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TORN From the Inside Out & THE JOURNEY

 MEMOIRS In 1973,  a young woman, barely sixteen years old, and a zealous member of a cultist religious group, married a twenty-three year-o...

Sunday, December 29, 2013

The Great Minimum Wage Hike of 2014 By Sara Niles

The Great Depression was the greatest economic disaster in America. It began with the crash of the stock market on ‘Black Tuesday’ in 1929, and by the early 1930’s, it was in full swing. The Grapes of Wrath, written by Nobel Prize winning author John Steinbeck, painted a fictional story of lives that were all too real for people who lived the tale that Steinbeck recreated through the Joad family’s desperate attempt to survive. The ‘grapes’ of prosperity, that is the work and prosperity the family hoped to find when they reached the grape orchards in California, became the ‘Grapes of Wrath’, by the time they reached their destination. Economic strife, hardship and the societal turmoil of a frustrated generation, paved the way for a New Day, when Eisenhower moved to enact ‘New Deal’ legislation that provided economic stability for the banks, and welfare programs for the poor, social security for the aged and sick, and a brand new minimum wage:Franklin D. Roosevelt's post depression Programs
The first minimum wage started out at a whopping $.25 an hour in 1938, was $1.60 per hour in 1968 (I remember those years), and finally, reached $5.15 an hour in 1997. The wage increases came in minute increments, while the runaway economy raced out of control; with inflation consuming the wages of families, to the point of totally eliminating what was once called ‘disposable income’. Every penny and dollar of the working poor was going to basic minimum, and often substandard survival.
Until now, when a substantial increase of the minimum wage is on our doorsteps.
The U.S. minimum wage due to be increased in 13 states on January 1st. 2014:
The U.S. minimum wage history:
U.S. Department of Labor: Minimum Wage history chart

How will this affect the economy? One can only wait to see.

Thursday, December 19, 2013

The Many Faces of Religion: excerpt from The Journey by Sara Niles



The Journey is a narrative memoir of the life of Sara Niles and her children after having fled abuse. Niles includes the context of world events and social issues within the narrative of their lives from 1987-2011; the following is an excerpt that demonstrates the power and influence of religion in individual lives:

Excerpt

Chapter 8

The Many Faces of Religion

Throughout history, every nation and village system in the world, has used religious gatherings to form social circles and networks among neighbors. I grew up in the southern United States, deep in the Bible Belt where country churches were the bulwarks of the communities. It did not matter what the local issue of the day was, church was where the meetings took place and the people gathered.

It takes a wise person to be able to judge situations from all sides,  and to see them multi-dimensionally, and to be able to do this perpetually: in fact perhaps it takes special genius to do so. At that time in our lives, I did not possess the genius necessary to judge where the boundaries that limited my children’s freedoms should be. I lacked the balance needed to use religion wisely.  Religion was a vital and powerful force, which can be as useful as it can be dangerous, if not used in a balanced way. Karl Marx once said, “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature… It is the opium of the people”, and though this famous saying has angered many a religious soul, it is a true statement nevertheless. Too much religion can indeed be like a drug of escape, for those who are trying to avoid the realities of a ‘dangerous’ world. Just as I found my way into religion as I perceived it at the time, I would find my way again. My children were simply my followers until they developed stronger wills of their own, and would then be free to chart their own paths in life.

Sunday, December 15, 2013

The Torn Trilogy By Sara Niles

Quote from Torn From the Inside Out

“For the next half decade, I lived on the ‘flower bed of Eden’, as Cousin Andrew called it.  The days were never long enough; perhaps that is why I hated to sleep.  Seasons came and went in a panorama of delight.  The record ice storm of the early 1960’s was a great memory to me as a small child, as I watched the storm through steam fogged windows, warm and snug, as the loud popping of snapping pine trees screamed with the howling winds. Nothing caused me to fear those years, because I felt perfectly safe, as I expected I always would”

From: The Journey
“When the dark night ended, a new day dawned for us when my children were still small, and the new day was a long as the long night had been, and in some ways, just as frightening”



“Love is one of the greatest human emotions and a powerful force in its own right, but even love cannot prevent some things from happening”


“Sometimes when you become so accustomed to loss, a new loss is only part of your usual ‘normal’”


“Our flight to freedom and safety was filled with a calm suppressed terror in the children and I, the type terror you have when you are used to living with danger

Quotes and Excerpts
From: Out of the Maelstrom

“He was dead, alright. The sight of death is an ugly and fearsome thing, I thought, as I absorbed the tragic sight in front of me. It was a man, ‘The man’ , was lying in the road with blackish- red blood pooled around his head, and as he lay face down with his feet in his own yard, while his head and shoulders were planted in the street, he gave the appearance of  a killed animal felled in its tracks by a hunter. 

Saturday, December 14, 2013

"Love is one of the greatest human emotions and a powerful force in its own right, but even love cannot prevent some things from happening”

“Sometimes when you become so accustomed to loss, a new loss is only part of your usual ‘normal’”

“Our flight to freedom and safety was filled with a calm suppressed terror in the children and I, the type terror you have when you are used to living with danger”

“Emotional breakings are delicate to repair and even harder to decipher. I was not smart enough, nor did I have the wisdom needed for such a job at that time”


“Ariel was the perfect emotional adapter when things went wrong, but she was not amenable to life when things went right. It seemed her coping mechanism was geared towards trouble”



Torn From the Inside Out Sara Niles

“In every life there is a timeless and unforgettable minute or day that will be forever etched into our mind’s memory. I have unforgettable memories that are so vivid that I see them in Technicolor, and I hear them in surround sound”

Wednesday, December 11, 2013

Tuesday, December 10, 2013

The Age of Mega-Authors: over one hundred million book sales by Sara Niles

There are best sellers in books, and there are epic, mega-bestsellers: books that have sold over one hundred million copies.  The authors who have had the distinction of being included among this very elite group, as mega-authors, are few.

The  book by author Agatha Christie that was published in 1939,  And Then There Were None reportedly sold over one hundred million copies worldwide;  which is no small feat considering the fact the prolific Christie has reportedly sold over four billion books worldwide, making Agatha Christie one of the  most prolific authors of all time.

Books that have sold over one hundred million copies include The Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien and A Tale of Two Cites by Charles Dickens;  both English authors whose long running sales dated back to  the nineteenth century, which of course, gave them both a good head start
Since the dawn of the second millennium, there have been noteworthy authors who may eventually eclipse the former prolific champions for the prize of mega-authors; to name a few:

Barbara Cartland (1 billion), Danielle Steele (800,000,000), and JK Rowling (450,000,000)
Followed by Dean Koontz, Stephen King (350,000,000), and Louis L’Amour (330,000,000), with a pretty long list of authors who have sold over one hundred million books per volumes of work http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_fiction_authors; however, there remain two distinct authors who are set far apart from the crowd: Suzanne Collins and E.L. James.

E.L. James’s Fifty Shades of Grey and Suzanne Collins’s Hunger Games topped the list in 2012 of book sales:  http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/bookselling/article/55383-the-bestselling-books-of-2012.html

AS of 2012 the Hunger Games reportedly outsold JK Rowling’s Harry Potter series with over fifty million copies sold worldwide. http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/bookselling/article/55383-the-bestselling-books-of-2012.html

Wow! Now that is a lot of book sales…but wait, Fifty Shades of Grey by Suzanne Collins has sold over seventy million copies, according to the Wall Street Journal in its March 26, 2013 issue: http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424127887323466204578384743129294104


The latter two authors, American author Suzanne Collins and English author E.L. James, are epic mega-authors whose names will live long in the annals of literature.

The Age of Mega-Authors: over one hundred million book sales by Sara Niles

There are best sellers in books, and there are epic, mega-bestsellers: books that have sold over one hundred million copies.  The authors who have had the distinction of being included among this very elite group, as mega-authors, are few.

The  book by author Agatha Christie that was published in 1939,  And Then There Were None reportedly sold over one hundred million copies worldwide;  which is no small feat considering the fact the prolific Christie has reportedly sold over four billion books worldwide, making Agatha Christie one of the  most prolific authors of all time.

Books that have sold over one hundred million copies include The Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien and A Tale of Two Cites by Charles Dickens;  both English authors whose long running sales dated back to  the nineteenth century, which of course, gave them both a good head start.

Since the dawn of the second millennium, there have been noteworthy authors who may eventually eclipse the former prolific champions for the prize of mega-authors; to name a few:

Barbara Cartland (1 billion), Danielle Steele (800,000,000), and JK Rowling (450,000,000)
Followed by Dean Koontz, Stephen King (350,000,000), and Louis L’Amour (330,000,000), with a pretty long list of authors who have sold over one hundred million books per volumes of work http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_fiction_authors; however, there remain two distinct authors who are set far apart from the crowd: Suzanne Collins and E.L. James.

E.L. James’s Fifty Shades of Grey and Suzanne Collins’s Hunger Games topped the list in 2012 of book sales:  http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/bookselling/article/55383-the-bestselling-books-of-2012.html

AS of 2012 the Hunger Games reportedly outsold JK Rowling’s Harry Potter series with over fifty million copies sold worldwide. http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/bookselling/article/55383-the-bestselling-books-of-2012.html

Wow! Now that is a lot of book sales…but wait, Fifty Shades of Grey by Suzanne Collins has sold over seventy million copies, according to the Wall Street Journal in its March 26, 2013 issue: http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424127887323466204578384743129294104


The latter two authors, American author Suzanne Collins and English author E.L. James, are epic mega-authors whose names will live long in the annals of literature.

The Age of Mega-Authors: over one hundred million book sales By Sara Niles


Sara Niles 

There are best sellers in books, and there are epic, mega-bestsellers: books that have sold over one hundred million copies.  The authors who have had the distinction of being included among this very elite group, as mega-authors, are few.

The  book by author Agatha Christie that was published in 1939,  And Then There Were None reportedly sold over one hundred million copies worldwide;  which is no small feat considering the fact the prolific Christie has reportedly sold over four billion books worldwide, making Agatha Christie one of the  most prolific authors of all time.

Books that have sold over one hundred million copies include The Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien and A Tale of Two Cites by Charles Dickens;  both English authors whose long running sales dated back to  the nineteenth century, which of course, gave them both a good head start
Since the dawn of the second millennium, there have been noteworthy authors who may eventually eclipse the former prolific champions for the prize of mega-authors; to name a few:
Barbara Cartland (1 billion), Danielle Steele (800,000,000), and JK Rowling (450,000,000)
Followed by Dean Koontz, Stephen King (350,000,000), and Louis L’Amour (330,000,000), with a pretty long list of authors who have sold over one hundred million books per volumes of work http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_fiction_authors; however, there remain two distinct authors who are set far apart from the crowd: Suzanne Collins and E.L. Grey.

E.L. James’s Fifty Shades of Grey and Suzanne Collins’s Hunger Games topped the list in 2012 of book sales:  http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/bookselling/article/55383-the-bestselling-books-of-2012.html

AS of 2012 the Hunger Games reportedly outsold JK Rowling’s Harry Potter series with over fifty million copies sold worldwide. http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/bookselling/article/55383-the-bestselling-books-of-2012.html

Wow! Now that is a lot of book sales…but wait, Fifty Shades of Grey by Suzanne Collins has sold over seventy million copies, according to the Wall Street Journal in its March 26, 2013 issue: http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424127887323466204578384743129294104

The latter two authors, American author Suzanne Collins and English author E.L. James, are epic mega-authors whose names will live long in the annals of literature.

Saturday, December 7, 2013

Nelson Mandela: When Greatness Walked Among Us

“I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black
domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society
in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal 
opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. 
But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die."


Nelson Mandela spoke these words from the dock at the Rivonia Treason Trial on April 20, 1964. Through his words and actions ever since, Mandela has 
been embraced worldwide as a symbol of courage, hope, and 
reconciliation.

When Greatness Walked Among Us: Nelson Mandela, 1918-2013