A Burden Of Silence

A Burden of Silence: My Mothers Battle with AIDS, is a heartwarming story of an affectionate bond between a daughter and her sixty-six year old mother who was transfused with HIV positive blood during heart bypass surgery. It will evoke emotions of faith, inspiration, anger, and overwhelming love. The reader will also smile at the funny, tender moments that Ms. Draper writes about in her story. This is a devoted daughters story of her elderly mothers painful and lonely journey through AIDS. Because her mother was not part of a so-called AIDS risk group, she felt ignored, rejected, stigmatized, and ashamed. For years, she suffered in excruciating silence. Nancy has given her mothers story a voice. There are lessons for everyone in this booklessons about acceptance, compassion, and forgiveness. -Ann Webster, Ph.D., director, HIV/AIDS Program, Mind/Body Institute, Boston, MA Nancy Draper has written a tender account of a daughters devotion to her dying mother. This story about a grandmother who developed AIDS from a contaminated blood transfusion, will inspire admiration for Ms. Drapers courage and persistence. It will also inspire rage against the blood banks that failed to screen blood donations adequately. -Ann Pozen, Psy.D., president, National Association for Victims of Transfusion-Acquired AIDS, Inc., Bethesda, MD This book is a must readIt teaches us about the importance of embracing AIDS patients as human beings. We need to provide them with compassion and empathy instead of treating them as if they were dirty untouchable, unworthy people. In the end, I believe it is people like Nancys mother teaching us about love and acceptance. Hopefully, her dying in silence will wake us up! -Maggie Sund, Ph.D., Central Oregon Counseling and Coaching Nancy Drapers mother told her, I want you to write about me having AIDS because I dont want anyone else to suffer in silence like we have. Nancys mother must be very proud of her and this account of three years of fear, heartache, some good days and always deep love. Here Nancy tells the rest of a story that she summarized in our March 1999 issue and wrote under a pseudonym. Thanks, Nancy!" -Father Pat McCloskey, O.F.M., Editor, St. Anthony Messenger

"This is the first comprehensive social, intellectual and religious history of the wide-spread Sabbatean movement from its birth in the Ottoman Empire in the seventeenth century to the Republic of Turkey in the first half of the twentieth century, claiming that they owed their survival to the internalization of the Kabbalistic "burden of silence"--

A sensuous, textured novel of life in a refugee camp, long-listed for the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction On a hill overlooking a refugee camp in Sudan, a young man strings up bedsheets that, in an act of imaginative resilience, will serve as a screen in his silent cinema. From the cinema he can see all the comings and goings in the camp, especially those of two new arrivals: a girl named Saba, and her mute brother, Hagos. For these siblings, adapting to life in the camp is not easy. Saba mourns the future she lost when she was forced to abandon school, while Hagos, scorned for his inability to speak, must live vicariously through his sister. Both resist societal expectations by seeking to redefine love, sex, and gender roles in their lives, and when a businessman opens a shop and befriends Hagos, they cast off those pressures and make an unconventional choice. With this cast of complex, beautifully drawn characters, Sulaiman Addonia details the textures and rhythms of everyday life in a refugee camp, and questions what it means to be an individual when one has lost all that makes a home or a future. Intimate and subversive, Silence Is My Mother Tongue dissects the ways society wages war on women and explores the stories we must tell to survive in a broken, inhospitable environment.

"A personal account of a Christian family's battle with AIDS describes the terrible impact on the Allen family, the deaths of Allen's daughter-in-law and two grandchildren, the revelation of one son's homosexuality and infection, and the ostracism, stigma, and personal loss the family"--

This tale of fiction is set in non-fiction. Amy's story will hit you with realisms on many fronts: from friendships to communication, to battles both self-imposed and unwarranted. Amy is a healthy, well balanced Canadian girl who, at age 15, has lots of vim and vigour. Living in Japan with her family, she is happy with life, both at home and at the International School she attends. She also treasures her friendship with Sue -her very best friend- and they are inseparable. Enter a charismatic boy named Anthony, and the picture begins to crumble as he becomes the architect of her demise. Her life takes an unexpected roller coaster ride as she tumbles into depression, and struggles through therapy, to re-emerge as a new Amy.

KIRKUS INDIE BOOK REVIEW A remarkable journey of self-discovery and survival, as the author navigates a perfect storm of homosexuality, religion and military service. Gay-themed memoirs have become more and more common, but this work stands out based on the unique circumstances surrounding the author's life. Tripp describes his childhood in Montana as a kind of war zone: "Growing up in an alcoholic home, I was never sure where the beginning was or where on the path I would hit a landmine and have the evening explode in front of me." He eventually seeks refuge in the structure and discipline of the armed forces but incurs the psychological burden of having to hide his true nature. Tripp's inclusion of excerpts from his personnel file adds another layer to the narrative, underscoring his criticism of the massive amount of resources expended by the military in an effort to weed out homosexual service members. Amid the subterfuge, the author finds tender moments of human connection as a lonely teenager working in a nursing home, a sexually repressed young man living on a submarine and a decorated officer approaching retirement. In fact, a submarine is the ideal metaphor for Tripp's odyssey: He attempts to move undetected through largely hostile waters while facing potentially disastrous consequences if discovered. The author also has a knack for explaining decisions that lead him to pursue "reparative therapy," heterosexual marriage and fatherhood. The only drawback is Tripp's fondness for well-worn or clunky similes, which will strike some readers as folksy or distracting. Regardless, this memoir full of sharp insights will appeal to a wide audience-not only gay men, but anyone who wants to better understand a loved one struggling with sexual orientation and identity. A powerful testament to the importance of self-acceptance and perseverance.

2017 INSPY Award winner, general fiction category Before Christ called her daughter . . . Before she stole healing by touching the hem of his garment . . . Elianna is a young girl crushed by guilt. After her only brother is killed while in her care, Elianna tries to earn forgiveness by working for her father’s textile trade and caring for her family. When another tragedy places Elianna in sole charge of the business, her talent for design brings enormous success, but never the absolution she longs for. As her world unravels, she breaks off her betrothal to the only man she will ever love. Then illness strikes, isolating Elianna from everyone, stripping everything she has left. No physician can cure her. No end is in sight. Until she hears whispers of a man whose mere touch can heal. After so many years of suffering and disappointment, is it possible that one man could redeem the wounds of body . . . and soul?

A young woman moves across an ocean to uncover the truth about her grandparents' mysterious estrangement and pieces together the extraordinary story of their wartime experiences In 1948, after surviving World War II by escaping Nazi-occupied France for refugee camps in Switzerland, Miranda's grandparents, Anna and Armand, bought an old stone house in a remote, picturesque village in the South of France. Five years later, Anna packed her bags and walked out on Armand, taking the typewriter and their children. Aside from one brief encounter, the two never saw or spoke to each other again, never remarried, and never revealed what had divided them forever. A Fifty-Year Silence is the deeply involving account of Miranda Richmond Mouillot's journey to find out what happened between her grandmother, a physician, and her grandfather, an interpreter at the Nuremberg Trials, who refused to utter his wife's name aloud after she left him. To discover the roots of their embittered and entrenched silence, Miranda abandons her plans for the future and moves to their stone house, now a crumbling ruin; immerses herself in letters, archival materials, and secondary sources; and teases stories out of her reticent, and declining, grandparents. As she reconstructs how Anna and Armand braved overwhelming odds and how the knowledge her grandfather acquired at Nuremberg destroyed their relationship, Miranda wrestles with the legacy of trauma, the burden of history, and the complexities of memory. She also finds herself learning how not only to survive but to thrive--making a home in the village and falling in love. With warmth, humor, and rich, evocative details that bring her grandparents' outsize characters and their daily struggles vividly to life, A Fifty-Year Silence is a heartbreaking, uplifting love story spanning two continents and three generations.