Retired Women Laughing At Gravity

As a psychotherapist for thirty years, Sheila Lopez spent several thousand hours talking with clients about the meaning of life, eventually learning the secret of good mental health in any chapter of life: Its all in how you look at it. In her collection of witty anecdotes, Sheila shares cheerful, inspiring advice on how retired women can have more fun in their everyday lives, find joy in simple pleasures, and realize that aging is funny! With hilarious honesty, Sheila reveals the secrets to achieving beauty and happiness as women age, through essays that provide entertaining glimpses at not only her life, but the lives of her close friends as well. From fashion secrets that include trading in polyester suits for glitter and bling to fulfilling a childhood dream of throwing a tea party for a group of girlfriends, Sheila teaches other women that it is okay to be proud of laugh lines and walk into the future with joy and gratitude. Retired WomenLaughing at Gravity is a wonderful reference manual for any woman who wants to turn the Golden Years into the most comical times of her life.

In this wonderful exploration of the meaning of laughter, Barry Sanders queries its uses from the ancient Hebrews to Lenny Bruce, turning up evidence of its age-old power to subvert authority and give voice to the voiceless.

"John Marvel, Assistant" by Thomas Nelson Page is a novel. Thomas Nelson Page (1853 – 1922) was an American lawyer and writer. He also served as the U.S. ambassador to Italy from 1913 to 1919 under the administration of President Woodrow Wilson during World War I. In his writing, Page popularized the Southern tradition of the plantation genre. Excerpt: "I shall feel at liberty to tell my story in my own way; rambling along at my own gait; now going from point to point; now tearing ahead; now stopping to rest or to ruminate, and even straying from the path whenever I think a digression will be for my own enjoyment. I shall begin with my college career, a period to which I look back now with a pleasure wholly incommensurate with what I achieved in it; which I find due to the friends I made and to the memories I garnered there in a time when I possessed the unprized treasures of youth: spirits, hope, and abounding conceit. As these memories, with the courage (to use a mild term) that a college background gives, are about all that I got out of my life there, I shall dwell on them only enough to introduce two or three friends and one enemy, who played later a very considerable part in my life."

With an introduction by Xiaolu Guo A classic memoir set during the Chinese revolution of the 1940s and inspired by folklore, providing a unique insight into the life of an immigrant in America. When we Chinese girls listened to the adults talking-story, we learned that we failed if we grew up to be but wives or slaves. We could be heroines, swordswomen. Throughout her childhood, Maxine Hong Kingston listened to her mother's mesmerizing tales of a China where girls are worthless, tradition is exalted and only a strong, wily woman can scratch her way upwards. Growing up in a changing America, surrounded by Chinese myth and memory, this is her story of two cultures and one trenchant, lyrical journey into womanhood. Complex and beautiful, angry and adoring, Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior is a seminal piece of writing about emigration and identity. It won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1976 and is widely hailed as a feminist classic.