Beyond a Difficult Childhood, Stories of Survival, Healing, and Hope

NY Weekly Staff on October 15, 2026

By: Elowen Gray

Stories of survival, resilience, healing, and the courage to keep going.

Every childhood leaves a record, even when that record is incomplete. Some memories remain vivid for decades; others are buried beneath family silence, fragmented recollections, or official documents that tell only part of the story. For people raised amid poverty, neglect, abuse, or instability, growing older does not necessarily mean leaving those experiences behind. The work of understanding what happened, finding a sense of safety, and building an independent life may continue long after childhood ends. Memoirs make that complicated journey visible. They allow writers to revisit difficult beginnings without reducing themselves to what they endured, and they give readers room to recognize both the cost of survival and the possibilities that follow it.

The ten books gathered here approach childhood hardship from different directions. Some examine the conflicts between family loyalty and personal freedom. Others document the failures of adults and institutions entrusted with protecting children, or explore the ways trauma resurfaces in adult relationships and identities. What connects them is not a simple promise that suffering produces strength. Instead, these memoirs show resilience as a gradual, uneven process shaped by choices, opportunities, support, and the determination to find a life beyond the circumstances of one’s upbringing.

In Educated, Tara Westover recounts growing up in a survivalist family in rural Idaho, where formal schooling was absent from her early life. She did not enter a classroom until she was seventeen, yet her pursuit of education eventually took her to Brigham Young University and Cambridge, where she earned a PhD. The achievement is remarkable, but the memoir’s deeper tension lies in the emotional cost of questioning the beliefs and expectations of the family that raised her. Learning becomes not merely an academic pursuit but a way of deciding who she is allowed to become. A similarly complicated attachment to family runs through The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls. Raised amid poverty, frequent moves, and her parents’ unpredictable decisions, Walls remembers both neglect and affection. Her story resists the convenience of portraying family life as entirely loving or entirely harmful. Instead, it considers how someone can acknowledge the people who shaped them while still choosing distance, independence, and a different future.

Questions of protection and belonging become even more urgent in Etched in Sand by Regina Calcaterra. Growing up on Long Island in poverty and instability, Calcaterra and her four siblings faced circumstances that demanded responsibility far beyond their years, including periods in foster care. Her determination to keep her siblings safe gives the memoir its emotional center, while her later work in law and public service shows how early experiences can inform an adult commitment to others. Three Little Words by Ashley Rhodes-Courter offers another intimate account of childhood within the foster care system. After moving through numerous homes, Rhodes-Courter eventually found permanence through adoption and later became an advocate for foster care reform. Read together, these books reveal how much a child’s sense of security depends on decisions made by adults, agencies, and institutions. They also challenge the assumption that finding a permanent home immediately resolves everything a child has already experienced.

In Finding Fish, Antwone Quenton Fisher describes a childhood marked by separation and abuse. Born while his mother was incarcerated and raised largely in foster care, Fisher faced profound instability before joining the Navy and later becoming a writer. His memoir follows the difficult movement from being defined by others’ decisions toward establishing an identity and direction of his own. The experience of abuse is also central to A Child Called “It” by Dave Pelzer, whose account describes severe mistreatment by his mother before he was removed from her care and entered foster care. Where Fisher‘s narrative looks toward the life he gradually built, Pelzer concentrates on the conditions of survival itself and the beginnings of recovery. Neither book invites readers to confuse endurance with an absence of pain. Both underscore that escaping a harmful environment is an essential change, but not necessarily the end of its effects.

Somebody’s Daughter by Ashley C. Ford approaches childhood difficulty through the complicated bonds of family and the search for belonging. Growing up in Indiana while her father was incarcerated, Ford navigated financial hardship and strained relationships, eventually examining how love, longing, and uncertainty could exist together. Her memoir is especially attentive to questions that do not produce tidy answers: how children interpret absence, how family stories shape self-image, and how understanding can change with age. Those lingering effects become the explicit subject of What My Bones Know by Stephanie Foo. After experiencing abuse and abandonment in her immigrant family, Foo later received a diagnosis of complex PTSD. Drawing on her background in journalism, she combines personal recollection with research on trauma and therapy. The result expands the conversation from what happens in childhood to what it can take, years later, to recognize familiar patterns, seek help, and begin changing them.

The gap between what is recorded and what is truly lived comes into focus in Unbroken: Life Outside the Lines by Adriene Caldwell. Her childhood involved family mental illness, poverty, instability, and time in the foster care system. By bringing memories into conversation with her childhood case files, Caldwell examines how official descriptions can fail to capture the full reality of a child’s experience. Her eventual path toward education and advocacy gives the memoir a perspective that is both personal and concerned with the circumstances facing other vulnerable children. I Trusted You: A Shocking True Story by Pierre D. Chambers closes the collection with an account told from the perspective of a twelve-year-old facing physical and emotional abuse within his family and church community. Chambers explores the betrayal that follows when trusted relationships become sources of harm, while faith becomes part of his effort to break the cycle of abuse. Together, these accounts ask readers to consider not only what children survive, but who listens, who believes them, and what meaningful protection requires.

There is no single model of healing across these ten memoirs. Education gives some writers the language and freedom to reimagine their lives. For others, stability, adoption, service, advocacy, faith, or trauma-informed care becomes part of the path forward. Even when a memoir reaches a hopeful conclusion, its meaning does not depend on pretending that the past has disappeared. These authors show that resilience can involve confronting painful memories, revising inherited beliefs, asking difficult questions, and recognizing that recovery may continue alongside ordinary adult life.

For readers with similar experiences, the value of these books may lie less in inspiration than in recognition: the feeling that someone has described a struggle that is often hard to explain. For other readers, they offer a more informed understanding of childhood adversity and its lasting consequences. Above all, the collection makes room for complexity. A difficult beginning can shape a life without determining every chapter that follows, and finding the way back to yourself rarely happens in one decisive moment. It can begin with learning, speaking, remembering, seeking support, or simply deciding that the future deserves a different story.

Cooper Neitzel Explores the Art of Listening Across Faiths in Dharmic Pulse

NY Weekly Staff on October 15, 2026

By: Elowen Gray

A journey through three sacred traditions and their distinct accounts of spiritual freedom

Cooper Neitzel’s Dharmic Pulse invites readers to hear Hinduism, Buddhism, and Sikhism in the vocabularies through which those traditions understand spiritual freedom. Its most compelling question concerns the reader’s own habits: how much can we learn when we allow an unfamiliar faith to challenge the categories we bring to it?

Drawing on sacred texts, explanatory prose, and personal reflection, Neitzel develops an approach that gives his writing a clear place within interfaith spiritual literature. The book’s breadth is matched by a deliberate structure, making a complex comparative inquiry accessible to readers willing to slow down and listen.

When Spiritual Freedom Changes The Question

A familiar religious word can offer comfort. It can also prevent us from hearing something unfamiliar. In the book, Cooper Neitzel asks readers to notice that tension before beginning a journey through Hinduism, Buddhism, and Sikhism. His opening question sets the stakes. “What if the promised land is not first a place to inherit, but a bondage to be released from?”

That question places Volume IV of The Covenant Pulse Series at a turning point. Earlier volumes developed the series through sacred journeys, spiritual practice, and the Abrahamic religious family. Here, the author enters traditions whose accounts of freedom require a different vocabulary. The resulting book follows a demanding but approachable inquiry into what binds human beings, how a life is formed, what liberation means, and how help is received along the way.

The subtitle, Pathways Through Three Traditions, Four Dimensions, One Sacred Field, describes both its scope and its ambition. Neitzel wants readers to encounter each tradition closely enough to recognize its own questions. The shared field is a space for attentive comparison, with room for disagreement and for religious identities that remain distinct.

Four Dimensions That Guide The Reading

Bondage, Discipline, Release, and Gift organize that inquiry. These are the author’s working questions, rather than a claim that the traditions describe themselves through an identical four-part system. The distinction matters because it allows the book to compare without making its framework more authoritative than the people and texts it examines.

Bondage asks what keeps a person entangled. Discipline considers the practices through which spiritual life takes shape. Release examines the freedom sought within a particular tradition. Gift attends to what is received through teaching, compassion, divine favor, or other forms of help that the tradition itself recognizes.

Each dimension becomes more precise as the book proceeds. Hindu avidyā, Buddhist dukkha, and Sikh haumai enter the discussion with different histories and meanings. Likewise, mokṣa, nirvāṇa, and mukti receive attention as particular accounts of liberation. Readers learn why similar English glosses can conceal substantial differences in belief.

Hinduism And The Many Paths Toward Liberation

The Hinduism chapter introduces a religious world with significant internal variety. Neitzel examines ignorance, action and its consequences, the cycle of rebirth, and the different ways Hindu schools understand the relationship between the self and ultimate reality. The reader encounters differences among philosophical and devotional traditions, rather than a single generalized account of Hindu belief.

The Bhagavad Gītā gives the discussion a human point of entry. Arjuna’s paralysis before battle brings questions of duty, action, knowledge, and devotion into a consequential setting. Neitzel uses that encounter to explain paths of spiritual formation, showing how a demanding philosophical question can emerge from a person’s inability to decide what to do next.

Knowledge, devotion, disciplined action, and contemplative practice receive attention as distinct paths. Their variety helps the reader understand why liberation cannot be reduced to a single technique. The chapter also considers how divine favor and received help operate within Hindu devotion, alongside the effort required of the practitioner.

Buddhism And The Habits That Sustain Suffering

The Buddhist discussion changes the terms of the inquiry. Neitzel turns to suffering and unsatisfactoriness, craving, clinging, conditioned existence, and the possibility of release. He examines the Noble Eightfold Path as an ordered cultivation of ethical conduct, attention, and wisdom.

The writing repeatedly brings abstract concepts back to patterns a reader can follow. A moment of craving becomes clinging. Repeated clinging shapes habits, and habits influence the way a life is experienced. Neitzel’s explanations give those relationships movement while keeping them within the Buddhist account he is presenting.

The chapter also attends to differences among Theravāda, Mahāyāna, Vajrayāna, and Pure Land traditions. Compassion, spiritual friendship, the gift of teaching, and other-power broaden the discussion of help along the path. This range allows Buddhist life to appear in its diversity, including forms that an account focused only on individual meditation might overlook.

Sikhism And Freedom Within Ordinary Responsibilities

Sikhism brings remembrance, the Guru’s word, service, and community into focus. Neitzel examines haumai, the self-centered ego, alongside nām simran, remembrance of the divine Name, and sevā, selfless service. Liberation is considered within a life that includes work, family, and responsibility to others.

The community kitchen, or langar, makes that relationship visible. Its openness and shared service connect theological ideas with an institution through which people feed and meet one another. The chapter gives household and communal life substantial spiritual weight, making the Sikh contribution essential to the book’s larger inquiry into how freedom is lived.

A Storytelling Instinct Within Religious Nonfiction

Dharmic Pulse is religious nonfiction, and its narrative strength lies in the way it directs an inquiry. The book begins with a question that the author’s existing framework may be unable to answer. It then gives the reader the conceptual preparation, encounters, and comparisons needed to reconsider that framework. Understanding develops through the sequence.

The reader is asked to discover whether a recognizable pulse can be heard across a change in religious language as substantial as the movement from covenant to liberation. Each chapter makes the next question more specific. The momentum comes from the reader’s changing understanding of the problem.

Neitzel’s recurring images of thresholds, rooms, houses, and journeys make this progression easier to follow. A reader can picture entering a space as a guest, listening long enough to understand what matters there, and returning home with a clearer sense of what has been learned. The metaphors help organize demanding material without replacing it.

The human stakes emerge in the details, from Arjuna confronting the demands of action to a household shaped by remembrance and service. Such examples give the writing a capacity to connect ideas with lived choices.

Research That Remains Visible To The Reader

The book supports that narrative movement with an extensive source apparatus. Its discussions draw on the Bhagavad Gītā, Upaniṣads, Buddhist scriptures, and Guru Granth Sahib, among other texts. Chapter notes identify translations and secondary scholarship, while a glossary and selected references give readers routes for further study.

Neitzel’s note on sources explains why terminology and translation require care. Sanskrit, Pāli, and Punjabi words are introduced with explanations, and meaningful differences between related forms are retained. English helps orient the reader, but the original vocabulary continues to carry weight.

The three-part organization reinforces this approach. Part I develops the listening framework. Part II gives each tradition sustained attention. Part III draws comparisons after that groundwork. The sequence makes the author’s method visible, as a reader first encounters the particular tradition, then considers what comparison can responsibly illuminate.

Why The Book Matters To The Wider Series

Dharmic Pulse extends a project that changes emphasis from volume to volume. Promised Lands begins the Covenant Pulse inquiry through sacred journeys and the relationship between calling, wilderness, and arrival. Living the Pulse turns toward spiritual formation and the practices through which faith enters daily decisions.

Abrahamic Pulse, Volume III, examines Judaism, Christianity, Islam, the Latter-day Saint Restoration, and the Bahá’í Faith through Promise, Lineage, Land, and Unity. Volume IV then asks what the project can learn when those organizing categories no longer provide its starting point.

This development gives the book a consequential role in the series. The author subjects his own comparative idea to a more difficult test. He allows the questions raised by Hinduism, Buddhism, and Sikhism to determine how the volume proceeds, making the series capable of learning from the encounter it proposes.

Readers can approach the book as an introduction to its particular inquiry, while those familiar with the earlier volumes will recognize how much has changed. The guiding rhythm of Listening, Learning, Living continues, but the vocabulary and the expectations carried into that rhythm become more carefully examined.

An Author Who Names His Own Faith

Neitzel openly identifies himself as a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. His perspective is part of the book’s context, and readers are told where he stands. He also distinguishes that standpoint from the authority of the traditions he is describing.

The introduction presents the Restoration as a witness within the conversation. The author’s own tradition becomes more visible during the later comparative work, while the Hindu, Buddhist, and Sikh accounts are first allowed to develop within their own terms. That order gives his personal reflection a basis in the encounters that precede it.

The closing reflection reveals the effect of this method on the writer. “I did not need to pretend sameness to be grateful,” Neitzel writes. It is a concise statement of the book’s central ethical possibility: a person can hold a conviction and still learn from a tradition they have not joined.

A Promising Voice In Interfaith Spiritual Literature

The book gives readers concrete reasons to watch Neitzel’s development as an author in comparative religion and spiritual nonfiction. He can organize a large body of material around a question, sustain that question across distinct religious worlds, and return to it with greater specificity. His voice combines personal investment with a willingness to be corrected by what he studies.

His storytelling ability is especially useful in this niche. A philosophical distinction can become more memorable when a reader understands the situation in which it matters. The book moves between sacred texts, conceptual explanation, practices, and the author’s own response, allowing the subject to remain intellectually demanding while giving the reading an emotional and narrative direction.

Who The Book Is For

Readers interested in world religions will find a focused comparison with enough detail to encourage further study. Latter-day Saints curious about other traditions will find a clearly named point of departure. Readers within Hindu, Buddhist, or Sikh communities can examine how an outside author has tried to hear their texts and practices.

The book also offers material for discussion groups and readers concerned with interfaith relationships. Its central questions can guide conversation without requiring participants to share a theology. What has been misunderstood? Which words need more explanation? What similarities survive close attention, and where do differences remain essential?

The Invitation That Remains After The Final Page

The book closes by returning responsibility to the reader. The traditions it examines continue beyond the book, carried in communities, texts, teachers, and practices..

That gives Neitzel’s project its most persuasive literary purpose. The book makes the reader’s way of listening part of the story. Its final invitation is to approach another sacred world with enough patience to hear its language, and to return to one’s own life with the questions that encounter has made possible.

More information about the author and his books is available on Cooper Neitzel’s official website and his official Facebook page.

Photo Courtesy: Cooper Neitzel (Dharmic Pulse cover artwork from the author’s official website.)

About the Book

Dharmic Pulse: Pathways Through Three Traditions, Four Dimensions, One Sacred Field is Volume IV of The Covenant Pulse Series by Cooper Neitzel. Published by Hemingway Publishers. First edition, 2026. Paperback ISBN 9798950690228. Hardcover ISBN 9798952508408.

About Cooper Neitzel

Cooper Neitzel writes about sacred texts, religious history, and spiritual formation. His work includes The Promised Land Series and The Covenant Pulse Series. Writing from a Latter-day Saint perspective, he engages other traditions through close attention to their texts and practices.

At Jacob’s Well, a Woman Who Had Known Rejection Finds a Different Kind of Love

NY Weekly Staff on October 14, 2026

In William M. Elrod’s forthcoming book, “The Encounter: The Woman, The Well, The Man,” a familiar biblical story becomes a reflection on loneliness, faith, and the possibility of beginning again.

Some wounds begin long before a person has the language to describe them. In William M. Elrod’s The Encounter: The Woman, The Well, The Man, the search for love begins in childhood, where affection is inconsistent, home offers little security, and the longing to be chosen becomes a force shaping an entire life.

The book follows a woman whose experiences of rejection influence her relationships and sense of worth. Growing up amid abuse and emotional uncertainty, she learns to seek affirmation wherever it appears. Her successive marriages bring periods of hope, commitment, and spiritual promise, followed by betrayal, separation, grief, and renewed uncertainty. Each loss leaves her questioning whether lasting love is something she can ever expect.

Williampresents these experiences as more than a sequence of failed relationships. They reveal the emotional cost of measuring personal worth by another person’s willingness to stay. The woman’s desire for companionship is deeply human, but her story also exposes the exhaustion of searching for acceptance while carrying the belief that she is somehow unworthy of it.

Meeting That Changes the Question

The narrative’s central image comes from the Gospel of John: Jesus meeting a Samaritan woman at Jacob’s well. In the biblical account, cultural divisions separate them. She is a Samaritan; he is a Jewish man. Their conversation crosses social and religious boundaries, beginning with an ordinary request for water and moving toward a spiritual promise.

Williamplaces this encounter at the heart of the book, using the woman’s personal history to consider what the biblical meeting might mean to someone familiar with rejection. The manuscript does not claim to establish the Samaritan woman’s actual history. Instead, it imagines a personal journey that illuminates the emotional significance of her encounter with Jesus.

The well becomes a place where the past is known without becoming the final judgment on a person’s life. Jesus acknowledges the woman’s history, including her marriages, but offers her living water rather than condemnation. For William, this distinction matters. Grace begins with being fully known and still being offered love.

What the Well Represents

Water in the book carries both practical and spiritual meaning. A physical well sustains daily life, while the living water Jesus offers represents the enduring presence of the Holy Spirit and the promise of eternal life. The metaphor gives the manuscript its organizing principle: a person can return to the same source repeatedly, rather than treating faith as a single moment of relief.

The woman’s eventual change is not presented as a life without difficulty. Her circumstances remain imperfect, but shame and guilt no longer define her understanding of herself. Her encounter becomes the foundation for a new purpose: sharing her testimony with others who may recognize their own loneliness in her story.

Takeaway

William’s book speaks especially to readers who have confused rejection with identity or believe their past has disqualified them from a hopeful future. Its Christian message is direct. Human relationships may fail, but the love offered by Christ is not dependent on a spotless history. The Encounter invites readers to consider a different question, not whether they have been rejected, but whether rejection must determine what comes next.

William M. Elrod’s The Encounter: The Woman, The Well, The Man is a story of faith, grace, and the living water offered to every searching heart. Available soon!

Beyond the Pain and DeAnna Armstrong Brathwaite’s All for His Glory Reveals the Purpose Waiting on the Other Side of Healing

NY Weekly Staff on October 13, 2026

By: Lennard James

There comes a moment when surviving is no longer enough. You have prayed through the pain, endured the disappointment, made it through nights when you wondered whether life would ever feel normal again, and somehow found the strength to keep going. But after the storm passes and the wounds begin to heal, another question emerges: What am I supposed to do with the life God has given back to me? That powerful question is at the center of DeAnna Armstrong Brathwaite’s All for His Glory: Living Redeemed, Walking by Faith, and Reflecting God’s Glory, a faith-centered book that challenges readers to see healing not as the conclusion of their story, but as the beginning of something greater.

Brathwaite, a Christian author, evangelist and inspirational speaker, writes from a place of personal experience. Her journey has included brokenness, restoration and rediscovering her identity through her relationship with God. Instead of allowing those experiences to remain painful chapters she would rather forget, she has transformed them into a message designed to encourage others. “God brought me out of the shadows, restored what pain tried to take, and reminded me who I am in Him but He was not finished with my story,” Brathwaite explains. That quote points to what makes the book intriguing. It is not simply about what happened to her. It is about what can happen after God begins putting the pieces back together.

Many people understand survival. They know what it means to continue functioning while carrying wounds nobody else can see. They have experienced rejection, heartbreak, grief, disappointment, uncertainty or circumstances that changed how they viewed themselves. They survived, but somewhere along the way they stopped dreaming. They learned how to exist again without necessarily learning how to fully live again. All for His Glory speaks directly into that space. Brathwaite encourages readers to consider whether God brought them through their difficult season merely to survive it, or whether there is purpose waiting on the other side.

The book’s subtitles provide a roadmap for that journey. Living Redeemed means understanding that yesterday does not have permanent authority over tomorrow. Your mistakes are not your identity. Your disappointments are not your identity. What someone did to you is not your identity. Redemption creates the possibility of seeing yourself through a different lens. Walking by Faith means continuing forward when you cannot see every step ahead. It requires trusting God when the answers have not arrived and believing that uncertainty does not mean He has abandoned you. Reflecting God’s Glory takes the journey another step further by asking what your transformed life will look like to the people around you.

At the heart of that transformation is God’s grace. Grace becomes especially powerful when someone realizes that the chapter they thought would destroy them did not become the ending. Grace gives people permission to begin again. It reminds the wounded that scars and purpose can exist in the same life. It demonstrates that failure does not eliminate possibility and that even after heartbreak, rejection or disappointment, there can still be another chapter worth living. Brathwaite’s message encourages readers to stop judging their future by what happened in their past.

That message is especially meaningful for women. Brathwaite has a heart for women who have forgotten their own value while spending years taking care of everyone else. She speaks to the woman who poured everything into a relationship and now has to rediscover herself. She speaks to the woman who looks strong in public but knows there are private places in her heart that still need healing. She speaks to the woman who has survived something she rarely discusses and still wonders why God allowed her to experience it. And she speaks to the woman who knows she has gifts inside her but has allowed fear, disappointment or the opinions of others to keep those gifts hidden.

What makes All for His Glory potentially transformative is that Brathwaite does not want readers to simply admire her testimony. She wants them to examine their own. The book raises questions that can follow readers beyond the final page. Have you truly healed, or have you simply learned how to hide the pain? Are you walking by faith, or have fear and disappointment quietly made your decisions for you? Have you accepted that you are worthy of another beginning? Are you using the gifts God gave you? And perhaps most importantly, who are you becoming now that you survived what happened to you?

Brathwaite’s prayer for the book reveals its deeper purpose. “My prayer is that readers will be stirred to know and trust Him, live for His glory, and share His good news with others,” she says. That means the book is not simply about emotional recovery. It is about spiritual transformation. Brathwaite wants readers to develop a deeper relationship with God, recognize their purpose and understand that their experiences can eventually become part of something larger than themselves.

Legacy is also woven into that message. What one generation learns through faith can become strength for the generation that follows. A mother’s testimony may eventually become her daughter’s survival guide. A grandmother’s wisdom may become the words a granddaughter remembers during her own difficult season. A story someone once felt ashamed to tell may eventually become the very testimony another person needs to hear. When viewed through that perspective, healing becomes more than personal. It becomes generational.

Photo Courtesy: DeAnna Armstrong Brathwaite

Brathwaite summarizes the heart of her message with a declaration that reaches directly toward anyone who feels wounded, forgotten or uncertain about what comes next: “You are not alone. There is hope. There is healing. There is purpose.” Those words capture the promise at the center of All for His Glory. Pain may be part of your history, but it does not have to control your destiny. Scars may reveal where you have been, but they do not determine where you are going.

For readers standing at a crossroads in their own lives, the book offers room to ask a harder question. You know what you survived. You know what it cost you. You know how difficult the journey has been. But you still have not discovered why you were brought through it.

That may be the question waiting for you inside these pages.

Because sometimes the greatest testimony is not simply “God brought me out.” Sometimes the most powerful part of the story begins afterward, when you finally discover what He brought you out to become.

Brathwaite shares more about her books and message on her official author website.

Javier Guzman’s Riptide Reveals the Rise and Fall of a Decorated Undercover Cop

NY Weekly Staff on October 12, 2026

By: Blake Daniels

Javier Guzman’s memoir, Riptide: Cartels, Cocaine, and an Undercover Cop’s Fall from Grace, follows a career that began with ambition, accelerated through high-risk police work, and ended in a public collapse.

Guzman was born in Puerto Rico and later grew up in the South Bronx, where poverty, crime, and the constant presence of law enforcement shaped his view of the world. He admired an uncle who served as a Puerto Rican State Police officer and also trained with two police officers who worked as boxing coaches.

“Being street-smart and bilingual were necessary assets to survive in that atmosphere and later transferred very well into police work,” Guzman said.

His path to the badge was not direct. A high school guidance counselor discouraged him from pursuing a career with the FBI. Years later in Florida, he answered a Tampa police recruiting advertisement. He began as a uniformed officer and expected to remain there, but after two years he was transferred to vice.

Plainclothes assignments put Guzman into street-level drug and prostitution investigations. He proved effective, earned a promotion to detective, and moved into larger narcotics cases. His Spanish fluency, cultural familiarity, and confidence made him valuable to federal investigators. Eventually, the Tampa Police Department assigned him to a DEA task force, where he was the only Hispanic agent in the office.

“Riptide traces my rapid rise from a rookie cop in Tampa in the mid-1980s to an undercover vice officer and, by 1991, a detective on loan to the DEA,” Guzman said.

His undercover role required him to appear convincing to cartel operatives and money launderers. During an investigation tied to the Cali Cartel, he traveled repeatedly to New York, Los Angeles, Houston, Miami, and San Juan, collecting millions of dollars in drug proceeds packed in duffel bags.

Success, however, came with a psychological cost. Guzman spent long periods with targets, informants, and their families. The people he was expected to deceive began to feel less like case subjects and more like friends or relatives. He recalls crying when one target was arrested and telling his wife, Elizabeth, that he wanted to stop.

“I had become too close to the target, and when it came time to arrest him, it was like watching a favorite uncle go down,” Guzman said.

He did not leave. As Operation PROMO became more dangerous and complicated, the pressure intensified. Guzman went absent without leave after being ordered to return to uniform duty during the expected Rodney King unrest. He feared that being seen in uniform could compromise the undercover investigation. A police psychologist initially recommended that he be removed from the operation, but he eventually returned.

Guzman now sees those moments as warnings he failed to follow. He ultimately accepted money from cartel associates, an act that destroyed his career and led to prison. He estimates the amount at $20,000 to $25,000 and insists his actions were not driven by greed. He stopped accepting payments and says guilt led him to give some of the money to homeless people.

“Ultimately, the responsibility is all on me,” Guzman said. “I made the decisions that landed me in prison, and I own that.”

That ownership is central to Riptide. The memoir does not separate the excitement of police work from the consequences of compromised judgment, asking readers to hold both realities at once. Guzman does not present himself only as a victim of pressure, inadequate oversight, or institutional mistakes. He acknowledges those forces while emphasizing that he crossed the line. The memoir asks readers to consider how identity, loyalty, danger, pride, and emotional isolation can change judgment over time.

Guzman began writing in prison for therapeutic reasons. After his release, he worried that publication could disrupt his family’s life. A later invitation to speak at a law enforcement conference in San Diego convinced him that sharing the story might help officers recognize warning signs before a crisis becomes irreversible.

“I truly hope that my readers see that our failures in life don’t have to define us,” Guzman said.

Riptide is therefore more than a crime memoir. It is a candid account of professional achievement, moral failure, and the possibility of redemption. Guzman’s fall was public, but his effort to rebuild was quieter: working, starting a business, serving his community, attending church, and becoming a pastor for five years. His story does not erase the betrayal of the badge. Instead, it asks whether accountability and sustained change can create a meaningful life after failure.

Riptide is available on Amazon.

Jack Deveny Explores Women’s Resilience and Personal Transformation in By Her Own Hand

NY Weekly Staff on October 10, 2026

By: Jenny Johnson

There is a specific kind of literary courage required to write a female protagonist with the combination of genuine vulnerability and genuine ferocity that makes her feel completely real rather than conveniently sympathetic, to give her the full range of damage and desire and moral complexity that actual women carry without softening either dimension for the reader’s comfort. Jack Deveny, who describes himself as an empath who finds it easier to write from a woman’s point of view, has that courage, and he exercises it throughout By Her Own Hand with the consistency of a writer who has thought seriously about what it actually means to inhabit a consciousness shaped by experiences he has not personally survived.

Madeline Crowne arrived at the army by fleeing an abusive home, which means that military life was both her salvation and the institution that formed her into someone capable of the heroism she demonstrates in Afghanistan. That formation is rendered with enough specificity that Madeline feels genuinely shaped rather than conveniently capable, someone whose toughness has a specific origin and a specific cost rather than existing as a narrative given. When she is falsely accused of a war crime and becomes the target of a global manhunt, the response she brings to that crisis carries the full weight of who she actually is, a woman who has been surviving impossible situations since long before she ever put on a uniform.

The relationship with Mira, the Lebanese civil war survivor who saves Madeline near death on an Afghan roadside, is where the novel’s most intricate emotional work happens. Deveny builds their connection through the specific recognition of two women who have survived different manifestations of the same essential experience, the experience of a world organized around violence that they did not choose and that has made them into people they could not have predicted. The revelation of Mira’s double life as an arms dealer, and the gradual transformation of her affection for Madeline into something considerably more possessive and more dangerous, is handled with the patience of a writer who trusts the accumulated weight of their relationship to make the betrayal genuinely painful rather than merely dramatic.

Eliot Lange carries his own damage from a desertion accusation born of genuine moral courage, and his tentative connection with Madeline is rendered with the fragility of two people who have been convincingly taught by their respective institutions that trusting anyone is a risk they cannot afford. Deveny gives them both enough interiority that their relationship feels like a genuine encounter between two specific people rather than a plot-required pairing, and the emotional stakes of watching them try to reach each other across the damage they have accumulated feel genuinely earned.

The recurring imagery of hands throughout the novel is the book’s most consistent and most effective structural metaphor, anchoring the question of what we do with the capacity for both violence and tenderness that every human being carries. By Her Own Hand is an ambitious, compassionate, and genuinely gripping novel about what war makes of the people it shapes and what those people choose to do with what remains.

If you have been looking for a war novel that puts a fiercely damaged and fiercely alive woman at its absolute center and follows her through betrayal and false accusation and impossible love without ever losing sight of the complete person underneath the soldier, By Her Own Hand by John W. Deveny is exactly that novel. Grab your copy on Amazon today and meet Madeline Crowne, one of the most fully realized female protagonists in recent literary fiction.

A Twist in Every Tale: Rick Allen Bennett’s Tall Tales, Rhymes, and Front-Porch Wisdom

NY Weekly Staff on October 9, 2026

How Rick Allen Bennett Turns a Lifetime of Mischief and Memory Into Laughter and Wonder in The Twisted Tales of Rick: Tales, Memories and Mischief

It is raining, there is nothing to do, and an owl is sitting on your doorstep. Better let him in.

That is how one of the stories begins in Rick Allen Bennett’s collection The Twisted Tales of Rick: Tales, Memories and Mischief. Between these covers are more than sixty tall tales, rhyming adventures, cowboy yarns, spooky ballads, heartfelt poems, and at least two recipes you should probably not try at home.

Bennett writes the way a favorite uncle talks on the porch after supper, with a grin and a habit of slipping in a little wisdom when you are not looking.

If you like a book that can make you laugh out loud and then sit very still, pull up a chair…

Every family has a storyteller who never lets the facts get in the way of a good time: Who in your life could turn an ordinary afternoon into an adventure?

An Owl, a Box, and a Rainy Day

In this rainy-day story, a bored boy stares at a gray sky when an owl strolls up the sidewalk carrying a box and wearing an umbrella for a hat. Once inside, the owl opens the box, and the world spills out. A steam train rolls out, followed by Big Ben. An ocean sloshes through the hall, a whole circus tumbles onto the floor, a rocket lands beside the wall, and an elephant settles onto the couch. The boy can only repeat that all of this is going to be very hard to explain.

When the house is finally too full, everything vanishes back into the box, and the boy peeks inside. The box is full of books. “Anything you want can be found in a book,” the owl tells him. “It’s easy and fun; just have a look.”

It is a lovely moment for young readers and a sly reminder for grown ones…

Bennett’s stories are boxes of their own, and you never quite know what twist will come rolling out next…

Tall Tales Told With a Straight Face

The tall tales are where Bennett’s comic voice runs wildest. In “A Trip to the Amazon,” a search for the fountain of youth ends with an army of ants, mosquitoes that seem to have trained with the Luftwaffe, a guide whose yellow BVDs do not survive the trip, and three men spinning down the river in a washtub with one paddle. In “And Rudolph Makes Nine,” a three-foot Santa barges in on Christmas Eve with a sack of dirty laundry, a pinch of snuff, and eight reindeer who flatten the narrator.

Then there is the old fisherman who has his boots nailed to the pier rather than let his catch get away and who, the story solemnly concludes, invented the very first water ski. There is Mr. Tubs, explaining to a weary judge how one shoe, a hog trough, a bed of fire ants, and his best friend BooBoo landed him in court. And there are two backwoods recipes, for fried possum and for armadillo in the shell with red eye gravy, told with such cheerful confidence that you may finish the page before you realize what you read.

Rhymes for Little Ones, Shivers for Everyone

Bennett promises that children like the book too, and the rhyming stories prove it. A boy begs to keep a moose that followed him home until the moose crashes through the bedroom floor and makes Mom’s point for her. Another boy wants to dig a hole but has only a cart, so a bird, a mole, a dog, a farmer, and a mouse pitch in until the hole becomes a home with a red door and a porch swing. And curious Malcom J. Fenny wonders about snails on ceilings, climbs a giant tree, dreams up a zoo, and sets sail.

Bennett also knows how to send a chill down the spine. In “A Halloween Tale,” trick-or-treaters named Freckles, Skinny, and Fatty spy on monsters chanting around a boiling cauldron and decide that Halloween must be saved, with results as funny as they are sweet. “The Shadow Prison” ends with a twist worthy of an old radio drama. “Rooster’s Grim Call” and the ballad “Dragon of Wren Knights” trade jokes for something older and darker, proof that a good campfire storyteller can make you laugh and then make you check the window.

And then there is the title story…

In “The Twisted Tales of Rick,” Erin, a cobbler’s son turned soldier, slips away from an endless war with four fellow deserters. The war is blamed on a winter custom gone wrong and a mysterious creature who rides the night sky and seems to know when they are sleeping and when they are awake. Readers who catch the clues early will grin; everyone else will get exactly the twist the title promises.

  • What is the best campfire story you ever heard?
  • Would you have let the owl in out of the rain?

Wisdom From the Trail and the Front Porch

Some of the most memorable pages are also the quietest. In “The Old Cowpoke,” a weathered rider leading a tired mare tells a young man named Zeke all the names life has given him, from Son and Boy to Hand, Deputy, Ranger, Barkeep, and Cookie, before resting by the creek at the ripe old age of “fifty and seven.” Elsewhere, a farmer watches his topsoil blow away in 1931, and a widow fishes with two poles beside an empty chair.

Through it all runs a grandfather’s gentle faith in people. In “A Grandfather’s Wish,” a granddaughter wishes for a camel sitting on a car, and when Grandpa questions it, she asks, “What do you want him to do, walk?” He concedes, then wishes for peace on earth. Bennett dedicates the book to four generations of family, hoping that even if they “may not always see eye to eye,” they will “always see each other.”

His author page simply tells readers to READ THE BOOK and make up their own minds.

An owl can knock on a rainy-day door…

A tale can take a twist you never see coming…

A storyteller can make you laugh, shiver, and remember…

In The Twisted Tales of Rick: Tales, Memories and Mischief, Rick Allen Bennett invites you to open the book and see where you are at!

Author Name: Rick Allen Bennett Book Title: The Twisted Tales of Rick: Tales, Memories and Mischief Published By: Visionary Book Publishers

Redefining Wellness and Why Doreet’s BEING HEALTHY Is More Than Just Another Health Book

NY Weekly Staff on October 8, 2026

By: Elowen Gray

A Fresh Perspective on Modern Health

In a marketplace saturated with wellness trends, miracle diets, and social media influencers, author and wellness educator Doreet takes a markedly different approach. Her latest book, BEING HEALTHY: Re-Defining Health & Well-Being, challenges readers to rethink the very definition of health, not as the absence of disease or the pursuit of physical fitness alone, but as a dynamic balance between the mind and body as one integrated whole, together with our emotions, environment and sense of purpose.

Rather than prescribing another one-size-fits-all wellness formula, Doreet encourages readers to cultivate self-awareness, resilience and intentional living. The book is written as a guide for people who want to think through their own lifestyle choices.

Looking Beyond Diet and Exercise

One of the book’s strongest messages is that health extends far beyond nutrition and physical activity. Doreet argues that emotional wellbeing, mental resilience, environmental influences, relationships, stress reduction and elimination of stressors, language and even the quality of our thoughts all play equally important roles in shaping our overall health.

Throughout the book, she introduces practical tools such as mindfulness, journalling, meditation, breathwork, gratitude practices and self-reflection. These are presented as sustainable habits rather than temporary wellness trends, and they are meant to encourage personal growth.

Readers are invited to explore concepts such as inner silence, the mind and body as one and the same, resilience and conscious living. Such topics feel increasingly relevant in a fast-paced, digitally connected world.

Science Meets Ancient Wisdom

BEING HEALTHY draws on modern scientific research and on time-tested wellness philosophies. Doreet discusses emerging research on the mind-body connection, stress physiology, gut health, epigenetics and emotional wellbeing, while also acknowledging the value of ancient mindfulness practices that have emphasised these principles for centuries.

The approach pairs practical strategies with a broader understanding of how everyday habits relate to long-term physical and emotional health.

A Lifetime Dedicated to Wellness Education

Doreet’s background rests on decades of experience in wellness education and coaching. Throughout her career, she has spoken at events including the Toronto Vegetarian Festival in Canada, Green Festival conferences in Los Angeles and San Francisco, Canyon Ranch Spa in Massachusetts, Expo West in Anaheim, California, SoCal Veg Fest in California, and at a Sustainability Conference at Rutgers University in New Jersey, USA.

She has also worked with clients from a range of backgrounds, including entrepreneurs, artists, athletes and professionals seeking support with physical vitality and emotional well-being. These experiences have shaped a practical philosophy that emphasises education, prevention and personal responsibility rather than quick fixes.

BEING HEALTHY builds on Doreet’s earlier books, which center on conscious living and reconnecting with nature. Her previous publications include 10 Harmful Myths That Prevent Us from Being Healthy & Fully Alive, The Elegantly Raw Doreet’s Coconut Recipes, Celebrating Our Raw Nature and Foraging to Flourish.

Across these titles, a consistent theme runs through the work. Doreet encourages readers to question conventional assumptions, reconnect with nature and build sustainable habits.

Why This Book Matters Today

As conversations about mental health, burnout, chronic disease and preventative healthcare continue to evolve, the book arrives at a relevant moment. Rather than offering simplistic solutions, Doreet presents health as an ongoing journey of learning, self-discovery and intentional daily choices.

Her writing encourages readers to look beyond symptom management and to consider resilience, emotional intelligence and mindful living as part of how they think about health.

BEING HEALTHY: Re-Defining Health & Well-Being is a reflection on what it means to thrive in an increasingly complex world. It combines practical guidance, a whole-person philosophy and discussion of scientific research. In a culture often driven by instant results, Doreet reminds readers that genuine wellbeing is not a destination but a lifelong practice of conscious living.

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