Beautiful Recovery

David Sheff's story is a first: a teenager's addiction from the parent's point of view, a real-time chronicle of the shocking descent into substance abuse and the gradual emergence into hope.

Before meth, Sheff's son, Nic, was a varsity athlete, honor student, and award-winning journalist. After meth, he was a trembling wraith who stole money from his eight-year-old brother and lived on the streets. With haunting candor, Sheff traces the first warning signs, the attempts at rehabilitation, and, at last, the way past addiction. He shows us that, whatever an addict's fate, the rest of the family must care for one another, too, lest they become addicted to addiction.

Every one of us sooner or later walks through hell. The hell of being hurt, the hell of hurting another. The hell of cancer, the hell of a reluctant, thunking shovel full of earth upon the casket of someone we deeply loved, the hell of betrayal, the hell of betraying, the hell of divorce, the hell of a kid in trouble...the hell of knowing that this year, like any year, may be our last. We all walk through hell. The point is not to come out empty-handed.... There is real and profound power in the suffering we endure if we transform that suffering into a more authentic, meaningful life.

When he was two years old, Hunter Biden was badly injured in a car accident that killed his mother and baby sister. In 2015, he suffered the devastating loss of his beloved big brother, Beau, who died of brain cancer at the age of 46. These hardships were compounded by the collapse of his marriage and a years-long battle with drug and alcohol addiction.

In his recovery from drugs and alcohol, Chris Grosso has stumbled, staggered, and started all over again. In an effort to understand why he relapses, and why many of us return to the myriad of other self-defeating behaviors despite our better judgment, he went to best-selling authors, spiritual teachers, psychologists, doctors, and more, and asked them why we tend to repeat mistakes in our lives, even when we know these actions will harm us and the ones we love. In Dead Set on Living, Chris shares these intimate conversations and the practices that have taught him.

Christianity and marijuana. This seems to have been a hazy subject for many years. Is smoking marijuana a sin? The answer is astonishing: Yes, they can and no, they don’t. But how can this be? See how Lucifer used the raw truth of scripture to craft a deadly lie. In Little Green Plant, Salaiz testifies to the truths concerning this subject, and the beautiful lie that has made a way for marijuana to subtly slide onto the throne in place of God, denying his power.

At the age of 68, Dr. Zeev Gilkis, a cancer survivor, decided to gift himself an unusual present for his 70th birthday - to run his first full marathon. In his previous book Running Back in Time, the author, writing at the time at age 69, told the story of the first half of his journey. The Beautiful Addiction relates the second part of his journey, through which Zeev gradually increases the distance of his runs from 21 kilometers to 42 kilometers while sharing his thoughts about life and becoming ageless, all the way to the surprising ending.