This heartfelt memoir captures the life-changing power of unconditional love and perseverance. Even though this Big Brother/Little Brother match has little in common, they learn how to grapple with life's struggles together. A narrative that by its nature risks sentimentality or maudlin hyperbole never falls over that edge, nor even skates near it. That's a rough task, handled with a sure and compact force that allows the reader to discover the remarkable delicacy that runs through the journey taken by this boy and man.
In this sometimes painful narrative, Douglas finds beauty in unexpected places and relates it in forthright, sometimes blunt terms. His gift for unadorned, wry metaphors lead readers to insights that might be lost under the weight of more customary embellishment, as in the description of his childhood backyard: "filled with plywood cut-outs of Disney characters, painted and nailed like little sacrifices to the redwood-stained fence." Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the book is the way in which the boy and man reshape each other; from Rico, Douglas draws insight into his own life. In a very complicated fashion, they both end up gaining from each other.
Same-sex couples are faced with many different options when choosing to have children today. In Journey to Same-Sex Parenthood, author, activist and father Eric Rosswood guides and helps prospective LGBT parents to explore these five popular options: Adoption, Foster Care, Assisted Reproduction, Surrogacy and Co-Parenting.
Each section includes a description of the specific family-building approach, followed by personal stories from same-sex couples and individuals who have chosen and gone through that particular journey. The appendix contains important legal issues to consider and questions to ask before deciding to move forward, along with a list of reasons why people may choose each of the five family-building paths and the challenges they may encounter.
Journey to Same-Sex Parenthood provides a unique combination of inspirational firsthand accounts combined with the critical information, tips and advice needed to help couples successfully navigate the complex road to parenthood.
Our brains have numerous functioning parts, all of which serve us at any one moment. But decades of research reveal the existence of two basic brain “operating systems”, two fundamental ways in which the whole brain processes incoming information. Because of this phenomenon of brain dominance, most of us tend to favor the input of either our “dualistic” left-brain (which focuses on parts instead of wholes) or our holistic right hemisphere. This means that typically only half of our innate intelligence informs our thinking and since the left-brain operating system dominates most males, our culture has itself become left-brain dominant.
How Whole Brain Thinking Can Save the Future explores this left-brain bias in our civilization, revealing it to be the root cause for centuries of war, racism, and political polarization, and eons of misunderstanding between the sexes. While most of our technological and scientific progress is driven by left-brain thinking, the great advances to come will require that we consciously harness both sides of our brain to greatly improve our cognition. Award-winning author James Olson goes on to explain how we can achieve greater internal harmony between the two operating systems of the brain both as individuals and as a culture thus showing us how ad why thinking with our whole brains will lead us to peace and to the ultimate healing of our relationships and our world.
