Book Spotlight: SECOND LIVES: The Journey of Brain-Injury Survivors and Their Healers – Now Available as an Audiobook!

15 May 2024 by Melissa

I’m so excited to be bringing you this spotlight. The authors have brought a personal, informational, deeply important subject to us in an accessible way. And now, it’s also available as an audiobook! Please take a look at

SECOND LIVES: The Journey of Brain-Injury Survivors and Their Healers, by Ralph B. Lilly, MD & Diane F. Kramer, with Joyce Stamp Lilly – Narrated by Loren C. Steffy & Joyce Stamp Lilly

About the book, SECOND LIVES: The Journey of Brain-Injury Survivors and Their Healers

Genre: Audiobook / Biography / Medical Professionals / Neuroscience
Publisher: Stoney Creek Publishing
Listening Length: 6 hours and 21 minutes
Publication Date: February 28, 2024

“Discharged from a hospital just means you’re not dead.” These words of Ralph B. Lilly, M.D., describe his early struggle to recover from a traumatic brain injury. Lilly was a forty-four-year-old practicing neurologist sitting on his motorcycle at a red light when a drunk driver rear-ended him in 1980. In the ICU, after regaining consciousness and being told what happened, he asked, “What’s a hospital? What’s a motorcycle?” This tragic experience transformed his life and his approach to his neurology practice: doctors treat those with brain injury; but loved ones heal them.

Second Lives: The Journey of Brain Injury Survivors and Their Healers is written by Dr. Lilly and Diane F. Kramer. After his death in 2021, Kramer completed the book with the assistance of Lilly’s wife Joyce Stamp Lilly. This memoir weaves together Ralph Lilly’s experience with a collage of stories about his patients and their healers. After his recovery, Lilly retrained in the emerging field of behavioral neurology, which focuses on behavior, memory, cognition, and emotion after brain injury.

His clinical skills and expert witness testimony were sought by physicians, survivors, families, and attorneys to secure the best “second life” for survivors. His many patients marveled at his uniquely compassionate approach: “What doctor gives you his cell number and says call any time?” Lilly’s pioneering career spanned forty years from Brown University’s Butler Psychiatric Hospital in Rhode Island to Nexus Health System and private practice in Houston, Texas. He treated ER and hospital inpatients whose loved ones were in acute quandary, as well as outpatients who’d long given up finding a doctor who knew how to help. Lilly’s memoir is full of heart, not science, and will provide insight to general readers, family, and friends of patients with brain injury, as well as those who treat them.

His narration is unintentionally poignant, often punctuated by wry humor. He generously incorporates the words of his patients and their families in telling their stories. Their gratitude for his care is profound. As one former patient said, “Without Dr. Lilly, I’d be dead or in jail.”

Buy, read, and discuss this book:

Amazon | Audible | Stoney Creek Publishing | Goodreads

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About the authors, Ralph B Lilly, M.D. and Diane F. Kramer

Ralph B. Lilly, MD

A neurologist for over half a century, Ralph B. Lilly, MD had a passion for learning and teaching. A traumatic brain injury in 1980 shifted his focus from general neurology to behavioral neurology, the study of how brain injury affects behavior. After completing a fellowship in neurobehavior at the University of California, Los Angeles, he served as a clinical assistant professor with the Brown University Program in Medicine in Providence, Rhode Island, consulting with psychiatrists looking for possible neurological causes for their patients’ psychiatric symptoms. In Texas, he worked joined what is now Nexus Health Systems and became a clinical assistant professor at The University of Texas in Houston. Lilly focused his life’s work on treating brain-injury survivors and counseling their families, who were victims in their own right. He saw these “healers” as instrumental in guiding the injured loved one to a “new life.” He practiced in Arizona, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Texas, and wherever he was called to help. Before his death in 2021, Lilly lived in Washington, Texas, with his wife, Joyce, three dogs, six cats, and two horses.

Diane F. Kramer

Diane F. Kramer retired from the counseling and psychology departments of Austin Community College in 2008 and began writing personal essays, family histories, and fiction. As a volunteer with the Brenham Animal Shelter, she wrote a weekly column on animal welfare for The Brenham Banner Press. Her writing has also appeared in Alamo Bay Press anthologies and blogs Peace through Pie and Drash Pit. She currently writes website copy and press releases for Brenham Lifetime Learning and the Read of Washington County. She lives with her husband and their rescue dog and cat in rural Texas.

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Review & Giveaway: The Big Empty, by Loren C. Steffy

24 November 2021 by Melissa

About the book, The Big Empty

Genre: Western / Rural Fiction / Small Town
Publisher: Stoney Creek Publishing Group
Date of Publication: May 25, 2021
Number of Pages: 304 pages
Scroll down for Giveaway!

When Trace Malloy and Blaine Witherspoon collide on a desolate West Texas highway, their fender bender sets the tone for escalating clashes that will determine the future of the town of Conquistador.

Malloy, a ranch manager and lifelong cowboy, knows that his occupation—and his community—are dying. He wants new- millennium opportunities for his son, even though he himself failed to summon the courage to leave familiar touchstones behind.

Witherspoon, an ambitious, Lexus-driving techie, offers a solution. He moves to Conquistador to build and run a state-of-the-art semiconductor plant that will bring prestige and high-paying technology jobs to revive the town—and advance his own career.

What neither man anticipates is the power the “Big Empty” will wield over their plans. The flat, endless expanse of dusty plain is as much a character in the conflict as are the locals struggling to subsist in this timeworn backwater and the high-tech transplants hell-bent on conquering it. While Malloy grapples with the flaws of his ancestors and his growing ambivalence toward the chip plant, Witherspoon falls prey to construction snafus, corporate backstabbing, and financial fraud. As they each confront personal fears, they find themselves united in the search for their own version of purpose in a uniquely untamable Texas landscape.

Praise for this book:

“The Big Empty” captures a moment when Big Tech seemingly promised everything. By turns funny and painful, Steffy’s story builds like an accelerating freight train, reaching a fast-paced climax.” — The Epoch Times

“Like the titular land itself, Steffy’s novel is uncompromising in spotlighting the strains that the drive toward material achievement puts on the individual in the face of nature’s whims.” — Southern Review of Books

Buy, read, and discuss this book:

Stoney Creek Publishing Group (Currently 25% off) │TAMU PRESS │Bookshop.org│ Amazon│Goodreads

About the author, Loren C. Steffy

Loren C. Steffy is the author of five nonfiction books. He is a writer at large for Texas Monthly, and his work has appeared in newspapers and magazines nationwide. He has previously worked for news organizations including Bloomberg and the Houston Chronicle, and he is a managing director for 30 Point Strategies, where he leads the 30 Point Press publishing imprint. His is a frequent guest on radio and television programs and is the co-host of the Rational Middle podcast. The Big Empty is his first novel. Steffy holds a bachelor’s degree in journalism from Texas A&M University. He lives in Wimberley, Texas, with his wife, three dogs and an ungrateful cat.

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WEBSITE | FACEBOOK | TWITTER | LINKEDIN | INSTAGRAM

My Thoughts

Loren C. Steffy’s debut novel is the perfect blend of his journalistic experience and a flair for good storytelling.

Set in the West Texas of the recent past, The Big Empty is a contemporary western, pitting modern cowboys against big technology, with a two-prong through line that addresses water access and the inevitability of modern development.

It’s a story Steffy tells well. The main characters literally crash into each other in the preface, and it’s obvious that these two men, cowboy Trace Malloy and techie Blaine Witherspoon will be confronting each other throughout the book.

What I found compelling about this story was that each man wants a better future for his family – Witherspoon wants to be settled in once place for a while, something he promised his wife – with a stable life for his family. Malloy wants a future for his son that isn’t tied to ranching, and includes college.

Each of these men also has different beliefs in how these things should be achieved, however. Malloy loves his West Texas home – the titular Big Empty – a flat stretch of land that’s home to cows, of course, but also to host of resident wildlife, including rattlesnakes and scorpions. Witherspoon, on the other hand, thinks technological progress is automatically good and right. In a way, he believes he’s bringing economic water to this proverbial desert.

Steffy has a good ear for dialogue, and that really helped to define the setting, as well as illustrating who was a native Texan and who was newcomer – a ‘homie’ in Malloy’s vernacular. He’s also presented, through this novel, an issue that is still very present in today’s world where we have corporations buying up small towns’ water supplies, and climate change has storms and droughts both increasing in strength and extremity.

It’s this combination of fiction and reality, as well as the conflict that comes between the characters, and how that conflict changes when they must unite – to a point – to fight a common enemy in the final third of the novel – that makes The Big Empty both full of literary craft, and as satisfying as a West Texas sunset.

Goes well with: Chicken fried steak, home fries, and a cold beer.

Giveaway

GIVEAWAY!  GIVEAWAY!  GIVEAWAY!

 THREE WINNERS:
Signed copy of The Big Empty and logo hat.
(US only; ends midnight CST 11/25/21)

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Visit the Other Great Blogs on This Tour

And check out the Lone Star Literary Life Tour Page for The Big Empty

11/15/21	Author Video	Chapter Break Book Blog
11/15/21	Review	StoreyBook Reviews
11/15/21	BONUS Promo	LSBBT Blog
11/16/21	Review	The Book’s Delight
11/16/21	BONUS Promo	Hall Ways Blog
11/17/21	Excerpt	All the Ups and Downs
11/17/21	Guest Post	The Page Unbound
11/18/21	Review	The Plain-Spoken Pen
11/19/21	Review	Jennie Reads
11/19/21	Excerpt	Book Fidelity
11/20/21	Review	It’s Not All Gravy
11/21/21	Deleted Scene	Forgotten Winds
11/22/21	Review	Rainy Days with Amanda
11/22/21	Guest Post	Missus Gonzo
11/23/21	Playlist	The Clueless Gent
11/24/21	Review	Bibliotica
11/24/21	Review	Reading by Moonlight

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Flames of Winter

We fill our homes with candles that represent nothing more than a cozy glow, and we gather ’round our gas logs or Franklin stoves even when our houses are fitted with central heating systems, because there’s something – some magical thing – about fire that seems to drive away the stress and darkness of winter in a way that electric light never can.

The Gift of the Mergi

A handful of pearls. That was all Nerissa had. Oh, she’d grown up in Poseidon’s Grotto, with abalone combs and aquamarine and moonstone gems, but when she’d left the great ocean to marry a land-walker, she’d forfeit her jewels and pirate’s treasure hoards and kept only the handful of her nameday pearls.

An Excerpt from “A MerChild’s Christmas with Whales”

And on solstice mornings, with landwalker-entrancing song and candy darters, they would send me out to play and I would glide through the swaying kelp searching for news of the Seven Seas,

TBM-2412.17 – Dogfish Days of Advent: Flames of Winter

And yet, these winter holidays all have something in common as well – aside from the tendency to celebrate with incredibly delicious, albeit unhealthy foods. They all bring light to the longest nights of the year.

TBM-2412.16 – Dogfish Days of Advent: Sandy Klaws Is Coming To Town

Oh, you better not splash, you better not wail.
Better keep flippin’ that shimmering tail.
Sandy Klaws is comin’ to town.

TBM-2412.14-Dogfish Days of Advent: – Excerpt from A Mer-Child’s Christmas With Whales

And on solstice mornings, with landwalker-entrancing song and candy darters, they would send me out to play and I would glide through the swaying kelp searching for news of the Seven Seas, and always find a barnacle-crusted whale by the deep trench or perhaps a clownfish with its colors dimmed by the colder water.