Ladder Of Hope

Inspiring true stories of courage and second chances.

Darkness will not last forever. Together we can climb toward the light. They were as troubled as we, our ancestors, those who came before us, and all for the very same reasons: fear of illness, a broken heart, fights in the family, the threat of another war. Corrupt politicians walked their stage, and natural disasters appeared without warning. And yet they came through, carrying us within them, through the grief and struggle, through the personal pain and the public chaos, finding their way with love and faith, not giving in to despair but walking upright until their last step was taken. My culture does not honor the ancestors as a quaint spirituality of the past but as a living source of strength for the present. They did it and so will we. In the same voice that has comforted and challenged countless readers through his daily social media posts, Choctaw elder and Episcopal priest Steven Charleston offers words of hard-won hope, rooted in daily conversations with the Spirit and steeped in Indigenous wisdom. Every day Charleston spends time in prayer. Every day he writes down what he hears from the Spirit. In Ladder to the Light he shares what he has heard with the rest of us and adds thoughtful reflection to help guide us to the light Native America knows something about cultivating resilience and resisting darkness. For all who yearn for hope, Ladder to the Light is a book of comfort, truth, and challenge in a time of anguish and fear.

From Maya Soetoro-Ng, sister of President Obama, comes a lyrical story relaying the loving wisdom of their late mother to a young granddaughter she never met. (Ages 4-8) Features an audio read-along performed by the author! Little Suhaila wishes she could have known her grandma, who would wrap her arms around the whole world if she could, Mama says. And one night, Suhaila gets her wish when a golden ladder appears at her window, and Grandma Annie invites the girl to come along with her on a magical journey. In a rich and deeply personal narrative, Maya Soetoro-Ng draws inspiration from her mother’s love for family, her empathy for others, and her ethic of service to imagine this remarkable meeting. Evoking fantasy and folklore, the story touches on events that have affected people across the world in our time and reaffirms our common humanity. Yuyi Morales’s breathtaking artwork illuminates the dreamlike tale, reminding us that loved ones lost are always with us, and that sometimes we need only look at the moon and remember.

A romantic comedy written with the authenticity of a memoir, Jacob's Ladder is entertaining and intelligent. Full of wit, slapstick and heart, it conjures up the great screwball comedies of the 1940s. Joel Yanofsky writes about a community he knows intimately -- anglophone Montréal -- a community which has, over the years, both changed dramatically and dramatically resisted change. The same is true of Yanofsky's narrator, Jacob Glassman, a thirtysomething Oliver Twist stuck in the suburban home he grew up in and clinging to the status quo for dear life. Not easy to do for a man who is pursuing two women at the same time and who is caught up in a shifting series of love triangles. When it comes to craziness, Jacob points out, there's an awfully wide margin for error. In Jacob's Ladder, that margin is stretched to the limit by a cast of hilarious, haywire characters: rogue real estate agents, sentimental adulterers, an obese shrink, an agoraphobic travel agent, a transsexual newspaper editor, and a proselytzing rabbinical student with his sights set on Jacob's bewildered soul.

Do you want to read poems that can transform your Life? Poems that can lead you to everlasting peace and bliss? Poems that can light up your life and eradicate the darkness of ignorance that most of us live in? These beautiful poems can help you Realize the Truth about life, about God, about your true self. They can motivate you to remain positive and strong, eliminate all negativity in life. You can read a poem every day and be inspired to move closer to the ultimate goal of life. A true treasure, these poems will see you through the hardest of times as they will help you Realize what life is all about.

A timely examination by a leading scientist of the physical, psychological, and moral effects of inequality. Today’s inequality is on a scale that none of us has seen in our lifetimes, yet this disparity between rich and poor has ramifications that extend far beyond mere financial means. In The Broken Ladder psychologist Keith Payne examines how inequality divides us not just economically, but has profound consequences for how we think, how our cardiovascular systems respond to stress, how our immune systems function, and how we view moral ideas like justice and fairness. Experiments in psychology, neuroscience, and behavioral economics have not only revealed important new insights on how inequality changes people in predictable ways, but have provided a corrective to our flawed way of viewing poverty as the result of individual character failings. Among modern, developed societies, economic inequality is not primarily about money, but rather about relative status: where we stand in relation to other people. Regardless of their average income, countries or states with greater levels of income inequality have much higher rates of all the social problems we associate with poverty, including lower average life expectancies, serious health issues, mental illness, and crime. The Broken Ladder explores such issues as why women in poor societies often have more children, and have them younger; why there is little trust among the working class that investing for the future will pay off; why people’s perception of their relative social status affects their political beliefs, and why growing inequality leads to greater political divisions; how poverty raises stress levels in the same way as a physical threat; inequality in the workplace, and how it affects performance; why unequal societies become more religious; and finally offers measures people can take to lessen the harm done by inequality in their own lives and the lives of their children.