Development Sociology

When a loved one passes unexpectedly, the person left behind can lose their bearings. After the sudden loss of her mother, Chelsea Hanson, a nationally recognized grief educator and founder of With Sympathy Gifts and Keepsakes, didn't know where to turn for help, what to do next, or how to put the pieces of her life back together. Hanson's The Sudden Loss Survival Guide gathers everything that she learned during her own recovery process and provides an indispensable road map to aid those who've experienced a life-changing loss.

Introvert Survival Tactics is going to shed light on exactly how you function and how to use your tendencies to your advantage - social survival tactics for your most demanding social obligations. Introvert Survival Tactics takes you on a tour of self-discovery and allows you to understand your exact wiring. You’ll be armed with specific and actionable survival and party tactics to get the most out of your social energy and make an impact every time.

While our civilization continues to advance, our capacity to live civilly - to appreciate our common humanity with empathy and humility - ironically dwindles daily. Even as we become more technologically connected, many of us feel increasingly disconnected and disengaged from each other. Civility Rules! offers an opportunity to learn about the history, substance, and significance of civility through the lens of George Washington’s “Rules of Civility”.

Women are constantly being told that it's simply too difficult to balance work and family, so if they don't really "have to" work, it's better for their families if they stay home. Not only is this untrue, Leslie Bennetts says, but the arguments in favor of stay-at-home motherhood fail to consider the surprising benefits of work and the unexpected toll of giving it up. It's time, she says, to get the message across: combining work and family really is the best choice for most women.

The Defining Decade for the #Adulting generation - a book that blends storytelling and data to unpack the choices you make in your 20s, why they matter, and how to turn those critical years into a launchpad for the life you want. We tend to think of our 20s as a playground for life: a time for low-consequence experimentation and delaying big decisions. But the truth is that while you're muddling through those years - exploring new cities, dating the wrong people, hopping between jobs - a small shift in your flight path can mean the difference between landing on Mars or Saturn.

When a brother or sister dies, surviving siblings often receive little support or recognition of their pain. But their grief is real, and there is a way to recover from it. Through intimate, true stories and interviews with brothers and sisters who have lost a sibling, expert on grief Katherine Fair Donnelly provides valuable insight on how to survive this traumatic experience.

Why is it that children in a family can share the same gene pool, a similar socio-economic environment and experience similar parenting styles yet have fundamentally different personalities, interests and even different careers as adults? Birth order! The implications for parents, teachers and adults involved with children are many. First published in 2003 to great acclaim, this fully revised and updated edition seeks to increase the listener's understanding of birth order theory.

This is the tale of Amy and her daughter and the people who helped raise them after Amy found herself a reluctant single parent. It is a story of frequent failures and surprising successes, as Amy starts and loses careers, bumbles through blind dates, and travels across the country with her daughter. All roads, though, lead them back to her hometown of Freeville (pop. 458), a tiny village where Amy's family has lived for over 200 years.

The fifth of eight children, Chris Forhan was born into a family of silence. He and his siblings learned, without being told, that certain thoughts and feelings were not to be shared. On the evenings his father didn't come home, the rest of the family would eat dinner without him, his whereabouts unknown, his absence pronounced but not mentioned. And on a cold night in 1973, just before Christmas, Forhan's father killed himself in the carport. Forty years later Forhan "bravely considers the way he is and is not his father's son" (Larry Watson).

Are you tired of dating men who string you along, disappear, or won't commit? Is He the One? explains why women often fall for the wrong guys and how to quickly recognize who they are. Dating today is anything but easy, especially as a single woman over 40. Wouldn't it be great if you could tell within three dates if a man was going to waste your time or had potential as a romantic partner? Well, now you can! Author and dating coach Ronnie Ann Ryan radically simplifies understanding what men do and say.

The Supreme Court has issued a decision, but that doesn't end the debate. Now that the Supreme Court has ruled, Americans face momentous debates about the nature of marriage and religious liberty. Because the Court has redefined marriage in all 50 states, we have to energetically protect our freedom to live according to conscience and faith as we work to rebuild a strong marriage culture.

In the fall of 1952, a courageous 18-year-old Roberta boarded a Greyhound bus in Missouri to start her new adventure to train as a nurse in Oklahoma. While in training, she falls in love with and marries a World War II soldier. The new couple moves to his cotton farm in rural Oklahoma and starts their life as a family. As the story develops, it proves how Roberta-Mama's early years in Missouri influenced her Oklahoma life and how it helped bond her family together.

Every year, some two million parents in the US suffer the death of a son or daughter. The unnatural sequence of the child's preceding the parent in death creates a wrenching loss and overwhelming emotional and spiritual disorientation. Most of these bereaved parents find relief from their isolation only in the company of others like themselves. The Grieving Garden offers support, understanding, and, ultimately, comfort and hope from those who have sowed the same tears over the death of a child.

Death is a fact of life, but the experience of grief is unique to each of us. This timely collection brings together a range of voices to offer reflections on death and dying, from individual losses to large scale catastrophes. Karin Schimke revisits her troubled relationship with her late father, a Second World War survivor ‘whose brain had been broken by violence’. Madeleine Fullard, the head of South Africa’s Missing Persons Task Team, draws us into the search for activists who were ‘disappeared’ or went missing in political circumstances between 1960 and 1994.

Twenty-seven-year-old Sarah Thebarge had it all - a loving boyfriend, an Ivy League degree, and a successful career - when her life was derailed by an unthinkable diagnosis: aggressive breast cancer. After surviving the grueling treatments - though just barely - Sarah moved to Portland, Oregon, to start over. There, a chance encounter with an exhausted African mother and her daughters transformed her life again.

In We Live for the We, first-time mother Dani McClain sets out to understand how to raise her daughter in what she, as a black woman, knows to be an unjust—even hostile—society. Black women are more likely to die during pregnancy or birth than any other race; black mothers must stand before television cameras telling the world that their slain children were human beings. What, then, is the best way to keep fear at bay and raise a child so she lives with dignity and joy?

Many couples prefer to go through relationship books or gather information and love tips so that their marriage can be smooth sailing, if not a bed of roses. But not all romance books will give tips that are realistic and ones that can be followed in daily lives. This book has not kept any stones unturned, as it is an invaluable piece of writing that has served as an ideal marriage help guide for many couples.

For decades they assumed that people who face adversity - a difficult childhood, career turbulence, sudden bouts of bad luck - will succumb to their circumstances. Yet over and over again they found a significant percentage are able to overcome their life circumstances and achieve spectacular success. How is it that individuals who are not “supposed” to succeed manage to overcome the odds? Are there certain traits that such people have in common?

There’s a quiet revolution happening in the way we die. More than 1.5 million Americans a year die in hospice care - nearly 44 percent of all deaths - and a vast industry has sprung up to meet the growing demand. Once viewed as a New Age indulgence, hospice is now a $14 billion business and one of the most successful segments in health care. Changing the Way We Die, by award-winning journalists Fran Smith and Sheila Himmel, is the first book to take a broad, penetrating look at the hospice landscape.

Even the smartest women play dumb when it comes to relationships. They make the same mistakes over and over again; they fall for the same kind of guys; and they cry to the same friends when, inevitably, the relationship goes sour. Best-selling authors Steven Carter and Julia Sokol have written the book for every woman who would like to be smarter when it comes to affairs of the heart - Men Like Women Who Like Themselves.