From the Dust Jacket: Topsy, the little Mongolian girl, an account of whose adoption by Mildred Cable and her colleagues is given in Something Happened, has become almost as well known as the famous “Trio” themselves. This beautifully illustrated book tells all about her life and adventures. When the “Trio” first found her Topsy was quite dumb, and she still has very few words, but her smile says more than many people’s full vocabularies! Children and adults alike have loved her wherever the “Trio” have taken her, and this, the story of her life, makes one of the loveliest gift books you have ever seen.

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By the Same Author: Something Happened (1933, Frederick A. Stokes).

From the Back Cover: Bonnie, age four, along with four of her siblings, was taken from her home in rural Canada and placed with the Children’s Aid Society. Over the next fourteen years, the children are split up and reunited multiple times, always hoping to find one another again.

By luck or providence, the four sisters spend the majority of their lives together working on a tobacco farm and living in an attic, where the stovepipe offers warmth, comfort, and news from the outside world that they do not receive from their foster parents. Surviving some of the worst torments a child can know, Bonnie and her sisters depend on each other to meet even their basic needs, forming an unbreakable bond.

Bonnie Virag’s heartrending yet triumphant memoir, The Stovepipe, recounts the author’s experience growing up as a foster child in the 1940s and 1950s. In an honest, unflinching voice, Virag engrosses readers with not only the darkness that she and her siblings endured but, more important, their ability to join together to create a sense of light.

This unforgettable story is informed by Bonnie’s recollections, remembrances from her sisters, and the official records of the Children’s Aid Society in Canada. This book is not an indictment of the foster care system and its many missteps. Rather, it is a testament to the resilience of the soul and the importance of family, friendship and fortitude.

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About the Author: Bonnie Virag was born in the town of Simcoe, Ontario, Canada. In 1964, she and her husband Anthony emigrated to the United States. They reside in Michigan and have two married sons and three grandsons. She travels often to Ontario where she enjoys visiting her three sisters.

A stand for truth against slavery, a national cover up : a posthumous autobiography by the illegitimate son of blood of the twenty-ninth president, Warren Gamaliel Harding / Charles Augustus Duncan, 1920-1981.

From the Publisher: The issue of adoptees making contact with their birth parents is often a contentious one. The traditional practice of denying adoptees knowledge of their genetic parents creates a very distinct social reality for the adoptees; secrecy sets them apart as a separate category of people with suspect family membership and questionable social identity. Karen March examines how some adoptees make contact with their birth mother to manage their ambiguous social status.

In The Stranger Who Bore Me sixty adult adoptees discuss the difficulties they have encountered in a world where biological kinship governs. Each of their stories reveals the personal dilemma created by the societal demand for secrecy and the deep pain and intense joy associated with adoptees making contact with their birth mother. Karen March has created a compelling and informative analysis of this need of some adoptees.

Little research has been done on the actual outcome of adoptee-birth parent reunion and most arguments in this controversial area are based on personal anecdotal reports. This book offers the first systematic study of the consequences of reunion. As such it is an invaluable guide for any member of an adoptive triad as well as for professionals and government officials in the field of adoption.

Any adoptee, adoptive parent, or birth parent may be faced with the reality of contact. The stories told in this book will help them cope with that event and provide others with the knowledge and insight needed to understand and support those who initiated it.

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About the Author: Karen March is a member of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Carleton University.

A father for ten years, a mother for eight, and for a time in between, neither, or both (“the parental version of the schnoodle, or the cockapoo”), Jennifer Finney Boylan has seen parenthood from both sides of the gender divide. When her two children were young, Boylan came out as transgender, and as Jenny transitioned from a man to a woman and from a father to a mother, her family faced unique challenges and questions. In this thoughtful, tear-jerking, hilarious memoir, Jenny asks what it means to be a father, or a mother, and to what extent gender shades our experiences as parents. “It is my hope,” she writes, “that having a father who became a woman in turn helped my sons become better men.” Through both her own story and incredibly insightful interviews with others, including Richard Russo, Edward Albee, Ann Beattie, Augusten Burroughs, Susan Minot, Trey Ellis, Timothy Kreider, and more, Jenny examines relationships with fathers and mothers, people’s memories of the children they were and the parents they became, and the many different ways a family can be. Followed by an Afterword by Anna Quindlen that includes Jenny and her wife discussing the challenges they’ve faced and the love they share, Stuck in the Middle with You is a brilliant meditation on raising—and on being—a child.

This book is centered around adoption and the realistic aspect of the “dysfunctional family syndrome.” These very real and awkward situations can be the cause of severe consequences within the family. At some point, “family” must realize that the “big cover-up,” is not always for the “best” ... but in most cases it happens to, “save face,” from the opinion of the community, at large. All things happen for a reason...in the end, it depends on how we handle the reality of it all.

From the Dust Jacket: In the early winter morning of January 17, 1984, police responded to a 911 emergency call at a small tract house on the outskirts of Annapolis, Maryland. The caller was a strikingly handsome teenager named Larry Swartz. He was waiting for the police when they arrived, his terrified younger sister in his arms. He appeared to be in shock and told police he had awakened to find his adoptive parents murdered. He pointed to the basement. There the officers discovered a scene of carnage they could never hope to forget—in his office off the family recreation room, Bob Swartz lay dead, stabbed seventeen times. Outside, in the cold, lay the corpse of his wife Kay. Her blood stained the snow.

Larry tried to cast suspicion on his adoptive brother Michael, a troublemaker who had been kicked out of the house, but the police soon focused their attention on Larry himself. The motive remained profoundly puzzling: Why would anyone want to kill Bob and Kay Swartz, a seemingly warm, deeply religious couple—least of all one of the three children they had struggled for years to adopt? As investigators delved into Larry’s past, they discovered a heartbreaking story of a child, abandoned by his young mother, trying desperately but in vain to please each successive set of foster parents. Unloved and unsure of his own identity when the Swartzes adopted him at age six, Larry was a time bomb waiting to go off. Ironically, Bob and Kay Swartz, intelligent and well-intentioned, may have contributed to the tragic explosion of violence. The Swartzes had unusually severe notions about child discipline notions that may have crossed the boundary into abuse. What began as one more family fight erupted in a moment of sudden fury.

It is Larry Swartz’s defense lawyer, Ron Baradel, who emerges as a hero. Horrified by the crime, yet deeply moved by Larry’s tragic past, he undertook a crusade to protect society while salvaging some hope from the ruin of his young client’s life. Sudden Fury is a powerfully told story of one family gone dramatically awry and of the American justice system that had to cope with the consequences.

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About the Author: Leslie Walker covered the Swartz murders as a reporter for the Baltimore Evening Sun. A resident of Annapolis, Maryland, she has been a political reporter for the last decade. She holds a B.A. and M.A. from the University of Virginia.

From the Dust Jacket: One woman learned on the eve of her Roman Catholic wedding. One man as he was studying for the priesthood. Madeleine Albright famously learned from the Washington Post when she was named Secretary of State.

“What is it like to find out you are not who you thought you were?” asks Barbara Kessel in this compelling volume, based on interviews with over 160 people who were raised as non-Jews only to learn at some point in their lives that they are of Jewish descent.

With humor, candor, and deep emotion, Kessel’s subjects discuss the trauma of refashioning their self-image and, for many, coming to terms with deliberate deception on the part of parents and other family. In Poland and other areas of eastern Europe, for instance, many Jews adopted by Gentiles as infants to save them from the Holocaust are now learning of their heritage through the deathbed confessions of their adoptive parents.

For many, the discovery of Jewish roots confirms long-held suspicions or even, in some cases, a deep attraction toward Judaism. Crypto-Jews in the southwestern United States (descendants of Jews who fled the Spanish Inquisition) find clues to their heritage in certain practices and traditions handed down through the generations—rituals that remained mysterious until their Jewish origins came to light.

Presented in their own words, the varied responses of these disparate people to similar experience—ranging from outright rejection to wholehearted embrace—offer compelling insights into the nature of self-knowledge. Fascinating, poignant, and often very funny, Suddenly Jewish speaks to crucial issues of identity, selfhood, and spiritual community.

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About the Author: Barbara Kessel is Director of Administration of the Board of Jewish Education of Greater New York. A freelance writer of nonfiction and poetry for 25 years, her work has appeared in The New York Times, Hadassah Magazine, and Midstream.

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Compiler’s Note: See, particularly, “Adoptees” (pp. 98-114).

From the Back Cover: To read and better understand the story of the small, almost impish little orphaned boy in my book, one should first try walking in the shoes of this four-and-a-half-year-old child. Quickly one will realise the bewilderment and confusion surrounding his small yet complicated world.

As his childish years pass into boyhood and he recognises the difference between his relatively cold, loveless institutionalised way of life, and compares it with the “outsiders” caring family structure, he can easily see the affection, love and normality he is missing in life.

Notwithstanding the harsh disciplined upbringing he received in much of his juvenile years, there are still the good times, the relatively loving people charged to look after him, but above all the lasting, even lifelong friendships he found and bonded with during all of those childhood years in Dr. Barnardo’s Homes.

This then, is the story of a Dr. Barnardo boy, who was raised in the “Homes” during the Second World War and until 1950. Whether his upbringing was an ordeal or a nurtured success, the reader will decide, and of course, is free to form his or her own conclusion.

From the Publisher: On September 26, 1989, 29-year-old Dereck O’Brien was called to testify before the Royal Commission of Inquiry into the response of the Newfoundland justice system of complaints of abuse. The horror of Dereck’s revelations of physical and emotional abuse was magnified exponentially by the knowledge that those authorities responsible for his welfare had twice been made aware of his plight, and had ignored his pleas for help. Determined to purge himself of his unhappy childhood memories and hoping to prevent similar abuse of today’s children, O’Brien began to write his story. Told in his own simple and compelling words, Suffer Little Children poses the haunting question, why? First banned by the Department of Justice in Newfoundland, t! his book went on to become a Canadian bestseller.

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About the Author: Dereck O’Brien was born in St. John’s, Newfoundland in 1959 to teenage parents. In 1964, the Department of Child Welfare removed Dereck and his brothers from their home, citing parental neglect as the reason. Dereck spent the next twelve years as a ward of the department, residing in a series of court-appointed residences. in several of these residences he suffered, and was witness to, horrific abuse by his caretakers.

In 1982, he married Dale Decker and, at last, found the family love he’d never known. The couple have two children, Sabrina, age six, and Brittany, age two.

From the Dust Jacket: On the death of their mother, the three little girls—at ages five, six, and almost eight—are taken from their father to become wards of the state.

With the cardboard suitcases given them by the social worker, they are moved from Catholic home to orphanage to foster homes, waiting for their father to come and claim them. But they realize at last this will not happen, and the hope that had sustained them turns to grief and anger.

Betty, the oldest, is their uncomplaining leader. Carolyn is the youngest, tiny and doll-like Anne is the middle sister, striking out whenever she thinks that she or the others have been wronged. It is Anne who tells the story.

The suitcases are the anchors in their lives. Anne keeps in hers a collapsed balloon, some marbles, a walnut, and a carefully folded picture of a Sonja Henie doll. These are her possessions and her treasures.

As they are moved about, they encounter a strangely religious woman with a murderous son; a farm family that needs the foster care money (and someone to help pick cotton); a kind black woman who understands when Anne does not; and a family that takes them for only a week, until other arrangements can be made. That week becomes the rest of their lives.

Their father reappears briefly in the course of the story, once in life and again in death, but their questions remain unanswered.

The story moves in time, not distance, from the Depression through the 1940 war years, into and beyond the 1960s. The locale is the North Carolina Piedmont and later the mountains of the Blue Ridge. It is in those mountains that Anne, now a young woman, sheds her grief for what once was and learns to accept what is.

Charles Kuralt, who had a role in the story unknown to him at the time, read The Suitcases manuscript when it was first completed. He found it very moving, and he has written the foreword.

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About the Author: Having lived the orphan life described in The Suitcases, her home and family count most with Anne Hall Whitt. Raising her two sons has been her first concern, but with time available for volunteer work at Johns Hopkins Hospital, where her husband was an administrator. She has also been a volunteer at Sidwell Friends Quaker School in Washington where the boys were enrolled, and at their later school. Now that they are grown, she can disappear into the gardening and needlework she loves. She can also speak out, as she does in The Suitcases and will do in other writings, on the injustices done to children, who have so little defense against these wrongs.

From the Dust Jacket: Time to tune into “The Jack Benny Show”! From 1934 to 1965—on radio, and later TV—millions of Americans kept that date with Jack: and it always left them laughing.

This sparkling memoir is the story of Jack’s life, told both in his own inimitable words and in the nostalgic reminiscences of his daughter, Joan. Using never-before-seen material from Jack’s unfinished autobiography, SUNDAY NIGHTS AT SEVEN is packed with classic Benny comedy routines and entertaining anecdotes about everyone from Cary Grant to Marilyn Monroe to Harry Truman. The book reveals the real Jack Benny, tells what it was like to grow up as his daughter, and paints a glittering portrait of Hollywood during its heyday and the Golden Ages of radio and television.

Most of all, it’s having Jack in your home once again—this time, talking about his own life. Let him take you back to the good old days of vaudeville when, as a struggling violin-with-joke act, he first met the Marx Brothers. “They closed the show because nobody could follow them.”

Listen as he tells you about his audacious 1934 radio debut when “Jell-O, folks, this is Jack Benny” was heard on the NBC Blue network. His sponsors went into shock, but listeners bought Jell-O in record numbers, and Jack’s star—and style—was born.

Sunday Nights at Seven bangs back the Jack Benny we remember so well: the deadpan, irascible cheapskate who played the violin (to everyone’s dismay), insisted he was thirty-nine (to everyone’s consternation), and fought a long-running battle of wits with Fred Allen that ended in an actual boxing match at Madison Square Garden. Jack’s on-air character was so popular that most folks assumed it was the real thing—like the hatcheck girl who returned his ample tip, begging him to “leave me with some illusions.”

And Sunday Nights at Seven introduces you to the off-stage Jack Benny, a man who was generous to a fault. Throughout his career, he pampered his wife (“she’s the only one I’ve ever had”), doted on his daughter and later his grandchildren—and was equally generous with new talent and lesser stars.

Here is Jack, entertaining the troops with Ingrid Bergman, hobnobbing with Laurence Olivier, making movies with Carole Lombard. And here is Joan, growing up with the kids of Burns and Allen and Barbara Stanwyck.

Featuring a hilarious foreword by Jack’s lifelong chum George Burns, thirty-two pages of rare and wonderful photos, and remembrances by friends like Claudette Colbert and Ronald Reagan, Sunday Nights at Seven is a delightful journey into Hollywood’s glamorous, star-studded past—and a visit from an old friend that will warm your heart and bring a smile to your face.

AN ALTERNATE SELECTION OF THE LITERARY GUILD AND THE DOUBLEDAY BOOK CLUB

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About the Author: Joan Benny is a writer and lecturer on the history of humor in film. The mother of four, she resides in both New York City and Beverly Hills.

From the Publisher: This first book in a two-part series entitled “Web of Deceit” charts the histories of two families—the Searbys and the Doubledays—over the first half of the twentieth century. Their lives are destined to be linked through the adoption of a child. As far as it is possible to check from official records, newspaper cuttings, original documents and letters, personal memories, and family oral history—this is a true story.

The Doubledays ran a general provisions shop in the East End of London and the Searbys were small-arms makers in Birmingham. Both husbands endured the horrors of the First World War leaving wives and families behind—especially difficult for Rosie Doubleday who had to take over the running of the shop as well as caring for her surviving daughter Charlotte (“Charlie”). Rosie and her family also endured the London blitz.

Bella was the Searby’s fourth child. During the Second World War she was orphaned at the age of fourteen years having learnt only a short time earlier that she had been given about six months to live. Her brother, by now in the RAF, was left the family home which he allowed an older sister and her husband to live in on condition that they look after Bella but they treated her as a drudge. At the age of seventeen she met a thirty-year-old SAS paratrooper at a dance. She was young for her age and very naïve and, after he was long gone, discovered that she was pregnant. Her sister and brother-in-law compounded their neglect of her proper care by throwing her out of the house late one evening in the middle of the Birmingham blackout with just a small suitcase of clothes.

This book was written in an attempt to: vindicate the girl I have called Bella (the name chosen because she will always be beautiful to me); to try to understand Charlie’s subsequent actions as my adoptive mother; and because never a week goes by without my thinking with love and gratitude of the woman I knew as “Nanny” and is Rosie in the book.

Once I discovered, at the age of almost fifty, that I had been adopted my ever considerate husband started searching records to help me locate my lost family. Charlie had spent years telling me about her and her family’s past and when I met my mother and sisters they were equally communicative about family lore. I knew Bella for only two years but spent hours on the phone as well as face to face discovering her past. She was quite thrilled to be the possible heroine of a book! From all this research I discovered that both families had very interesting tales to tell.

The second and concluding book in the “Web of Deceit” series is the autobiographical Along Came a Spider. This relates the deeply disturbing effects on a child of nineteen months in an adoption which was consistently and elaborately denied.

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By the Same Author: Along Came a Spider (2011).

From the Back Cover: After a series of tick bites, Dianne Ellis became extremely sick. Months of unsuccessful medical and natural treatment, including a week in hospital, left her struggling to hold onto life, terrified of leaving her girls. Just when she had given up hope one little old lady with a small bag of green, leafy herb changed everything. Dianne credits alfalfa-leaf tea with saving her life. Renewed, she embarked on a journey back to health and hope, releasing the profound emotional trauma deeply entwined within her physical illness.

Dianne passionately shares her process for reclaiming her lost joy and vibrancy, which was enhanced by her deep connection with the ocean, including techniques, treatments, wisdom, and knowledge gained from working with a number of incredible healers along her journey. Her story—one of mystery illness, amazing healers, adoption, death, separation, and loss, a beautiful home birth in the forests of Tasmania, a crazy gunman, astonishing breath sessions, deep love and forgiveness, singing, African drumming and dance, wild surfing and horse-riding adventures, and swimming with dolphins—is proof that from the ashes of the old, a new life can blossom.

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About the Author: Dianne Ellis is an inspirational breath practitioner, radio host of "The Healing Hour," a budding photographer and filmmaker, mum to two beautiful girls and a keen surfer. Guided and mentored by a number of healers along her journey of self-discovery and self-empowerment, she currently lives in Australia.

Born in 1930, at the beginning of The Great Depression, identical twins Marge and Marie weighed just a tad more than two pounds each. Left on steps of the local hospital by a family unable to care for them, they entered foster care and, later, an orphanage, but still managed to live lives surrounded by love and family. A heartwarming memoir of love, life, family, and faith.

To the outside world, Elizabeth Marvin Mulholland had it all. Adopted into a wealthy New England family, the young Elizabeth was afforded the luxury many people only realize in their dreams. She joined her family on lavish European vacations, lived in a finely decorated home, grew up in a world heavily infiltrated by power and money, and hob-knobbed with celebrities. As a close friend of Katherine Hepburn’s niece, she gained an inside look into Katherine Hepburn’s guarded inner life, which she details in Surviving High Society. Her real life, however, was not the fantasy it seemed to others. Elizabeth grew up in a volatile household. Her adopted brother attempted to murder her mother and remained estranged in the decades to follow. Her father, who was her strongest ally, died suddenly when she was twenty-two. And, until her death, Elizabeth’s mother used all means possible to exert control over her life. Her mother bounced Elizabeth in and out of psychiatric facilities and used her wealth to persuade doctors to keep Elizabeth locked up and medicated. Throughout, Elizabeth struggled to keep the pieces of her life together. After her mother disinherits Elizabeth, she successfully seeks to find freedom and a life of her own away from her mother’s ever-watchful gaze. Her life becomes a life without fantastic riches, filled with its own obstacles and triumphs. But it is now her life. About the Author: Born in Chicago to Maxie Fannie Hawthorne and Charles Lynn Terrel, Elizabeth Marvin Mulholland was adopted by Kathryn Caine Marvin and Edwin Waldo Marvin and was brought up in Connecticut. She has also lived in Arizona and Virginia, and now resides in Florida. Educated at Phillips Andover Academy and Briarcliff College, she was married in 1987 and has one stepson. Active as a volunteer in various political campaigns and hospital work, her interests also include bridge, golf, and anthropology. She has traveled to Scandinavia, Poland, Greece, and throughout greater Europe, as well as the Caribbean, and is a member of the Junior League and the DAR.

A true story that reveals the strength and resilience of the human spirit in the face of betrayal, grief and loss. At age forty, Margaret Watson learned she was adopted. This shocking and confronting truth was previously unknown to her and turned her whole world upside down. Faced with a major identity and life crisis, Margaret embarked on a physical and spiritual journey to find her birth family and discover her true self. By sharing her story, Margaret offers hope and understanding for those people who have discovered in their adult years that they were adopted.

From the Publisher: This touching and thought-provoking book examines the 19 years of frustrations encountered by David McKinstry, a gay man, trying to adopt and provide a loving home for orphaned children. McKinstry, adopted himself, shares the story of growing up in small town Ontario, fathering a son when he was a teenager, attempting to be the fastest man to swim across Lake Ontario, meeting his birth parents, and his burning desire to form a family unit with Nick, his HIV+ ex-Jesuit spouse. Intense, intriguing subplots abound in every chapter and make this book a fascinating read! Tragically before the dream to adopt was realised, Nick dies of AIDS and leaves the family portrait incomplete. David rallies while grieving the loss of his partner and the death of an hours-old infant daughter and continues his journey toward parenthood. David takes a Canadian bank to court over their refusal to honour his deceased spouse’s mortgage insurance and comes out publicly on CTV’s Canada AM.

At age 22, the author set out to find her English birth parents, a Jewish father and a mother believed to be an artist. The adventure led to parents, grandparents, and siblings, a kaleidoscope of relationships with one dark secret at its center. As an adoptive child in Britain, playwright Nicole J. Burton always wanted to find her birth parents. After emigrating with her adoptive family to the United States, she pursued the elusive characters haunting her imagination. With an appointment with one of Her Majesty’s social workers and her birth mother’s name in hand, she returned home to Britain. There she began a search that led to more drama than any play she could possibly conceive.

Alan Gerstel’s career has run the gamut from actor to stage manager to filmmaker to television news anchor. But his first love has always been music ... though he never fully understood why. Alan was adopted soon after birth and suffered the pangs of rejection through his formative years even though he was raised in a warm, loving household. That nagging rejection prompted the unrelenting search for his birth parents when he reached his late 20s. To compensate for feelings of rejection, many adoptees are known to fantasize that their birth parents were famous people. Alan’s decades-long investigation revealed that his birth father certainly fit the bill. Louis Prima was a huge star ... and a married man ... when he had a fling with a pretty, young woman who yearned to be a singer in his band. Alan was the product of their short-lived liaison. Swing takes the reader on an adventure that centered on 52nd Street in New York City during World War II when it was known as “Swing Street.” Alan’s birth mother was a “hostess” at many of the jazz clubs that made 52nd Street also known as “The Street That Never Sleeps.” Her heartless act after giving birth to Alan crushed one couple’s hopes while setting up impediments that would frustrate Alan’s investigation many years later. Swing is a tale of dogged determination. It is a story of private investigators, of payoffs and bribes, of good people and some very bad people. Louis Prima was a show business headliner and one of the good people. He created a monumental musical legacy that is not fully appreciated today. Alan is proud to call Louis Prima his birth father. About the Author: Fifty-second Street in New York City earned the notorious reputation of “Swing Street” during the 1940s. The booze flowed freely in the jazz joints that peppered the street where every night was party night! Louis Prima was the headlining band leader noted as much for his wild onstage antics as he was for “Sing, Sing, Sing” ... ”Jump, Jive and Wail” ... and “Just a Gigolo.” Dorothy McDonald was one of the party girls who worked on Swing Street. She lusted to take the stage as the singer in Louis Prima’s band. She wasn’t shy. She was willing to indulge him in a wild night of sex to achieve her dream. 30 years later, the son they sired but didn’t want, embarked on the nearly impossible mission to identify them and then locate them. Swing is a detective story filled with deceit and double-crossing, payoffs and bribes. It takes readers on a ride through the underbelly of New York City ... to Sing Sing Prison ... and to Atlantic City, New Jersey as its author unravels the treachery that eventually leads him to the truth of his origins.

This a true story about two baby boys who were switched at birth on two different days who would later in life cross paths in many ways not knowing they were switched at birth. How the author’s life has been spared, it seems like he has more lives than a cat. How the discovery of DNA has been following him around since he was born, which ultimately would play a vital part in him finding out he was for whatever reason given to the wrong mother. How much we inherit the genes from our parents & pass it onto our children the traits, mannerisms, looks, the way we walk, talk etc., are determined by the genes which are part of the DNA. How the author dealt with the genes he had as a child not knowing he was living in different atmosphere had he not been switched. The purpose of his book is to reach out to people that have been separated from a parent through adoption, divorce, death illegitimacy or for whatever reason, that may be having identity issues. Also to let his birth mother know what his life was without her in it.

To find a solution, a person must first admit there is a problem. Taking Down the Wall is a chronicle of one woman’s journey to the painful and reluctant admission that there is indeed a problem, her refusal to let an old wound heal. The journey takes twists and unexpected turns but eventually arrives in a place of peace. Issues involving adoption, reunion, addiction, death and grief are addressed in the context of real life, humor, spirituality and healing. Taking Down the Wall will make you cry, make you laugh and most of all, make you think. About the Author: Christine Murphy lives in Saratoga Springs, NY, with her husband and three children. She works as a Speech Language Pathologist helping special-needs children. Christine was adopted by a loving family in 1969 in a closed adoption. In 1992, she received an unexpected phone call from her birth mother. Shaken by the situation, Christine chose not to meet. In 2007, after a health scare and some words from God, Christine contacted and met her birth mother and half-brothers. Their reunion continues to evolve.

Did you ever have an experience and know at once that the memories of that moment would last you a lifetime? These are the ah-ha moments we repeatedly replay in our heads, such as the moment in Charlotte Snead’s story, “Becoming Grandmother” when her newly adopted grandson realized that she was his grandmother, rather than a part-time caretaker. Or perhaps you gathered your most precious memories from a cluster of experiences spread over an extended period in time, such as in Melanie Sue Bowles’ story “A Horse Named Cody,” when she slowly mastered the technique of communicating with her recalcitrant horse. Reading about experiences such as these are likely to enrich your life evermore. The Awakenings stories found within the pages of this book fall into one of the above two categories. They will warm your heart as they inspire you to live your life to its fullest. Don’t be surprised if you begin to view the world and your place in it slightly differently after savoring the Tales 2 Inspire, the Topaz Collection of Awakenings stories. Compiler’s Note: See, particularly, “Becoming Grandmother” by Charlotte Snead (A single word, spoken by a Korean salesman at a Hyundai dealership, brings boundless joy and awareness to this newly adopted toddler) and “God Made a Mistake” by Jessica Marie (If you were adopted, don’t judge your birth mother harshly, as you might never know what circumstances drove her to make that decision).

In fourteen compelling chapters the author takes her readers on a revelatory journey that brings insight to the haunting pains of secrets and past abuse. Through this work, the author gives her audience permission to speak boldly from places that’s kept them in bondage. She tells the story of a little girl whose ideas about life have been shaped through the things she’s suffered. She shares the heart of a woman who shelters the little girl within, while in search of a rescuer, and a safe haven. As the two of them journey that encounter some powerful truths that lead them to the Ultimate Rescuer...God the Father.

Born into the social experiment of closed adoption in the early 1960s, Noelle was taken home directly from the hospital at the age of three days. Her early life in rural Washington state seemed idyllic. With loving parents, two brothers, and her beloved pets, she had a childhood to be envied. But all that was ripped away, first by the violent loss of her innocence, followed by the slow death of her mother. Essentially left to raise herself, she embarks on a lifelong journey of self-discovery, guided at unexpected times by “the voice” only she can hear. Even the most mundane choices, such as where to go to college, seem to be divinely directed. Haunted by recurring loss, Noelle is determined to find her birth mother, to uncover the secrets of the feelings and visions she cannot contain or control. In surviving the breakdown of her husband and marriage, she realizes she has a psychic connection with the family she never knew, and in a series of incredible events reunites not only with them, but also eventually with her soul mate. A true account of one woman’s life, existing as not one, but two people: one born and one adopted, and enduring the reality of not completely belonging in either world.

This biography of automotive pioneer John C. Dodge explores his romance with secretary Matilda Rausch and investigates the claim made by Frances Mealbach Manzer that she is a daughter of John C. Dodge’s who was given up for adoption shortly after her birth.

A non-fictional account of an adoptee who has fallen into the pit of darkness and despair. This is a record of the journey he took to locate his birth parents in an effort to climb out of the pit and suppress his thoughts of suicide.

From the Publisher: The Tell is a must-read for everyone tasked with the magnitude of loving a child ... despite it all. A veritable survivor’s manual, this true memoir runs the gamut from the highs of adoption to the lows of sibling incest—peaks and valleys in a landscape that was previously flat—where the passage of time is sometimes the only way through such uncharted territory.

From Publishers Weekly: On March 3, 1991, Eddie Benzola, who had been raised in a foster home, learned that he had two half-sisters and a half-brother born to his remarried natural father. Upon hearing this news, he contacted one of his sisters and began to piece together his origins and identity. Abandoned by his birth mother, Eddie grew up in the home of Henrietta Butler, a loving foster mother who constantly took in babies from the Child Welfare service until they could be matched with adoptive families. From childhood, Eddie seemed withdrawn. This was due, perhaps in part, to Butler’s husband, a violent alcoholic, and to a series of attachments quickly made and then severed in the rapid turnover of other foster babies in the Butler home. In his research into his own life history, the author’s contacts with the foster care bureaucracy led him to several conclusions regarding the need for greater supervision of the foster care system. While compelling as an account of the alienation that can result from a foster care childhood, Benzola’s book is undermined by amateurish writing, scant insight and excessive introspection. Beach is a freelance writer. © 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.