National Network for Equitable Library Service

Many issues can strain a marriage relationship, but none is as challenging as a life-threatening illness. Every year, almost two hundred thousand women are diagnosed with breast cancer. When Racinda Nygren joined the ranks of these women, she and her husband, Bruce, were thrust into an agonizing season of their marriage. With warmth and depth, Bruce shares their moving story. Touching the Shadows shows the power of love and faith amid a harrowing trial and will encourage readers to renew their own commitment to their spouse and celebrate God's special gift of love together.

The Gibson family, of One Man's Medicine, emigrates to the Canadian West. Readers will recall that Gibson and his wife, both Scottish physicians, were established in family practice near the English port city of Hull. In time, Gibson now relates, Britain's National Health Service impinged so greatly on their practice that they packed up their teenage daughter, sold their possessions, and relocated in the tiny Alberta town of Okotoks, within sight of the Rockies 100 miles from Calgary. There follow short, homespun vignettes of Gibson's new practice.

You may have heard of David Hartman: Temple University held a press conference when he entered medical school there, the first blind student accepted into such a program. This biography, however, spends perhaps 20 pages on that controversial four-year experience; the larger part concerns his previous history, from the onset of blindness at age eight through his years of education at special and mainstream schools, examining in some detail his struggle for admission to medical school.

In this deeply moving memoir, Margaret Trudeau speaks with candour and insight about the illness that silently shaped her life -- a life lived often in turbulence and in the public's fascination. Plagued since childhood by extreme moods, Margaret was ill-prepared for the high-profile role into which she was cast at age twenty-two, as Canada's youngest first lady. Captivated by her high spirits, youth and beauty, Canadians fell in love with Margaret, just as they had with her charismatic husband, Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau, three years earlier.

Helen grew up in a pit village in Tyneside in the post-war years, with her gran, aunties and uncles living nearby. She felt safe with them, but they could not protect her from her neglectful mother and violent father. Behind closed doors, she suffered years of abuse. Sometimes she talked to an imaginary sister, the only one who understood her pain. Jenny was adopted at six weeks and grew up in Newcastle. An only child, she knew she was loved, and with the support of her parents she went on to become a golfing champion, but still she felt that something was missing...

Laurie's dreams had been shattered before she came to work at Crystal Peaks Youth Ranch—the ranch of rescued dreams—where broken horses and broken children encounter healing every day. In an attempt to soothe her aching soul, Laurie reached out to save a dog in need. And she soon began to realize that the dog was rescuing her.

Caroline Baum's fascinating and moving memoir about being an only child in a very unusual family.

Felix Opatowski is only fifteen years old when he takes on the perilous job of smuggling goods out of the Lodz ghetto in exchange for food for his starving family. It is a skill that will serve him well as he tries to stay alive in Nazi-occupied Poland. With dogged determination, Felix endures months of harrowing conditions in the ghetto and slave labour camps until he is deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp in the spring of 1943.

Helpers and heroes shine brightest in darkness. Disaster Heroes recounts the stories of ordinary men, women, and children who have done extraordinary things to help respond, rebuild, and recover from catastrophes around the world. Did you know it was an American from Pennsylvania who ultimately saved the lives of 33 Chilean miners in 2010? Or that the state of Louisiana donated a fire truck, the Spirit of Louisiana, to FDNY following 9/11, all because of a spur-of-the-moment outburst from one Louisiana man?

When the Nazis invaded Hungary on March 19, 1944, elementary school teacher Helena Jockel could only think about how to save "her" children. She accompanied them all the way to Auschwitz only to see them taken to the gas chamber. Her account of living and surviving in the camp and on the subsequent death march is clear-eyed and poignant, sometimes recording the too-brief moments of beauty and kindness that accompany the unremitting cruelty. She returns to Czechoslovakia after the war, and attends university so that she can teach high school.