These World-Changing Books Make Great Christmas Gifts!

byLyn Lomasi,Write W.A.V.E. Media Staff

Christmas is the season for giving. Make your gifts count this year by touching hearts with these world-changing true stories. These  will inspire, help people relate to one another, and perhaps even help some change the world themselves.

My Way Home: Growing Up Homeless in America

"His life was barely worth a dollar. He slept outside, on park benches, in stairwells, under bushes. Michael Gaulden lived in shelter after shelter across the United States. With his father incarcerated and mother disabled, he stayed homeless for ten years.

From the age of seven to seventeen, Michael, with his mother and sister, journeyed along his own underground railroad, desperately searching for a way to free his family from the sewers of society.

Michael learned death was a big part of youth homelessness. Education was not. To survive, he had to become something more. Caught in between two worlds- his dreams vs. his reality- violence, gangsters, hunger, poverty, and sorrow marked his daily life.

Michael vowed to change his fate through getting his high school diploma. He never hoped to dream that not only would he graduate from high school but also from a prestigious California university. This is the true story of a homeless boy, marked for prison or worse, who fought against tremendous odds and persevered to achieve academic and professional success."

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Being Seen: Memoir of an Autistic Mother, Immigrant, And Zen Student

"Being Seen is a memoir about a woman with autism struggling not only to be seen, but to be understood and respected. Anlor Davin grew up in a small town on the Western coast of France. From earliest childhood she was beset by overwhelming sensory chaos and had trouble navigating the social world. Only many years later did she learn that she was autistic. Throughout childhood, Anlor struggled to hold her world together and in many ways succeeded: she became an accomplished young tennis player, competing even at the level of the French Open. However, in addition to her autism a dark history hung over her family—a history that she did not fully understand for years to come"

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AMERICAN JUSTICE ON TRIAL: People v. Newton

"On the 50th anniversary of the Black Panther Party, Pearlman’s new book American Justice on Trial: People v. Newton compares the explosive state of American race relations in 1968 to race relations today with insights from key participants and observers of the internationally-watched Oakland, California death-penalty trial that launched the Panther Party and transformed the American jury “of one’s peers” to the diverse cross-section we often take for granted today."

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The Girl from Spaceship Earth: A True Story

"This innovative debut memoir tells the remarkable true story of one girl's lifelong passion to live up to the practical utopian ideas of the iconic American genius Steve Jobs called the Leonardo da Vinci of the twentieth century.

Instead of great works of art, Buckminster Fuller created new ways of thinking. A search to understand and then to share his practical utopian wisdom turns into a heartfelt, sometimes hilarious and always inspiring journey.....

The famous revolutionary thinker, inventor and futurist known to all as Bucky twice sweeps the author off her feet: First as a young girl visiting Fuller's 1969 World Game in Carbondale, Illinois and then again as a fledgling journalist in 1982 Chicago. High atop Michigan Avenue Bucky takes her cosmic surfing in an animated lecture about the remarkable possibilities for humanity to succeed beyond our wildest dreams. She promises to share his ideas with the world, which is the passionate obsession in an inspiring coming of age journey.

Readers get a charming introduction to an important historical figure as well as some uncommon sense prescriptions for humanity's success. 

This book gets readers out of their comfort zones to find their own voices to speak truth to power. Discovering Bucky's ideas is like finding a new engine under the hood of your car.  "

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Captive Market: Commercial Kidnapping Stories from Nigeria

"Captive Market is the first ever book-length exposé of the business side of kidnapping in Nigeria. Using first hand interviews with kidnap victims and their families, a story emerges that is packed with surprising twists, turns and paradoxes as it shines a light on the fear and the fact of kidnapping.

Kidnapping in Nigeria, though a growing fact of life that few want to talk about, is not very well understood. Its existence is a cancer that needs to be rooted out - it limits the potential of a growing Nigerian economy and the simple fear

of being the next kidnapping victim degrades how many Nigerians live their lives.

Captive Market takes the view that if we understand the way kidnappers think about kidnapping it might be easier to get people out of kidnapping situations. It uses first person kidnapping stories and interviews with hostage negotiators and peeks into the twisted and bizarre world of kidnapping insurance."

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