Read Online Book The Bridge Ladies: A Memoir by Betsy Lerner

A fifty-year-old Bridge game provides an unexpected way to cross the generational divide between a daughter and her mother. Betsy Lerner takes us on a powerfully personal literary journey, where we learn a little about Bridge and a lot about life.

After a lifetime defining herself in contrast to her mother’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” generation, Lerner finds herself back in her childhood home, not five miles from the mother she spent decades avoiding. When Roz needs help after surgery, it falls to Betsy to take care of her. She expected a week of tense civility; what she got instead were the Bridge Ladies. Impressed by their loyalty, she saw something her generation lacked. Facebook was great, but it wouldn’t deliver a pot roast.

Tentatively at first, Betsy becomes a regular at her mother’s Monday Bridge club. Through her friendships with the ladies, she is finally able to face years of misunderstandings and family tragedy, the Bridge table becoming the common ground she and Roz never had.

By turns darkly funny and deeply moving, The Bridge Ladies is the unforgettable story of a hard-won—but never-too-late—bond between mother and daughter. Read Online Book The Bridge Ladies: A Memoir by Betsy Lerner Full Free

Review :

“A searching, funny, warm memoir.” (O, the Oprah Magazine)

“A heartfelt and affecting memoir.” (Washington Post)

“A smart and colorful memoir.” (Maureen Corrigan, NPR's Fresh Air)

“In her absorbing memoir, Lerner probes marriage, career, motherhood, depression, aging, death, religion and sex, discovering that, although the Bridge Ladies’ generation differs from hers, they share common values of love and kinship. This beautifully written, bittersweet story of ladies of a certain age and era will have wide appeal.” (Publishers Weekly (starred review))

“Through the alchemy of a grand game, Betsy Lerner has woven a universal coming-of-age story for both mother and daughter. A poignant, humorous and often painful struggle through the pageantry of playing cards; a woman’s face on every one.” (Patti Smith, author of Just Kids and M Train)

“Betsy Lerner’s ladies are our ladies, our mothers, grandmothers, and aunts. Lerner takes us back to their tables, capturing a group of wonderful American women—growing older now and braving new battles—with sweetness, humor and sharp perceptiveness. This is a book with heart and feeling.” (George Hodgman, author of Bettyville)

“Lerner takes us on a journey of understanding: the card game, the women who play it, their lives and relationships. In Lerner’s beautifully observed account, Bridge becomes both a literal and figurative pathway to repairing an even more precious bond: her own relationship to her mother.” (Deborah Tannen, author of You Just Don’t Understand and You're Wearing THAT?)
“The Bridge Ladies reminded me of Tuesdays with Morrie, except it takes place on Mondays and has five Morries. Exquisitely written, in this book are portraits of five women whose like we won’t see again. I devoured it in one greedy sitting, and started re-reading as soon as I finished.” (Will Schwalbe, author of the New York Times bestseller The End of Your Life Book Club)

“This is the best book about mothers and daughters I’ve read in decades, maybe ever. It’s about mother-daughter conflict, the desire to love and be loved, aging and loss, discovery and renewal. Betsy Lerner is a beautiful, achingly honest writer, and The Bridge Ladies is at once heartbreaking and hilarious.” (Amy Chua, Yale Law Professor and author of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother and The Triple Package: How Three Unlikely Traits Explain the Rise and Fall of Cultural Groups in America)

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Read Online Book A Mother’s Reckoning: Living in the Aftermath of Tragedy by Sue Klebold

On April 20, 1999, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold walked into Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado. Over the course of minutes, they would kill twelve students and a teacher and wound twenty-four others before taking their own lives.
 
For the last sixteen years, Sue Klebold, Dylan’s mother, has lived with the indescribable grief and shame of that day. How could her child, the promising young man she had loved and raised, be responsible for such horror? And how, as his mother, had she not known something was wrong? Were there subtle signs she had missed? What, if anything, could she have done differently?
 
These are questions that Klebold has grappled with every day since the Columbine tragedy. In A Mother’s Reckoning, she chronicles with unflinching honesty her journey as a mother trying to come to terms with the incomprehensible. In the hope that the insights and understanding she has gained may help other families recognize when a child is in distress, she tells her story in full, drawing upon her personal journals, the videos and writings that Dylan left behind, and on countless interviews with mental health experts.
 
Filled with hard-won wisdom and compassion, A Mother’s Reckoning is a powerful and haunting book that sheds light on one of the most pressing issues of our time. And with fresh wounds from the recent Newtown and Charleston shootings, never has the need for understanding been more urgent.
 
All author profits from the book will be donated to research and to charitable organizations focusing on mental health issues. Read Online Book A Mother’s Reckoning: Living in the Aftermath of Tragedy by Sue Klebold Full Free

Review :

“…[U]nimaginably detailed, raw, minute-by-minute, illuminating, and just plain gripping. It's also the most extraordinary testament--to honesty, love, pain, doubt, and resilience.… This book is nothing less than a public service. I beseech you to read it.” 
– Bruce Feiller

“As people read Sue’s memoir, what they will find is that her book is honest, and her pain genuine.  Her story may be uncomfortable to read, but it will raise awareness about brain health and the importance of early identification and intervention to maintain it.  If people listen to her – to all that she has experienced, and to how this has changed her – they will be quicker to respond to depression in young people, to the suicidal thinking that can accompany it, and to the rage that can build almost unnoticed in young people when the people who truly and completely love and care for them are distracted by other challenges in life.”
—Paul Gionfriddo, President and CEO of Mental Health America
“Required reading for all parents of adolescents...soul-piercingly honest, written with bravery and intelligence... A book of nobility and importance.” –The Times
 “Reading this book as a critic is hard; reading it as a parent is devastating….I imagine snippets of my own young children in Dylan Klebold, shades of my parenting in Sue and Tom.  I suspect that many families will find their own parallels….This book’s insights are painful and necessary and its contradictions inevitable.”
—Carlos Lozada, The Washington Post
 “[Sue Klebold’s book] reads as if she had written it under oath, while trying to answer, honestly and completely, an urgent question: What could a parent have done to prevent this tragedy?…
She earns our pity, our empathy and, often, our admiration; and yet the book’s ultimate purpose is to serve as a cautionary tale, not an exoneration.”
—The New York Times Book Review
“[T]he parenting book everyone should read.”
—Parents.com
 “I believe Sue Klebold.  So will you.”
—LA Times
“At times her story is so chilling you want to turn away, but Klebold’s compassion and honesty –and realization that parents and institutions must work to discover kids’ hidden suffering-will keep you riveted.”
—People.com
“This book which can be tough to read in places is an important one. It helps us arrive at a new understanding of how Columbine happened and, in the process, may help avert other tragedies.” Rated: A.
—Entertainment Weekly


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Read Online Book The Sound of Gravel by Ruth Wariner

A riveting, deeply affecting true story of one girl’s coming-of-age in a polygamist family.

RUTH WARINER was the thirty-ninth of her father’s forty-two children. Growing up on a farm in rural Mexico, where authorities turn a blind eye to the practices of her community, Ruth lives in a ramshackle house without indoor plumbing or electricity. At church, preachers teach that God will punish the wicked by destroying the world and that women can only ascend to Heaven by entering into polygamous marriages and giving birth to as many children as possible. After Ruth’s father―the man who had been the founding prophet of the colony―is brutally murdered by his brother in a bid for church power, her mother remarries, becoming the second wife of another faithful congregant.

In need of government assistance and supplemental income, Ruth and her siblings are carted back and forth between Mexico and the United States, where Ruth’s mother collects welfare and her stepfather works a variety of odd jobs. Ruth comes to love the time she spends in the States, realizing that perhaps the community into which she was born is not the right one for her. As she begins to doubt her family’s beliefs and question her mother’s choices, she struggles to balance her fierce love for her siblings with her determination to forge a better life for herself.

Recounted from the innocent and hopeful perspective of a child, The Sound of Gravel is the remarkable memoir of one girl’s fight for peace and love. This is an intimate, gripping tale of triumph, courage, and resilience. Read Online Book The Sound of Gravel by Ruth Wariner Full Free

Review :

“The Sound of Gravel is a riveting portrayal of what it's really like to grow up in a polygamist community. Ruth Wariner's simple writing, her enduring love for her mother and siblings, and her dramatic escape make this an engrossing, deeply moving memoir.” ―Claire Bidwell Smith, author of The Rules of Inheritance and After This

“What chance does a girl have in a world where men believe that they (and they alone) are destined to be gods? This is the question Ruth Wariner bravely asks as she brings us into the hardscrabble Mormon polygamous communities of remote northern Mexico. Like a Dorothy Allison of the American West, Wariner shows us the humanity and tenacity in the people she comes from while making no apology for wanting something better for herself. Ruth Wariner has given us an unforgettable portrait of an enduring and deeply misunderstood segment of American society and a deeply moving account of her own determined pathway out.” ―Joanna Brooks, author of The Book of Mormon Girl: A Memoir of an American Faith

“A beautifully narrated story that manages to be both heartbreaking and heartwarming at the same time. Told with generosity and without self-pity, I turned each page with admiration of Ruth's resilience and strength of spirit. Powerless as she watches her misguided mother endure a life of servility to her stepfather, Ruth's love for her siblings and determination to break destructive family patterns will fill your heart with hope and triumph. I will not be forgetting this incredible memoir anytime soon.” ―Cea Sunrise Person, author of North of Normal: A Memoir of My Wilderness Childhood, My Unusual Family, and How I Survived Both

“I can’t remember a book that’s had a greater impact on me. Beautifully written, Ruth Wariner’s powerful, raw memoir will touch your heart like nothing you’ve read before. Told with unflinching honesty and a childlike innocence, Wariner takes us places―emotional and physical―few will ever experience, or even fathom. Ultimately this book is a testament to the human spirit, a tale of hope. Its stories of tragedy, abuse, trust, and dreams betrayed are more than offset by Wariner’s pure goodness: her courage, determination, wits, resilience, and ultimately, in her quest to save her beloved siblings, triumph. Jon Krakauer’s Under the Banner of Heaven is a very good book. Ruth Wariner’s The Sound of Gravel is a great book, one that will haunt and inspire you for the rest of your life. In her exquisite and powerful telling, Wariner takes us to the darkest recesses of extreme polygamist Mormonism―on a painfully real and personal level―and brings us back to the light.” ―April Christofferson, author of Trapped

“The Sound of Gravel takes us into the complex relationships of families with intransigent beliefs, religious convictions so dogmatic that harrowing consequences are forced upon their children. Ruth Wariner, this child of an isolated polygamist community, not only survives the oppression, but writes this unaffected tale of compassion and haunting sadness."” ―Sonya Lea, author of Wondering Who You Are: A Memoir

“The Sound of Gravel is a powerful indictment against religious fundamentalism and the way zealots control and harm generations of women and children. This is an important, and ultimately triumphant, story.” ―Julia Scheeres, New York Times bestselling author of Jesus Land and A Thousand Lives

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