The single event that we know as 9/11 is over, but the shock waves continue to radiate outward, generated by orange alerts, terrorism lockdowns, and the shrinking of personal liberties we once took for granted. The stories in this book, of real people faced with extraordinary trauma and gradually transcending it, are the best antidote to our fears. Middletown, America is a book of hope. All Americans were hit with some degree of trauma on September 11, 2001, but no place was hit harder than Middletown, New Jersey.

Gail Sheehy spent the better part of two years walking the journey from grief toward renewal with fifty members of the community that lost more people in the World Trade Center than any other outside New York City. Her subjects are the women, men, and children who remained after the devastation and who are putting their lives back to-gether. Sheehy tells the story of four widowed moms from New Jersey who started out scarcely knowing the difference between the House and the Senate, yet turned their sorrow and anger into action and became formidable witnesses to the failures of the country's leadership to connect the dots before September 11. Sheehy follows the four moms as they fight White House attempts to thwart the independent commission investigating 9/11 and expose efforts at a cover-up. What would become of the young wives carrying children their husbands would never see, wives who had watched their dreams literally go up in smoke in that amphitheater of death across the river? Amazingly, each finds her own door to the light. Here, too, is the story of the widow and widower who met in the waiting room of a mental-health agency and brought each other back from the brink of despair across a bridge of love. Sheehy also reveals how bereft mothers who will never have another son or daughter found reasons to recommit to life. And she follows in the footsteps of the robbed children, documenting the incredible resilience of four-year-olds, the anger of teenagers, the courage of sisters and brothers.

Sheehy follows survivors who escaped the burning towers only to find themselves trapped inside a tower of inner torment, from which it took love, family, and faith to free themselves. She is taken into the confidence of the night crew at Ground Zero, police officers who worked.. Published at Twenty Six dollars. .. Random House 0-375-50862-7 / 9780375508622
Hardcover As New Westminster, Maryland, U.S.A. 

Price: 16.17 USD

Gail Sheehy's 'Sex and the Seasoned Woman ' serves as a Magna Carta for liberated women determined to feel their way in the new millennium. The book display's the author's trademark blend of anecdotes, interviews, research, and personal manifestations. A winning entry from the woman The New York Times called "America's most therapeutic journalist."

From the Publishe: A seasoned woman is spicy. She has been marinated in life experience. . . . She can be alternately sweet, tart, bubbly, mellow. She can be maternal and playful. Bossy and submissive. Strong and soft. . . . The seasoned woman knows who she is. She could be any one of us, as long as she is committed to living fully and passionately in the second half of life. In her most groundbreaking work since Passages and The Silent Passage, bestselling author Gail Sheehy reveals a hidden cultural phenomenon–increased vitality in women's sex and love lives after fifty. Sex and the Seasoned Woman is the story of an intimate revolution taking place under our very noses. Boomer generation women in midlife are open to sex, love, dating, new dreams, exploring spirituality, and revitalizing their marriages as never before. This is a new universe of passionate, liberated women–married and single–who are unwilling to settle for the stereotypical roles of middle age and are now realizing they don't have to. As life spans grow longer and as societal constraints continue to loosen, older women–once free of the exhausting demands of young children, needy husbands, and demanding careers–find themselves ready to pursue the passionate life. They embrace their “second adulthood” as a period of reawakening. Written in Sheehy's singularly compelling style, combining interviews and research, this book gives voice to more than a hundred fascinating and colorful women. The inspiring stories tell of wives who reinvigorate their marriages after their children leave the nest as well as divorced, widowed, and long-single women who find newdreams and new loves. Sheehy delineates a crucial link between cultivating a new dream and reopening the pathway to intimacy and sexual pleasure. She also examines the latest medical breakthroughs addressing symptoms that have unnecessarily curtailed women's sex lives. From women who find their sexuality reawakened by a younger lover, to couples whose marriages survive health crises and grow stronger, to women who finally find a soulmate in their sixties, to stories from seasoned sirens in their seventies, eighties, and even nineties, these portraits cover an enormous range of experience. In them, Sheehy locates the universal patterns that enable us all to recognize and understand our own lives. The New York Times - Toni Bentley Sheehy covers the usual midlife issues: sexless marriages, adulterous affairs, divorce, low self-esteem, financial dependence, overlooked dreams and empty-nest syndrome, as well as physical conditions like hot flashes and thinning vaginal walls. She then suggests the usual remedies…Confused readers might do better to consult Miss Manners's superb and witty etiquette manuals, which tell us how to behave with grace in any given situation, at any age. Because isn't life really, in the end, not so much about which passage you're in but how to behave, wherever you are? Publishers Weekly Sheehy, a self-described seasoned woman, set off in search of others like herself. Her premise? There's "a new universe of lusty, liberated women, some married and some not, who are unwilling to settle for the stereotypical roles of middle age." Aside from the question whether the 200-odd women she contacts constitute a representative universe, her claim is hardly revelatory. Older women (especially Europeans) have known from time immemorial that age has nothing to do with desire. Published at Twenty Seven dollars. (Some pencilled in lines accenting important areas of interest to previous reader).  Random House Publishing Group 1-4000-6263-2 / 9781400062638
Hardcover Very Good Condition  Very Good w/shelf Wear Edges 

Price: 21.71 USD

. A must-read for women of menopausal age by the author who's written books that make the point on all the subjects she knows about. Interviewing many across the land, she manages to come up with viable statistics for her subjects.

 Random House Inc 067941388x / 9780679413882
Westminster, Maryland, U.S.A. This edition is Out of Print 

Price: 10.00 USD