From the Dust Jacket: “There is no pleasanter sight within the front door of any man’s castle than the strewn and disordered evidences that children are there,” writes Edgar Guest, in this very human story on making of the house a HOME. The spiritual give-and-take that is the essence of Mr. Guest’s philosophy of life shines as joyously from this intimate narrative of his own home-building as from the pages of his books of verse, that are treasured in half a million American homes to-day. His publishers wish that they might put this little story of the inception and growth of Edgar Guest’s home-of-his-own in the hands of every young couple to be married in these United States this year. They feel that you, who will read these pages, will understand why. The story carries the message of hope and faith. “Our home is not yet completed,” writes Mr. Guest. “We hope to go forward together, changing and improving it. To-morrow shall see something that was not there yesterday. But through sun and shade, through trial and through days of ease and peace, it is our hope that something of our best shall still remain within its walls.”

---

Compiler’s Note: This book is in the public domain and may be read online.

The Guests adopted a three-year-old girl named Marjorie following the death of their first child, also a girl, at the age of 13 months. The story is related matter-of-factly and reminded me of nothing so much as when one might obtain another pet to replace one that died suddenly and unexpectedly. “‘I must have another little girl,’ [his wife] sobbed night after night. ‘I must have another little girl!’ ... We heard of a little girl who was to be put out for adoption; she was of good but unfortunate parents. We proposed to adopt her.” Guest’s language here is, like Marjorie’s birth parents, “unfortunate.”

Guest extols the virtue of adoption (“I have heard many arguments against adopting children, but I have never heard a good one. ... To childless couples everywhere I would say with all the force I can employ, adopt a baby!”), but he frames it more in terms of the benefits that can accrue to the adopters than to the adoptee (“If you would make glorious the home you are building; if you would fill its rooms with laughter and contentment; if you would make your house more than a place in which to eat and sleep; if you would fill it with happy memories and come yourselves into a closer and more perfect union, adopt a baby! Then, in a year or two, adopt another. He who spends money on a little child is investing it to real purpose; and the dividends it pays in pride and happiness and contentment are beyond computation.”).

The Guests can be credited for adopting an older child, but he exemplifies his generation (he was born in 1881) when he relates that they kept Marjorie’s adoptive status secret (“Our friends were asked never to refer in her presence to the fact that she was adopted. As far as we were concerned it was dismissed from our minds. She was three years old when she was born to us, and from then on we were her father and her mother.”).

Sadly, Marjorie Ellen Meagher Guest’s misfortunes did not end when she was adopted by the Guests after being “put out for adoption”; she would die little more than 10 years later, at the age of 14.

From the Publisher: Mamadona: Heartbreaking Cry of a Child is the controversial story of a young boy’s adoption; a story that brings with it many other questions of human nature and social inequality and discrimination. David is adopted from Malawi when he is still only a baby and brought to live in England with a well-known, affluent family [pop-star Madonna and her husband]. When the story catches the attention of the world’s media, he is instantly catapulted into the public eye and, some may say, into the firing line.

From Booklist: The Tems’ extraordinary autobiographical novella, “The Man on the Ceiling,” garnered an unprecedented number of major horror and fantasy awards. In this set of loosely connected essays and semi-fictional discourses, the husband-and-wife horror-writing duo supplements the novella with sober meditations on aging, loss, and the writing process. Except as illustrative digressions from a given autobiographical topic, there are few actual stories in the volume, and, indeed, the Tems repeatedly emphasize that “everything we’re telling you here is true.” Yet certain events and predicaments dance in and out of each chapter, among them the suicidal death of the couple’s eldest adopted son and the penchant for storytelling that afflicts the members of the Tems’ extended family. The titular specter is a recurring metaphor for the dark, fleetingly glimpsed shadows that linger in the background of daily life and quicken fear. The Tems’ assemblage of brooding, often surrealistic prose experiments defies easy categorization but succeeds as compelling, perhaps compulsory, reading for true horror fans. —Carl Hays.

---

About the Author: Award-winning author, poet, and playwright Melanie Tem is the author of fourteen published novels. Her works have won, among many accolades, the Bram Stoker Award and the British Fantasy Award. Dan Simmons called her “the literary successor to Shirley Jackson,” and readers and reviewers consistently rave about her deeply involved stories of the terrors that haunt families.

Steve Rasnic Tem has been called “a school of writing unto himself” (Joe R. Lansdale). His surreal stories have earned him comparisons to Franz Kafka, Dino Buzzati, Ray Bradbury, and Raymond Carver. He has also won the Bram Stoker award and been nominated for British Fantasy and World Fantasy awards for his short stories, novels, and collections.

Together, Melanie and Steve won the Bram Stoker award for their multi-media collection Imagination Box, and won a Stoker, International Horror Guild, and World Fantasy award for their novella “The Man on the Ceiling” (the only work ever to win all three). They live in Denver, CO, with the family they have made for themselves.

---

Compiler’s Note: The titular novella was originally published in 2000 as a chapbook from American Fantasy Press in an edition limited to 500 copies. It was also published in an anthology of horror fiction called Poe’s Children, edited by Peter Straub (2008, Doubleday).

March into My Heart is a poignant and inspiring story of family, adoption, and the search for the irreplaceable bond between a mother and daughter. Patty Lazarus was happily married and busy raising two sons. By all accounts she was a very lucky woman. But still, something was missing. Despite her love for her family, she felt a deep longing for the mother-daughter connection she’d always dreamed of. After enduring her mother’s tragic illness and untimely death, Patty knew that adding a girl to the family was the only way to ease the pain she felt. She and her husband set out on a four-year, arduous, complicated, and emotional journey through infertility, miscarriages, and adoption ending in a small town in rural Missouri where they would finally meet their new daughter as she came into the world.

From the Dust Jacket: This is a magnificent new biography of Martha Gellhorn, whose fearless reporting from the front made her a legend, and whose private life was often messy and volcanic. Her determination to be a war correspondent—and her conspicuous success—contributed to the breakdown of her already stormy marriage to Ernest Hemingway.

Martha Gellhorn’s journalism tracks many of the flashpoints of the twentieth century. As a young woman, she was a witness of the suffering in America caused by the Depression. She risked her life in the Spanish Civil War, which was the subject of some of her finest writing. During the Second World War she covered the fall of Czechoslovakia and the Normandy Landings, the liberation of Dachau and the Nuremberg Trials. She reported from Vietnam and Israel; and at the age of 81 was covering the US invasion of Panama.

All her life, Martha fought against injustice, and she always looked for the human story. She was influenced by two older women: her mother, who was a social reformer, and Eleanor Roosevelt. Her books of reporting and travel reflected her personality and her courage; her travels her shrewd and ironic eye; both were often very funny. Martha’s letters (many of which are quoted in this biography) are delightful—passionate, ebullient and no-holds-barred.

Martha Gellhorn died in 1998. Caroline Moorehead knew Martha—not only as one of the circle who were invited to Martha’s London flat, but also because her parents (Alan Moorehead, the writer, and his wife, Lucy) were lifelong friends of Martha. This fascinating book reveals much about Martha’s life and loves, and is based on primary source material which no previous biographer has seen.

---

About the Author: Caroline Moorehead’s biographies of Bertrand Russell and Iris Origo were both New York Times Notable Books. She lives in London.

---

Compiler’s Note: See, particularly, Chapter Eleven: Nothing with Mirrors (pp. 264-290), which covers, inter alia, Gellhorn’s adoption of her son, Sandy.

Traveling to Mexico to adopt the three-month-old baby they’d been assigned, Mary Beth and Eugene de Ribeaux anticipated a dream come true. But it would be “mañana” many times over before they’d cross the border with their child six months later. Between the emotional high points of first receiving their baby and finally bringing him home, Eugene returned to work in the U.S., leaving his wife, a first-time mother with limited proficiency in Spanish; in lovely Puerto Vallarta with their new baby, Martin. Despite the precarious status of their adoption case and the pain of their separation, they remained determined to make the best of the situation. The Martin Chronicles originally a series of email messages Mary Beth sent home to family and friends’ records not only a mother’s growing love for her baby, but also a deepening appreciation of his native culture, as she learns lessons in Spanish and single motherhood, Mexican culture and culinaria, friendship and faith, patience and perseverance. Part travelogue, part adoption narrative, The Martin Chronicles follows the unfolding adventures of a new family in a foreign land with humor and freshness. Ultimately, it is an inspirational and triumphant story of overcoming hardships and reaping blessings along the way.

From the Back Cover: The Marvelous Journey Home tells the remarkable story of parents and children coming together. This fictionalized story, based on actual events, takes the reader through a roller coaster of emotions as parents seek their child, who longs for the chance to have a family and travel home to a faraway place. With scenes situated from orphanages in small, remote Russian villages, to Moscow, and finally on to America, “the fairytale land,“ the reader is taken on a journey around the world, home again, and eventually, even far beyond. Filled with hope and disappointment, love and loss, happiness and despair, The Marvelous Journey Home draws the reader along by the heartstrings to an unexpected destination. Home is found in distant places, peace is found in unlikely circumstances, and family is always what matters most.

---

About the Author: John M. Simmons is president and co-owner of White Knight Fluid Handling, LLC, a company that designs, manufactures and sells components for the distribution of acids and other chemicals. In addition to The Marvelous Journey Home, he has written several short stories, which are available from the web site, www.whiteknightpublish.com. Simmons is currently working on his next novel, a sequel to his first. “There was just so much more to tell...” he said. The author lives with his wife, Amy, and nine children in Kamas, Utah, in a small mountain valley about 35 miles cast of Salt Lake City.

---

By the Same Author: To Sing Frogs (2013).

From the Dust Jacket: This is the third and concluding volume in Robert Peel’s monumental biography of the founder of Christina Science. Like the first two volumes (Mary Baker Eddy: The Years of Discovery and Mary Baker Eddy: The Years of Trial), it does not assume the reader’s prior familiarity with the subject, but allows him to become acquainted with this remarkable woman at a significant stage of her career as though he were coming upon her for the first time.

The last years of Mary Baker Eddy’s life (1892-1910) witnessed the triumph of Christian Science over some of the harshest criticism and severest crises that the new religious movement had yet encountered. In those years Mrs. Eddy formed The Mother Church in Boston, saw her movement spread to Europe and around the world, wrestled with the problem of spiritual authority in an increasingly secular society, and in her eighty-eighth year founded the Christian Science Monitor. During the same period, she faced lawsuits, personal attacks and assorted onslaughts by disaffected followers, the press, hostile biographers, and that spokesman for the age, Mark Twain. But even Twain’s mordant cynicism could not entirely nullify the incongruous admiration that flashed out in the midst of his strictures and led him to describe her as “the most interesting woman that had ever lived, and the most extraordinary.”

The closing years of Mrs. Eddy’s life are fascinating in themselves and round out Robert Peel’s brilliantly detailed portrait of a great religious leader. In addition, this volume examines in new perspective the nature of Christian authority in an age of science.

---

About the Author: Robert Peel has had a varied career as college professor, counterintelligence officer, newspaperman, historian, literary critic, and editorial consultant to The First Church of Christ, Scientist, in Boston, Massachusetts. Born in England and educated at various schools in three countries, he was graduated from Harvard with highest honors and remained there to study and teach for six more years. After service in World War II he became an editorial writer on The Christian Science Monitor and entered upon a new career as author.

With the publication of his book Christian Science: Its Encounter with American Culture in 1958 he turned his attention more and more to the history and significance of Christian Science in today’s culture. His book Spiritual Healing in a Scientific Age was published in 1987 by Harper & Row.

---

Compiler’s Note: In the words of the author, “Nothing in Mrs. Eddy’s life has been more astonishing to most people than her adoption in 1888 of a forty-one-year-old ex-homeopathic doctor as her son. This has been considered all the more remarkable because she had an actual son of almost the same age—living, to be sure, with a family of his own in the far-off Black Hills of South Dakota.” According to Peel, Eddy’s natural-born son was taken from her and placed in the care of others not long after his birth due to her inability to properly care for him herself, and they never saw one another again until the boy had grown into a 35-year-old man with a wife and four children. In a sense, then, her experience reflects that of both a birth and adoptive mother.

From the Back Cover: Does God really hear and answer very specific prayers? Can He really bring us from the depths of despair and bless us beyond belief? The answer to these questions is a resounding “yes”! This story details the journey of one couple from the agonizing despair of infertility to the joy of open adoption.

• Are you facing infertility?

• Is someone you love walking through this devastating ordeal?

• Have you considered open adoption, but still have uncertainties?

• Are you facing an unplanned pregnancy and considering your options?

• Are there trials in your life that just seem impossible to overcome?

As you read this book, you will walk with the author through the darkness of disbelief, sorrow, anger, bitterness and hopelessness. You will be amazed as the pieces of a puzzle emerge and God miraculously joins them together. You will rejoice as the darkness fades and joy arrives with the dawn. You will marvel at the masterpiece. And your faith will be strengthened.

---

About the Author: Bobbi Grubb has shared this amazing personal story at speaking engagements for many years. The testimony has touched the lives of countless infertile couples, women in unplanned pregnancies, and others seeking encouragement. Bobbi has been involved in adoption counseling for ten years and serves on the board of directors of a crisis pregnancy center. She stays busy homeschooling her two sons. Bobbi and her husband, Steve, will celebrate 25 years of marriage in 2008.

From the Dust Jacket: In her extraordinary career as a prison reformer, Miriam Van Waters worked tirelessly to champion the cause of socially disadvantaged and delinquent women. Yet, it was her sensational battle to retain the superintendency of the Massachusetts Reformatory for Women in 1949 that made her a national cause célebre, triumphantly defending herself against an array of political and ideological enemies.

In this compelling biography, Estelle Freedman moves beyond the controversy to reveal a remarkable woman whose success rested upon the power of her own charismatic leadership. She touched thousands of people—from Boston Brahmins to alcoholics, prostitutes, and desperate criminals, to her devoted prison staff and volunteers. Through her, we meet a wealth of characters, including Eleanor Roosevelt, and see the realities of life in the early decades of this century for a single mother of an adopted daughter.

Drawing from Van Waters’ diaries, letters, and personal papers, Freedman recreates a complex personal life, unveiling the disparity between the confident public persona and the agonized private soul. Van Waters struggled through family tragedy, depression, and ill health but found solace in her work, her friends and supporters, and in the deeply romantic relationship she shared with her benefactor, Geraldine Thompson.

A compelling tale in its own right, Van Waters’ life also supplies a missing chapter in the history of American women. Combining a deep faith in the social power of motherhood with professional efforts to secure equal justice for women and children, Van Waters and her generation provide a legacy for contemporary women activists.

With the power and elegance of a novel, Maternal Justice illuminates this historical context, casting light on the social welfare tradition, on women’s history, on the American feminist movement, and on the history of sexuality.

---

About the Author: Estelle B. Freedman, is professor of history at Stanford University, author of Their Sisters Keepers and co-author with Join D’Emilio of Intimate Matters.

From the Dust Jacket: This is a mother’s powerful and moving story of her adopted son’s triumph over adversity. Matthew was born with a face and body so disfigured that he was abandoned at birth and left to what everyone assumed would be an early death. He had a gaping hole instead of a mouth, so feeding was near impossible, and his internal disorders required a series of operations while he was still a baby.

But no one had bargained for Matthew’s spirit. He survived, and blossomed into a little boy with hopes and dreams far beyond the hospital walls where he spent his early years. At the age of seven, one of his dreams was realised when he found himself a mum, dad, brothers and sisters. Four years later, when his struggles were publicised nationally, Matthew inspired such admiration and sympathy in the British public that they raised £100,000 to send him to the United States for help from the Boy David surgeon, Jan Jackson.

The story has a further twist, for the family that adopted Matthew is both unusual and remarkable. Fred and Christine Learoyd are simple working people with three grown-up children of their own; but over the years they have added six severely physically and mentally handicapped children to their brood.

The Learoyds dote on their family, but life has not always been easy for them, and there are some episodes in this book which Christine found painful to recall. There were times when those around her were unkind and even spiteful to her and her family, but she and her husband persevered, sometimes against enormous odds, to do the best for their children. Today, after many adventures—some joyful, some sad—they have moved from their home county of Kent, where Fred was a miner, to the depths of Wales, where they have already become a much-loved part of the community.

Now, for the first time, Christine Learoyd tells the story of her very special son and of the British people at their most kind and generous.

---

About the Author: Christine Learoyd was born in 1941 in Canterbury, Kent, to a working-class family. The memory of her deeply unhappy childhood made her promise that when she had children of her own they would never have to suffer the tension and trauma of parental fights and arguments. At the age of seventeen she trained as a nurse at the Royal Sea Bathing Hospital in Margate. It was there that she met her husband, Fred, who was a regular visitor to his sick mother, a patient in Christine’s ward. That same year they were married, and two years later, after they had moved to Germany where Fred was serving in the Army, she gave birth to her first child, Kevin, who was followed by Stephen and Lorraine. Today Christine is a grandmother four times over and a devoted mother to her adopted and fostered handicapped children.

Jane Owen was born in London and brought up near Windsor. After a year spent working as a teacher at Clyde School in Australia, made famous by the film Picnic at Hanging Rock; she read Late Ancient and Medieval History at London University and subsequently became a journalist. Almost every national newspaper has published her work on subjects as diverse as the English legal system and St Valentine’s Day, and she has written several books. She is joint winner of the Van den Berghs and Jurgens reporting award. Today she is Associate Editor of dx, the Daily Express magazine, and writes the Daily Express gardening column.

From the Publisher: God has sent us a little angel dressed as a dirty, tiny boy. He has so much to teach us of empathy and pure joy. It is our goal and most important role as his FOREVER Mom and Dad to love, nurture, and guide this little angel into a confident, caring man.

---

About the Author: Tracy Pillow works part-time at Dutilh United Methodist Church and over-time at home with her husband and four kids. Her husband’s military career keeps the family moving to new places and adventures every few years. She currently resides in Cranberry Township, Pennsylvania with her husband, passel of kids, one goldfish, and a turtle.

---

By the Same Author: Bharat Mata: As Humanity Unfolds in Mother India (2001) and Bringing Our Angel Home (2002).

From the Dust Jacket: Maybe you know my kid, writes Mary Cahill Fowler. He’s the one who says the first thing that comes to mind. He’s the youngster who can’t remember a simple request. When he scrapes his knee, he screams so loud and long that the neighbors think his mother is beating him. He’s the kid in school with ants in his pants who could do the work if he really tried. Or so his parents have been told over and over again.

Mary Fowler’s son David is afflicted with a syndrome known as Attention-deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), which affects between three and six percent of all children. In one-third to two-thirds of these cases, the symptoms are carried into adulthood. While there are different degrees of severity, there is a common theme: inattentive, impulsive, restless behavior.

Scientists believe that ADHD is genetically transmitted in most cases. While there is no cure, the symptoms of ADHD are very treatable.

In candid and dramatic fashion, Mary Cahill Fowler tells the story of her son, David. She describes how at first his behavior devastated the family and, finally, how Mary and her husband discovered their child was not willfully misbehaving, but had a problem that could be treated and solved.

But this book does much more than tell David’s story. It serves as a guide to parents, helping them recognize the symptoms of ADHD and understand what is affecting their child. It also describes treatment from birth through early adulthood. Because ADHD is not the same for all children, the author has included the experiences of others to explain the differences.

In addition, Maybe You Know My Kid provides the insights of practitioners who are nationally recognized for their work in ADHD, so that the reader gets a clear, clinical explanation of how to deal with the problem.

Often moving, Maybe You Know My Kid is filled with revelatory information that could improve the lives of millions of families and children.

---

About the Author: Mary Cahill Fowler, a former teacher, currently heads an ADHD parent support group and gives numerous lectures on the subject to school faculties and parents. She lives in Fair Haven, New Jersey.

From the Back Cover: For the first time the inside story of the meteoric career of the most controversial senator of our time is told by his intimate associate. Roy Cohn was at Senator Joseph McCarthy’s side throughout the turbulent years of the search for communists hiding within our government structures, and during the bitter weeks of the Army-McCarthy hearings—weeks that destroyed a man who might have become president. No American of the last 100 years has been subjected to the vilification that was heaped upon Joseph McCarthy—and yet to millions he remains a symbol of patriotism and courage and forcefulness that has been too long missing from our leaders. History must pass the final judgment on Senator McCarthy, and his role in the fight for preservation of a free society in a free world but Roy Cohn offers here the first intimate and honest portrait of Joe McCarthy, the man and the crusader.

---

About the Author: Roy Cohn is a native New Yorker, the son of accomplished parents—State Supreme Court Justice Albert Cohn and Dora Marcus Cohn. He was educated at Fieldston Lower School and Horace Mann School for Boys, and, at the age of sixteen, entered Columbia University, where he earned both a college degree and a law school degree within three and a half years.

He began to work as a clerk in the United States District Attorney’s office, and later became a prosecutor. He was a key figure in the courtroom prosecution of the Rosenberg spy trial and the second-string Communist party leaders. He was then called to Washington, where he served a brief stint as special assistant to the Attorney General late in 1953. At the age of twenty-six he was named counsel for the Senate Investigating Committee under Senator Joseph McCarthy.

Within a year he had become a hero to millions, who regarded him as a brilliant young Communist fighter, and a devil to millions, who placed him alongside McCarthy as a destroyer of civil liberties.

After the Army-McCarthy hearings described in this book, Mr. Cohn returned to New York. He has been and is a key figure in some of the most renowned legal cases of our time. He is now counsel to one of New York’s most active law firms, Saxe, Bacon & Bolan, and also a very active business life. He has taught law at New York Law School, is president of the American Jewish League Against Communism, is a Regent of St. Francis College, and is founder of the Roy M. Cohn Charitable Foundation.

Mr. Cohn made powerful enemies during his years fighting subversion. One of them, Robert Mergenthau, became the Federal prosecutor in New York, and brought about three criminal indictments against Mr. Cohn. But only one old Morgenthau charge still remains on the books. Once again taking his case to the people, Cohn was unanimously found innocent by the juries on all counts in the other two indictments. He made courtroom history by taking over his own successful defense.

---

Compiler’s Note: Joseph McCarthy married his secretary, Jeannie Kerr. Later the couple adopted a five-week-old girl from the New York Foundling Home. While this biography focuses more on the infamous Senator’s political career, it does talk about McCarthy’s personal life, as well.

This is a remarkable true story. This author, a single woman, resigns from her nursing career and adopts a severely abused child with uncontrolled behaviors. She finalizes the complicated adoption. The child and mother adopt each other as it becomes a match made in hell. They learn in this process they need to change their response with each different behavior. Many things seem backwards as the mother pushes forward. Nothing is normal. She’s changing now too. Everything she’s ever learned is now all backwards to her. Thus the name of this book, Me Other The, which is The Other Me backwards. The behaviors are specific personalities that later are diagnosed as Disassociative Identity Disorder, and therapy begins. The story takes you up and down the mother-daughter roller coaster ride with inspirational twists and turns. Physical evidence proves court intervention and specialized counseling is a very important tool.

From the Back Cover: Meditations for Adoptive Parents serves as a trusted confidant as you take up the holy experience of parenting through adoption. This heartfelt collection celebrates adoption as an act of grace mirroring God’s own redeeming love for us, of family adoption as a sacred experience and a model of the redemption offered by God through Jesus.

Author Vernell Klassen Miller offers thirty days of encouragement and wisdom for new families through devotionals, poetry, Scripture, prayers, and readings. Brimming with real-life examples from the author’s own journey as the parent of four adopted children, this warm volume offers what every Christian adoptive family can use—a pause for spiritual nourishment amid the ongoing journey of raising children.

This spiritually and theologically rich book aims not only to help adoptive parents with day-to-day living but to sustain hope in their high calling. Topics include bonding, the stages in relinquishment and adoption, dealing with unsolicited advice and questions, and stories of adoption in the Bible.

From the Back Cover (of Of Braces and Blessings): Meet the Overcomers!

Discover the charming, often amusing story of a family that moved from being overcome by hardship—to being overcomers through the grace of Jesus Christ.

Here is a warm, personal account of a couple whose three children faced serious health problems: one had cerebral palsy, and two suffered from hyperactivity.

Read how the family learned to lean on God to help them overcome and to open their hearts to three more children with special health problems.

Read the Wheelers’ story and be encouraged, entertained and inspired!

From the Back Cover: The baby is screaming again. My baby. I hoist her off the narrow hotel bed—again—and try to cradle her as I rock my torso back and forth in an uncomfortable straight-backed chair.

This baby does not cradle. She doesn’t know how to cuddle, to be soothed in anyone’s arms. She howls and arches away, squirms and flops, a sixteen-pound fish out of water. I’m not used to holding babies, and she’s not used to be being held, but when I try to put her down, she wails. My arms feel chafed, raw, and my wrists ache from the hours of straining to hang on to her.

Huge tears pool in her eyes. These tears could break my heart. These screams could break my eardrums.

After years as a temporary college instructor with no real home—her family and longtime friends scattered—Nancy McCabe yearned to settle down, establish a place she could call home, and rear a child there. A tough academic job market led her to accept a position at a church-connected college in the deep South, a move that felt like an uneasy return to the conservative environment of her childhood that she thought she had left behind. McCabe had many reservations about rearing a child alone in this climate, but the desire to become a mother would not go away.

Meeting Sophie tells the story of McCabe adopting a Chinese daughter and the many obstacles she faced during the adoption and adjustment process as she renegotiated her role within her family and fought difficulties in her job. Especially poignant is her struggle to bond with a sick, grieving baby while in a foreign country during political unrest—followed, upon her return to the U.S., by a devastating loss and a Career crisis.

---

About the Author: Nancy McCabe’s creative nonfiction has won a Pushcart Prize and been listed in Best American Essays twice. She is the author of After the Flashlight Man: A Memoir of Awakening and the Assistant Professor of Writing and Director of Writing Programs at the University of Pittsburgh in Bradford.

---

By the Same Author: Crossing the Blue Willow Bridge: A Journey to My Daughter’s Birthplace in China (2011).

Since her adoption in China in 1998 at one year old, Melanie has turned life on its head for middle-aged Terry & Julie Garlock. She has brightened their lives and helped them refocus on things that are genuinely important, like teaching a child to make alligator shadows with her fingers against a sunlit wall. This book begins with Melanie’s adoption, and Dad describes the trials and rewards of fatherhood at 50 through a collection of short stories. The brief stories were written to encourage and support others involved in their own adoption journey. If you are impatiently waiting for your own adoption to be completed, this book is for you. If you wonder about a parent bonding with an adopted child, this book is for you. If you have a spouse or relatives or friends who are somewhat reluctant about adoption, this book is for you and them. If you wonder whether an adopted child can be loved as much as a biological child, this book is for you. If you are like me and most other Dads, a Neanderthal when it comes to articulating how you feel about your child, this book is especially for you. But the truth is, ultimately this book is for Melanie. Someday when she can read, she will read not only the words but between the lines to discover she could not possibly be more loved if she were our biological child.

From the Back Cover:  Foster Parent Offers Insight Into Troubled System 

Mary Callahan never planned on writing a book about her experiences as a foster parent. She had only one goal as a parent—to help the children in her care. But as she learned their stories, it became painfully clear that the child welfare system had no sincere regard for the welfare of children. Callahan realized the only way to truly help the children was to tell their stories.

Written from the unique perspective of a foster parent, Memoirs of a Baby Stealer chronicles Callahan’s experiences with five foster children, shedding light on the inadequacies of the Child Welfare System in this country. As the author explains, “They are taking kids from places that aren’t that bad, putting them in places that aren’t that good, and completely ignoring the bond that exists between parent and child.”

Share Callahan’s struggle as she:

• Deals with the power politics of the child welfare system

• Provides loving care to the children in her charge

• Uses her extensive experience as a parent and a nurse to discover problems and solutions in each child’s development

• Defends herself against unsubstantiated child abuse charges

• Overcomes fear of retribution by the Department of Human Services

• Becomes a powerful advocate for the rights of foster children and their parents

This book is essential; reading for parents, foster parents, and professionals involved in children’s lives. The author hopes it will also inspire decision and policy makers throughout the country.

---

About the Author: Mary Callahan is an emergency room nurse, cardiopulmonary nurse educator, and foster parent. She is the author of Fighting for Tony, as well as numerous articles on parenting, nursing, and foster care. The mother of two children, Callahan resides in Maine.

From the Dust Jacket: At the age of sixty Grace Nies Fletcher was suddenly left alone—her beloved husband Jock passed away and her only son Rick got married. But circumstances that might have plunged different women into panic or self-pity instead became a challenge to Mrs. Fletcher.

At that time, in 1960, she pasted her own nine-clause Declaration of Independence on her mirror-a declaration which began, “From now on, I solemnly swear to 1) Refuse to be bored,” and continued, “to 2) Do the things I like NOW!” Whereupon she embarked on an adventure trip to the Orient with her friend Polly. Ten years and four global trips later sometimes accompanied, sometimes solitary—Merry Widow is Mrs. Fletcher’s spirited and humorous account of those gallant journeys.

An interview with the Dalai Lama, the author’s experiences with her adopted Chinese daughters in Hong Kong, and a straightforward eyewitness report on Vietnam are only a few of the highlights of this book. There is a marvelous portrait of Maki, the charming Japanese lady, born into the Royal Family, who married the American Merrell Vories. Mrs. Fletcher also tells of her visits to Hawaii, Fiji, Bangkok, Nepal and Egypt—her cruise on a barge down the Nile fulfilled a childhood wish.

But Merry Widow is more than the record of an adventurous woman’s journeys—the pervading scent of cloves on the island of Penang reminds her of the pine smell of Maine, where she summered as a child, and throughout Merry Widow the past is a vital part of the present. There is a delightful reprise of her childhood in a Methodist parsonage, of her marriage to Jock and, in particular, the halcyon year they spent together in Majorca, living on a shoestring; and her accounts of the birth and boyhood of her son Rick and of her husband’s and her last fling when they went off to Ibiza with Jock under sentence of death are particularly moving.

As Merry Widow makes clear, for the author “time is not measured by the tick of the clock but in heartbeats.” Inevitably a vivid portrait of Mrs. Fletcher herself emerges—modest and unassuming, yet undaunted and eternally curious about and deeply concerned with the lives of people of all extractions and cultures.

---

About the Author: Grace Nies Fletcher, born in Townsend, Massachusetts, was graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Boston University and later studied at Columbia and Ohio Weslyan. A preacher’s kid—the family of German and Irish extraction—Mrs. Fletcher married an Englishman. During their married life they spent a year in London, another year on Majorca and Ibiza in the Balerics, and varying lengths of time in Massachusetts, New York, Michigan, Maine, and Texas. Mrs. Fletcher is the author of many books, including In My Father’s House and The Fabulous Flemings of Kathmandu. When not abroad, she makes her home in Sudbury, Massachusetts.

A road trip that will test every bit of one couple’s courage and resolve to the limit...Francesca and Rick don’t give up easily—which is just as well when they decide to adopt a child internationally after being turned down in the UK. They can have children naturally but believe passionately in adoption and their desire to do some good in the world sees them go to Mexico. With no idea where to start, they plunge straight in and find themselves in a country that seems stuck in the 1970s. Faced with a series of nail-biting unexpected twists and turns, this is a personal touching human drama and a heartbreaking account of one couple’s trials and tribulations. The story will hook you in and keep you reading as their journey brings them into contact with a cast of characters straight out of Hollywood casting, from a demented but loving mother to a lawyer offering babies for sale in Starbucks. Francesca’s writing is inspired by authors Chris Cleave, Niccolo Ammaniti and Isabel Allende. Mexican Takeaway will appeal to women, mothers and especially those who are interested in adoption. It will also reach readers who enjoy true stories of impossible adventures in exotic destinations. Francesca and Rick’s story has already had high press visibility with an article in the Daily Mail and The Sun, and Francesca appeared on BBC and ITV during National Adoption Week.

From the Dust Jacket: Within days of his election, George Bush met with his Mexican counterpart, Carlos Salinas de Gortari. The urgent meeting, held even before the two men had been sworn in as their countries’ respective chief executives, reflected the leaders’ anxiety that Mexico’s simmering problems could soon make it the country that Americans will have to worry about most.

Inspired by Oscar Lewis’s The Children of Sanchez, a classic study of Mexican life published more than a quarter century ago, The Mexicans brings to life the people whom Americans will have to deal with if they are to avoid the onrushing disasters that both nations face. Meet the fire-breather, the movie star, the peasant, the comic, the cop, the expatriate, the mind reader, the feminist, the homosexual, and even one of the original Children of Sanchez, a sometime smuggler who brings Lewis’s classic saga up to date.

The Mexicans is above all a collection of stories—vivid, real-life stories about America’s unknown neighbor to the south. These are not the people encountered by the four million Americans who vacation in the escapist atmosphere of Mexico’s splendid beaches or magnificent archaeological ruins each year. These are the real Mexicans. The Mexicans is a guided tour through the mean streets and dusty byways of this most mysterious neighbor. It is a look into Mexico’s very soul.

For those who want the statistics, The Mexicans provides the worrisome figures. Mexico is the number-one source of illegal drugs and illegal immigrant workers to the United States. It has been the number-one source of vital oil imports. After Canada and Japan, Mexico buys more U.S. goods than any nation. But The Mexicans is not about numbers. It is about people, people who are as different from Americans as a chile pepper is from an apple pie.

---

About the Author: Patrick Oster grew up in the Chicago area, where he practiced law before taking up journalism as a career in 1973. He spent ten years in Washington, D.C., from the end of Watergate to the beginning of the second Regan administration. He was Washington bureau chief for the Chicago Sun-Times. He covered the White House, the State Department, and the Pentagon, specializing in foreign affairs most of this time. He traveled to about fifty countries in the process.

In 1984, he became the Mexico City bureau chief for the Knight Ridder newspaper chain. He has won awards from the Overseas Press Club and the Inter-American Press Foundation for his coverage of Mexico and Latin America. He and his wife and son now live in Belgium. This is his first book.

---

Compiler’s Note: The author integrates the story of the adoption of the couple’s son in Mexico into the narrative.

Ok... I’m a foster carer who doesn’t want this placement. The department of Social Services know just how to apply pressure... Oh yes... they get one very good, very friendly, very experienced social worker that I happen to have so much respect for, to make the call, knowing, just knowing that I will possibly surrender and agree to share our home with a child that, to be honest, was the last child in the world that I felt capable of caring for... Felt capable of feeling anything for... Felt capable of... anything to do with her. Mmmm, sometimes I’m so bloody shallow you see. I don’t want people to look at me as I go about my business. I don’t want strangers giving me pitying looks or hurrying past pretending they haven’t looked in my pram. I don’t want to give up any of the precious time I spend with my birth children and husband. I want my life to stay just as it is. Happy and contented. Oh the lessons I was about to learn.

From the Dust Jacket: The shocking story of the unraveling of Mia Farrow and Woody Allen’s relationship can only be told by someone who lived amidst the intimate details of their daily life together. Friend and confident to Mia, nanny to her four youngest children, Kristi Groteke is that someone.

For a dozen years, the two stars seemed to live a sophisticated Manhattan fairy tale. Why did this famous couple parade the shocking end of their affair before a stunned and fascinated public? To their fans, the degree to which they sacrificed their privacy was almost as appalling as the revelations of Woody’s affair with one of Mia’s daughters and the allegations of his sexual abuse of another.

What went wrong? Mia & Woody is the first true insider’s account of how their unusual love/work partnership, a coupling that lasted a dozen years and involved thirteen notable movies, imploded. It is also the story of a remarkable family threatened from within, fighting to hold their life together. How this disparate group of children and their mother worked and lived, laughed and cried, is candidly revealed. So too is the drama of a trusting woman betrayed by her lover and her daughter.

Written from first-hand knowledge and with sympathetic understanding, Mia & Woody is the moving tale of a love gone terribly wrong. Kristi Groteke shares with the reader Mia’s fight to retain her dignity in the glare of public humiliation; her struggle to protect her children; and her courage in the face of events that assaulted evervthing she believed in.

---

About the Author: Before signing on as a nanny to Mia Farrow’s children, Kristi Groteke attended Manhattan College on a track scholarship—earning national ranking as a middle distance runner—and graduated with a B.S. in education. Ms. Groteke has also studied acting and physical therapy. She lives in Connecticut.

Marjorie Rosen, the author of Popcorn Venus: Women, Movies, and the American Dream and co-author of the comic murder mystery, What Nigel Knew, is a journalist and screenwriter. She is currently a senior writer at People magazine. She lives in New York City.

From Publishers Weekly: Less a biography than a collection of clippings from various publications, Hollywood film/TV journalists Rubin and Taylor follow the actress from her birth in 1945 through the present. Readers might wish for more about Mia Farrow’s parents, director-author John Farrow and screen actress Maureen O’Sullivan (“Jane” in the early Tarzan movies), but the text remains devoted to its subject. Her career is traced from her first acting stint at age 19 to her role in the TV series Peyton Place, the plum lead in Rosemary’s Baby, the disastrous celluloid version of The Great Gatsby and her successes in Woody Allen’s films. There are reminders of the actress’s failed relationships with Sinatra and Andre Previn and her liaison with Allen, as well as critiques of her films. Here the authors go overboard with praise, even higher than their fulsome paeans to Mia Farrow the madonna, unrivaled in her devotion to her children.

From the Publisher: Every foster parent knows how hard, yet rewarding, it can be to care for a child with a difficult past and an uncertain future. Christie Erwin has been a mom, in the middle, for countless children over nearly two decades. In this poignant and insightful book, she honestly shares the reality of making yourself vulnerable to the pain and indescribable delight of giving your heart away to a child. If you have ever considered foster parenting and just aren’t sure you have what it takes, let Christie’s inspiring, faith-filled story assure you that there is One that can and will equip you with all you need.

---

About the Author: Christie Erwin has cared for over forty children in the past fifteen years, in both the public and private sector. She is currently the co-chairman of the Pulaski County Adoption Coalition and the coordinator of the Pulaski County Heart Gallery as well as a founding member of The C.A.L.L. (Children of Arkansas Loved for a Lifetime). Christie and her husband, Jeff, live in Little Rock, AR, with their five children.

Blending lyrical vision with down to earth, hard-headed, practical common sense, the author addresses what is surely one of the most critical issues of our day: teenage sexuality. Pleading with parents to both understand and smile at the normal “craziness” of adolescence, he also asks them to take a good hard look at how much the world has changed during the last ten years, with MTV and AIDS and the exponential rise of teenage pregnancy, so that it’s become much more difficult to be a teenager’s parent, especially when the teenager is adopted.

From the Back Cover: A Miracle Every Day takes an illuminating and intimate look at flourishing single-mother families. Single motherhood and the children of single mothers have been the subject of overwhelmingly negative statistical analysis. But, asks Marita Golden, where are the studies that analyze the strengths of single mothers, the positive adaptive skills learned by their children, the support systems that help these families work? In A Miracle Every Day Golden, once a single mother herself, and several other single mothers and their family members share their success stories with great honesty and insight. Golden identifies the coping characteristics these families have in common and organizes them into guiding themes, making A Miracle Every Day a book that single mothers and their support networks can turn to for wisdom, comfort, and inspiration.

---

About the Author: Marita Golden is the author of four novels, most recently The Edge of Heaven (Doubleday, 1997). She has also written Saving Our Sons: Raising Black Children in a Turbulent World; edited Wild Women Don’t Wear No Blues: Black Women Writers on Men, Love and Sex; and co-edited Skin Deep: Black Women and White Women Write About Race—all of which have been published by Doubleday. Executive Director of the Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Foundation, Marita Golden is also on the faculty of the M.F.A. Graduate Creative Writing Program at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Virginia. She lives in Mitchellville, Maryland, with her husband and son.

From the Back Cover: Have you ever wondered about adopting a child from overseas? Is adoption part of your family—or would you like it to be? Travel with Elle and Jonathan through their true adoption journey —through the steps of the adoption process in an expedition that pulls you, draws you, presses at you, and at the end, has the power to ultimately complete you.

The people and the events are real. The emotions are incredibly powerful. And the story’s page-turning significance will grip your soul. Come with us; let the story capture your heart. Travel with us until the moments of waiting fall into one: The powerful uniting of parent and child. And feel the joy of coming home.

---

About the Author: Elle Conner, the mother of two teenage boys and Allie (now nine), lives in mid-Michigan balancing working part-time with being there for her kids. A voracious reader, Elle also loves to write and is now working on books Two and Three of this series. Elle and her husband love to spend time with their kids; traveling, camping, and attending their children’s numerous events.

Erin Brown Conroy, a mom of 13 children (eight adopted internationally), has been an instructor to children and counselor to families for over 30 years. As author of three parenting books including 20 Secrets to Success with Your Child, Erin slips away on evenings and weekends for educational and motivational speaking at conferences and workshops and teaches as a part-time university professor in leadership, writing and research, and health and wellness. Erin and her husband, Shawn, together enjoy homeschooling and raising their children in Michigan.