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Reading recommendations: Real Life Preparing for the Seven Most Challenging Days of Your Life, Dr. Phil McGraw.

There are certain days in life that stand out because they bring the toughest experiences that you or someone you love will ever face. Encountering these days can feel like hitting a brick wall, but while they can change your life, they do not have to ruin it. Bestselling author and talk show host, Dr. Phil McGraw offers a step by step plan for getting through the worst days so that you feel prepared when it really happens, in the midst of a crisis. Dr. Phil provides wisdom and resources that will guide you toward a solution that is right for you, showing you how to minimize the disruption to your life and maximize the recovery.

This book is not just about giving you a crisis-mode plan. It shows you how to change your life before you get into a crisis so that you are not behind the power curve when any of the seven days hits. Dr. Phil says there are no exceptions; with the right attitude and the right information, every challenging day can be turned into a valuable life experience.

And, Horton Foote, America's Story Teller, Wilborn Hampton.

From his Pulitzer Prize winning play, The Young Man From Atlanta to his film adaption of To Kill a Mockingbird, which received an Oscar, millions of people have been touched by Foote's work. He has long been regarded by other play writes and screen writers, actors, and cog nos. cent: of the theater and cinema as America's master storyteller; critics compared him to William Faulkner and Anton Chekhov. Yet Horton Foote's compelling character and rich life remains largely unknown to the general public. His is the story of an artist who refused to compromise his talents for the sake of fame or money, or just to keep working, who insisted on writing what he regarded as truth, even when, for years almost no one would listen.

As a child in the small town of Wharton, Texas, Foote's favorite pastime was to listen to the stories his elders told, about themselves, their families, their neighbors, around the dinner table or sitting on the front porch. As he once explained; "One thing I was given in life is a deep desire to listen. I've spent my life listening. These stories have haunted me all my life." These stories also served as an inspiration for Foote's life work as he chronicled America's wistful odyssey through the twentieth century, mostly from the perspective of a small town in Texas. Beginning in the Golden Age of Television with dramas such as The Trip to Bountiful, through Broadway and Off Broadway successes, to the mark he made in films such as Tender Mercies, he documented the struggle of ordinary people to maintain their dignity in the face of hardship and change that the erosion of time inevitably brings. It is a theme Horton Foote lived yet the paradox that shines through his work is that while the externals of life alter over the years, wealth may be gained or squandered, love may be won or lost, friends and relations die, people themselves do not.

I do appreciate this book. Horton Foote is extended family to my husband, John. Life in that world will never come again.

And, The Intimate Lives of the Founding Fathers, Thomas Fleming.

With his usual storytelling flair and unparalleled research, Tom Fleming examines the women who were at the center of the lives of the founding fathers. From hot tempered Mary Ball Washington to promiscuous Rachel Levine Hamilton, the founding father's mothers powerfully shaped their son's vision of domestic life. But lovers and wives played more critical roles as friends and often partners in fame. We learn of the youthful Washington's love for Sarah Fairfax; of Franklin's life in London and Philadelphia; of Adam's long absences, which required a lonely deeply unhappy Abigail to keep home and family together for years on end; of Hamilton's betrayal of his wife and then their reconciliation; of how the brilliant Madison was jilted and went on to marry Dolly, who helped make this shy man into a popular President; Jefferson's controversial relationship to Sally Hemings is also examined with a different vision of where his heart lay.

Fleming takes us through a great deal of early American history, as his founding fathers strove to reconcile the private and public , often beset by a media every bit as gossip seeking and inflammatory as ours today. He offers a powerful look at the challenges women faced in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. While often brilliant and articulate the wives of the founding fathers all struggled with the distractions and dangers of frequent childbearing and searing anxiety about infant mortality. Jefferson's wife, Martha, died from complications following labor, as did his daughter. All the more remarkable, then that these women loomed so large in the lives of their husbands and in some cases, their country.

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