Crossing Back Over

Brett’s most recent manic episode has derailed him from life as the director of operations at a prominent software start-up in Texas. He is now at home, fully dependent on his mother, and officially diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Brett is terrified. He has no guarantees on his long-term health, no understanding of how his medication works and is still dealing with hell-like anxiety, restlessness, mania, and depression. Crossing Back Over: The Practice of Owning and Accepting Bipolar Disorder details Brett’s battle with taming the beast that is bipolar. Written in the same style as part 1 of his story, Crossover: A Look inside a Manic Mind, Crossing Back Over sheds light on what true recovery looks and feels like from a firsthand account. No matter the environment, recovering from a serious event takes hard work, discipline, patience, and acceptance. Crossing Back Over allows the reader to peek behind the curtain of an individual determined to find a happy life, even with his chronic brain disorder. This book is valuable for anyone who is facing a deeply personal challenge.

From the award-winning author of Crossing Ocean Parkway, a personal memoir about adjusting to loss through books, meditation, and the process of memory itself Marianna De Marco Torgovnick experienced the rupture of two of her life’s most intimate relations when her mother and brother died in close proximity. Mourning rocked her life, but it also led to the solace and insight offered by classic books and the practice of meditation. Her resulting journey into the past imagines a viable future and raises questions acute for Italian Americans but pertinent to everyone, about the nature of memory and the meanings of home at a time, like ours, marked by cultural disruption and wartime. Crossing Back: Books, Family, and Memory without Pain presents a personal perspective on death, mourning, loss, and renewal. A sequel to her award-winning and much-anthologized Crossing Ocean Parkway, Crossing Back is about close familial ties and personal loss, written after the death of her remaining birth family, who had always been there, and now were not. After their loss, she entered a spiritual and psychological state of “transcendental homelessness”: the feeling of being truly at home nowhere, of being spiritually adrift. In a grand act of symbolic reenactment, she found herself moving apartments repeatedly, not realizing she did so subconsciously to keep busy, to stave off grief. By reading and studying great books, she opened up to mourning, a process she constitutionally resisted as somehow shameful. Over time, she discovered that a third death colored and prolonged her feelings of grief: her first child’s death in infancy, which, in the course of a happier lifetime, had never been adequately acknowledged. Her new losses led her finally to take stock of her son’s death too. Reading and meditating, followed by writing, became daily her healing rituals. A warm and intimate user’s guide to books, family, and memory in the mourning process, the end-point being memory without pain, Crossing Back is a wide-ranging memoir about growing older and learning to ride the waves of change. Lively and conversational, Torgovnick is masterful at tracking the moment-to moment, day-to-day challenges of sudden or protracted grief and the ways in which the mind and the body seem to search for—and sometimes find—solutions.

The Jordan represents the barrier God is calling you to cross over. It represents the transition between where you are now, and where He wants you to be.

A powerful exploration of grief and resilience following the death of the author's son that combines memoir, reportage, and lessons in how to heal Everyone deals with grief in their own way. Helen Macdonald found solace in training a wild gos­hawk. Cheryl Strayed found strength in hiking the Pacific Crest Trail. For Carol Smith, a Pulitzer Prize­ nominated journalist struggling with the sudden death of her seven-year-old son, Christopher, the way to cross the river of sorrow was through work. In Crossing the River, Smith recounts how she faced down her crippling loss through reporting a series of profiles of people coping with their own intense chal­lenges, whether a life-altering accident, injury, or diag­nosis. These were stories of survival and transformation, of people facing devastating situations that changed them in unexpected ways. Smith deftly mixes the stories of these individuals and their families with her own account of how they helped her heal. General John Shalikashvili, once the most powerful member of the American military, taught Carol how to face fear with discipline and endurance. Seth, a young boy with a rare and incurable illness, shed light on the totality of her son's experiences, and in turn helps readers see that the value of a life is not measured in days. Crossing the River is a beautiful and profoundly moving book, an unforgettable journey through grief toward hope, and a valuable, illuminating read for anyone coping with loss.

Growing up an Italian-American in the Bensonhurst neighborhood of New York city, Marianna De Marco longed for college, culture, and upward mobility. Her daydreams circled around WASP (White Anglo Saxon Protestant) heroes on television—like Robin Hood and the Cartwright family—but in Brooklyn she never encountered any. So she associated moving up with Ocean Parkway, a street that divides the working-class Italian neighborhood where she was born from the middle-class Jewish neighborhood into which she married. This book is Torgovnick's unflinching account of crossing cultural boundaries in American life, of what it means to be an Italian American woman who became a scholar and literary critic. Included are autobiographical moments interwoven with engrossing interpretations of American cultural icons from Dr. Dolittle to Lionel Trilling, The Godfather to Camille Paglia. Her experiences allow her to probe the cultural tensions in America caused by competing ideas of individuality and community, upward mobility and ethnic loyalty, acquisitiveness and spirituality.

Like John Muir, David Pitt-Brooke stepped out for a walk one morning—a long walk of a thousand kilometres or more through the arid valleys of southern interior British Columbia. He went in search of beauty and lost grace in a landscape that has seen decades of development and upheaval. In Crossing Home Ground he reports back, providing a day-by-day account of his journey’s experiences, from the practical challenges—dealing with blisters, rain and dehydration—to sublime moments of discovery and reconnection with the natural world. Through the course of this journey, Pitt-Brooke’s encounters with the natural world generate starting points for reflections on larger issues: the delicate interconnections of a healthy landscape and, most especially, the increasingly fragile bond between human beings and their home-places. There is no escaping the impact of human beings on the natural world, not even in the most remote countryside, but he finds hope and consolation in surviving pockets of loveliness, the kindness of strangers and the transformative process of the walking itself, a personal pilgrimage across home ground. Crossing Home Ground is a book that, though rooted in one specific place and time, will evoke a universal sense of recognition in a wide variety of readers. It will appeal to hikers, natural-history enthusiasts and anyone who loves the wild countryside and is concerned about the disappearance of Canada’s natural spaces. Pitt-Brooke’s grassland odyssey is sure to become a classic of British Columbia nature writing.

Brett is intense. Intense as a youth piecing together the world. Intense as an undersized point guard, middle child, and student. Intense as a professional poker player, manager, and problem solver. But most notably, intense as an unaware manic mind set free in the world. Crossover: A Look inside a Manic Mind is a personal memoir detailing the evolution of psychotic thoughts and how they influenced Brett's behavior during the three manic episodes that spanned the past decade of his life. Through basketball, poker, and work, Crossover offers a firsthand account of how the world looks and feels as a person with Bipolar I from childhood traits to adult expression. Brett's recall of these incidents is so detailed because he has a rare condition called hypermnesia, an unusually enhanced, vivid, and precise memory. His perspective sheds light on the progression of bipolar disorder and will enhance your ability to learn and empathize with those affected by the illness. Suicide among people with bipolar disorder is thirty times higher than the general population, yet the cause and prevention remain a mystery. Brett's story is educational and inspiring for anyone who suffers from or has been affected by mental illness. It is a must read for medical professionals, therapists, students, and teachers.

WHY IS COOPERS CROSSING GROWING SO FAST? JACK VAN CAMP, charming mayor of the booming Indiana town, isn’t telling where all his new townsfolk are coming from. He likes to think of it as his little secret. BUT WHEN attractive visitor Mrs. Zimmer expresses an interest in settling there, he reveals some of the town’s stranger aspects in a day-long tour. A tour complete with “tales“ of twelve of its more interesting “citizens.“ Quite strange tales, in fact. They might even be true. ONLY AT THE END of the tour, as night falls, does he discover that quiet, demure Dilly Zimmer has her own tale to tell, her own little secret. A secret involving a missing childhood . . . A deathbed whisper . . . And a very peculiar old typewriter. NOW MRS. ZIMMER has come to Coopers Crossing to set things right. One keystroke at a time. Fourteen more tales from just beyond the edge of the ordinary. Check out the author’s books at danielcrossbooks.com. Write to him at [email protected]. Cover design by Leah Diekhoff. Write to her at [email protected].