Light­ly-sprin­kled with sar­casm and wit, this riv­et­ing sto­ry takes the read­er on an intense and mov­ing cross-cul­tur­al jour­ney that begins in Latin Amer­i­ca when while preg­nant, a Jew­ish Amer­i­can moth­er is diag­nosed with a mas­sive brain tumor. After a most com­pli­cat­ed surgery, the tragedies that fol­lowed were mind-bog­gling. When their promis­ing new busi­ness col­lapsed overnight, the fam­i­ly spi­raled into finan­cial ruin. Beset with hope­less­ness and con­fu­sion, they aban­doned high-soci­ety life in Pana­ma, and despite every­one’s dis­cour­age­ment, returned to South Flori­da — march­ing straight into the worst finan­cial cri­sis since The Great Depres­sion. On shaky ground, they start­ed over with noth­ing more than raw guts and five young kids to sup­port. Cling­ing to her faith, this moth­er fought like hell to stay sane and over­come the nag­ging com­pul­sion to give up as cir­cum­stances dete­ri­o­rat­ed. This sto­ry, at its core, is noth­ing fan­tas­ti­cal; it’s about how we cope with the adver­si­ty that befalls us — adver­si­ty inher­ent in real life, an inescapable com­po­nent of the human expe­ri­ence. And sug­gests a par­a­digm shift in the way we han­dle it all. Fore­word writ­ten by a promi­nent inter­na­tion­al psy­chi­a­trist, Dr. Dar­ryl Apple­ton, M.D., a lead­ing author­i­ty on the sub­ject of sleep and anx­i­ety dis­or­ders who’s received a great deal of media atten­tion for a new rTMS tech­nol­o­gy recent­ly espoused by Dr. Oz. He writes: “…that is why this book is so cru­cial; it is tru­ly a game chang­er. This book will be pre­scribed read­ing mate­r­i­al for all of my patients, and will con­tin­ue to be used per­son­al­ly in my life. It will be on my list of items need­ed if one was strand­ed on a desert island, and should be uti­lized by all men­tal health prac­ti­tion­ers in their practice.”