A step-by-step guide to raising confident, open-minded, tolerant kids -- as featured on the PBS NewsHour A rapidly growing demographic cohort in America, non-religious and progressively religious parents are at the forefront of a major and unprecedented cultural shift. Unable to fall back on what they were taught as children, many of these parents are struggling -- or simply failing -- to address issues of God, religion and faith with their children in ways that promote honesty, curiosity, kindness and independence. The author sifts through hard data -- including the results of a survey of 1,000 secular parents -- and delivers gentle but straightforward advice to atheists, agnostics, humanists and open-minded believers. With a thoughtful voice infused with humor, Russell seamlessly merges scientific thought, scholarly research and everyday experience with respect for a full range of ways to view the world. "Relax, It's Just God" goes beyond the numbers to assist parents (and grandparents) who may be struggling to find the right time place, tone and language with which to talk about God, spirituality and organized religion. It encourages parents to promote religious literacy and understanding and to support kids as they explore religion on their own -- ensuring that each child makes up his or her own mind about what to believe (or not believe) and extends love and respect to those who may not agree with them. Subjects covered include: <ol>
<li>Talking openly about our beliefs without indoctrinating kids</li> <li>Making religious literacy fun and engaging</li> <li>Talking about death without the comforts of heaven</li> <li>Navigating religious differences with extended family members</li> <li>What to do when kids get threatened with hell</li>
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Relax It's Just God: How and Why to Talk to Your Kids About Religion When You're Not Religious

Biographies & Memoirs

Russell, Wendy Thomas

Leaders & Notable People

Brown Paper Press

In a series of strangely resilient personal adventures–often beginning with breakups, and fueled by a sense of "invincible longing"–essayist Alan Rifkin flings himself at the last vestiges of the Southern California Dream. He chases summer with a pool man, lives with monks in a Santa Barbara monastery, joins a dysfunctional Los Angeles writing club, communes with wild dolphins, traces the steps of Otzi the Iceman, emulates a Bible-based marriage, and confronts his mother's last season in his beloved San Fernando Valley, in each case wrestling with mysteries of heaven and earth. By the time he looks up, he has waded deep into the complications of later life–compromised love, family tragedy, and what it might mean to be a grownup in the 21st century West.

Burdens by Water: An Unintended Memoir

Rifkin, Alan

Religion & Spirituality

Long Beach Press-Telegram writer Tim Grobaty was promoted to columnist at his newspaper back when it was still a glamorous and coveted job. In Iâ€™m Dyinâ€™ Here, the author means two things: Heâ€™ll likely die at the job that heâ€™s spent nearly four decades doing, and at the same time his profession, too, is seeing its last days. Weaving together personal history and a selection of columns written over the course of his storied career, Grobaty offers readers a rare glimpse into the inner workings of a dying breed: the local columnist. With everyday life â€” fatherhood, holidays, suburbia, and random encounters with animals â€” serving as fodder for his column, Grobaty reveals his sources of motivation and vulnerability, all the while struggling to maintain relevance in a rapidly changing industry. I'm Dyin' Here was chosen to inaugurate the Long Beach Mayor's Book Club â€” a new, citywide book club â€” in September 2016. Says David Kipen, founder of Libros Schmibros and book critic for KPCC's Take Two: "Tim Grobaty, one of these great city-side columnists [has written] a book-length meditation on the current 'optimistic' state of the print journalism industry in which he works." And Russ Parsons, former LA Times food critic and author of How to Pick a Peach: The Search for Flavor from Farm to Table, had this to say: "Over the years, a newspaper columnist develops a very special relationship with their readers: They become a favorite neighbor, a good friend, maybe even a family member. They don't deliver news; they tell us about life. Long Beach is lucky to have had Tim Grobaty in that role all these many years. He is the Bard of Big Town."

I'm Dyin' Here: A Life in the Paper

Grobaty, Tim

Arts & Literature

A page-turner, at once fascinating and deeply moving, "The Inheritance of Shame" is a memoir with shades of "A Little Life" by Hanya Yanagihara and enough hope and joy to inspire anyone who has ever been shamed by their family or society. Author Peter Gajdics spent six years in a bizarre form of conversion therapy (delivered in the form of primal therapy) that attempted to "cure" him of his homosexuality. Kept with other patients in a cult-like home in British Columbia, Canada, Gajdics was under the authority of a dominating, rogue psychiatrist who controlled his patients, in part, by creating and exploiting a false sense of family. Juxtaposed against his parents' tormented past–his mother's incarceration and escape from a communist concentration camp in post-World War II Yugoslavia, and his father's upbringing as an orphan in war-torn Hungary, "The Inheritance of Shame" explores the universal themes of childhood trauma, oppression, and intergenerational pain. Told over a period of decades, the story shows us the damaging repercussions of conversion therapy and reminds us that resilience, compassion, and the courage to speak the truth exist within us all. All over the United States and Canada, districts, cities and states are banning conversion, ex-gay and reparative therapies. This book offers the most complete and compelling reason for those bans to date. A groundbreaking memoir, "The Inheritance of Shame" offers insights into overcoming all kinds of shame, especially that which has trickled down from previous generations, and into the complicated but all-too-worthwhile process of forgiveness. This work also is a powerful example of "healing through memoir."

The Inheritance of Shame: A Memoir

LGBTQ+ Books

Gajdics, Peter

“An encyclopedic exploration of the most effective methods for giving children the courage to realize their full potential.” ― ADELE FABER, author of How to Talk So Kids Will Listen &amp; Listen So Kids Will Talk This extraordinary guidebook offers a refreshing new approach to raising confident, healthy, whole human beings, from toddler to teen. Groundbreaking in both its scope and methodology, ParentShift challenges some of our most popular disciplinary tools and replaces them with more than a dozen “toolkits” designed to help parents solve virtually any household without sabotaging their long=term goals. All children ― regardless of geography, ethnicity or socio-economic status ― are bound together by ten universal truths. These truths account for the vast majority of children's everyday behavior, both positive and negative. They are things like: "All children have emotional needs" and "All children have neurological responses to stress." When we understand and honor each of these truths, children reach adulthood with high and healthy self-esteem and close, trusting bonds with their parents. Too many of the tactics parents use today violate at least one of these truths. ParentShift explains this phenomenon, empowers parents to change, and shows them how to do it. In this book, readers will learn to: • Respond thoughtfully to outbursts and tantrums. • Prepare children to meet life’s challenges. • Ensure kids become strong boundary-setters. • Set consistent limits and boundaries. • Curtail power struggles and sibling rivalry. • Move beyond timeouts, reward charts and other outdated tactics. • Help prevent alcohol abuse, addiction, early sex, high-risk behavior and other disturbing trends among teens. • Build open, trusting parent-child bonds that keep kids turning to parents, instead of peers, for guidance.

ParentShift: Ten Universal Truths That Will Change the Way You Raise Your Kids

Self-Help

Thomas Russell, Wendy

Hatfield, Linda

Hatfield, Ty

Relationships

Trove is the story of a woman whose life is upended when she begins an armchair treasure hunt―a search for $10,000 worth of gold coins buried in New York City, of all places―with a man who, as she points out, is not her husband. In this eloquent, hilarious, sharply realized memoir, Sandra A. Miller grapples with the regret and confusion that so often accompanies middle age, and the shame of craving something more when she has so much already. In a very real way, Miller has spent her life hunting for buried treasure. As a child, she trained herself to find things: dropped hair clips, shiny bits of broken glass, discarded lighters. Looking to escape from her volatile parents and often-unhappy childhood, Miller found deeper meaning, and a good deal of hope, in each of these objects. Now an adult and facing the loss of her last living parent―her mother who is at once cold, difficult, and wildly funny―Miller finds herself, as she so often did as a little girl, pressed against a wall of her own longing. Her search for gold, which soon becomes an obsession, forces her to dredge up painful pieces of her past, confront the true source of her sorrow, and finally discover what it is she has been looking for all these years.

Trove: A Woman's Search for Truth and Buried Treasure

Miller, Sandra A.

Parenting & Relationships

Thirteen-year-old Maxine Russell is a self-described feminist, and she knows it's not always easy. The world is full of misinformation about feminism. And, sometimes, being an activist — especially in middle school! — can make a girl feel pretty lonely. Here, Russell writes and illustrates a book for children, ages four to ten, introducing them to the wonders of feminism, clearing up some common misconceptions, and presenting feminists as supportive superheroes advocating for a better world.

How To Be a Feminist (For Little Girls & Boys)

Children's Books

Russell, Maxine

Growing Up & Facts of Life

Review\n"Klenz' lens shields us from nothing, stripping away the secrecy to expose the beauty and wonder that has been concealed for too long." --Julie Cantrell, INTO THE FREE\n"Cristina Salvador Klenz's book is a striking example of visual storytelling. It captured my heart from the very first image, lending me entry into an intimate world of the universal human experience, filled with love, sadness, and hope." --Oksana Marafioti, AMERICAN GYPSY\n"Klenz's sensitivity and skills as a professional photojournalist result in intimate photographs documenting the community's daily life; milestones including birth, death, marriage; child-rearing; and extreme poverty set in the suburbs." --Ken Kobre, PHOTOJOURNALISM: THE PROFESSIONALS' APPROACH\nPhotojournalist Cristina Salvador Klenz takes us behind the scenes of an ethnic minority largely unknown and yet routinely reduced to stereotypes by mainstream America.\nSince their exodus from India more than a thousand years ago, the Roma (widely known by the exonym "Gypsies," which is increasingly considered an offensive pejorative) have migrated all over the globe, having survived centuries of discrimination and persecution along their travels.\nKlenz’s work ― the first of its kind ― features various nations of Roma in America, including the Kalderash and Machvaya, whose ancestors were kept as slaves in Eastern Europe for 500 years; the Xoraxay, whose people arrived in California after extended stays in Chile; the Mihais, who immigrated to the United States from Colombia; and the Ludar, who were forbidden from speaking their native tongue while enslaved and therefore had lost the Romani language entirely by the time they encountered Klenz.\nBeginning in 1990, Klenz spent several years with Roma families in California; documenting their lives on black-and-white, 35mm film; and developing the film in her home bathroom-turned-dark room. With a foreword by Ian Hancock, widely considered the world’s preeminent Romani scholar, Hidden provides historical as well as social context for the book’s 120 photographs, all lavishly printed in Italy and published by Brown Paper Press.\nGiven their widely divergent paths to the United States, many Romani-American nations today have little social contact with each other, but the groups have been brought together in this rare, intimate collection of photographs so that readers may gain a greater understanding of and appreciation for the history, celebrations, and struggles that bind Romanies together.

Hidden: Life with California's Roma Families

Arts & Photography

Klenz, Cristina Salvador

Photography & Video

A self-described crybaby who sees the end of the world lurking around every corner, Cheryl E. Klein has relied on planning and hard work to reach her goals and avoid catastrophe. But when she and her partner find their plans for a baby dashed over and over--first by infertility, then miscarriage, and finally a breast cancer diagnosis--Klein's carefully structured life, marriage, and belief system begin to crumble. Adding a detour through the fickle world of open adoption seems like the last thing she should do; yet where she lacks control, she finds adventure. Empathetic, candid, and often humorous, Crybaby is the story of what happens when a failed perfectionist and successful hypochondriac is forced to make room in her life for grief and joy, fear and hope, all at the same time.

Crybaby: Infertility, Illness, and Other Things That Were Not the End of the World

Klein, Cheryl E.

Community & Culture

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