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The ghost garden : inside the lives of schizophrenia's feared and forgotten / by Hannaford, Susan Doherty,1957-author.;
"A rare work of narrative non-fiction that beautifully illuminates a world most of us try not to see: the daily lives of the severely mentally ill, who are medicated, marginalized, locked away and shunned. Susan Doherty's groundbreaking book brings us a population of lost souls, ill-served by society, feared, shunted from locked wards to rooming houses to the streets to jail and back again. For the past ten years, some of the people who cycle in and out of the severely ill wards of the Douglas Institute in Montreal, have found a friend in Susan, who volunteers on the ward, and then follows her friends out into the world as they struggle to get through their days. With their full cooperation, she brings us their stories, which challenge the ways we think about people with mental illness on every page. The spine of the book is the life of Caroline Evans (not her real name), a woman in her early sixties whom Susan has known since she was a bright and sunny school girl. Caroline has given Susan complete access to her medical files and her court records; through her, we experience what living with schizophrenia over time is really like. She has been through it all, including the way the justice system treats the severely mentally ill: at one point, she believed that she could save her roommate from the devil by pouring boiling water into her ear ... Susan interleaves Caroline's story with vignettes about her other friends, human stories that reveal their hopes, their circumstances, their personalities, their humanity. She's found that if she can hang in through the first ten to fifteen minutes of every coffee date with someone in the grip of psychosis, then true communication results. Their "madness" is not otherworldly: instead it tells us something about how they're surviving their lives and what they've been through. The Ghost Garden is not only touching, but carries a cargo of compassion and empathy."-- Provided by publisher.
Subjects: Schizophrenia.; Schizophrenics.;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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What kind of paradise : a novel / by Brown, Janelle,author.;
"Growing up in an isolated cabin in Montana in the mid-1990s, Jane knows only the world that she and her father live in: the woodstove that heats their home, the vegetable garden where they try to eke out a subsistence existence, the books of nineteenth-century philosophy that her father gives her to read in lieu of going to school. Her father is elusive about their pasts, giving Jane little beyond the facts that they once lived in the Bay Area and that her mother died in a car accident, the crash propelling him to move Jane off the grid to raise her in a Waldenesque utopia. As Jane becomes a teenager she starts pushing against the boundaries of her restricted world. She begs to accompany her father on his occasional trips away from the cabin. But when Jane realizes that her devotion to her father has made her an accomplice to a horrific crime, she flees Montana to the only place she knows to look for answers about her mysterious past, and her mother's death: San Francisco. It is a city in the midst of a seismic change, where her quest to understand herself will force her to reckon with both the possibilities and the perils of the fledgling Internet, and where she will come to question everything she values"--
Subjects: Domestic fiction.; Psychological fiction.; Novels.; Crime; Family secrets; Fathers and daughters; Internet; Recluses; Secrecy; Social isolation; Teenage girls;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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A light beyond the trenches / by Hlad, Alan,author.;
By April 1916, the fervor that accompanied war's outbreak has faded. In its place is a grim reality. Throughout Germany, essentials are rationed. Hope, too, is in short supply. Anna Zeller, whose fiancé, Bruno, is fighting on the western front, works as a nurse at an overcrowded hospital in Oldenburg, trying to comfort men broken in body and spirit. But during a visit from Dr. Stalling, the director of the Red Cross Ambulance Dogs Association, she witnesses a rare spark of optimism: as a German shepherd guides a battle-blinded soldier over a garden path, Dr. Stalling is inspired with an idea--to train dogs as companions for sightless veterans. Anna convinces Dr. Stalling to let her work at his new guide dog training school. Some of the dogs that arrive are themselves veterans of war, including Nia, a German shepherd with trench-damaged paws. Anna brings the ailing Nia home and secretly tends and trains her, convinced she may yet be the perfect guide for the right soldier. In Max Benesch, a Jewish soldier blinded by chlorine gas at the front, Nia finds her person. War has taken Max's sight, his fiancée, and his hopes of being a composer. Yet despite all he's given for his country, the tide of anti-Semitism at home is rising, and Max encounters it first-hand in one of the school's trainers, who is determined to make Max fail. Still, through Anna's prompting, he rediscovers his passion for music. But as Anna discovers more about the conflict's escalating brutality--and Bruno's role in it--she realizes how impossible it will be for any of them to escape the war unscathed ...
Subjects: Historical fiction.; War fiction.; Blind; Dogs; Dogs; Guide dogs; Jewish soldiers; Man-woman relationships; Nurses; World War, 1914-1918;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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Stealing : a novel / by Verble, Margaret,author.;
"Since her mother's death, Kit Crockett has lived alone with her grief-stricken father, spending lonely days far out in the country tending the garden, fishing in a local stream, and reading Nancy Drew mysteries from the library bookmobile. One day when Kit discovers a mysterious and beautiful woman has moved in just down the road, she is intrigued. Kit and her new neighbor Bella become fast friends. Both outsiders, they take comfort in each other's company. But malice lurks near their quiet bayou and Kit suddenly finds herself at the center of tragic, fatal crime"--
Subjects: Bildungsromans.; Historical fiction.; Novels.; Female friendship; Indigenous children; Cherokee; Residential schools;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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Two wicked desserts / by Cahoon, Lynn.;
Magic Springs, Idaho, may be a small town, but Mia Malone is living an enchanted life running her own catering business and cooking school. And while she's teaching the locals culinary craft, her grandmother is teaching her witchcraft for the day she inherits the family magical spells that have been passed down for generations. Unfortunately, all that knowledge is not helping Mia or her grandmother in removing the spirit of warlock Dorian Alexander from Mia's cat Mr. Darcy. But even though Dorian hasn't yet left this earthly plane, his spells have already been transferred to his daughter Cindy's grimoire. An actress looking for her big Hollywood break, Cindy is hoping there's something in her father's bag of tricks to make her a star. But playing with magic has only resulted in a trip to Idaho where Cindy finds herself the number one suspect in the murder of a hitman whose body was found in the garden of Mia's Morsels. Now it's up to Mia to conjure up a killer before everything she's worked so hard for vanishes with a poof!
Subjects: Detective and mystery fiction.; Caterers and catering; Murder; Desserts;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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Jesus Henry Christ [videorecording] / by Abrams, Aaron.; Collette, Toni.; Lee, Dennis.; Moore, Frank,1946-; Rose, Philip,1921-2011.; Sheen, Michael.; Spevack, Jason.; Weinstein, Samantha.; Williams, Dewshane.; Entertainment One (Firm);
Music, David Torn, Simon Taufique ; editor, Joan Sobel ; director of photography, Danny Moder.Toni Collette, Michael Sheen, Jason Spevack, Samantha Weinstein, Frank Moore, Aaron Abrams, Dewshane Williams.A 10-year-old genius embarks on a search for his real father, and gets more than a few unexpected surprises along the way in the quirky sophomore feature from Fireflies in the Garden writer/director Dennis Lee. Henry James Hermin (Jason Spevack) began speaking in full sentences before he was a year old. And before he's even reached his teens, he's already in college. But the older Henry gets, the more he begins to wonder why he doesn't have a father. The son of a left-wing feminist named Patricia (Toni Collette), Henry is investigating his origins when he's kicked out of school for penning a controversial essay, and his grandfather Stan (Frank Moore) makes a shocking revelation: Henry is a test-tube baby. Upon learning that he has a half-sister named Audrey (Samantha Weinstein), and that she was conceived so that her father Dr. Slavkin O'Hara (Michael Sheen) could pen a best-seller titled "Born Gay or Made That Way?" the precocious boy decides to seek out his long-lost sibling. Later, as Henry and Audrey attempt to map out their family tree, the twisted roots make tracing their origins a formidable challenge, and a new kind of family begins to emerge.MPAA Rating: PG-13.DVD, widescreen presentation, 1.78:1, 16x9 (2.40:1) 5.1 Dolby Digital.
Subjects: Comedy films.; Dysfunctional families; Feature films.; Gifted boys; Single mothers; Test tube babies;
© c2012., Entertainment One,
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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Miss Julia happily ever after / by Ross, Ann B.,author.;
"The delightful final installment of the beloved and New York Times bsetselling Miss Julia series. Wedding fever hits Abbotsville and several of Miss Julia's friends have plans to tie the knot. But, as usual, nothing is so simple. Christy Hargrove suddenly gives up a lifelong dream and drops out of medical school to marry, Helen Stroud and Thurlow Jones decide to change their commercial arrangement into a marital one, and, to Miss Julia's consternation, Lillian, her housekeeper and closest companion, is considering a less-than-romantic offer to wed a local businessman who turns courting into a job interview. And then there's LuAnne who just wants to be married, and Janelle who doesn't. Miss Julia wants to properly celebrate each ceremony, insofar as anyone will let her. But Helen wants a private, even secretive, wedding; Christy's fiancé wants a destination wedding, and Lillian can't decide if she wants a wedding at all. In the middle of it all, a strange figure keeps showing up in town, streaking across lawns and vandalizing the gardens of Miss Julia's neighbors. Abbotsville's liveliest resident finds herself trying to solve it all---matters of the heart and petty crime alike---and once again save the day"--
Subjects: Humorous fiction.; Springer, Julia (Fictitious character); City and town life; Weddings; Vandalism;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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Your brain on art : how the arts transform us / by Magsamen, Susan,author.; Ross, Ivy,1955-author.;
Includes bibliographical references and index."Have you ever gotten chills while listening to a particularly gorgeous piece of music? Or felt a sense of calm while gazing at a painting of a serene landscape? We have experiences like those every day, but rarely stop to consider what's happening internally to cause them. In Your Brain on Art, founder of the International Arts + Mind Lab at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine Susan Magsamen and Google designer Ivy Ross explain how, by understanding how we biologically react to aesthetic experiences, we can not only heal as individuals but thrive as communities. Using the new science of neuroaesthetics, which explores our physiological reactions to art, Magsamen and Ross show us how, for instance, gardening can help a person heal from trauma or listening to a major fifth interval can snap the body out of a fight-or-flight response. Beyond enjoyment and abstraction, art can change the way we operate on a daily, practical level. And, in addition to helping each of us heal from stress, anxiety, burnout, and other malaises of modern life, neuroaesthetics can effect major change in society writ large, whether through public art murals in high-crime areas or music and dance therapy for patients experiencing neurodegenerative disorders"--
Subjects: Aesthetics; Arts;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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