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Vampire Grooms and Spectre Brides

Author: Tyler Tichelaar

Culture can be seen through many outputs within a society. And while many once believed that culture stopped at a country’s barriers, this excellent analysis shows otherwise.

In the nineteenth century, the French and the British shared their culture through their tellings, retellings, and translations of their gothic literature. While the Gothic Golden Age began in France with three prominent authors, it led to a second Gothic Golden Age in Great Britain, and then bounced back to France, lending to an even richer time in gothic literature.

Vampire Grooms and Spectre Brides offers the context needed to better understand how some gothic literature of that time gained in notoriety, while others were lost in the shuffle and translations of the time.

Tyler Tichelaar focuses his analysis on some widely known novels and essays, but also on some stories that may only be known by a gothic-reader enthusiast. Tichelaar analyzes the popular authors and tracks how their works became famous, whether it be through an aspect of their writing or the usage of a particular gothic element. He also mentions other writers who were influenced by the authors and others who penned works using the influencer’s name or the title of the original work.

Vampire Grooms and Spectre Brides is a great analysis on the works that were written during the nineteenth century and how they affected the culture of their own, but also other, countries.

Sinking Your Teeth into Proper Dental Care

Author: Miriam Ruff

Most people will have their teeth for their entire lives, but the only education many people have had about proper dental care typically came from their parents when they were little or from their dentists when they were doing something incorrectly.

Sinking Your Teeth into Proper Dental Care helps to fill this gap. This book begins by educating the reader about tooth development and tooth structure. Once the reader has been informed about all of the parts of a tooth, the reader is enlightened on the most common dental problems, periodontal disease, common dental procedures, and dental emergencies.

This book continues with educating the reader on proper dental care, choosing a dentist, and how dental care can affect one’s health.

Sinking Your Teeth into Proper Dental Care offers a great source of information to teach readers how the small items in their mouth can have large effects.

Good Grief

Authors: Valerie Swinton and Fred Kirby, Jr.

Losing a loved one is hard. And while many books focus on coping after the loss, Good Grief focuses specifically from a biblical perspective of coping with the loss of a spouse after a long illness.

Both authors share their stories of their personal struggles with their spouses and their spouses’ illnesses. After the loss of their spouses, the authors felt a loss of purpose and hope. Though they each had children, the children were grown, leaving the authors with an empty feeling in day-to-day activities.

To assist those in the grieving process, the authors disclose the effects of grief and the potential effects of grief on the body. The authors then share in more detail their stories about the grief they have endured in their lives. Those stories are then followed by short essays written by other surviving spouses and how they have rebuilt their lives after the loss of a spouse.

The authors explain the stages of grief and answer a list of questions to show how they moved through the stages. The final section of the book is a guided grief journey that includes those same questions and space for the reader’s response to help one move through the grief process and begin to heal.

Good Grief is a well-designed book to help the reader journey through the grieving process. It allows the reader to understand that their feelings are normal. While this book can be read in a single sitting, it may be best for the reader to read the section related to their current need and work through that before continuing in the book.

Highway to Homelessness: Road to Recovery

Author: Brian Masters

Many look to the homeless as people who want to be there, people who are addicted to drugs, and while some do want to live on the streets, and some are addicted to drugs, this life may not have always been what was desired.

Brian Masters was a successful technology sales executive, married with a son in college, living in a nice neighborhood, and owning a second house on a lake. However, when his wife chose to leave him, all of Masters’ plans for his retirement years disappeared. Even his attorney told Masters that the divorce settlement, the worst one in the county, would leave him without any money.

While the financial settlement from the divorce did leave Masters with a significantly smaller nest egg, the economic circumstances occurring in the 2008 banking crisis caused him to not be able to afford his home and soon after he found himself unemployed as his employer closed up shop. Masters was left to live out of his car and fall into a cycle of drugs and depression.

Once Masters has the reader hooked based on his circumstances, he doesn’t leave the reader behind. In his final chapters, Masters offers an 11-point action plan that turned his life around and shows the reader how they can use it too.

Highway to Homelessness offers a real-life story of how a successful life can be turned upside down, and how one can overcome those obstacles and live a fulfilling life.