The purpose of this book is to help the people in the world struggling to be happy. It is here to help people that have a feeling within them that says, “This formula for happiness I am living isn’t working” ; The person tired of living a life that society said will make them happy, a life where we are searching outside of ourselves for happiness. It is for a person who declared yesterday to be the last day of this formula that isn’t working. This book is for every person who wants to define their own life of happiness, a life where happiness is 100 percent under your control; a life where we don’t have to wait for success and material gain to be happy but instead are happy because we understand it attracts success and material gain. In this book you will learn the tools to implement this. Learn tools to assist us physically, mentally and emotionally to be happy. Much success with the teachings in this book and I know they will help you in this quest as they have helped me in mine.

After a boy named Kimbo is kidnapped from the jungles of Africa while on his first hunt with his father, we learn of his journey through a book of recollections he wrote once he became a man, wherein he describes the life he’d led while in America as the slave of many masters. He eventually gains his freedom with the help of a minister who becomes his dearest friend. Let me encourage you to read the reviews on amazon or elsewhere, from those who’ve read it. The following is an excerpt from the award winning book, The Slave’s Diary.

“She stopped rocking and pulled the pipe from her mouth and held it in her wrinkled hand.

“Well, now, how do you s’pose you’re gonna eat it if ’n yer hidin’ in them there woods?”

Leaving the safety of the brush, I walked slowly up to the porch and told her my name.

“Hmmm. Rastus, is it? I like it. It’s a good strong name. I knew a Rastus once. A good man he was, an’ kind to animals too. Well, what are ya standin’ there like a lump fer? Come on up here and set fer a spell an’ tell me about yerself, Rastus.”

“Thank ya, kindly ma’am, don’t mind if I do.”

 “You might jest as well call me Miss Owens. Evrabuddy else does.”

She patted the chair next to her and told me to sit for a while and talk with her.

“So tell me about yerself, young feller.”

I told her my story, and I mean everything. Well, almost everything. I told her about how I was a boy when I came to America from Africa, and then about Jed an’ Miss Kassie, and all about the Masters I had. But I didn’t tell her anything about Lizbeth ’cause it just didn’t seem like a good idea.

She seemed real interested when I talked about the draft horses I used to work with, and laughed when I told her some of the things that happened while I lived with Miss Kassie and Jed. But when I told her that I was a set-free man, she tipped her head and looked at me over top of her spectacles, almost as if to say out loud that I was a liar. I don’t know how she knew it, but I could tell that she knew. But instead of calling me out on it, she started to tell me about herself.

She was married for a long time to a man called Wilbur, but he died almost a year before from something called the pox.

“Tain’t been an easy road, son, but this homestead’s been paid for in bitter coin. If it wasn’t the Injuns, cold weather, or poor crops, there was always some kinda illness tryin’ to git us to move on. My man Wilbur was a fine man, Rastus, an’ I think he’d a liked you. Did I tell you Wilbur was a horse man jest like you? He’d go on an’ on about it, always talkin’ about raisin’ them dang horses and makin’ it big by sellin’ ’em to the rich folks in the Bay Colony. A course he never got around to it other than all the talkin’, but a man has to have his dream now, don’t he, Rastus?”

She stopped talking and looked at me as if waiting for me to speak.

“So tell me, young feller, what’s yer dream about?”

I didn’t know what to say. I wasn’t sure I even had a dream apart from being free, which I already lied and told her I was.

“I don’t reckon I have a dream Miss Owens. Leastwise, nothin’ I kin think of. An’ tha’s okay ’cause I don’t aspect a whole lot outta life other’n what I already got.”

She looked at me kinda serious like and told me that that was just crazy talk. Then she leaned her chair toward me and pointed that corncob pipe my way and shook it at me.

“Now you listen to me, Rastus, ’cause I’m an old woman an’ I know what I’m talkin’ about. If a body don’t want much outta this life, then by golly that’s usually all they’s ever gonna git! Not much! Now you got to reach down deep inside yerself an’ think on what makes ya happy. An’ what it is that makes ya happy that you ain’t got yet, well, that kin be yer dream. Can ya see what I’m sayin’, boy? A body hasta have dreams. It’s what keeps us goin’.”

She put the pipe between her lips again as I lowered my head and thought about what she said for a bit before saying anything. Her words made a lot of sense, and I thought about it hard for a few minutes more before a smile came onto my face.

“Well then, I has a dream, Miss Owens. I think I wants ta go home. Yes, that’s what I wants. I wants ta go back home to Africa someday.”

She pulled the pipe from her mouth and smiled at me.

“Now that’s a good dream to have, Rastus, a real good dream, an’ I hope ya git it one day. An’ soon too.”

She stood up after some effort and asked me if I’d like some of that apple pie. “For it goes to spoil,” she added…”

Recovery from anything is hidden in our life in Christ.This 240 day journey will help you see that we all are recovering our lives by checking it against Christ’s finished work at the cross.

Nick was willing to go to any lengths to be with his High School crush.

Some would say he had an unhealthy obsession with Jeanie, but he had dreamt about this for his whole adult life. He didn’t think it was unhealthy…He only wished it had come sooner.

Some would also say, you should be careful what you wish for.

Ah, the unfortunate Bartley Hannigan. Teacher burnout is just one of his problems. There’s also his disintegrating marriage, the inheritance of a haunted property with its uninvited bibulous guest, a psycho poet with a fatal attraction, the arrival of an Irish banshee hunter with poor personal hygiene, his sudden passion for a stripper, and eventually, the hit man on his trail. But as the gypsy said, this “shit-storm” will lead to either a higher plane of understanding—or sudden death. Either way, Bartley can hear his train a comin’, and he’s ready to jump aboard and ride the winding rails to the last stop, because he’s done with the bullshit! Done!

In Swedish author Miller’s thriller series starter set in and around Stockholm, an aging private investigator and her young team take on a seemingly simple adultery case that proves to be complex, indeed. Nadja Franzén’s ordinarily staid husband, Mikael, has been acting strangely. He’s been staying out late at night, claiming to be working but coming home drunk, and his wife has concluded that he’s having an affair. She hires a private detective agency to investigate, and her case is assigned to investigator Gunvor Ström, a former surgeon in her mid-60s. As she pursues Mikael from bar to bar, it quickly becomes apparent that he’s involved in something altogether more sinister than garden-variety adultery. As a sexagenarian, though, Gunvor struggles to be inconspicuous at the Stockholm nightspots that Mikael frequents, so she recruits two young acquaintances to be her eyes and ears: Elin, a rather plain teenager with low self-esteem, and David, an immature dropout. The trio soon forges a plan to uncover the truth. After some bodyguards viciously attack Mikael, though, Nadja reconsiders the investigation—and things take a very dark turn when a brutal murder is broadcast live to paying customers.

In 1950, the classic American downtown of Norristown, Pennsylvania, centered on the six blocks of Main Street, was the bustling commercial heart of central Montgomery County, and had been for over a century. With depression and war in the past, downtown merchants looked forward to an extended period of prosperity. It was not to be.

By 1975, downtown’s core stood largely shuttered and deteriorating, with 99 storefronts vacant and countless others lost to the wrecking ball, as first shoppers and then the merchants fled Main Street.

What Killed Downtown? Was it…

• The Malls? Commercial wisdom points to the King of Prussia Mall as the prime suspect. But were there accomplices?
• Municipal Government? The Main Street merchants always believed that the Borough Council was the culprit–and with good reason.
• The Downtown Merchants themselves? Did the shopholders blind themselves, then step into the firing line, ignoring the threats of a changing world?
• Or was it something else…something more fundamental?

Historian Michael E. Tolle’s extensive research into the collapse of downtown Norristown reveals not only the answers to these questions, but also recreates the classic American downtown shopping experience, long an American characteristic, but now largely foreign to anyone below middle age. In so doing, Tolle lays bare the fundamental incompatibility between the urban grid and the automobile, as he recounts how a middle-sized American city struggled — and failed — to solve the the issues of traffic flow and parking, issues that are no closer to solution today, regardless of the size of the city.

First came the time-storm, which erased half the population. Then came the Dinosaur Apocalypse …

How did it all begin? That depends on where you were and who you ask. In some places it started with the weather—which quickly became unstable and began behaving in impossible ways. In still others it started with the lights in the sky, which shifted and pulsed and could not be explained. Elsewhere it started with the disappearances: one here, a few there, but increasing in occurrence until fully three quarters of the population had vanished. Either way, there is one thing on which everyone agrees—it didn’t take long for the prehistoric flora and fauna to start showing up (often appearing right where someone was standing, in which case the two were fused, spliced, amalgamated). It didn’t take long for the great Time-displacement called the Flashback—which was brief but had aftershocks, like an earthquake—to change the face of the earth. Nor for the stories, some long and others short, some from before the maelstrom (and resulting societal collapse) and others after, to be recorded.

Collected herein are the stories in which Love mattered.

From Love in the Age of Reptiles:

There were six of them, as I said—all of whom rushed us the instant our feet touched the ground. All of whom snarled and charged us like wolverines as we raised our weapons and fired—the flare gun cracking and hissing, blanching the scarlet haze (for the sun had painted everything red and gold), its projectile punching through one of the raptors’ chests and lighting it up so that its ribs were backlit briefly and I could see, if only for an instant, its burning, beating heart.

Yet still they came, another one leaping at me even as I dropped the gun—which clattered against the planks—as I dropped it and grabbed the thing by its neck—then brought the knife down with my other hand and stabbed it between the eyes.

“Run!” I shouted, even as Amanda shot another—her second—and then bolted toward the shore, drawing the others so that I was able to snatch up the flare gun and quickly reload it; so that I was able to pursue them and to shoot one in the back—while Amanda turned and took out the last of them (shooting it in the head so that the back of its skull exploded like a spaghetti dinner thrown against the wall; so that it collapsed, writhing, about 10 feet in front of her—whereupon she quickly approached it and shot it again, just to be sure).

And then she looked at me (as the dead and dying animals lay all around us) and I looked back: our chests heaving; our faces covered in sweat, our worn clothes bloody and disheveled, and I knew that she knew—which was that today we were the predators, the thing needing to be feared—the killers. And that neither of us needed to worry; not about food or other predators or mysterious lights in the sky or anything. Because we were the masters of our fate, we and no one else, not even God. And we were the master of the world’s fate, too.

At which she ran to me and we collided and I held her fast, there on the long jetty in the Atlantic Ocean (in the Bermuda Triangle), there beneath a day moon and the blood-red sky, in an instant in which it was good, so very good, not to be afraid, not to be alone. And as to what may or may not have happened in those breaths, those pulse points between that moment and the next—the next day, the next search, the next milestone; as to that, I offer only a quote from Gandhi: “Speak only if it improves upon the silence.”

Ellie is strong willed and determined, the two skills that made her what she is, a successful woman factory owner in Atlanta. Even though she has achieved financial independence, she finds herself searching for something more and takes a journey back home to the prairies of Kansas.

The prairie is dangerous after the Civil War with Indians and Quantrill’s men, so she hires two bodyguards. Thomas is a detective for the Pinkerton Detective Agency and exceptionally good at what he does, but Ellie is everything he ever dreamed of.

Will he give up a stellar career to follow Ellie back to Atlanta? He must convince her they could have a beautiful life together. Will she choose love or her business success?

Annette finds herself stranded on the prairie of the Kansas Territory. With her fiancé dead, she knows she will not be able to drive the covered wagon over the mountains until spring. Alone and terrified, there is only one choice… Cole.

Cole knows he can help Annette survive but he doesn’t know if she can fit into the rough life living on a ranch requires. In spite of his doubts, he offers her a bargain in trade for food and shelter.

Can two independent people strike a bargain on the prairie and survive the Kansas winter together?

Barry Richard Donadio is a native of New York who led an honorable career in the Volunteer Ambulance Service, Volunteer Fire Department, the Military, Law Enforcement, and the United States Secret Service. He was assigned to the White House to protect Presidents Bush and Obama. He also served in multiple Middle Eastern war zones during his career. In 2013, he authored the book ” TWA Flight 800 First Responder Witness Account”. This is his account describing his actions during the rescue of TWA Flight 800 on July 17th, 1996. In 2014 he was elected to the Queen Anne’s County Republican Central Committee in Maryland. He successfully completed his 4year term. January 2017, he was appointed the Sergeant at Arms of the Maryland Republican Party by the Honorable Dirk Haire. Donadio successfully completed a 2-year term as Sergeant at Arms of the MDGOP. Donadio continues to serve as the President of Public Security LLC. It is a high-profile private security and investigation firm that provides protection to high-risk clients in Maryland, New York, and dangerous overseas locations. Donadio is expected to publish his the second book “That Day When Hell Froze Over” by August 2019.

July 17th, 2016 UPDATE

Barry Donadio led events commemorating the 20 year anniversary of the downing of TWA Flight 800 on Long Island. The controversial crash occurred on July 17th, 1996. There are still many people with questions as to why the plane crashed. Most people were attending events to remember their loved ones and friends.

Mr. Donadio authored the book “TWA Flight 800 First Responder Witness Account”. The book was released in September 2013 and has been gaining more interest. The book is about his account of the evening the plane went down. He was an Emergency Medical Technician that responded to the scene of the rescue operations.

Donadio stated ” I felt that it was important to remember the victims of the tragedy on the 20th anniversary. I was happy to meet families of some of the victims. We turned the 20th anniversary of a horrible event, into a positive day for all those who attended.”

Mr. Donadio led victims families to the TWA Flight 800 Memorial in Shirley, New York as well as the TWA Flight 800 Memorials in East Moriches New York. With the cooperation of the U.S. Coast Guard Station in Moriches, he led the group to the Coast Guard station. The group was able to access the station while Mr. Donadio explained to the group what happened there on the night of July 17th, 1996.

More can be learned about Barry R Donadio on his LinkedIn and Facebook pages:

July 17th 2021 UPDATE

Barry Donadio was in New York to conduct a book signing in order to commemorate the  25th anniversary of the downing of TWA Flight 800.  Donadio prays for the the victims as well as all those affected by this tragedy.

A variety of poems spanning Author’s life. Written during each emotional time in her life, whether it was during the parts that were Love, Happiness, Romance, or those written in times of sadness, sorrow and tears. Then there are the ones that were written during the part of her life when God simply stepped in and took over to help with the healing.

Alex Harris is a world famous rock star, lead singer of the Internationally acclaimed band The Waterdogs. But Alex is no ordinary rocker, he has a secret that he and his family have painstakingly kept since Alex was ten years old.

This is the story of him, and his life, growing up with his parents and his elder sister Annabel whilst coming to grips with a strange condition.

Follow them as this Journey twists and turns its’ way through tragedies, heartbreak, intrigue and into the clutches of organised crime.

What goes through the mind of a hardened criminal when he is released from prison after thirty-four years?

A mix of emotions ranging from happiness and excitement of being free to confusion and maybe even fear of unwelcome society’s wrath and people not accepting him. He might also feel lost because the world would’ve changed so much by the time he comes out of prison. This could all happen to anyone but not John Sweets Russo. He’s a tough nut to crack, and thirty-four years in prison couldn’t break his spirit. Though he came out of the prison burdened with guilt, he was ready to face the world head-on. He will not let his guilt bend him down and let the world break his spirit. He is not asking for a second chance from anyone. He is making a come-back.

John Sweets Russo was once the left-hand man of William Vallery, the head of the notorious Vallery gang of Toronto and now aspires to be a singer. He is looking for a chance to make the most of his life that is left, considering he is seventy-five now. As he got out of prison and joined a world he didn’t recognize anymore, all he wanted to do was to sing.

‘The Incredible Mr Sweets’ is the coming-of-age story that chronicles an ex-con’s journey to becoming a singing star. ‘The Incredible Mr Sweets’ also highlights the identity crisis faced by immigrant’s children born in Canada.

Jake discovers a 3,000 year old ring with the power to control demons as well as the weather and all animals. Jake starts to hear a voice that belongs to Smith, the computer-like interface who gives him guidance on how to deal with his newfound powers. Smith’s single goal is to insure Jake is King of Earth with an appropriate Queen chosen by Smith. Both a rogue government and a secret society want the ring and its powers for their own wicked scheme. Smith’s methods for protecting Jake are prone to violence. Jakes teams with Nava, a no-holds barred woman with unique training. Smith doesn’t like her hair. The government and the secret society have just met their match.

Koritt Diviak’s assignment was simple—travel to Earth and return with a human specimen, along with samples of their technology. After Koritt’s transport crashes in the desert of Afghanistan, 10^th Mountain Division Lieutenant Ty Lavender commandeers the ship, along with the U-10— the most ingenious technology in the galaxy focused into a weapon with multiple capabilities—and uses it to protect his team from local insurgents, who want retribution.

Things heat up when special operative Lincoln Frost shows up, determined to appropriate the alien technology for SEED, the top-secret, power-hungry US paramilitary agency tasked with eliminating threats to national security. Thinking a breeding pair will be even more valuable to his home planet, despite the animosity between them, Koritt captures both Lavender and Frost, along with the U-10, and waits for help.

But rescue isn’t coming…and the humans are more intelligent, and resourceful, than Koritt anticipated. As the true purpose of Koritt’s mission comes to light, the battle begins. Under attack from all sides, hidden agendas emerge, and Koritt, Lavender, and Frost—all at odds with each other—will do whatever it takes to ensure victory. Now they must work together if they—and the planet—are going to survive.

The first scout ships of the Chrysallaman Empire made contact in 1947. Their mission was simple: find a suitable planet for colonization. Earth—HG-281—was the perfect target. Rich with land, minerals, and water, the blue planet could boast only of a primitive race of defenders known as Humans, bugs who could be easily squashed by the might of a single Chrysallaman’s mind. When one of the scout ships is unexpectedly brought down, the advance party is forced to return to their home planet 30 light-years away to report and regroup. In their wake, they left behind a broken ship, dead crew members, and a young alien boy who would grow to become one of Earth’s greatest assets—and her greatest ally.

The lizard-like aliens would be back, and in force. Mankind must prepare a strategy capable of defending against not only superior technology, but superior psychic ability and strength. It will take an elite group of military personnel, brilliant scientists, a sombrero-wearing alien, and another generation to plant the seeds that will grow into a World Wide Defense, the likes of which the Chrysallamans have never known.

First, tragedy strikes.

Next, the enemy targets him.

Then, he’s framed.

Now, he’s on the run.

Collin Cook’s life gets turned upside down when his family is killed in an accident. A large settlement is coming while Collin is still reeling, but so is the nefarious Pho Nam Penh, who is hell-bent on destroying the world’s economy. Penh locks in on Collin as an easy target and his settlement as funding for his terrorist plot.

After Penh frames him, Collin has to stay ahead of Penh’s henchmen, Interpol, and the FBI. With the help of his lifelong friend and NSA cyber-guru, Lukas Mueller, Collin must stay alive and free long enough to save the world from Penh’s devious scheme.

Can this ordinary man, untrained and inexperienced, outwit a determined foe, escape the incessant pursuit of law enforcement, and keep himself from mental collapse?

In the first installment of the action-packed “Off” Series, Glen Robins takes you on a whirlwind adventure with the fractured Collin Cook as he navigates the dangerous maze of economic cyber warfare. And he’ll do it without the graphic language or gratuitous scenes so prevalent in today’s thrillers.

If you’re a fan of Robert Ludlum’s Jason Bourne, Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan, or Tim Tigner’s Kyle Achilles, with a twist of Sylvia Nasar’s “A Beautiful Mind,” you will love Collin Cook and his adventures.

Get your copy of “Off Kilter” today and join the adventure.