Major Misconduct: The Human Cost of Fighting in Hockey Paperback – November 5, 2019

Every night in hockey arenas across Canada and the United States, modern-day gladiators drop their gloves and exchange bare-fisted blows to the bloodthirsty roars of the paying public. Tens of millions of people a year, including children, watch and cheer on the fighters. Some players are paid handsomely; others barely a living wage. But either way, these fighters are lauded, valued, and considered to be essential to the game. That is, until their playing days are over. Hockey enforcers spend their lives fighting on ice to protect their teammates and entertain their fans, but when their playing days are over, who’s left to fight for them?
Major Misconduct scrutinizes a highly dangerous and controversial cultural practice. The book dives deep into the lives of three former hockey fighters who, years after their playing days ended, are still struggling with the pain and suffering that comes from bare-knuckle boxing on ice. All of these men believe they may be living with the degenerative brain disease chronic traumatic encephalopathy. They may have had their shot at pro hockey glory, but none of them is rich or famous, and the game has left them with injuries and trauma. They have experienced estrangement, mental health issues, addiction, and brushes with the law. And they’ve stared death in the face.

The debate surrounding fighting in hockey is hotly contested on both sides. This daring and revelatory book explores the lives of those who bare-knuckle boxed on ice for a living and investigates the human cost we’re willing to tolerate in the name of hockey fighting.

You can read this book for free through BC Libraries, accessible throught the OverDrive app

The story of the author’s  39 year old son Robert Pownall, who at the age of eighteen, suffered a near fatal head injury. He was unfortunate in having an accident which caused an intercranial hemorrhage that required life saving surgery. The story describes Rob’s remarkable determination and courage in fighting his way back from the darkness of a coma.

Adversity to Empowerment “Letting Traumatic Brain Injury out of the closet” by Anne Margaret McKenzie

No imagination could conjure up the unforeseen thing that would happen, wrenching away my perfect and effortless functioning, casting an indelible mark over my psyche, breaking my body, and propelling me on a journey which would have me clinging to my self-esteem, and rebuilding my life. This journey was not the plan.

Unthinkable by Dixie Fremont-Smith Coskie
A mother’s narrative of perseverance following her son’s traumatic brain injury. Unthinkable is filled with universal lessons of struggle and triumph. Following each chapter of the harrowing journey are vital insights to assist others through their tragedies.

Follow Dixie’s Journey…a mystery, a love story, a prayer.

TBI Purgatory: Comes After Being in TBI Hell by Geo Gosling
This is the follow-up book to TBI Hell, which was published in 2006. The author, Geo Gosling talks about life 14 years after sustaining a Traumatic Brain Injury. Few, if any, books regarding brain injuries give a perspective of what life may be like 14 years after suffering a brain injury, this one does. It is a male’s perspective who received a TBI at age 25 and is now 39 years old.

It is also rather humorous in spots, as humor is, in Geo’s opinion, the best way to deal with what life is like after suffering a TBI.

A portion of the purchase price for each book purchased through our links to Amazon are donated directly back to the Powell River Brain Injury Society by Amazon.ca!

A Change of Mind: One Family’s Journey Through Brain Injury
by Janelle Breese Biagioni

This is one family’s journey through brain injury. Highly compelling and emotional. Straight from the heart.

Book on marital stress and adjustment for families when a spouse has a brain injury. Discusses emotional trauma for family, grieving, mourning, parenting, and care giving after severe head trauma.

Doing Up Buttons
by Christine Durham

A deeply personal yet practical account of understanding head injury.

Gifts from the Broken Jar: Rediscovering Hope, Beauty and Joy
by PJ Long

Everyone, at some time, learns how life can change in a moment: with the crossing of the center line on a highway or the reading of a blood test; a telephone’s knell in the still of night or a spouse’s hesitation before the unspeakable is spoken. Occasionally, out of the turmoil emerges a work of exceptional wisdom and beauty. Gifts from the Broken Jar is one such work. Psychotherapist PJ Long’s life-altering moment came when the bolt of a terrified horse left her brain-injured. She became a stranger to herself, unable to drive a car, prepare a meal, or carry on a conversation.

But when PJ began to write, pen and ink acted as needle and thread, mending her torn mind and stitching together a new life. Lessons she had gleaned over years of helping others returned to guide her. And as PJ wrote, she gained profound insight into the resilience of the spirit and the unexpected joys of everyday life.

Warm, engaging, and exquisitely crafted, Gifts from the Broken Jar will take its place beside treasured works like May Sarton’s journals or Tuesdays with Morrie–books that tell the quieter tale, savoring the ordinary and discovering life’s wonders.

Scattered Minds
by Gabor Mate

A groundbreaking book explains what really causes Attention Deficit Disorder.

Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) has quickly become a controversial topic in recent years. Whereas other books on the subject describe the condition as inherited, Dr. Gabor Mate believes that our social and emotional environments play a key role in both the cause of and cure for this condition. In Scattered, he describes the painful realities of ADD and its effect on children as well as on career and social paths in adults.

While acknowledging that genetics may indeed play a part in predisposing a person toward ADD, Dr. Mate moves beyond that to focus on the things we can control: changes in environment, family dynamics, and parenting choices. He draws heavily on his own experience with the disorder, as both an ADD sufferer and the parent of three diagnosed children. Providing a thorough overview of ADD and its treatments, Scattered is essential and life-changing reading for the millions of ADD sufferers in North America today.

Stillness Speaks
by Eckhart Tolle

In Stillness Speaks, best-selling author Eckhart Tolle illuminates the fundamental elements of his teaching, addressing the needs of the modern seeker by drawing from all spiritual traditions. At the core of the book is what the author calls “the state of presence,” a living in the “now” that is both intensely inspirational and practical.

When the pressures of future and past thinking disappear, fear and frustration also vanish, conquered by the moment. Stillness Speaks takes the form of 200 individual entries, organized into 10 topic clusters that range from “Beyond the Thinking Mind” to “Suffering and the End of Suffering.” The entries are concise and complete in themselves, but, read together, take on a transformative power.

When the Body says No: The Cost of Hidden Stress
by Gabor Mate

The potential for wholeness and health resides in all of us, affirms Dr. Gabor Mate in When the Body Says No: The Cost of Hidden Stress. But disease is often the body’s way of saying “no” to what the mind cannot or will not acknowledge, warns the author, who quotes the latest scientific findings about the roles stress and individual emotional makeup play in the causation of cancer and other chronic illnesses. Mate is a medical doctor and bestselling author of Scattered Minds.

This work offers stories from his own patients in the belief that insight is more helpful to people than advice. Natalie, for example, develops multiple sclerosis after years of marriage to a drunken and emotionally abusive husband. In another case, a 74-year-old man diagnosed with cancer experiences spontaneous remission. His own body mobilized formidable immune responses to defeat the disease. “If we gain the ability to look into ourselves with honesty, compassion and with unclouded vision, we can identify the ways we need to take care of ourselves,” says Mate, who invites us all to be our own health advocates by pursuing emotional competence in seven areas: acceptance, awareness, anger, autonomy, attachment, assertion, and affirmation. If a link exists between emotions and psychology, he says, not to inform people of it will deprive them of a powerful tool.

The Brain Injury Workbook
by Trevor Powell

Evolved from working with head injured groups at Headway and those attempting to return to work, this is a rich, comprehensive and photocopiable workbook for professionals, carers and clients.

Contains over 140 cognitive rehabilitation exercises – tailored for memory, thinking skills, executive functions, awareness and insight, and emotional adjustment. Provides more than 40 information sheets on key problem areas, with questions for the reader, designed to educate and stimulate thinking and discussion. Suitable for both individuals and groups. Includes questionnaires for clients to complete with or without help and quizzes to evaluate and encourage information retention. Primarily for professionals where exercises or handout sheets can be photocopied and used therapeutically, The Brain Injury Workbook can also be used by carers or family members to provide stimulating activities for a brain-injured person. In addition, the brain-injured person themselves can work through the book on their own.

Brain Injury Survival … Read the rest