Brittle Never Broken

After LaViza Lockwood is born her mother notices something is wrong, but doctors cannot detect a problem. It is not until LaViza becomes a walking toddler that she is diagnosed with Osteogenesis Imperfecta (OI), also known as brittle bones. This debilitating bone disease causes LaViza countless fractures, numerous surgeries, and several months of hospital stays. But she still manages to do what others in her environment are doing-gambling, drinking, drugs, and sex, all prior to being of legal age. LaVizas mother is single, with three children. She has several nervous break downs, which causes her to attempt murder and suicide. Unable to maintain employment, government assistance becomes her only source of income. As a result, her best option for residency is to live in the Wellrock Gardens housing projects. Many of LaVizas family members and friends succumb to substance addictions in order to cope with living in poverty and fear. However, LaVizas biggest fear of becoming entangled in the vicious cycle of generational poverty, crime, and addiction is what makes her take drastic chances to not become a statistic. Brittle Never Broken is definitely not your typical rags-to-riches memoir because riches refers to LaVizas ability to remain self-motivated, despite relentless afflictions and heartaches. LaVizas bones are brittle, but nothing, or no one can break her awesome spirit!

The deluxe eBook edition of Never Broken includes more than an hour of audio tracks and video footage, including live performances, exclusive a cappella recordings of each song featured in the book, and a rare recording of the audition that Jewel made at age fifteen for Interlochen Arts Academy. These additions, along with photographs of handwritten lyrics, personal artwork from Jewel’s archives, behind-the-scenes tour footage, and more, enrich the heartfelt emotion and sense of adventure already so present in Jewel’s words. New York Times bestselling poet and multi-platinum singer-songwriter Jewel explores her unconventional upbringing and extraordinary life in an inspirational memoir that covers her childhood to fame, marriage, and motherhood. When Jewel’s first album, Pieces of You, topped the charts in 1995, her emotional voice and vulnerable performance were groundbreaking. Drawing comparisons to Joan Baez and Joni Mitchell, a singer-songwriter of her kind had not emerged in decades. Now, with more than thirty million albums sold worldwide, Jewel tells the story of her life, and the lessons learned from her experience and her music. Living on a homestead in Alaska, Jewel learned to yodel at age five, and joined her parents’ entertainment act, working in hotels, honky-tonks, and biker bars. Behind a strong-willed family life with an emphasis on music and artistic talent, however, there was also instability, abuse, and trauma. At age fifteen, she moved out and tasked herself with a mission: to see if she could avoid being the kind of statistic that her past indicated for her future. Soon after, she was accepted to the prestigious Interlochen Arts Academy in Michigan, and there she began writing her own songs as a means of expressing herself and documenting her journey to find happiness. Jewel was eighteen and homeless in San Diego when a radio DJ aired a bootleg version of one of her songs and it was requested into the top-ten countdown, something unheard-of for an unsigned artist. By the time she was twenty-one, her debut had gone multiplatinum. There is much more to Jewel’s story, though, one complicated by family legacies, by crippling fear and insecurity, and by the extraordinary circumstances in which she managed to flourish and find happiness despite these obstacles. Along her road of self-discovery, learning to redirect her fate, Jewel has become an iconic singer and songwriter. In Never Broken she reflects on how she survived, and how writing songs, poetry, and prose has saved her life many times over. She writes lyrically about the natural wonders of Alaska, about pain and loss, about the healing power of motherhood, and about discovering her own identity years after the entire world had discovered the beauty of her songs.

The relation of mind to body has been argued about by philosophers for centuries. The Mind-Body Problem: An Opinionated Introduction presents the problem as a debate between materialists about the mind and their opponents. After examining the views of Descartes, Hume, and Thomas Huxley the debate is traced through the twentieth century to present day. The emphasis is always on the arguments used and the way one position develops from another. By the end of the book the reader is afforded both a grasp of the state of the controversy and how we got there.

Feelings argues for the counter-intuitive idea that feelings do not cause behavior, but rather follow from behavior, and are, in fact, the way that we know about our own bodily states and behaviors. This point of view, often associated with William James, is called self-perception theory. Self-perception theory can be empirically tested by manipulating bodily states and behaviors in order to see if the corresponding feelings are produced. In this volume, James D. Laird presents hundreds of studies, all demonstrating that feelings do indeed follow from behavior. Behaviors that have been manipulated include facial expressions of emotion, autonomic arousal, actions, gaze, and postures. The feelings that have been induced include happiness, anger, fear, romantic love, liking, disliking, hunger, and feelings of familiarity. These feelings do not feel like knowledge because they are knowledge-by-acquaintance, such as the knowledge we have of how an apple tastes, rather than verbal, knowledge-by-description, such as the knowledge that apples are red, round, and edible. Many professional theories of human behavior, as well as common sense, explain actions by an appeal to feelings as causes. Laird argues to the contrary that if feelings are information about behaviors that are already ongoing, feelings cannot be causes and that the whole mechanistic model of human behavior as "caused" in this sense seems mistaken. He proposes an alternative, cybernetic model, involving hierarchically stacked control systems. In this model, feelings provide feedback to the control systems, and in a further elaboration, this model suggests that the stack of control systems matches a similar stack of levels of organization of the world. An original contribution to the study of the relationship between feelings and behavior, the volume will be of interest to social, emotional, and cognitive psychologists.