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The Life We Share
Price range: $3.99 through $19.99In 1972, my mother left her farming village in México with six young children and one suitcase to go by bus to California. I was eight years old. This is the journey that changed my life, as portrayed in my poetry, writings, and artwork in “Art & Poetry – nested in these – Captured Moments,” published 2021. As an engineering graduate from Loyola Marymount University, my professional career began designing theme park attractions for Walt Disney Imagineering. After 10 years as an engineer, and after researching other fields in which to apply my experience, I discovered the field of Intellectual Property (IP). I hold a patent agent registration from the United States Patent and Trademark Office and a Juris Doctorate. I’ve worked in the IP field for 20 years. My journey continues as I’ve discovered the joy of writing poetry, photography, and painting. Although, I embark in these gratifying art forms during my spare time, I take each moment to the fullest until a project is complete.
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My Dad (Mr. P): THE POET AND HE DIDN’T KNOW IT
Price range: $3.99 through $9.99Joseph L. Piranio is kind, loving, and a sincere person who loves his family. He always puts other people first. He can put a smile on anyone’s face. He would start a conversation with anyone. As for hobbies, he has lots. He would go fishing and race pigeons. His favorite one was singing Frank Sinatra’s song, “My Way!” in karaoke sessions. His on-circuit name was Mr. P. Everyone knew him as that. He was a U.S. Navy veteran. He served in the Korean War. He worked as an electrician for Kansas City. He helped build projects like Worlds of Fun, the Kansas City International Airport, and Liberty Hospital. He has five grandchildren and four great-grandchildren. One of the things he is great at was writing down his thoughts as poems. He would teach his two sons to hunt and fish. Anyone who knows him knows family is very important to him in every way.
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Set Yourself Free Live The Life You Were Meant To Live
Price range: $3.99 through $12.99More than two thousand years ago a great master instructed the masses on simple techniques to live lives of passion, joy, and vibrancy. His pragmatic approach is as viable today as it was then; and by incorporating his methods, you have the power to live the exalted life for which you were designed. Set Yourself Free: Live the Life YOU Were Meant to Live provides an outline of these dynamic teachings. In this book, Jesus is used as a prototype for each person and his trials and tribulations are symbolic of yours. By learning through his example, we save time, effort, and frustration and move to enlightenment with ease and grace. There are numerous examples given of individuals who have overcome major challenges and obstacles to live dynamically and express the fullness of their divine potential. By following these teachings, you can do the same.
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The New Tower of Babel
Price range: $3.99 through $11.99Do we really believe in God? What difference does it make if God exists or does not exist? Are we better off with God or without God? Are we made in God’s image or is it God who is made in our image? Is God our creator or are we the creators of God the way we create other gods? Does God tell us from on high what to do or do we go on building higher and higher towers and defy the God of heavens? Does God have rights? Do we have rights? Are these and those rights the same, different, or incompatible?
Obviously, it is not easy to fi nd adequate answers to such fundamental and life or death questions. In this book, philosopher Jean Maalouf helps us to find our way around. With “[his] gift for writing about the most sublime truths in the most simple language,” as his style was once described, he masterly walks us through the eras of Enlightenment, modernism, post-modernism, existentialism, and the deconstruction and cancel culture projections. With clarity, lucidity, and boldness, he explains how we are building the new tower of Babel, what the meaning of it is, and what the next step in our human journey could be.
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The Coming
Price range: $3.99 through $12.99It had been a long day, and the drive home proved to be even longer as freezing rain and subsequent black ice quickly turned into wet, heavy snow. Snow on black ice is treacherous, but going slowly, I made progress. As I approached my turn, I looked across the valley; a car spinning out of control crashed into the guardrail and stopped! Flames flickered from under the car as it hung precariously over the cliff.
Throwing caution to the wind, I raced up the hill, slid to a stop, jumped out of my truck, and as I ran to the woman standing there, another woman was slumped over the wheel, eyes open but not moving, and both of them, pregnant! Immediately, I knew them, Mareilene and Dareilene, twins from high school. As I grabbed the door handle, Mareilene yanked me back, looked at me, almost insanely, with blood dripping down her face, screamed,
“Dareilene and baby are dead, and ‘He’ doesn’t know that she was traveling with me. Damn it, Joe, help me! I need to push the car off the cliff and let it explode with them in it.”
I yelled,
“What the fuck! You can’t do that!”
Mareilene, scared to death, yelled,
“He’s coming, Joe, and the only way we live is to let him think it’s me and my baby that are dead at the bottom of this cliff. Damn it, Joe, decide! Both my baby and I live, or we all will die! Dareilene and her baby are dead, and Joe, I now know that God sent you here to save me and my baby!”
Her eyes told me the truth, and then, with one shove, the car with Dareilene and her unborn baby plunged off the cliff and exploded in flames. We climbed into my truck, and as I hit the gas, Mareilene, rapidly going into shock, cried,
“Drive like the Devil is on your heels, Joe because He is!”
The Coming . . . God and man, versus the Devil and his minions.
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Small Dreams Have No Magic: The Key to Success
Price range: $3.99 through $24.99What would you do if you found a little black book that revealed the true secrets of success? How would you react to the innocuous yet mysterious phrases, brimming with hidden meanings, which awaited you the first day? Naturally your aroused curiosity would drive you to read another phrase the next day, and the cycle would go on.
In Small Dreams have no Magic (The Key to Success), author Roger F. Johnsrud gives us Jonathan, a young stable worker, who finds, ” The Key to Success”, a book which seems to hold the magical power to bring him the success he so very many desires. Jonathan lives in a time long ago when kingdom-based societies flourished, and selfless goodwill abounds in daily life.
By chance he meets Heather, a young woman who holds the promises to a new life in the form of a homemade secret formula. Jonathan risks his future by leaving his job to run a business with Heather and his friends.
Along the way, Jonathan acquires the respect of noblemen and the generous assistance of local businessmen, gathering new friends and assistance while looking to build the business and doing his best to understand the magic within the book.
Small Dreams Have No Magic is invigorating and rewarding, while at the same time educational and spiritually uplifting. The author creates his characters and story line in such a way as to teach us very important moral directives about avoiding the negative temptations of life, helping those that try to help themselves, and never letting determination slip away in the fear that our dreams won’t come true.
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Through It All: Estella Walked With The Lord
Price range: $3.99 through $8.99Estella was a very hard-working woman, who did not rely on the husband for provision. She was a very strong believer in Jesus Christ. Estella had great love for her children and had to risk her life to find food, School fees, and clothes for her children. Estella did not cease to pray everyday. Estella reached a point where her own father of her children deserted them leaving them with nothing. The children cried but Estella whose job had ended due to circumstances beyond her control. Tried hard to calm her children. Estella believed in God and promised her children that God was going to see them through. Estella was lucky; she got some opportunity to go to the United States of America. It was not easy for a mother who had children to leave them behind. But God is our Shepherd we shall not want. God has taken care of Estella’s children. Estella clang to the Old rugged cross. When she left home she had no idea how she was going to survive. But she trusted in God who created her. Estella was hosted, she ate, and she was dressed. She managed to get a job which enabled her to send money to her children for school fees and food. God took care of the four kids. They paid school fees and were able to get their education. Through it all Estella never left God.
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The Coming: Hunted
Price range: $3.99 through $14.99Then, as thoughts of the past cleared, I remembered the same voice that I had heard and trusted since that night on the side of the road as Joe said again,
“Red, you’ve been with me the longest and seem lost in thought; please speak your mind.”
“Well, Joe, Mary, we are it. We aren’t playing games here. This is the real ‘Game of Life.’ Our choices really can mean life or death for Hope and Christian. You, Mary, and I are as deep into this as possible. We all know this and accept the burden. Alice’s letter is the tip of the iceberg to our knowing something, anything, about what we are up against. Let’s see how deep into this game of life we are.”
Mary and I looked at Joe and then at each other as tears flowed down all three of our faces, and if I remember right, I said.
“Damnit, Joe, why did you pick me up that night? That’s right, I know I was probably, no not, I would have died of freezing to death. But Joe, this is so much bigger than we ever thought. And again, I ask anyone who has a clue: “Why, out of all the people in this world, to pick to protect Saviors, God picked us.”
The Coming – Hunted . . . God and Man, versus the Devil and his minions.
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Words Of Expression
Price range: $3.99 through $11.99In her poem “The Lost Courage,” Tanya Marie Breaud exhibits the style and emotive voice that weaves its poignant way through Words of Expression, her first published collection of verse.
“Hear me when I cry at night,
be Mother’s arms that hold me tight.
Bring me up when I fall down,
Come to me when no one else is around. . .
Listen to the words that I speak,
give me courage when I’m scared and weak.”
With inspiration continuously evolving from her personal experience, Ms. Breaud delights her readers with poetry that tugs at their heartstrings while wringing out their disappointed, wet washcloths of heartache. From high-spirited enthusiasm to sad, distressing loneliness, these poems run the gamut of truth, longing, forgiveness, faith, and hope. Readers will surely find solace in this poet’s words, as well as the reassuring momentum to keep going in life, despite the obstacles placed before them.
In true spiritual observance, Tanya Marie Breaud confides in the Introduction to her book, “All the chances I never took, I’m now taking. For the longest time I have searched for a way to express myself. I finally found my way through Words of Expression.”
It is her hope that her readers will, too!
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The Art Of Dying
Price range: $3.99 through $9.99Much writing on the subject of death, dying, cancer, and grief is often sugar coated. That is understandable, considering the difficulty experienced by those dealing with it. However, in the process of grieving, it is essential to express, in often raw terms, how excruciating it is. Jere Truer, being both a therapist and a widower, worked through his grief via poetry and honesty, with the hope that these poems will validate others’ reality, give permission to bear down into grief and emerge on the other side of it.
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Freedom, A Call To Healing
Price range: $4.99 through $13.99In the history of America, other human beings seem to get the empathy to mourn and build memorials after a trauma occurs in their lives-except the black race. We had a trauma in the Western Hemisphere that lasted over four hundred years. Yet, after slavery and segregation, our people were expected to pick up the pieces of life and move on. We were expected to live in self-denial as if the scars we were carrying never happened. The statistics are heartbreaking. One in three black males can expect to spend time in prison. One in one hundred black women are in prison. The high school graduation rate for black males is under fifty percent. Fifty-four percent of black children are raised by single mothers. These tragedies have not occurred by chance. Thus, Jason Panton points out that the most important component is hope. This hope is the hope of redemption offered by a loving and merciful God. He is not a God who visits with us for a few hours on Sunday morning, nor a God to be called upon only in times of distress. He is a God who eagerly awaits a personal and constant relationship with every individual. The Bible is clear that Jesus Christ has a tender heart for the oppressed, the despised, the broken hearted, the hopeless, and the outcast, and His heart is unchangeable. “Incline your ear, and come unto me: hear, and your soul shall live; and I will make an everlasting covenant with you, even unto the sure mercies of David” (Is 55:3).
