Showing titles in Adoption & Fostering

As she closes the door on her stunningly successful television show, Rosie O' Donnell opens her heart to share the amazing experience that changed her life forever. "An enormously powerful story," says Publishers Weekly, "about how forces strong enough to shatter one person can make another shine like a diamond."

Foreign correspondent Neely Tucker and his wife, Vita, arrived in Zimbabwe in 1997. After witnessing firsthand the devastating consequences of AIDS on the population, especially the children, the couple started volunteering at an orphanage that was desperately underfunded and short-staffed. One afternoon, a critically ill infant was brought to the orphanage from a village outside the city. She'd been left to die in a field on the day she was born.

Foreign correspondent Neely Tucker and his wife, Vita, arrived in Zimbabwe in 1997. After witnessing firsthand the devastating consequences of AIDS on the population, especially the children, the couple started volunteering at an orphanage that was desperately underfunded and short-staffed. One afternoon, a critically ill infant was brought to the orphanage from a village outside the city. She’d been left to die in a field on the day she was born, abandoned in the tall brown grass that covers the highlands of Zimbabwe in the dry season.

Gerrold, a science fiction writer from California, adopts a son who has a slight behavioral problem. He believes himself to be a Martian. Gerrold begins the long, involving work of trying to earn the acceptance of Dennis, a hyperactive eight-year-old who desperately wants a father's love, but is so insecure he feels he must be an alien. Gerrold's semi-autobiographical memoir of the first two years with Dennis is a funny, endearing, heartbreaking, and beautifully written testament to fatherhood.

The acclaimed writer A. M. Homes was given up for adoption before she was born. Her biological mother was a twenty-two-year-old single woman who was having an affair with a much older married man with a family of his own. The Mistress's Daughter is the ruthlessly honest account of what happened when, thirty years later, her birth parents came looking for her.

When Andrew Bridge was seven years old, he and his mother - a mentally unstable woman who loved her child more than she could care for him - slid deeper and deeper into poverty, until they were reduced to scavenging for food in trash bins. Welfare officials did little more than threaten to take Andrew away, until a social worker arrived with a police escort and did just that while his mother screamed on the sidewalk.

The gospel of Jesus Christ—the good news that through Jesus we have been adopted as sons and daughters into God’s family—means that Christians ought to be at the forefront of the adoption of orphans in North America and around the world. Russell D. Moore does not shy away from this call in Adopted for Life, a popular-level, practical manifesto for Christians to adopt children and to help equip other Christian families to do the same.

"It sounded at first like something out of an old horror movie. I thought maybe someone was just playing around, but then I heard it again and again, a loud piercing cry, and less like Hollywood every time. The windows were down in my police cruiser on that warm fall day, but I still couldn’t tell where the sounds came from. I began looking around for the unlikely sight of someone being disemboweled in a mall parking lot on a Saturday afternoon. Seeing nothing, and still hearing the screams, I called in a “disturbance”.... Around the next corner I found the source of the commotion.

When the two-time National Book Award finalist Melissa Fay Greene confided to friends that she and her husband planned to adopt a four-year-old boy from Bulgaria to add to their four children at home, the news threatened to place her, she writes, "among the greats: the Kennedys, the McCaughey septuplets, the von Trapp family singers, and perhaps even Mrs. Feodor Vassilyev, who, according to the Guinness Book of World Records, gave birth to 69 children in eighteenth-century Russia."

In this memoir by Flannery O’Connor Award winner Debra Monroe, the soon-to-be divorced Debra buys a dilapidated Texas cabin miles from her teaching job. While waiting to adopt a child, she refurbishes and expands the rude dwelling. She soon finds herself in the strange new world of single motherhood, complicated by her being white and her adopted daughter being black.

CBA best-selling author Karen Kingsbury - herself an adoptive mother - offers an inspiring collection of true stories to remind readers that God is present in every adoption. Providing the perspectives of people from a diverse set of backgrounds and age ranges, Treasury of Adoption Miracles features stories of inspiration and hope that will appeal to adoptive parents, their children, and lovers of nonfiction alike.

When Kim de Blecourt and her husband decided to adopt a child from Ukraine, they knew that the process might be challenging. Nothing, however, could have prepared de Blecourt for the twisted nightmare she would endure. During her year-long struggle to extricate her newly adopted little boy from that post-Soviet country's corrupt social service and judicial systems, de Blecourt was insulted, physically assaulted, and arrested. Worse, her months of loneliness, worry, and fear drove her to the brink of spiritual despair. But God had no intention of abandoning de Blecourt or her family.

Meredith Hall's moving but unsentimental memoir begins in 1965, when she becomes pregnant at sixteen. Shunned by her insular New Hampshire community, she is then kicked out of the house by her mother. Her father and stepmother reluctantly take her in, hiding her before they finally banish her altogether. After giving her baby up for adoption, Hall wanders recklessly through the Middle East, where she survives by selling her possessions and finally her blood.

Born in Africa to a Nigerian princess, Precious Williams was less than one year old when her mother put an ad in Nursery World: "Pretty Nigerian baby girl needs new home." Precious's mother had flown to London in search of a new life - a life in which there was no space for a daughter. The first response came rom a 60-year-old white woman, Nan, who prided herself for being "color blind." Correspondence were exchanged, no questions asked, and Precious left her mother for Nan's home in rural England.

An American music icon is on a collision course with the world's two superpowers when trying to save a Chinese baby from death. Haunted by a troubled past and betrayed by the people closest to her, she is set to win against those determined to silence her.

It's 1965 and Annie Peters is just eight years old when her mother is committed full time to a mental health organization. Uprooted by their mother's illness, Annie and her four siblings find themselves torn between a Catholic-run orphanage and the final remnants of their shattered home. As tumultuous church and state changes begin to collide with the lure of an escalating pop-culture movement, the orphans of St. Vincents are determined to maintain the fierce independence that would forever mark America's early baby-boomer generation.

We all may agree that love is the greatest emotion one can possess. Every one of us has a love for someone or something. What is Love, Faith and Hope in God's own words? "But now abideth faith, hope, love, these three, but the greatest of these is LOVE." 1 Cor. 13:13. Faith - How does faith come to a person? One way faith in God, Christ, and the Holy Spirit can come to anyone is through the hearing the Word of God. Rom. 10:17 - "So when Faith comes from hearing, and hearing by the Word of God."

Some families are created in different ways but are still, in every way, a family. Writer and star of My Big Fat Greek Wedding Nia Vardalos firmly believed she was supposed to be a mom, but Mother Nature and modern medicine had put her in a headlock. So she made a choice that shocked friends, family, and even herself: with only 14 hours' notice, she adopted a preschooler.

Jesse and Ramon are a loving couple, but after years spent unsuccessfully trying to get pregnant, they turn to adoption, relieved to think that once they navigate the bureaucratic path to parenthood they will have a happy ending. But nothing has prepared them for the labyrinthine process - for the many training sessions and approvals; for the constant advice from friends, strangers, and "experts"; for the birthmothers who contact them but don't ultimately choose them; or even, most shockingly, for the women who call claiming they've chosen Jesse and Ramon but who turn out never to have been pregnant in the first place.

In a family memoir that reads like a detective novel, Rhonda Noonan recounts her 30-year quest to find the truth of her own background - and what she uncovered will surprise listeners as much as it did her. Rhonda was born and adopted in Oklahoma, a state with closed adoption records. And, although she was cherished by her adoptive family, she - like so many adoptees - felt a burning desire to find and make contact with her birth parents.