Mailbox Monday

The above picture is of a London postal carrier from the early 1900's.  I got a couple of books in the mail this week:

The Psychiatrist Who Cured the Scientologist by Aaron David Gottfried (from the author).  Step inside the misunderstood world of mental illness and the underground secrets of Scientology in this first-hand account of a walk on the extreme side of both.  This true story of a teenager trying to seek truth, finds himself going completely backward in a downward spiral of curiosity, rebellion and fanaticism.

One Amazing Thing by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni (from the publisher).  Late afternoon sun sneaks through the windows of a passport and visa office in an unnamed American city. Most customers and even most office workers have come and gone, but nine people remain. A punky teenager with an unexpected gift. An upper-class Caucasian couple whose relationship is disintegrating. A young Muslim-American man struggling with the fallout of 9/11. A graduate student haunted by a question about love. An African-American ex-soldier searching for redemption. A Chinese grandmother with a secret past. And two visa office workers on the verge of an adulterous affair.  When an earthquake rips through the afternoon lull, trapping these nine characters together, their focus first jolts to their collective struggle to survive. There's little food. The office begins to flood. Then, at a moment when the psychological and emotional stress seems nearly too much for them to bear, the young graduate student suggests that each tell a personal tale, "one amazing thing" from their lives, which they have never told anyone before.