Take a heartfelt journey with Lorina Simmons, otherwise known as Chocolate, who was raised in one of the roughest housing projects in Queens, New York, and see her life through her words. She bares her struggles and her painful, poverty-stricken life, in which she suffered abandonment and many phases of abuse. After being raised by her grandmother and her drug-addicted mother, she landed in the foster care system. Tossed from ghetto to ghetto, her life became a series of battles, which included promiscuity, petty crimes, drugs, violence, survival, education, and love. Will self-destruction be the outcome for young Chocolate for years to come, especially when she met Maurice Sparks, a handsome red bone with ulterior motives, or will C.J. (Corey Jeppard), another stunning man and veteran be the key to life-altering decisions? Will a world full of deceit and betrayal make or break her? Through turmoil, however, music became her guide and sanctuary, as she continued to survive in the belly of the beast, known as the streets.

Memoirs of a Spiritual Healer is a collection of inspiring mantras, photography, words, and own experiences shared to the readers of Reiki in the Prairie LLC. Cynthia created this collection to inspire people to look inwards for their spiritual, emotional, and physical healing. A collection to help with whole health.

The Introduction of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9781315584225 The twentieth century has been a century of wars, genocides and violent political conflict; a century of militarization and massive destruction. It has simultaneously been a century of feminist creativity and struggle worldwide, witnessing fundamental changes in the conceptions and everyday practices of gender and sexuality. What are some of the connections between these two seemingly disparate characteristics of the past century? And how do collective memories figure into these connections? Exploring the ways in which wars and their memories are gendered, this book contributes to the feminist search for new words and new methods in understanding the intricacies of war and memory. From the Italian and Spanish Civil Wars to military regimes in Turkey and Greece, from the Armenian genocide and the Holocaust to the wars in Abhazia, East Asia, Iraq, Afghanistan, former Yugoslavia, Israel and Palestine, the chapters in this book address a rare selection of contexts and geographies from a wide range of disciplinary perspectives. In recent years, feminist scholarship has fundamentally changed the ways in which pasts, particularly violent pasts, have been conceptualized and narrated. Discussing the participation of women in war, sexual violence in times of conflict, the use of visual and dramatic representations in memory research, and the creative challenges to research and writing posed by feminist scholarship, Gendered Wars, Gendered Memories will appeal to scholars working at the intersection of military/war, memory, and gender studies, seeking to chart this emerging territory with ’feminist curiosity’.