When Life Turns Upside Down

A heartwarming, feel-good story of friendship and overcoming adversity in a time of COVID, this is a book about community, giving back, and understanding the world around us through the power of generosity from debut author K. Ibura. With one little announcement from their fourth-grade teacher, Shayla, Liam, Ben, and Ai's world turned upside down. Now, with school on hold due to a strange virus that they don't quite understand, the only semblance of safety they feel is knowing that they have one another in their apartment complex. But as each of them head home and experience their own version of confinement, it becomes very real. And as their individual struggles grow, they need each other now more than ever. Very soon, they discover that they're not the only ones who need a little help. Banded together, the friends find ways to help others struggling in their building. And one by one, they do their part in making their neighbors feel just a little bit safer. As the world becomes more complex, as protests take the streets, Shayla, Liam, Ben, and Ai do everything they can to better understand the world around them and the people around them in order to discover the power and comfort that understanding and generosity can bring.

Aids in the development of coping mechanisms and making a realistic adjustment to the changes posed by shared custody. Problem situations are presented on upside down pages. The book is turned rightside up to read solutions.

In the story of a heartbreak that no mother should have to face, Caryn Franca manages to put into words the unspeakable feelings that give a voice that is universal as we all go through the tragedies that are a part of life. Her memoir shows that though we may suddenly feel crushed by life, we are not alone. Caryn's son Nick was diagnosed with cancer at fifteen, beginning a hard-fought six-year battle. They moved forward one day at a time. And though it is a mother's job to teach her son, Caryn found that Nick was the one teaching her. For one so young, he became amazingly courageous and inspiring. On his back he tattooed a compass with the words courage, strength, friends, family, and faith his guideposts for life moving forward. He encouraged his family to get inked as well, and over the next few years, his family learned just how important those ideas were. Slowly, they each had to learn how to live with loss and find encouragement in the small miracles that happened each day. By leaning on each other and developing inner strength, they found the courage to push forward-with his memory in their hearts and the lessons he taught them etched into their skin.

Mariko Kikuchi tells the painful story of her father's alcoholism and her own journey through guilt to understanding her father's illness. She rejects the common belief that family members can and should be forgiven for anything they do, no matter how much harm they cause. This powerful, self-contained autobiographical manga began as a web series that went viral, and inspired a critically acclaimed 2019 film in Japan.

"It's a relief just to talk about it. It's heaven to fix it: "admin," the administrative chores that have exploded in our busy lives. Here's the book that will give you many hours of your life back"--

Ours is an age of anxiety. We worry about our children, jobs, homes, health, and finances. News and social media feed our fears. Even the fear of missing out leads to anxiety. The solution isn't to rid ourselves of the sources of anxiety but to recognize that anxiety originates from a spiritual influence--and then use the weapons of power, love, and a sound mind to fight back and live in God's peace. Sharing her own story of emerging from the battle with anxiety as well as the stories of others, Dr. Michelle Bengtson reminds you of your identity as a follower of Christ and of the peace he promises you in spite of everything. She provides tools to cope with the crushing emotional burden of anxiety now, and, more importantly, shows you how to reclaim God's peace as a way of life so that you can break anxiety's grip.

The case histories are drawn from the actual experiences of people struggling to survive traumatic change. However, each story is a compilation of several cases and have been changed to protect people.

In what we tell ourselves is an age of reason, we are behaving increasingly irrationally. An astonishing number of people subscribe to celebrity endorsed cults, Mayan armageddon prophecies, scientism, and other varieties of new age, anti-enlightenment philosophies. Millions more advance popular conspiracy theories: AIDS was created in a CIA laboratory, Princess Diana was assassinated, and the 9/11 attacks were an inside job. In The World Turned Upside Down, Melanie Phillips explains that the basic cause of this explosion of irrationality is the slow but steady marginalization of religion. We tell ourselves that faith and reason are incompatible, but the opposite is the case. It was Christianity and the Hebrew Bible, Phillips asserts, that gave us our concepts of reason, progress, and an orderly world on which science and modernity are based. Without its religious traditions, the West has drifted into mass derangement where truth and lies, right and wrong, victim and aggressor are all turned upside down. Scientists skeptical of global warming are hounded from their posts, Israel is demonized, and the US is vilified over the war on terror—all on the basis of blatant falsehoods and obscene propaganda. Worst of all, asserts Phillips, this abandonment of rationality leaves the West vulnerable to its legitimate threats. Faced with the very real challenges of spiraling demographics and violent, confrontational Islamism, the West is no longer willing or able to defend the modernity and rationalism that it once brought into being.