Pieces of a Larger Mirror

“If anyone believes they are religious and does not bridle their tongue but deceives their own heart, this person’s religion is worthless.” James 1:26

Not to be read in isolation, or necessarily in order, walk side by side with the narrator as she opens up on issues of childhood experience and race, upbringing and relationships, schooling and culture through a unique lens intended to be merely the beginning of your journey upward, outward, inward. Are you ready to look into the mirror?

Pass On My Greetings to Jenny

There is a very deep sense of gratitude that I have kept in my heart, a gratitude that I cannot describe in words. I promise in my heart that someday I will come to meet her, to convey my gratitude and I really want to repay her kindness. Now I have been waiting too long, for seven years, but there's no chance to meet her and that hope is only stored in my heart, I don't know for how long. One morning when I woke up from my sleep, I stood in front of the mirror. I saw there was one grey hair and I realised that I was old. Then I asked myself, if today I die without the slightest amount of time to fix anything, what would I regret the most? My answer was; I will be sorry because I haven't had the chance to meet Jenny to convey my gratitude. I wrote this book, because I did not know when would I meet her. If I would never have time to express my gratitude to her, at least through this book I have already conveyed it. Jenny is a beautiful old woman who helped me that night, the night I was struggling. Not even one person was by my side, even I could not help myself. Thank you, Jenny. If you were not there, I might have had a miscarriage, or I might had died.

Parenting is (Not) Child's Play

Most parents would say that they love their children, passionately. They might also admit that at times they experience frustration, anger and even disappointment because of disobedience and a lack of cooperation from their children.

Parenting is (Not) Child’s Play deals with the ‘Special Play Time’ method, a revolutionary and proven tool that empowers both parents and children. During a 40-minute weekly play session, parents learn, not only clear and practical skills in setting boundaries, they also gain a deeper understanding of the emotions and worries of their children. They discover how to encourage positive behaviour, too and thus increase the self-esteem of their children.

Within a short time, parents notice positive changes in the home. While enjoying mutual fun and play, they regain their parental authority and notice an increase in the emotional and social abilities of their children.

Orit Josefi Wiseman is a non-directive play therapist with an M.A. from the University of York in the United Kingdom. She has a clinic in Israel and has rich and extensive experience with parents and children using this method. She has also established trainings for families and professionals in the field of education in order for them to improve their communication with and empower the psychological robustness of children.

During her work, Orit has met many parents who have learnt parental skills but could not implement them in real time. Her book is written for all those parents. Having a deep faith in the efficacy of the method, Orit wishes to share her knowledge and make it accessible to every household with children.

Overcoming Selective Blindness

With a looming cloud of collective defeatism casting an increasing shadow across the NHS, this book offers a potential lifeline to exhausted individuals and organisations. ‘Selective Blindness’ is cited as the reason why the root causes of the NHS’s problems are failing to be addressed and the single biggest risk to the future of the NHS.

Seeking to share experience and learning from a decade of working with trusts to improve services, the pages are packed with practical, simple, and achievable tools and techniques to increase the pace and focus of improvements. The book recognises the need to practically help both those positioned by the bedside and around the board table so that they may be better positioned to address the root cause of local issues to achieve improvements for patients.

Only when this is achieved will they be able to challenge what is described as Selective Blindness present within those in legitimate positions of influencing the future of the NHS.

Our Inherently Controversial Human Nature - and How We Should Hack It

Human induced climate change, overuse of natural resources, overwhelming amount of waste and pollution, gender inequality, elevated stress levels, flood of fake news. All these have a lot to do with our controversial human nature and how our race has formed, besides making our life more difficult and less sustainable.

You are to see the controversial process of how we began to become the only highly intelligent species, how widespread is our impact on our environment and why we are inching ahead to the point where extinction will be an issue to deal with. This book provides an original context of the links to our roots and hints at what we should do. It offers a solution to the seven decade-old Fermi paradox and answers the eternal question of meaning and importance of happiness.

It is easy to get the idea. Accepting the conclusions might be a harder task. The real challenge is making a change. Are you ready to start seeing the whole picture?

Neuroscience and Teaching Very Difficult Kids

Teaching students whose behaviour is so ‘out of control’ is a challenge faced by all teachers in modern schools. Contemporary approaches have focused on dealing with the presenting behaviours and attempting to control those. This approach may deal with the problem in the short term but creates no long-term solution.

This work accepts that the majority of extremely dysfunctional behaviour is carried out by children who have suffered early, persistent trauma and/or neglect. Disruptive conduct can be explained by the effect their early childhood environment has had on the neural construction of their brain. These children are not ‘born bad’ but behave this way because of the ‘parenting’ they received in their early life. These are the children who have graduated out of these dysfunctional environments.

Recognising this provides the key to understanding how to deal with these kids. Because the social conditions created these problems, if we change those conditions, over time these children will develop different behaviours to get their fundamental needs met. The solution lies in the fact that everyone acts to get their needs met in the environment in which they live, so it makes sense to present an environment that demands different behaviours to satisfy these needs.

The book provides a description about how the early childhood environment creates the neural scaffold that drives dysfunctional behaviour and how developing a well-defined classroom environment will make a positive contribution to changing that behaviour.

N Z Small Business Owners Handbook

The N Z Small Business Owners Handbook is an essential guide for the over 500,000 small business owners in New Zealand. This practical and comprehensive book offers clear and actionable insights that every owner and stakeholder needs to understand in order to succeed.

While many small business owners are skilled at working in their business, they often neglect the crucial task of working on their business due to their busy schedules. This can lead to exponentially increased risks and missed opportunities. Simply working harder is not the answer - knowing how to work on your business is critical.

This book offers an easy-to-understand solution, using the analogy of the popular game ‘snakes and ladders.’ Just like in the game, business life can be full of ups and downs. This handbook provides a clear roadmap to help navigate the challenges and capitalize on the opportunities that arise.

Whether you are an established business owner or just starting out, this handbook is an indispensable resource for anyone seeking to thrive in the dynamic and ever-changing world of small business. With practical advice, real-world examples, and clear action steps, the N Z Small Business Owners Handbook is the ultimate guide to achieving success and realizing your business dreams.

My Mother was a Woman

Gender equality should be top of the agenda of discourse on human affairs. There is no rhyme nor reason for the status of women to be languishing below the male ranking. The ‘weaker sex’ label must cease forthwith. Women are strong, resilient and always unbowed. Moreover, women conceive and populate our world with all the talents the human race celebrates from time to time. Women deserve to be ululated and rewarded. The current status demeans women and denies the human race the chance to scale the heights it has the potential to scale!

Musculoskeletal Imaging

The book includes 100 cases (common and rare) with highly organised radiological description of the diseases.The cases are grouped into three chapters: Upper Limbs, Neck/Trunk/Spine and Lower Limbs.High quality images (X-ray, US, CT and MRI).It covers all imaging modalities including conventional radiology, ultrasound/Doppler, CT scan and MRI.The topics covered in the book represent the common and important diseases encountered in musculoskeletal imaging.The material presented for each case provides a thorough and comprehensive description of the disease entity, enabling the radiologist or the clinician to develop a clear concept of the entity through the different imaging modalities that are present.What is interesting in this book is one case per page. The book can be used as a mean of rapid revision of a large number of cases in a short time or as a test of knowledge by masking the radiological description and diagnosis and trying by using the clinical data and radiological images to describe first the pathology then propose a diagnosis.

Mundane Insurance

Manufacturing industries are a common knowledge as are the likes of the motor car, television, foodstuffs and electrical goods that exist around us every day and are forcefully advertised. Banking too but it is only true to a lesser degree regarding insurance because if canvasing the average person in the street about insurance they would think only about their life insurance, health insurance, motor cover, house and contents, pet plan insurance and so on. Put like that, it is all very wearisome and therefore hardly a subject worth writing about, or is it? That was certainly the author’s impression of insurance even up to the point of moving into the financial sector from manufacturing industry.

Pursuing the subject a step further, hazarding a guess, if those very same people were quizzed regarding the types of people they imagined are employed in insurance they would probably describe their insurance broker or simply a voice at an insurance call centre. This account therefore will, in all probability, dispel the notion that all insurance dealings are routine and in the main, predictable as did an international group of young insurance delegates at a Middle East seminar, many of whom were totally unaware that the insurance industry’s activities were so diverse.

Mother’s Love

Mother’s Love is a series of essays about social issues. I say that my readers know my essays are good for them like broccoli, but the jokes throughout are sort of the cream cheese that makes the essays tasty. I started writing them in 2014 and then picked up where I left off in 2021. Some of the best essays were written while travelling to Brooklyn in New York in 2021. The other more notable essays were written after long beach walks where I would empty my mind out so when I started writing I would only have a heading in mind and then let the rest flow directly out of my subconscious. I often say that my life is sort of a circus that my essays are based on but the Dalai Lama says circuses are fun. 

Mother is Dying

It’s hard enough to get your head around the fact that Granny is dying and that we may have to sort out her personal affairs. So, it’s no wonder that we struggle to get our heads around the fact that Mother Earth is dying too. Heavens above, we might have a lot more sorting out to do. Thinking and talking about death is hard. Are you ready to face the fact that our Mother is dying?

Wendy’s previous book, Surviving a ‘New Norm’, created by Loss and Bereavement: moving from Trauma to Insight, told how Wendy moved forward from the traumas and bereavements in her own life. The two central messages in Mother is Dying adapt her understanding and experience of the effects of trauma and bereavement to those that will occur during the slow demise of humanity on our planet, as she sees the future, which is a highly plausible vision.  

Mother is Dying has both pessimistic and optimistic tones and the change in climate change throughout the world is now critical.  

The distinctive contribution of Mother is Dying is asking us to consider now the emotional trauma of climate change and the losses it will bring. It is understanding the way that people will react to the major changes in our lives brought about by climate change – the outcome of global warming – that is so important to finding ways to reduce the impact of those consequences.  

If trauma and bereavement are our reactions to future climatic changes, how should we respond? What can we, as individuals do? Wendy is an idealist at heart, describing how both individuals and society need to adapt to the dangers of global warming that lie ahead.  

One of the delights of Wendy’s book are the ideas for what we can do both individually and in our local communities and these permeate her writing.

I am less sanguine than she is; her actions are necessary, but will they be sufficient? The responses to climate change require holistic whole-world concerted actions in a rapid timescale. Mother Earth will survive, but will humanity survive with it? What will you do to make a difference?

Dr David White
MBE, Biologist, The Cavernoma Alliance.