CHOOSING JOY IN THE MIDST OF CRISIS
By DOLLY MAE

Hara Publishing Group
$17.95 (softcover)

Reviewed by Cecilia Ray

If you find your life is not all you want it to be, Choosing Joy in the Midst of Crisis holds the potential for helping you figure out where you may be going wrong. The entire book is built around a technique Dolly Mae learned from her teacher, Rajni. According to her, choosing joy is a matter of choosing love rather than fear.

Beginning with the story of her own life and the loss of 25 million in assets, Dolly grabs the reader’s attention. Though she doesn’t give a lot of detail about how the situation arose, she does paint a clear picture of how it felt to dread the arrival of the mailman and the devastation of receiving a continuous flow of foreclosures. Faced with this, she reversed her attitude and became joyful. So strong was her belief in this way of living in joy that she refused to pursue an opportunity to recover her losses because it would have kept her captive in the situation.

Practices to Heal Ourselves and Our Planet
by FRANCESCA CIANCIMINO HOWELL

Red Wheel/Weiser
$16.95 (softcover)

reviewed by Jenny Getchell-Durante

Making Magic with Gaia is a special book filled with many ideas for respecting and honoring ourselves, our planet, and all of life. The author calls her work a "magical activist’s handbook," and she asks her readers to "make a commitment to conscious and more sustainable living in whatever way (you) can."

I was immediately captivated by Howell’s personal story at the beginning of the book and by her writing style. I found Making Magic with Gaia to be extremely well written, easy to read, and also filled with a great deal of interesting information about Wiccan history, deep ecology, crystals, magic, and more. Howell discusses complex subjects, including Dr. James Lovelock’s Gaia Hypothesis and the physics of crystals, and explains them in very understandable language.

ONLINE Reviews by Maria Marsala

Grow them, cook with them, wash with them, and use them for medicinal purposes. The list of what you can do with herbs seems to be endless.

www.egregore.com
<http://www.egregore.com/misc/herbindx.htm>
Pick a medicinal herb and learn more here.

Cooking
<http://members.visi.net/~mandy/herbs.html>
Cooking herbs anyone?

Salad Oils
<http://world.std.com/~krahe/oils.html>
Create your own herb-flavored salad oils with these instructions.

www.herbnet.com
<http://www.herbnet.com/eng-lat%20A-H.htm>
Choose an herb, then find it's name in Latin or other languages.

More Herb Links
<http://www.holisticonline.com/Herbal-Med/hol_herb.htm>
A terrific page of links to 10 informational herb Web sites.

Maria helps daydream believers create professional and personal success by custom-designing solutions and systems that work! Visit her website to subscribe to "Growing You and Your Business" a complimentary e-zine or request a consultation now <http://www.CoachMaria.com/a/consultation/>.