My name is Linda.  I am a survivor of verbal, emotional, and sexual abuse in my marriage, and I struggle with multiple facets of co-dependency including pride, control, self-sufficiency, shame, and isolation. Jesus Christ is my Higher Power.

I was born in rural Alabama, the youngest of six children of Godly parents. My dad did sharecrop farming and later built houses.  My mom worked hard at home and picked and chopped cotton to buy my school supplies and clothes. We were extremely poor, but I never felt ashamed because it didn’t seem to matter.

The Biography of the cofounder of Al-Anon

By William G. Borchert

Review by David Palmer

Picture if you will, eight women parked in front of the Clinton Street Brooklyn home of Bill and Lois Wilson. Their motors are running and they are steamed.

On this night in 1938, their husbands, most of them newly sober, are attending a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous with the organization’s co-founder, Bill Wilson. What ticks the ladies off is that their husbands have replaced drinking with meetings, leaving them once again alone and unloved.

By David Palmer

One in eight Arkansas adolescents has taken a prescription pain reliever medication illegally. One in 20 has done so in the past 30 days. And nearly seven percent admit to using an over-the- counter medication to get high, half of them within the past month.

Surveys also show that teenagers are more likely to have abused prescription and over-the-counter drugs than street drugs like ecstasy, cocaine, crack and methamphetamines.

Why is this important to know and deal with? Because prescription drugs can kill, maim and fuel other drug abuse.

The abuse of these potent drugs can damage evolving young brains, and they are sometimes deadly. From 2003 to 2007, 15 Arkansas children aged 12 to 17 died as a result of an overdose involving prescription drugs, seven of them from the pain relievers oxycodone and hydrocodone.

CEO looks back on his life as a troubled teen

By Michael Kennon
Outskirts Press
$10. 95

Review by Dorothy Cox

Remembering vividly his own pain, shame and isolation as a runaway from age twelve to early adulthood, CEO Michael Kennon hopes his story will let the untold thousands of runaway children in the U.S. know that if he made it, they can too.