Showing results by publisher "Greenleaf Book Group" in Biographies & Memoirs

Valarie Clark Miller seemed to have it all. Smart and beautiful with a wealthy, successful husband and growing family, Valarie appeared to be the picture-perfect Mormon wife. But it was all a façade. Inside, she was crumbling from the pressures of long-repressed memories of a childhood filled with sexual and physical abuse.

In this inspirational cross between self-help and memoir, Chad Michael Hardy chronicles his journey from a strict Mormon upbringing to self-acceptance and true authenticity. Facing discrimination and a crisis of faith due to living inauthentically, Hardy embraced the transformative law of Zero to get unstuck, find balance, and unlock infinite potential.

Weldon Long knows firsthand that Maui is nicer than prison. After 13 years of federal and state incarceration, he emerged a transformed man: a powerful speaker, driven motivator, and successful trainer/entrepreneur. Long holds a BS in law and an MBA in management, despite dropping out of high school in the ninth grade.

From a young age, Layla Salek has experienced some people as colors—her mother brown, her father green, her husband rainbow. As she notes, sometimes, when words fail, colors speak. Chaos in Color is the captivating story of Layla’s journey from childhood to adulthood with a mother who suffered from untreated bipolar disorder. Each chapter paints a vivid, heartbreaking picture of the abuse, neglect, and trauma that she experienced as she grew up at the mercy of her mother’s bipolar swings, an incompetent mental health system, and the strangers with whom she was often left.

In a world run amuck with seemingly irreparable differences and conflicts, Gail Straub’s memoir offers an antidote. As a seeker on pilgrimage across the Sahara with indigenous Tuaregs, trekking off the beaten trail high in the Himalayas, the intrepid Straub seeks out all that is different so that she can become whole.

Sustainability is going mainstream—but where did the story start? For decades, the traditional capitalist business model required growth at all costs. Business-as-usual guaranteed unsustainability. Now, in contrast, we see growing adoption of greener practices, but where did these ideas come from—and where are the linked movements headed? Drawing on a half century of experience since the early seventies, “Godfather of Sustainability” John Elkington explains how a series of societal pressure waves have helped to transform business, markets, and, ultimately, capitalism.

Gerald D. Hines stands at the top of the international real estate investment and development world. A Purdue graduate with a degree in engineering, Hines may have arrived in Houston in 1948 for a nine-to-five job at a heating and air conditioning company, but before long he was making the deals that would transform Houston’s skyline. Later, with his revolutionary idea that great architecture was good business, he was reshaping the skylines of the world.

The Fastest Tortoise is about not just weathering the unknown but embracing it and thriving. Structuring his story around “Ken-isms” that define his personal and professional philosophies—such as “yellow lights don’t turn green,” “be uncomfortable,” and “feed the ducks while they’re quacking”—Ken demonstrates how to approach a volatile world.

When ten-year-old Juliette’s father tragically dies, she is left alone with her mentally disturbed mother. As Juliette comes of age in London during the sixties while struggling to support her mother, she finds a job at London’s Playboy Club as a casino bunny. The adventurous Juliette is soon running with a crowd of famous musicians and actors, many of whom become her lifelong friends. Inevitably, Juliette’s mother renders them homeless, and they leave London with no money for an unknown life in Istanbul, where Juliette eventually runs to Beirut to work as a nightclub singer.

Integrity. Kindness. Hard work. Substance and value. Are these the words that describe a media mogul? They are when it’s the late Frank Biondi, the former CEO of HBO, Universal Studios, and Viacom, who leaves a legacy far beyond the movies and TV you love. Through Frank’s example, we can learn how to make good relationships alongside great deals, earn respect while earning multi-million dollar returns, and maintain character even when surrounded by an industry full of characters.

In The Constant Choice, Peter Georgescu offers a gripping narrative of his journey from childhood captivity in a Romanian labor camp to his role as CEO of the world-renowned advertising agency Young & Rubicam. His traumatic youth - his parents’ exile from their homeland, his grandfather’s murder in prison, his neighbors’ betrayal of one another - led to a lifelong struggle to grasp humanity’s moral nature. Despite his conviction when he arrived on American soil that he had reached the land of the good, he discovered a more subtle evil at work all around him.

Author Benjamin Plumb’s life comes across like an introvert’s worst nightmare: terror during US Army field training, fear during enemy night attacks in Vietnam, forced extroversion at the Harvard Business School, chaos during economic collapse in Chile, and shock from an extortion attempt by Manuel Noriega in Panama.

Robert East loved his older brother, Tom, but always resented Tom’s favored role in the family cattle business based at their San Antonio Viejo ranch near Hebbronville, Texas, just north of the Rio Grande. Tom was a figure to be reckoned with, a cattleman with ambitions to supplant their Uncle Bob Kleberg, head of the enormous King Ranch, as the leading cattle raiser in Texas. Robert, by contrast, was a cowboy who cared little for what occurred beyond the San Antonio Viejo’s main gate.

In Spirit of a Hummingbird, Felicia Thai Heath, the daughter of Vietnamese and Chinese immigrants who met in the United States, gives us a disquieting, eventful memoir based on her early childhood on the run with her father—a notorious Vietnamese kingpin and escaped convict—and her conflicted mother. Clever and mature beyond her age, young Felicia experienced poverty and witnessed abuse as her dysfunctional family bounced around in the United States and Canada. Amid all the tumult and terror, she found ways to love her family, educate herself, navigate her world, and discover her potential.

Captured by Love shares the real love stories of 20 Vietnam War POWs. Some had wives who started a movement that changed American foreign policy. Others came home and had to start over, while five single men met the loves of their lives. Despite their unique differences, all these couples have been happily married 40 to 65 years. Former POW Lee Ellis and love expert Greg Godek take you on a dramatic journey of faithfulness, passion, excitement, resilience, and practical love lessons from these couples.

With Out of the Ashes: A Story of Recovery and Hope, Sallie Crotty offers a profoundly moving memoir told with unflinching bravery and insight. Her compelling story explores a topic that affects us all: mental health. Detailing a mid-life descent into debilitating despair, she brings the listener on a deeply personal journey. She reveals her struggles, time spent in a psychiatric ward, and how lacking a clear diagnosis almost led to her death. She also describes how proper care and receiving the right diagnosis and treatment can provide hope, stability, and a path to happiness.

In More After the Break, Jen Maxfield revisits ten memorable stories from her career as a TV news reporter, describing in heart-pounding detail how the events unfolded and revealing what happened after the cameras went away. She introduces listeners to unforgettable people who will inspire you with their hopefulness, even when confronting life’s greatest heartbreaks. Returning to find these people years after she featured their stories on the news gives Maxfield an opportunity to ask the questions she had always pondered: What happened after the live truck pulled away?

When my son Sean was born with special needs, his mother and I were told he would never be “normal” and we mourned for the life we had imagined for him. We thought we would have to be his teacher and protector, more so than the typical child. However, we quickly learned that lessons can come from the most unlikely places and that our world would be changed for the better in ways we could have never envisioned. . . all because of Sean. Before he died on Father’s Day 2019, Sean taught me valuable life lessons. He taught me how to live like Sean, and these lessons are his legacy.

Told as a conversation between David and his two sons, American Familia is David’s story of growing up in rural poverty in Puerto Rico and urban poverty in the United States, detailing hopeful and transformative life-lessons along the way. This book encourages youth with a vision of hope that they, too, can transcend their environment and situation—and achieve more, be more, and become more. David’s story provides guidance on how to overcome challenges and gives direction on how to develop purpose and embrace opportunities with courage and personal responsibility.

Award-winning memoirist Meg Stafford has an adventurous spirit, and this time she takes us along for the ride. When her daughters venture into terra incognita—one of them meditating in the Himalayas and the other negotiating with the Colombian military—Stafford decides to go too. In the process, she reflects on her own lifetime of wanderlust and what it means for a parent to love and to let go. Generous, insightful, and deeply funny, Stafford is the ideal tour guide for a journey as big as the world and as intimate as the human heart.