New York in the 1960s featured the Upper West Side as a diverse community, with free July Fourth fireworks, elite performances at Lincoln Center, and reasonably priced apartments and restaurants, albeit tainted by crime that inspired one Saul Bellow character to compare the neighborhood with Sodom and Gomorrah.
Jump forward to the new millennium. While gentrification rendered those same streets safe, it also made housing too expensive for the working class and replaced dozens of pizza and barbecue favorites with fancy eateries and more sources of high-priced ice cream than anyone needs.
This is the story of that change, viewed from a one-bedroom apartment, second floor front. And while the accompanying narrative is by the tenant, the author, it connects with all those others drawn to New York to prove themselves in that most competitive of environments—in the arts, fashion, business, and sports. Over time, they saw their situations change, and their priorities, putting their city lives in jeopardy.
The View from Apartment Four presents an intimate picture of the impact of these changes on the author as he goes from being single to a married father of four, then joins those other New Yorkers forced to leave the city by taking on adult responsibilities avoided in our youth, all while pursuing his work-a-day career as a writer.
Do you ever feel like being an adult sucks? You get so caught up in grown-up stuff like forgetting to pay bills, finding socks that match, and lying about why you were late for work that you lose sight of everything that ever made you happy as a child? You give up on popping wheelies. You stop ding-dong ditching and vandalizing stuff. You don’t think spitballs or really loud farts are as funny as they used to be. And you can’t even remember the last time you threw a party at your parent’s house while they were on vacation or had sex with a seventeen-year-old girl in the back of their car. This is what happened to me, and by my 40th birthday, I was just a shell of that spry young man who left the loudest farts in the 5th grade. I was twenty-five years old when I needed to find a Goddamn job and move the fuck out so I could start paying my own goddamn bills already. At least that’s what my parents were always telling me. What my parents didn’t understand was that I was a Psychology major, and Psychology majors don’t do stuff like get good jobs or move out of their parents’ house. With a shitty college major, and not enough charm or good looks to enter the lucrative world of pharmaceutical sales like my mom and dad wanted me to, it looked like I was destined to live with my parents forever. After a lifetime of bad decisions, job after job, excessive indulgence in drugs and booze, a massive accumulation of student debt and an unwanted divorce my life is finally on the right track. I healed the damaged relationship with my father, even though he could be a real dick sometimes. I also learned how to reconnect with my inner-child. Now I am the same fun-loving, happy-go-lucky kid who used to masturbate five times a day and played with matches. I even have dental insurance and two kids who aren’t in therapy yet. My life has turned out exactly as I planned. My inspirational story of faith, hope, and redemption will change your life forever. If you don’t believe me, my 3rd cousin from Jersey didn’t read it, and he’s still on heroin. My fat boss didn’t read it either, and he’s still a dick. My nan and pap didn’t read it. Now they are both dead. This book is a must-read for anyone who wants to change their life or simply laugh at mine.
From the means streets of Baltimore to Stanford Ph.D., to Black Woman Millionaire, The Raw Truth: A Pimp’s Daughter’s Diary is a relentlessly honest and emotionally intimate account of Dr. Venus Opal Reese’s spiritual healing from a traumatic childhood to salvation and personal power. Inspiring, disturbing, and as “real” as it gets, enter a world very few survive. Ruthlessly authentic, sensually erotic, and viscerally explicit, this story is a road map to guide you, if you’re ready, from socially acceptable acts of self-hate to self-making, self-love, to ultimately self-respect.
In 1963, The Feminine Mystique was published. The second wave of Feminist goals followed from its publication.
A Manhood Doctrine discusses the origins, results, and ongoing malaise facing not only the United States, but also the majority of the Western world. The author presents the issue in three parts: societal radicalization, family history, and individual responsibility and action.
From the family story of a left-leaning son, of a single mom, to facing the future individually, the author provides a theory of self-development approach and insights from forty plus years of “failures” and more recent improvements. Derived out of Maslow’s hierarchy pyramid, the keystone habits of health and energy form the foundation and supports one’s trek to growth. Career, knowledge, finance, relationships, and legacy lead to a path of self-fulfillment. This is meant to thwart the ideological pushes of the 21st century. Men must weigh out their future interactions in a different light and assess risks therein.
Mr. Powers provides the links to the history, his intimate path trekked, for good and ill, and a better way ahead as surmised in a Self-Fulfillment model.
A Manhood Doctrine does not speak for all men. But it hopes to dent the psyche of those that wonder why this reality is not as expected from the years of social conditioning. It serves up data to buttress the argument against much of what has been taught and a way out to a better you.
Mr. Powers holds an MBA from Valparaiso University and an Industrial Engineering degree from Purdue University. He lives in West Lafayette, Indiana.
Mary Dunnewold was a yoga-practicing, organic-food-eating health geek. But six months after a clear mammogram, she was diagnosed with stage-three breast cancer. She had six tumors. The largest was the size of a summer plum.
In the next two years, she endured a bilateral mastectomy, chemotherapy, radiation, and multiple reconstruction procedures. But she soon learned that navigating cancer involves more than suffering through the treatment gauntlet. How do you walk the aisles of a small-town Target, guilty of having cancer in public, wondering who knows and who doesn’t? Where do you look when the handsome plastic surgeon kneels in front of you to measure your body fat? What etiquette applies when, during a dinner party, your chest splits open like an overripe watermelon?
In this memoir, the author moves from needing a reason to explain her troubles to finding meaning despite the randomness that afflicts us all.
Eighty years ago a young man disappeared in the Utah wilderness. A large manhunt followed, but all they turned up was his last camp and a couple burros. Pledge to the Wind, the Legend of Everett Ruess follows the adventures of Everett Ruess from his appearance in the southwest in 1931 when he was only seventeen, until his disappearance in 1934, shortly before he turned 21. Theories abound as to what may have happened to him: drowned crossing the Colorado River, bit by a rattlesnake, fell off a cliff while trying to reach a ruin, killed by an Indian who thought he was a witch, shot by a rancher, etc. There are others that believe he didn’t die at all, and that the Navajo or the Hopi are hiding him out. In this compelling narrative, Robert Louis DeMayo explores what might have happened.
This a fictionalized account of a true story – the tale of how two rough Maine woodsmen took a young Theodore Roosevelt under their wing in 1878 and introduced him to the beautiful but unforgiving woodlands of the Northeast. Under their guidance, the frail but strong-willed New Yorker becomes a worthy outdoorsman, an experience which significantly shaped the world view of the man poised to become the 26th President of the United States thirteen years later. Historical Fiction.This a fictionalized account of a true story – the tale of how two rough Maine woodsmen took a young Theodore Roosevelt under their wing in 1878 and introduced him to the beautiful but unforgiving woodlands of the Northeast. Under their guidance, the frail but strong-willed New Yorker becomes a worthy outdoorsman, an experience which significantly shaped the world view of the man poised to become the 26th President of the United States thirteen years later. Historical Fiction.
A broad picture of the Holocaust from the point of view of a child
This book is a memoir of a child who is swept into the whirlwind of the Holocaust. The epic history is narrowed down to the struggle of a single boy nicknamed Leosz to survive the war. From age 7 to age 13, he endures all the horrors that the Holocaust brings upon the Jewish people. Life hangs on split-second timing, decision-making in impossibly cruel circumstances, incredible resourcefulness, luck and the help of others, even Germans.
In the Krakow Ghetto, Leosz is saved from three mass deportations to the death camps. He escapes the ghetto, survives for several weeks pretending to be a
Polish street child, and then goes into hiding. Although sentenced to die after being caught, he is instead miraculously reunited with his family in the Plaszow labor camp. A year later, father and son become slave laborers in the Gozen 2 camp in Austria, where his father perishes. Close to death himself, Leosz is finally liberated by the American army on May 5th, 1945.
Imagine you find a chicken coop full of orphaned puppies in the middle of bone-chilling winter. You already have a house full of rescue dogs. Your resources are already at their breaking point. You know the shelter is no place for puppies. It’s a death sentence. Do you close your heart to them, and leave them for dead? Do you turn them away and deny their cries for help? Or, do you have the strength to do the right thing? What would Beth and her husband do when faced with such a life-changing decision?Standing on the edge of a slippery slope, would they save themselves, or fall head first into rescue? Would they walk away, or take the path of leashed resistance? This book is a hilarious and heartbreaking look into the life of a remarkable family that fell into canine rescue completely by accident, but now lives to protect and care for their dogs absolutely on purpose. An awe-inspiring read for anyone who loves dogs! When Robert and Beth Hading-Yostlot rescued Buddy Lee, they had no idea what they had started. How one dog would spark such compassion in them for abused and abandoned animals. But that spark turned into a blazing fire that burned brighter and hotter than they could have ever imagined. Fueled by destroyed furniture, food follies, bizarre accidents, and near death experiences, the fire spread to every corner of their lives. They experienced both the pleasure of seeing damaged dogs be healed by the courage of a loving family and the love of other amazing dogs, as well as the hardships of having to make such great sacrifices to give them what they needed to grow in strength and joy. They also experienced the triumph of watching a dog’s spirit be lit up by life, along with agony when it was extinguished by death. Beth Hading-Yostlot gives us a glimpse into their adventures, their pragmatic existence, and explains why forty-plus dogs later, they’re still living a life devoted to canine rescue and what it means to live by the Buddy System. The only thing she can’t predict, is who’s going to need their help next…
This is the #1 Best Selling, Pinnacle Award Recipient. Mister B’s jaunty calculating rhythm offers timely subject matter for adult children caring for parents and grandparents. With middle-age couched between quirky days and minutes of kindness, MISTER B’s confessions roll tide from the earliest days of aerospace engineering in Alabama through World War II and the Cold War secrecy. So, how will life unfold when a chauffeur-cook decides to move into the home of this self-centered, 98-Year-Old Rocket Scientist… will she really lend aid?
Mister B is a book that spins Americana like cotton candy. He could care less about being politically correct. That’s not Mr. B’s style. But, it seems his plan is to live forever.
For curiosity seekers of aerospace and structural science, for story lovers of the Greatest Generation and World War II, for family members caring for aging parents… Mister B is a treasure worth unearthing. Lacking education, a child of Polish immigrant parents, Joseph Byk determined to get educated and use what he learned to design flying machines. If you liked the movie, Imagine That, you’ll love this book.
How did Mister B pull himself up by his bootstraps in the 1930s and 1940s? This much is true, that the old’ man views history as his current state, telling all he can manage to repeat, while his new companions embark to redesign his dry acre into a flowering conversation piece where mushroom collecting. The unlikely companions eventually discover why they each still matter.
Joseph Byk was born in 1916, the Woonsocket, Rhode Island son of Polish immigrants. From the disadvantage of rope-tied, baggy pants poverty, Mister B becomes a man whose search for meaning defies gravity as much as his work on the 1930s new flight trainers and spacecraft do. How does he do it?
This instructive and humorous aerospace memoir, Mister B, offers biographical tender family stories, irony, and historic photographs to make a disgruntled reader furiously happy. It can be found in the grumpy old men’s section at your local bookstore…aging older men.
A terrific confessional. An unusual love story! The instructive and comedic Mister B begins as a 98-year-old rocket science distraction as a chauffeur-cook on the verge of financial ruin decides to help alleviate his loneliness. A surprising odyssey begins. After she settles in with the physicist, the old man decides to teach his new helper a few life lessons.
Born in 1916, to a Polish-speaking mother, physicist Joseph Byk began his early schooling in rope-tied-baggy-pants-poverty. He was every teachers’ dreaded student. Ending his senior year, however, he aspired to design vehicles that defy gravity. Joseph B IS the loveable, bumbling scientist portrayed in Nevil Shute’s romantic character, Mr. Honey, (Jimmy Stewart) in the movie, No Highway in the Sky.
For curiosity seekers of aerospace and structural science, how did it all start? Here is the story of a forgotten stress engineer whose philosophy, calculations, and outspoken opinions saved many lives. Being politically correct is not Mister B’s style, though Greatest Generation story lovers, World War II hounds, and family members caring for aging parents, think of Mister B as a national treasure.
