amazing read, hard to put down. nothing different from her other one’s. her stories bring up questions…what if? … with such insite almost so share her hidden wisdom…like she has experienced it herself. her words teach as you read. so inspiring.

Between the Tides by Patti Callahan Henry

Pub. Date: June 2007

The scene of a childhood tragedy that forced her family to move, Seaboro, South Carolina, is the last place Catherine Leary wants to see again. But her father’s last wish to have his ashes scattered there, and his young colleague’s desire to write an article about him, conspire against Catherine. Hoping to stop her family’s secrets from being exposed, she travels to her once-beloved Lowcountry town-and embarks on a poignant trip into the past…a journey that might lead her into a new life of love, forgiveness, and self-discovery.

wonderful read, once you start it, you have to finish it. mind challenging, heart challenging…some hard what if’s are asked. you feel the pain, yet you yearn for the heart’s remorse and forgiveness that follows. clear insight to real life situations. amazingly powerful.

another wonderful read.  a life’s journey to find perfection…but do you forget who the real you is along the way…do other’s love and know a false you…how to find yourself again. moving, make you think kind of read.

My first book by Patti Callahan Henry…and can i just say….she had me at “hello”. I mean, she just sucked me straight through the book in about 5 hours. I couldn’t stop. A wonderfully good book about sisters and friends….a must read. It’s like i’m reading stories with wisdom built in….and she carries you through to the end with such magic.

Pub. Date: June 2009, Publisher: Penguin Group (USA)

In the small seaside town of Palmetto Beach, the Sheffield sisters – responsibly Riley, vivacious Maisy, and fun-loving Adalee – reunite to celebrate their mother’s birthday and try to save the family bookstore, which has long been a beloved gathering place in their tight-knit community. But June also marks the return of Mack Logan, who thirteen years ago was Riley’s best friend and Maisy’s teenage crush. His choice of Maisy over Riley during that pivotal summer destroyed the special closeness between the sisters, and sent their lives in very different directions.

Now Riley, a single mom who doubts any man will ever live up to the ideal Mack Logan, must work with her sisters while hiding a shattering secret about their mother. Maisy, a California designer, still blames Riley for ruining her one true love. And Adalee, a college coed, resents the family’s intrusion into her summer plans. When Mack arrives, all three sisters are forced to confront their long-held beliefs about the conflicts that tore them apart and the bonds of love and loyalty that still draw them together. Will they allow the past to define the future?

ok, so after i ran the half last month, i was a little puffed up about it. it was just so cool and an overall amazing experience. a friend from high school…mike…sent me an autographed copy of  bart yasso’s “my life on the run”. i was so excited when i got it, i had to post…..thankyou, thank you, mike.

Bart Yasso, an icon of one of the most enduringly popular recreational sports in the United States, offers a touching and humorous memoir about the rewards and challenges of running.
Recounting his adventures in locales like Antarctica, Africa, and Chitwan National Park in Nepal (where he was chased by an angry rhino), Yasso recommends the best marathons on foreign terrain and tells runners what they need to know to navigate the logistics of running in an unfamiliar country. He also offers practical guidance for beginning, intermediate, and advanced runners, such as 5-K, half marathon, and marathon training schedules, as well as advice on how to become a runner for life, ever-ready to draw joy from the sport and embrace the adventure that each race may offer.

Monday, Jul. 06, 2009

Postcard from Bismarck By Barbara Kiviat

It’s tough to find a foreclosure sign in Bismarck, N.D. Banners announcing NOW HIRING are much more common. Over at the mall, the Scheels sporting-goods store is so busy on weekends that some shoppers have sworn to go only during the week. Want to make jokes about North Dakota? Sure, the state’s got three times as many cattle as people, and a typical day in January is a balmy 20°F. But the folks who live here, unlike those in many other parts of the country, have jobs. And not only haven’t they felt the bite of the housing-market collapse, but their houses have actually inched up in value. The recession, by and large, never made it to places like Bismarck (pop. 60,000). While the local economy is hardly bulletproof, for every bit of bad news — the Bobcat plant’s summer shutdowns, say — there’s more than one bit of good. How about a metrowide unemployment rate that’s been dropping since February and at 3.7% is now less than half the national average? (See 50 authentic American experiences.) Have lunch on the back patio of Fiesta Villa on Main Avenue and watch the railroad cars packed with coal go by — and by and by — and you’ll start to understand why. Last year was a great one for energy and agriculture: corn, crude oil, coal and wheat are major state exports. The boom helped push energy outfit MDU Resources onto the FORTUNE 500 (the first North Dakota firm to make the list) and the state budget to a $1.2 billion surplus. State workers around the country are being told to sit at home without pay to trim costs; in North Dakota they’re getting 5% raises. At Justin Theel’s car dealership, a sprawling campus on Interstate 94, the Dodges may be gone — troubles at Chrysler know no state boundaries — but sales this year are still off by only about 20 vehicles. That’s a blip that dealers elsewhere would kill for. “For the most part, we’re a boring story,” says Theel. “But sometimes that’s good.” Word has spread. The state’s employment agency now fields calls from people in hard-hit cities like Phoenix and Miami who want to know how to get a job in North Dakota. Last winter, facing bleak work prospects in upstate New York, William Phillips boarded a Greyhound bus and three days later landed in Bismarck. He was shocked, he says, when the same day he applied for a job at Fireside Office Solutions, an IT-management firm, he got called in for an interview. With the city’s dearth of tech-oriented workers, the company had been looking to fill the position for six weeks. He started at 8 o’clock the next morning. Says Phillips: “There’s definitely not a lack of work.” Or shopping. On a Monday afternoon at the home-improvement store Menards, the parking lot is packed with pickups. It’s the start of construction season, after all, and with Bismarck’s population growing — not the case for North Dakota overall — there are still houses and stores to be built and remodeled. The trucks drive away with picnic tables and water heaters in their beds. Buying, though, is different from conspicuous consumption. At the string of big-box retailers north of town, a few miles before city streets fall away and the horizon takes over, shoppers leaving Kohl’s and Best Buy and Shoe Carnival are carrying bags — but not huge ones. In plenty of other places, that might be a sign of cutting back. Here in Bismarck, though, moderation is business as usual. Yes, Bismarckers like their things; it’s rare to drive down a residential block and not see at least a few boats or RVs sitting in driveways. But splurging never really took hold here as it did in much of the rest of the country. Mortgage data show that the sorts of loans that landed so many home buyers in trouble elsewhere were written at a much slower pace here (in 2004, when 18% of borrowers in the U.S. were taking out subprime loans, only 6% of those in North Dakota were). “It’s no secret that we’re a little more conservative than the rest of the country,” says John Jessen, president of Bismarck’s BlackRidge Bank. “We just haven’t taken a large jump outside of the box.” Funny how far that can get you.

by the light of a log fire and a small reading lamp, she opened the book that led her to a place called deptford. there she’d bask in magic, murder and intrigue and she wouldn’t have to think about the mess she’d made of her life. she wouldn’t worry about the people she’d stomped on or the lives she’d had a hand in ruining. most important, sitting in the half-light lost in another world, she wouldn’t have to address what she’d done and why she’d done it. she could pretend that her life to date had been one long accident and that she was better now. the ghosts that once haunted her were silenced, at least for the time being….anna mcpartlin

Apart from the Crowd by Anna McPartlin :: Synoposis :: In a little Irish town like Kenmare, there’s no need to worry whether people will discover your secrets. They already have.For Mary, that means being remembered for her tragic losses, even if she’d rather get on with her life. For her cousin Ivan, as close as a brother, the gossip is all about how his wife took the kids and ran off with her new lover. For Mary’s friend Penny, it’s an old romance that didn’t work out quite right, and a current affair with a bottle of vodka.Then Sam Sullivan rents the cottage next door to Mary, and within hours the whole town is talking about the film-star-handsome American. When Sam hurts his back while helping his new neighbor and spends the next week confined to a mattress on her floor, gossip runs rampant. But neither Kenmare nor Mary know about the secrets Sam is so successfully hiding….For Mary’s circle of friends, Sam’s arrival marks more than one change. And Mary — whose unlucky history has kept her apart from the crowd much of her life — has finally found a man with whom she feels she might truly connect. But so long as both are captive to memories they dare not reveal, the past is a barrier that will keep them forever alone. In this powerful novel, Anna McPartlin perfectly captures the drama, the emotion, and the laughter of a small Irish community, for those who fit in — and those who don’t. Apart from the Crowd mixes wit and insight to create an engrossing tale that will keep you reading to the very last page.

Belong to Me by Marisa de los Santos  :: Synopis :: Cornelia Brown, heroine of de los Santos’s bestselling Love Walked In, returns in a gracefully written if formulaic sophomore effort. Cornelia and her husband, Teo, move to suburban Philadelphia, where she finds it difficult to fit into the sorority-like atmosphere. Despite a bevy of domestic dramas (planning a family among them), Cornelia’s first-person chapters are the quietest of the three points of view. Seemingly shallow and vicious, neighbor Piper shows her kinder side as she struggles through her best friend’s fight against cancer. Though the extreme of Piper’s two-facedness isn’t convincing, her moments of sincerity invite genuine empathy. Cornelia also yields narrative time to Dev, a precocious teenager whose father is missing and whose mother develops a friendship with Cornelia. Dev’s connection to the story is initially unclear, though he does grow close to Clare, a troubled teenager with an unconventional connection to Cornelia, and a late-breaking development grounds his role more firmly. Though each story line is a good read on its own, they don’t always braid nicely, and while the predictable plot wanders into sappiness, the prose is polished and the suburban travails are familiar enough that fans of the women’s fiction and higher-brow mommy lit will relate.

The Shack by William P. Young :: Synopsis :: Mackenzie Allen Philips’ youngest daughter, Missy, has been abducted during a family vacation, and evidence that she may have been brutally murdered is found in an abandoned shack deep in the Oregon wilderness. Four years later in the midst of his Great Sadness, Mack receives a suspicious note, apparently from God, inviting him back to that shack for a weekend. Against his better judgment he arrives at the shack on a wintry afternoon and walks back into his darkest nightmare. What he finds there will change Mack’s world forever. 

Ask Again Later by Jill A. Davis :: Synopsis :: Emily has a tendency to live with one foot out the door. For her, the best thing about a family crisis is the excuse to cut and run. When her mother dramatically announces they’ve found a lump, Emily gladly takes a rain check on life to be by her mother’s side, leaving behind her career, her boyfriend, and those pesky, unanswerable questions about who she is and what she’s doing with her life. But back in her childhood bedroom, Emily realizes that she hasn’t run fast or far enough. One evening, while her mother calls everyone in her Rolodex to brief them on her medical crisis and schedule a farewell martini, Emily opens the door, quite literally, to find her past staring her in the face. How do you forge a relationship with the father who left when you were five years old? As Emily attempts to find balance on the emotional seesaw of her life, with the help of two hopeful suitors and her Park Avenue Princess sister, she takes a no-risk job as a receptionist at her father’s law firm and slowly gets to know the man she once pretended was dead.From the brainy, breezy writer who “writes like a professional comic” (The Onion) and is “hard to stop reading once you start” (USA Today) comes a laugh-out-loud tale that confirms you can recover from your parents, the bad habit of missed opportunities, and men who romance you with meat. When opportunity knocks, it’s time to stop running and start living.

Pack up the Moon by Anna McPartlin :: Synopsis :: THERE’S A BIG LIFE AHEAD OF HER. CAN SHE FIND THE COURAGE TO LIVE IT? Emma is twenty-six — pretty, intelligent, and happily living with her childhood sweetheart John in a cute little Dublin apartment. Her biggest problem is that her mother won’t stop nagging her to get married already. Emma and John feel like the perfect couple, their future alive with possibilities. But out of the blue, a tragedy throws her life into disarray — and Emma is suddenly, incomprehensibly, alone. As she emerges from grief, Emma has to find a whole new way of living, and her loyal friends rally round in an attempt to help. Clodagh, Emma’s lifelong friend, with whom she’s shared everything from mud pies to dating disasters. Anne and Richard, more-or-less happily married and debating a move to the country. Emma’s brother Noel, the young Catholic priest, finding his own faith tested even as he tries to comfort Emma. Seán, the gorgeous bad boy of a thousand one-night stands, uncomfortably aware of his and Emma’s growing connection. Witty, acerbic, and sometimes downright shocking, Emma documents the stories of her friends and her own recovery from grief with a candor that engages the reader from the very first page. With an amazing insight into the power of friendship and a wry, irreverent humor that considers no subject off-limits, talented new Irish writer Anna McPartlin tells a heartwarming story of the courage it takes to move past loss and learn to live.

Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert :: Synopsis :: Oddly but aptly titled, Eat, Pray, Love is an experience to be savored: This spiritual memoir brims with humor, grace, and scorching honesty. After a messy divorce and other personal missteps, Elizabeth Gilbert confronts the “twin goons” of depression and loneliness by traveling to three countries that she intuited had something she was seeking. First, in Italy, she seeks to master the art of pleasure by indulging her senses. Then, in an Indian ashram, she learns the rigors and liberation of mind-exalting hours of meditation. Her final destination is Bali, where she achieves a precarious, yet precious equilibrium. Gilbert’s original voice and unforced wit lend an unpretentious air to her expansive spiritual journey.

Love Walked In by Marisa de los Santos :: Synopsis :: A tribute to classic film and true romance, Love Walked In tells the story of two women – one older, one younger – and the unexpected ways in which their lives are forever changed by chance.  For thirty-one-year old Cornelia Brown, life is a series of movie moments, and “Jimmy Stewart is always and indisputably the best man in the world, unless Cary Grant should happen to show up.” So imagine Cornelia’s delight when her very own Cary Grant walks through the door of the hip Philadelphia café she manages. Handsome and debonair, Martin Grace sweeps Cornelia off her feet, becoming Cary Grant to Cornelia’s Katharine Hepburn, Clark Gable to her Joan Crawford. Meanwhile, on the other side of town, eleven-year-old Clare Hobbes must learn to fend for herself after her increasingly unstable mother has a breakdown and disappears. With no one to turn to, Clare seeks out her estranged father, and when the two of them show up at Cornelia’s café, the lives of Cornelia and Clare are changed in drastic and unexpected ways. A cinematic and heartfelt debut that pays homage to the classic Cary Grant/Katharine Hepburn romantic comedy The Philadelphia Story, Love Walked In is sure to win over critics and readers of contemporary fiction.

The Mermaid Chair by Sue Monk Kidd :: Synopsis :: A dazzling novel of passion and spirituality – the instant blockbuster bestseller from the author ofThe Secret Life of Bees Sue Monk Kidd’s phenomenal debut, The Secret Life of Bees, became a runaway bestseller that is still on the New York Times bestseller list more than two years after its paperback publication. Now, in her luminous new novel, Kidd has woven a transcendent tale that will thrill her legion of fans. Telling the story of Jessie Sullivan – a love story between a woman and a monk, a woman and her husband, and ultimately a woman and her own soul – Kidd charts a journey of awakening and self-discovery illuminated with a brilliance that only a writer of her ability could conjure.

Understanding Exposure: How to Shoot Great Photographs by Bryan Peterson :: Synopsis :: Peterson is a professional photographer, internationally known instructor, and author, living in the U.S. and France. Drawing on 30-plus years of experience taking pictures, he provides a practical guide covering “the photographic triangle”—the interrelationship between aperture, shutter speed, and film—that is at the heart of every exposure. Suitable for both novice and experienced photographers, the text is illustrated throughout with the author’s own work, accompanied by detailed explanations of how he achieved each shot. Changes from the first to the revised edition are not stated. Annotation ©2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Understanding Shutter Speed: Creative Action and Low-Light Photography Beyond 1/125 Second by Bryan Peterson :: Synopsis :: The first book in the Understanding Photography series, Understanding Exposure, was a runaway best-seller, with more than 250,000 copies sold. Now author Bryan Peterson brings his signature style to another important photography topic: shutter speed. With clear, jargon-free explanations of terms and techniques, plus compelling “before-and-after” photos that pair a mediocre image (created using the wrong shutter speed) with a great image (created using the right shutter speed), this is the definitive practical guide to mastering an often-confusing subject. Topics include freezing and implying motion, panning, zooming, exposure, Bogen Super Clamps, and rendering motion effects with Photoshop, all with helpful guidance for both digital and film formats. Great for beginners and serious amateurs, Understanding Shutter Speed is the definitive handy guide to mastering shutter speed for superb results.

The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd :: Synopsis :: Fourteen-year-old Lily Owens lost her beloved mother when she was only four—under tragic circumstances clouded by time and secrecy. She later found a fiercely protective “stand-in,” her abusive father’s outspoken housekeeper, Rosaleen. Ignoring differences in age and color—and the fact that racial hatred seethed during the summer of 1964 in rural South Carolina—these two unlikely companions set off on a seemingly aimless pilgrimage that ends at the home of a trio of eccentric bee-keeping black sisters. Lily tells her remarkable tale of longing and love in an idiom and accent heard far south of the Mason-Dixon Line, but the lessons learned during her odyssey into the world of bees and their “secret life” are universal and everlasting. In her debut novel, Sue Monk Kidd proves herself adept both at storytelling and at creating characters who are simultaneously outlandish and credible—in other words, worthy to join the ranks of such first-rate Southern stylists as Kaye Gibbons, Anne Rivers Siddons, and Ellen Gilchrist.