Lady Duff Gordon quickly becomes the subject of media scorn and later, the hearings on the Titanic. Set against a historical tragedy but told from a completely fresh angle, The Dressmaker is an atmospheric delight filled with all the period's glitz and glamour, all the raw feelings of a national tragedy and all the contradictory emotions of young love.
Read the interesting story of how this book got published HERE.
Thursday, March 1, 2012
Judy B. says this book contains "text and illustrations that are inventive and original and thought-provoking."
This looks like an ordinary box full of ordinary yarn.
But it turns out it isn’t.
Mac Barnett's personal motto, which seems to play into this book very nciely:
Judy B. says:
"This is a picture book that contains text and illustrations that are inventive and original and thought-provoking. Illustrated by Jon Klassen (I Want My Hat Back) it tells the story of a girl who knits sweaters and hats for people, and then for animals and houses and trees and all of nature. Miraculously, she never runs out of yarn as she happily transforms a colorless village into a work of art.
The story seems to say that goodness cannot be bought or stolen or ended, but always abides within each generous person."
But it turns out it isn’t.
Mac Barnett's personal motto, which seems to play into this book very nciely:
Judy B. says:
The story seems to say that goodness cannot be bought or stolen or ended, but always abides within each generous person."
The First Class at M.I.T. The Last Hope For a City in Peril
The acclaimed author of The Dante Club reinvigorates the historical thriller. Matthew Pearl’s spellbinding new novel transports readers to tumultuous nineteenth-century Boston, where the word “technology” represents a bold and frightening new concept. The fight for the future will hinge on . . .
THE TECHNOLOGISTS
Boston, 1868. The Civil War may be over but a new war has begun, one between the past and the present, tradition and technology. On a former marshy wasteland, the daring Massachusetts Institute of Technology is rising, its mission to harness science for the benefit of all and to open the doors of opportunity to everyone of merit. But in Boston Harbor a fiery cataclysm throws commerce into chaos, as ships’ instruments spin inexplicably out of control. Soon after, another mysterious catastrophe devastates the heart of the city. Is it sabotage by scientific means or Nature revolting against man’s attempt to control it?
The shocking disasters cast a pall over M.I.T. and provoke assaults from all sides—rival Harvard, labor unions, and a sensationalistic press. With their first graduation and the very survival of their groundbreaking college now in doubt, a band of the Institute’s best and brightest students secretly come together to save innocent lives and track down the truth, armed with ingenuity and their unique scientific training.
Led by “charity scholar” Marcus Mansfield, a quiet Civil War veteran and one-time machinist struggling to find his footing in rarefied Boston society, the group is rounded out by irrepressible Robert Richards, the bluest of Beacon Hill bluebloods; Edwin Hoyt, class genius; and brilliant freshman Ellen Swallow, the Institute’s lone, ostracized female student. Working against their small secret society, from within and without, are the arrayed forces of a stratified culture determined to resist change at all costs and a dark mastermind bent on the utter destruction of the city.
Studded with suspense and soaked in the rich historical atmosphere for which its author is renowned, The Technologists is a dazzling journey into a dangerous world not so very far from our own, as the America we know today begins to shimmer into being.
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