Book Review
Lurdes Rodriques, Medford, MA
You are not only a great writter but a wonderful human-being! I know myself as a reader of your books; learned/open my eyes how alcoholism destroys and changes lives forever. I recommend this wonderful writers books to anyone that that wants to learn what alcoholism can do to a family. I believe that we all can identify with the subject matter!
http://www.amazon.com/Please-God-Not-Alberta-Sequeira/dp/0741460297/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1302185366&sr=1-1
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A New Book Launch Coming!
In March 2012, Riverhaven Books (www.riverhavenbooks.com) will be updating and republishing A Spiritual Renewal; A Journey to Medjugorje. It was the former book A Healing Heart. It will have more pictures and information on the visionaries in Medjugorje in Bosnia. Learn what the ten secrets are all about that the Blessed Mother is giving to six visionaries since 1981. One more secret is needed to be given to two visionaries and they will slowly be given to the world.
The first secret was told by Our Lady. She will leave a permanent sign on Apparition Hill where she first appeared (Location on the book cover). You will be able to see it but won’t be able to touch it. She claimed that all the unbelievers will know that She was here.
This is a warm, powerful book on how the author comes back to her faith after returning from Medjugorje.
** It will be available in Ebook form.
67 CENTS
Want to read a fast-paced book on crime in Boston, Massachusetts? This is the one. Just came out.
About the Author
Thomas Cirignano was born in Dorchester, Ma., in 1952. He moved to South Boston, taking over the family’s auto repair business. He experienced first-hand, Southie’s era of unbridled organized crime and violence, during the Whitey Bulger years.
Tom lived directly across the street from South Boston High School during the years of “forced busing” and saw the violence that resulted, right on his doorstep. He lived through the stress of running a gas station in the heart of Southie during the oil embargo and gasoline shortages of the 1970s. In 1987, he sold the shop, spending the next eleven years in Florida. He returned to Massachusetts in 1998.
Tom studied journalism, is a certified scuba diver, ultra-light aircraft pilot, has owned several motorcycles, and loves boating.
He has been a contributing writer and served as an advisory member on the Standard-Times Newspaper Editorial Board.
He also authored “The Constant Outsider, Memoirs of a South Boston Mechanic.”
“67 Cents: Creation of a Killer” is a fictional version of Tom’s memoir.
Order at: http://www.amazon.com/67-Cents-Creation-Thomas-Cirignano/dp/0741470683/ref=sr_1_cc_1?s=aps&ie=UTF8&qid=1330007048&sr=1-1-catcorr
Alcohol in Men
The son of an alcoholic, Tom began drinking at a very young age. For much of the time, he was able to balance his family, his job, and his alcohol. However, the more success he had in his career, the more his drinking became a problem. And soon enough, the disease took everything he had. Please listen to his story…
Go to Youtube to hear part 2-4.
Women Alcoholics
This program by the National Institues of Health features narratives of seven women recovering from problems with alcohol. These stories make it clear that it’s possible to miss danger signs and that social drinking can become problem drinking, which in turn can evolve into addiction. Abuse and
Attention Substance Abusers
I’m looking for substance abusers to help me with my new book. This will be “your” book. I’m doing a study with questions and answers from the addicts that my daughter, Lori, never answered for me. I will send you the 25 questions and you need not fill in your name.
Please email me at memoirs@albertasequeira.com. Lets work together to get this disease under control. Your replies will be a tremendous help to other abusers, especially our young kids.
Thank you,
Alberta
Guest Post
Hello,
I’ve received a lot of emails from people who I wanted to reply back to, but since I don’t have Outlook, I’m not reaching any of you. I’ve tried taking your email address and sending it from mine and they all come back as Not Sent.
If anyone has interest in being a blog guest on my blog, and I would with yours, please, email me direct at memoirs@albertasequeira.com. For some reason, all the replies I used to receive, and had trouble keeping up with, have stopped. I’m not a wiz at the computer so maybe I hit something.
I love hearing from all of you so please continue to send me messages.
Alberta Sequeira: Author, Speaker and Instructor
Alberta H. Sequeira was born in Pocasset, MA. Her father, Albert L. Gramm, was a One Star Brigadier General in the Army, and she spent her childhood in various towns across the different states traveling. She lives in Rochester, MA with her husband, Al.
She is the author of her first memoir, A Healing Heart; A Spiritual Renewal (2006). Her book is in the process of being re-published by Riverhaven Book Publishing Company with the new title A Spiritual Renewal; A Journey to Medjugorje by the end of January 2012. It’s about her relationship with her father, Brigadier General, Albert L Gramm, and her spiritual changes after his death. Miracles take her on a ten day pilgrimage to Medjugorje a tiny, remote village in Bosnia where she witnessed four of six visionaries having apparitions with The Blessed Mother.
June 19, 2009, her second memoir, Someone Stop This Merry-Go-Round; An Alcoholic Family in Crisis (2009), was self-published by Infinity Publishing. Its about the authors young marriage with two daughters that turned to fear, confusion and abuse from her alcoholic husband. The sequel Please, God, Not Two; This Killer Called Alcoholism (2010) is the continuation of their lives, and the story follows her daughter, Lori Cahill, going down the same destructive path as her father. Riche died in 1985 at forty-five years of age and Lori died in 2006 at the age of thirty-nine from the same alcohol addiction. Lori’s name was added to her father’s gravestone and put to rest with him.
REVIEW: Truth in every page
By meme – This review is from: Someone Stop This Merry-Go-Round: An Alcoholic Family in Crisis (Paperback)
I have been unable to read a complete book for the last 8 years and this one I couldn’t put down. Not only is it an easy read but anyone who has been in an alcoholic marriage will find comfort in this. This is not a self help book but it gives you the realization that someone else has felt exactly what you felt and you were not crazy.
REVIEW: Highly recommended by William R. Potter for Reader’s Choice Book Reviews
Please God, Not Two works as a stand alone, however I recommend you read it and the prequel together to obtain full effect of this poignant story. This is a candid look into alcoholism. Sequeira makes no excuses for herself or for her daughter. She writes with the best of intentions–to help others struggling to save a family member caught in the relentless grip of this disease. The information is well presented and Sequeira’s experiences are described with a desperate honesty that will have you reaching for tissues in many scenes. Direct links to purchases all books are below.
Alberta is a co-founder of Authors Without Borders and co-authored with their book Loose Ends. She is a co-host to the NBTV-95 Cable TV Station from New Bedford, Massachusetts. Ms. Seuqiera has been interviewed on numerous Cable TV Shows, radio blogs, and newspapers. She also teaches a three hour workshop in “Bring Your Manuscript to Publication.” Ms. Sequeira presents a talk on “The Effect of Alcoholism to the Whole Family” to private and public locations. She also offers a talk on “My Spiritual Changes Within” after her trip to Medjugorje.
See her full bio and media appearances at www.albertasequeira.com or email her at memoirs@albertasequeira.com.
Introduction/Someone Stop This Merry-Go-Round
Nominated in 2009 for the “Editor’s Choice Award”
Someone Stop This Merry-Go-Round is now in e-book form.
Richie Lopes was born on January 2, 1937. He had been born into a family fighting alcoholism, a disease that had been past down from generations of family members. His mother and sister battled their addiction leaving Richie and his sibblings with little security or happy times in his young growing years.
By the time I had met Richie, I was at eighteen, and he was already drinking. Being a young girl coming from a happy family life, I had no knowledge, education or awareness on what alcohol abuse was all about or what it could do to a person. It wasn’t until we got married and had two daughters, Debbie and Lori, that I came to see how alcoholics can’t stop at one drink. They drink until they slurr their words, get into arguements, and can’t remember a thing the next day.
Slowly, I became an enabler without realizing it. In the late sixties and up, I kept silent to our problems with our families. Small arguments turned into abusive moments with the girls witnesses things they shouldn’t have in their lives. I should have protected them more than Richie.
Our once happy, family life turned to fear, confusion and abuse. While I thought I was protecting our children and foolishly thinking they needed their father, I innocently damaged our daughter’s emotionally. Instead, I brought fear into Lori’s life that continued up until her death.
It took a lot of strength for me to open up about our lives that I had kept behind closed door for over seventeen years to write Someone Stop This Merry-Go-Round; An Alcoholic Family in Crisis (2009). I watched a loving husband and father turn into someone I didn’t know. This man who hated his family for drinking and the life he swore never to bring into our family became the same person with abusive behavior.
After many times of suffering physical abuse and being lucky not to have been killed, I left a man that I once loved to survive. By then, my daughters had seen too much and lived without knowing love in a family. The horrible, sufficating disease passed down to Lori.
My memoir shows how we all get on the merry-go-round to keep the abusive action going within the family. Making demands without breaking down would have stopped years of our family’s mental and physical suffering.
Feburay 10, 1985 at forty-five years of age, Richie died from this awful disease. Now I waited to see if my daughers would abuse alcohol.
Introduction: Please, God, Not Two; This Killer Called Alcoholism
Lori Lopes (Cahill) was born July 29, 1967 at Morton Hospital in Taunton, MA. She was my second daughter coming into the world four years after the birth of her sister, Debbie Lopes (Dutra) on May 14, 1963. I had lived in North Dighton, MA for over thirty years.
Lori had a personality once she started to walk and discovered the world and the people in it. By two years old, she delighted in any comical gesture of hers to make people laugh. She continued this wonderful habit throughout her life. Our house filled with her friends since Lori seemed to be the leader of the pack. I enjoyed each moment my daughter’s girlfriends, and at times the boys in the gang, come over to our house. I knew where they were and loved all the neighborhood kids.
On the outside, Lori made everyone around her think that she was delighted with life and the friends she had. But, she hid her pain deep down inside her including away from me, her mother. At the age of seventeen, Lori and Debbie at the age of twenty-one lost their father when he was only forty-five years of age from cirrhosis of the liver.
It wasn’t until Lori’s last two years that the family came to realize that she had been following the same path as her father. She had deeper problems that kept her frightened all her life, making her lose confidence in herself, and turned to alcohol abuse, and I think drugs played a part in her silent suffering.
How does a parent miss the signs, especailly after losing a husband nineteen years earlier? Easily. Lori never came and told me she was hurting or had been mentally upset with past trumas in her life. It had been the physical, and mental health breakdowns that opened the door to her illness, including being bulemic. Her second marriage fell apart, and I blamed the weight loss to the stress she had been under.
On November 22, 2006 after three alcoholic rehabilitation stays, Lori died at thirty-nine years of age at the Charlton Memoiral Hospital in Fall River, MA. She was laid to rest with her father at the St. Patrick Cemetery in Somerset, MA.
God gave me a loving, happy, beautiful daughter who filled all our lives with joy. She left us her two children, Joe and Meagan. Debbie and her husband, Brian, took Lori’s children to live with them and their children Kerri and Michael. Meagan became the nurse Lori had hoped to be and Joe became a Marine December 18, 2009. I see her each time I look in their eyes.
Please, God, Not Two; This Killer Called Alcoholism (2010) is the sequel after self-publishing Someone Stop This Merry-Go-Round; An Alcoholic Family in Crisis (2009).
It’s a very honest, painful and emotional story of losing a child to a demon that became her killer. People say authors write to heal. I haven’t healed. Every parent losing a child in any way, has to go on living. It’s how we live that counts.
I turned my life to speaking engagements on “The Effect of Alcoholism on the Whole Famliy.” For a shy girl, who couldn’t talk in public, I’m now reaching out to other families of abusers and the abusers themselves. God has a way of putting a path in front of us. We have to decide if we want to travel down it. If we open our hearts to Him, the decision is easy.
My trust and love in God has me taking this dark journey along with other sufferers hoping to find a light at the end of visiting each location to give a speaking engagement. Like the alcoholics state; “It’s one day at a Time.” But, I know He leads me. If I stumble, I just get up and keep going. Seeing the faces of lost souls controlled by this killer, gives me peace when they hug and kiss me while thanking me for coming to talk to them.
Purchase at:
http://www.amazon.com/Please-God-Not-Alberta-Sequeira/dp/0741460297/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1302185366&sr=1-1
See my other memoirs below!
