Don’t Expect Me To Cry is a powerful story of the horrors Janet experienced at the hands of multipleabusers, including her father, and the courageous journey of healing that brought her to a life that isinspirational to other survivors.Janet’s resilience is evident as she tells her story in three parts, reflecting her thoughts and experiencesat critical stages of her life.Don’t Expect Me To Cry - Starting with a child’s view of shocking abuse, Janet shares how she had tobuild defenses to survive the impact of the horrors of her childhood.Don’t Expect Me To Lie – Continuing with her journey through early therapy, Janet describes the painand fear she experienced as she started to share the ‘secret’.Don’t Expect Me To Die - The final part tells how Janet hit ‘rock bottom’ and tried to end her life. Sheexplains how, from that place of despair, she learned that it is possible to heal from the dark shame andtrauma and live a steadier and more content life.“Believing myself to be a reasonably healed survivor of childhood sexual abuse, I didn’t expect to findmyself becoming teary-eyed as I read Don’t Expect Me to Cry by Janet Bentley. But her story moved meand touched me more deeply than the many other books I have read by those who have bravely told oreven written their own books, myself included”. – V. Boland“I really liked Don't Expect Me To Cry and the sincere and genuine way in which it is written. The entirebook is raw and real, and although I am sure it was difficult to write about for Janet, she is aware that itis precisely for that reason that it is important to share her story along with all of the details of sexualabuse, and the emotional damage that results from it. Her writing style, which is engaging and fastpacedyet detailed……This is a must-read autobiography”. - G. Dixon

At the age of forty-five, Deborah Tobola returns to her birthplace, San Luis Obispo, to work in the very prison her father worked in when he was a student at Cal Poly. But she’s not wearing a uniform as he did; she’s there to teach creative writing and manage the prison’s arts program―a dream job.





As she creates a theatre program for prisoners, Tobola finds plenty of drama off the stage as well. Inside the razor wire she finds a world frozen in the ’50s, with no contact with the outside except by telephone; officers who think prisoners don’t deserve programs; bureaucrats who want to cut arts funding; and inmates who steal, or worse. But she loves engaging prisoners in the arts and helping them discover their voices: men like Opie, the gentleman robber; Razor, the roughneck who subscribes to The New Yorker; charismatic Green Eyes, who really has blue eyes; Doo Wop, a singer known for the desserts he creates from prison fare.





Alternating between tales of creating drama in prison and Tobola’s own story, Hummingbird in Underworld takes readers on an unforgettable literary journey―one that is frank, funny, and fascinating.

Lise Pearlman's With Justice for Some: Politically Charged Criminal Trials in the Early 20th Century that Helped Shape Today's America takes a fascinating look back at headline-grabbing criminal trials from the early 1900s as a cultural backdrop for contentious issues we face as a nation today. In her first book The Sky's The Limit: People v. Newton, The REAL Trial of the 20th Century? these early trials were compared to the 1968 death penalty trial of Black Panther leader Huey Newton, which the author considered the real trial of the century neglected by most historians. Here, these riveting trials are reexamined with emphasis on the insights they provide to today's political climate.

Pearlman's new book opens with a remarkable admission by former FBI Chief James Comey in a speech on Lincoln's birthday in February 2015: "All of us in law enforcement must be honest enough to acknowledge that much of our history is not pretty. At many points in American history, law enforcement enforced the status quo . . . that was often brutally unfair to disfavored groups." He invited all Americans to re-examine our "cultural inheritance" with fresh eyes.

That is what Pearlman's new book seeks to do. This well-researched volume takes advantage of the passage of time to put each trial into perspective from work done decades, sometimes even a century, later by investigative journalists and historians who unearthed far more evidence of what really happened in the events that made banner headlines in the early 20th century. She makes the case that by revisiting riveting high-stakes trials that still have ramifications today, we can gain a better understanding of the extent cultural bias has permeated the fabric of our culture -- and a better premise from which to move forward as a nation than the whitewashed history so many of us were taught in school.

This is the handbook you need now to survive on Twitter...

Twitter: Surviving Change includes the latest on the “auto-suggest” issue that led many users to believe they were shadow-banned during the past two years.

If you have experienced a decrease in Interactions, a declining number of Impressions, difficulty posting and/or replying, a temporary lockout, less sales and web traffic from Twitter referrals, or you just have a feeling that something isn’t quite right... then read this book now.

Contents include chapters on shadow-banning, the platform’s shift from porn, the tweet count hike, continuing purges of bots and fake accounts, and what Section 230 means for social media users today. There is also a chapter covering issues we are still seeing in writers’ accounts on Twitter.

The level of enforcement on Twitter has increased since their latest Rules were implemented in March. Your account can be compromised right now, and you don’t even know it. Follow our checklist and quickly see how others see you on the platform.

Learn what to do if you find you have been penalized or if you’re caught in one of the platform’s known glitches. What took us months to research and repair, you can now accomplish in a matter of days with this book.

We realized the old advice we read for finding success on Twitter no longer worked for our accounts. Retweets and Likes didn’t matter so much anymore. “Impressions” suddenly became the new goal. Automated Retweets and Likes would get you kicked off the platform fast.

Twitter was once a fantastic seller’s market for us (writers and publishers) but that all changed at the end of 2017, so we had to figure out what to do to survive on the platform. We discovered how bot purges, software bugs, algorithm changes, outright account bans, and stealth penalties had apparently affected numerous Twitter accounts.

We still see issues on many streams every day on Twitter.

Our resources for Twitter: Surviving Change are shared within the book and will put you a step ahead of everyone else: we tell you where to go to obtain up-to-the-minute information and how to avoid future issues.

*** Contains mature themes. For readers 18+ ***

“Living is what’s supposed to happen after you survive. It’s life in ‘post-survival’ that defines the human character’s ability to move forward from trauma.” - Maggie Kirton

My Firefly is a true account of a child's abuse at the hands of her family. It will pull you into its pages and grab hold of your spirit.

Seen from the perspective of the family home, a young girl struggles to stay alive as she is slowly ripped apart emotionally, physically, and sexually by her father. You’ll experience an abundance of feelings throughout this book and won’t be able to put it down.

It is cruel and brutish and bloody. But in the end, Kirton shows that there is hope of having a full and meaningful life even after a horrible and traumatic experience.

Set against the backdrop of the Civil Rights Movement, Redlined exposes the racist lending rules that refuse mortgages to anyone in areas with even one black resident. As blacks move deeper into Chicago’s West Side during the 1960s, whites flee by the thousands. But Linda Gartz’s parents, Fred and Lil choose to stay in their integrating neighborhood, overcoming previous prejudices as they meet and form friendships with their African American neighbors. The community sinks into increasing poverty and crime after two race riots destroy its once vibrant business district, but Fred and Lil continue to nurture their three apartment buildings and tenants for the next twenty years in a devastated landscape―even as their own relationship cracks and withers.




After her parents’ deaths, Gartz discovers long-hidden letters, diaries, documents, and photos stashed in the attic of her former home. Determined to learn what forces shattered her parents’ marriage and undermined her community, she searches through the family archives and immerses herself in books on racial change in American neighborhoods. Told through the lens of Gartz’s discoveries of the personal and political, Redlined delivers a riveting story of a community fractured by racial turmoil, an unraveling and conflicted marriage, a daughter’s fight for sexual independence, and an up-close, intimate view of the racial and social upheavals of the 1960s.

A shocking sex scandal made headlines around the world. The truth was stranger than fiction.
On a quiet spring morning in 2010, a group of federal, state and local law enforcement agents gathered in northern Washington State to stage a raid. Their target: a rustic cabin perched high on a hilltop, just five miles from the Canadian border. At the time, it was inhabited by a high-tech entrepreneur who provided encryption and privacy services. The once-wealthy man now lived in the little cabin with his dogs and horses, including a champion show jumping stallion. Authorities accused Douglas Spink of a shocking crime--operating a commercial bestiality farm. But in fact the whole truth was more complicated than that. Reporter Carreen Maloney spent years seeking the real story, ultimately uncovering a secret society of zoophiles who form their main social, emotional and physical bonds with animals. Uniquely Dangerous sheds light on a worldwide social phenomenon that dares not venture from the shadows.

A young lesbian girl grows beyond fear to fearlessness as she comes of age in the ’60s amid religious, social, and legal barriers.



Carol Anderson grows up in a fundamentalist Christian home in the ’60s, a time when being gay was in opposition to all social and religious mores and against the law in most states. Fearing the rejection of her parents, she hides the truth about her love orientation, creating emotional distance from them for years, as she desperately struggles to harness her powerful attractions to women while pursuing false efforts to be with men.



The watershed point in Carol's journey comes when she returns to graduate school and discovers the feminist movement, which emboldens her sense of personal power and the freedom to love whom she chooses. But this sense of self-possession comes too late for honesty with her father. His unexpected death before she can tell him the truth brings the full cost of Carol's secret crashing in compelling her to come out to her mother before it is too late.



Candid and poignant, You Can't Buy Love Like That reveals the complex invisible dynamics that arise for gay people who are forced to hide their true selves in order to survive and celebrates the hard-won rewards of finding one's courageous heart and achieving self-acceptance and self-love.

It was the spring of 1989. I was sixteen years old, a junior in high school and an honors student. I had what every teenager wants: a stable family, a nice home in the suburbs, a great group of friends, big plans for my future, and no reason to believe that any of that would ever change.

Then came my mother's psychosis.

I experienced first-hand the terror of watching someone I loved transform into a monster, the terror of discovering that I was to be her primary victim. For years I’ve lived with the sadness of knowing that she, too, was a helpless victim – a victim of a terrible disease that consumed and destroyed the strong and caring woman I had once called Mom.

My mother's illness took everything. My family, my home, my friends, my future. A year and a half later I would be living alone on the street on the other side of the country, wondering whether I could even survive on my own.

But I did. That was how my mother - my real mother - raised me. To survive.

She, too, was a survivor. It wasn't until last year that I learned that she had died - in 2007. No one will ever know her side of the story now. But perhaps, at last, it’s time for me to tell mine.