Tag: memoir

Book Brief: Turning This Thing Around

Turning This Thing Around
by Keith Maginn
Genre: Nonfiction/memoir/self-help
Word count: 24,000

Turning This Thing Around is an inspiring memoir of overcoming personal struggles. This brutally honest, deeply personal account of redemption takes readers on a moving spiritual journey. Confronted with a myriad of obstacles–a debilitating arthritic disease, narcolepsy, anxiety and depression–the author was outwardly happy, but inwardly miserable.

Pushed to the lowest point of his life, Maginn shares how he gradually turned things around and used his experiences to grow as a person. Supplemented by heartfelt poetry by the author and with quotes from Gandhi to Dr. Wayne Dyer to Eckhart Tolle, Turning This Thing Around has universal themes that speak to nearly everyone, as we all must face challenges as part of being human. It is a self-help memoir of sorts: the author discusses not only what he overcame, but also how he did so–and how others can, too.

Unlike many popular memoirs on the market, this is a story that more people can relate to. Maginn was not raised in an eccentric family (Jeannette Walls in The Glass Castle, memoirs by Augusten Burroughs), nor did he travel to Italy, India and Indonesia, as Elizabeth Gilbert did in Eat, Pray, Love. Rather, Turning This Thing Around is a story of a normal young man’s resiliency when battling extraordinary circumstances.

This book is available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

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Book Brief: Stumbling Through the Dark

Stumbling Through the Dark
by Thelma Zirkelbach
Genre: Memoir
Word Count: 62,000

In October 2004 Thelma Zirkelbach’s husband was diagnosed with acute myelogenous leukemia and began a journey from which he would not return. As he fought cancer, she battled her own demons: fears of loss and loneliness and the absolute certainty she could not survive without him. But she did survive to record their final year together with all its anger, beauty and pain. An interfaith couple, their different ways of dealing with death added more tension to an already dark year; yet they stumbled along together and after his death she trudged along on her own. Early in her widowhood she discovered a Yiddish proverb that translates to, “When one must, one can.” She resolved to make that her mantra and to strive to fulfill the prediction her husband made shortly before he died: “You’ll be all right. You’ll do something good.”

This book is available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

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Book Brief: Love’s True Second Chance

Love’s True Second Chance
by Jeff Dawson
Genre: Memoir
Word count: 50,000

Join Debbie and me for the love of a lifetime. From the halls of high school, to the joys of her accepting my class ring. Journey farther through a terrible break-up and the chance encounters in college where the wounds from the past still haven’t healed.

And finally, after thirty years, a reunification that will embark on the most intense love affair I could have ever imagined and the lessons in life, I had all but forgotten.

In the end, is “true love” worth a Second Chance even if it means a tragic end? The answer is an emphatic YES!

This book is available from Amazon and Smashwords.

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Book Brief: Dog Water Free

Dog Water Free
A Memoir
by Michael Jay
Genre: Young Adult – Coming of Age
Word count: 70,000

Meet Joe Black visits The Wonder Years in the true story of Dog Water Free. It chronicles the journey of a boy named Mikee, whose coming-of-age search for emotional truth lands a dumbstruck orphan from the unlikely side of Detroit front and center before England’s Queen, America’s Maestro, and the first non-Italian Pontiff in more than 400 years.

A family saga at its core, Dog Water Free is an uplifting story of discovery that celebrates a remarkable hero in the person of an ordinary mom who is thrust into an extraordinary situation, the likes of which few could imagine.

Mikee is eleven when his world turns upside down. His mom is sharing news from her doctor. She has a year to prepare her family for her death. Her passing will leave the man she loves and the four children she cherishes alone to fend for themselves. “At least you’ll always have your dad,” she comforts.

Still on her mission fifteen months later, her focus heightens when her husband drops dead.

With that, Mikee’s improbable coming-of-age journey begins.

This book is available from Amazon, Apple iTunes, and Barnes & Noble.

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