Review: Banged-Up Heart: Dancing with Love and Loss by Shirley Melis
★★★★½ 
Business and travel writer Shirley Melis experiences love and devotion for two amazing men in her life and suffers the loss of both in her poignant memoir Banged-Up Heart: Dancing with Love and Loss.
Honesty is the hallmark of this memoir, a paean to the best of relationships beset by the inevitability of death. Two years after the sudden loss of Joe, a fellow writer, political activist, and her husband of thirty years, Melis arranges to meet an old acquaintance and recent widower for a possible new start. She is urged on by a coterie of old friends. […]
Academic Betrayal: The Bullying of a Graduate Student is Loren Mayshark’s account of bad practices and mistreatment at Hunter College in New York City. Eager to get a master’s degree to become a history professor, that degree never materialized, as he became demoralized with a dysfunctional administration, ineffectual teachers, and bad policies, which are endemic to the educational system in the U.S. on the whole.
Peach is a lively and normal teenager, except for the fact she has mitochondrial disease, called MITO, a genetic disorder that means movement and speech are somewhat affected by her condition. Her friend and publisher, Pete Geissler, has presented this book to offer inspiration and hope to others.
The most powerful stories are those torn from personal experience, and in Molding My Destiny by Patrice M. Foster, readers are presented with a heartbreaking account of an impossible childhood. Parental support and love seem nonexistent, and selfishness is the crucible in which the author is formed. From the mean streets of Jamaica, witnessing the immorality and cruelty of her father, to the feeling of abandonment on American shores, this book is a painful saga of experience that would be too great for many people to overcome.