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A captivating tale of unlikely friendship.quirky love.and unwavering courage.They have no idea how much they need each other...Trinka McDaniels is only eleven when her mother takes her to a small house on Pockettown Road and leaves her there because her new boyfriend "don't want no kids." Believing that only family and magic can keep her safe, Trinka creates her own family by naming pieces of furniture, her pillow, and the screen door. Even the kids at school have no idea she lives alone.Georgia Collins, an elderly widow who never leaves her house, finds herself in a bind when the local grocery store refuses to deliver her groceries anymore. Could the little girl who rescued a kitten in her backyard be the answer to her problem?Junior, an enormous black, handicapped man, spends most of the day sitting on his front porch, watching passers-by. People think he's too dumb to learn. But Trinka thinks differently, and she's determined to make him try.When the worlds of Georgia, Trinka, and Junior intersect, none of them will ever be the same.... ... Read more

Customer Reviews (6)

Inspires Us All To Be Courageous!
From the very first page I was thrust into the world of 11-year old Trinka. In rising above her fears to face unbelievable challenges, this youth unknowingly encourages those around her to be courageous. She has no idea that those that she looks up to are amazed at the strength that she doesn't realize she possesses. Scriptures birth boldness throughout this book, and Alison Pickrell captures your heart with the love expressed by the main characters. This fictional work introduces us to unlikely heroes that will inspire all of its readers to be the eagles God intended. Thank you, Alison.

As Eagles Soars
As Eagles is a touching story of friendship and couragewhich evolves as connections are formed between an abandoned child, an agoraphobic widow, and a mentally handicapped neigbor.
This short novel is well-plotted, highly engaging, and has a strong spiritual message.

Modern masterpiece
In an astounding and profound coming of age story Trinka McDaniels, Junior, and Mrs. Collins lives are about to come crashing together.Out of the wreckage eagles are born!

You can only love Trinka an eleven year old cast away child whose life is filled with fear and her imaginary friends.She lives alone because her mother's new boyfriend "don't want no kids."Trinka does well in school, but she subsists on Trix and Mac and Cheese.Her best friends are the solitary pieces of furniture in her tiny house.She doesn't know anything better and longs only to be seen and not ignored.

Mrs. Collins unintentionally banished herself from the world.She won't even go out for the groceries.But when the new owner of the grocery changes the store's delivery policy, she needs someone to buy things for her.Trinka needs the dollar she earns each week from Mrs. Collins--to eat.

Trinka's neighbor is an enormous retarded man, Junior.Junior becomes her project.He needs her, and Trinka needs to help.

Three people bound together by need and soon bound together in courage.Out of the wreckage eagles are born.A beautiful and well written tale that touches hearts and minds--don't miss it.

AS EAGLES by Alison Winfree Pickrell
Rarely do I find a character in a novel I adore as much as Trinka Daniels, whose mother takes the eleven year old girl to a little house on Pockettown Road and leaves her to survive by her own devices while the mother tries to wangle amarriage proposal from a man who has made it plain he "don't want no kids." She promises Trinka that it won't be long until she is able to convince the boyfriend to change his mind, and then they will all be one happy family.
I am fascinated by Trinka's creation of a family for herself from her surroundings and the people she encounters. She has an indomitable spirit and an ability she isn't even aware of to bring about victories in others who are totally without self confidence.
The author has an incredible knack for creating unique characters and putting them in unique situations, and I look forward to many more books filled with many more of them. Thank you, Alison Winfree Pickrell!

Moving and Innovative
The author draws us into an unusual combination of an old woman's faith in the Scriptures, and an abandoned child's faith in her own imagination and resourcefulness. There is something for everyone - action, suspense, a solid moral to be learned, fears to overcome, good versus evil, innocent humor, memories of love, and even garter belt revelations! The book is a quick, creative read and leaves the reader hopeful for the future of the characters. ... Read more

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Agoraphobia, the fear of open spaces, has received minimal attention from sociologists.Yet implicit within psychiatric discussion of this disease is a normative account of society, social order, social ordering, and power relations, making agoraphobia an excellent candidate for sociological interpretation.Narrating Social Order provides the first critical sociological framework for understanding agoraphobia, as well as the issue of psychiatric classification more generally.

Shelley Z. Reuter explores three major themes in her analysis: agoraphobia in the context of gender, race, and class; the shift in recent decades from an emphasis on psychoanalytic explanations for mental diseases to an emphasis on strictly biogenic explanations; and, finally, embodiment as a process that occurs in and through disease categories. Reuter provides a close reading of reports of agoraphobia beginning with the first official cases, along with the DSM and its precursors, illustrating how a "psychiatric narrative" is contained within this clinical discourse.She argues that, while the disease embodies very real physiological and emotional experiences of suffering, implicit in this fluid and shifting discourse are socio-cultural assumptions.These assumptions, and especially the question of what it means, both medically and culturally, to be ‘normal’ and ‘pathological,’ demonstrate the overlap between the psychiatric narrative of agoraphobia and socio-cultural narratives of exclusion. Ultimately, Reuter seeks to confront the gap that exists between sociological and psychiatric conceptions of mental disease and to understand the relationship between biomedical and cultural knowledges.

Product Description
Based on a conference, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Canada, March 1987. DNLM: 1. Agoraphobia. ... Read more

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This volume analyses the perplexing and often disabling form of distress known as anxiety from a psychological rather than a biomedical perspective, illustrating the rich contribution that psychological theory has made and is making to this topic.**The first section extensively examines the clinical literature, describing and delineating with case examples the cluster of characteristic features termed panic-anxiety.Research findings in other clinical areas such as alcohol dependence are shown to have conceptual and empirical links with panic-anxiety.The second section of the book reviews and evaluates the main theoretical approaches to anxiety, including specific models of panic and agoraphobia, challenging many traditional assumptions and advocating the analysis of anxiety as a socially constructed meaning imposed on experience rather than a theoretical concept or psychopathological state.The methodological implications are discussed and a schematic model of panic-anxiety is proposed.**The theoretical integration represents a major contribution to the resurgence of interest in this field and will be of relevance to all researchers and postgraduate students within the mental health professions.**FROM THE PREFACE: This book has two main objectives.The first is to describe a dimension of psychological distress I have called panic-anxiety.This takes up the first part of the book, which surveys literature that is primarily descriptive and psychiatric.The second objective is pursued in the second part of the book, in which I examine a large number of theories of anxiety to see what they might have to offer in explaining the panic-anxiety cluster of complaints.I am therefore concerned to apply psychological theory to a real-world problem, that is, to what people who seek professional help loosely describe as panic, anxiety and fears of public situations.**The theoretical and experimental literature on anxiety is so vast that I have had to be disciplined and in no small measure prejudiced in favour of a particular theoretical perspective.I have attempted as far as possible to treat anxiety as a lay construct, that is, as a social construction and not a scientific concept.For this reason, I have endeavoured to refer to reports of anxiety or to complaints of anxiety in order to avoid the common tendency to reify anxiety as a an entity which exists independently of the social origins of the term.Accordingly, I believe that the relevant question to ask is not, What is anxiety?but, What are the antecedents of reports (or complaints) of anxiety?**It is intended that this book should provide a coherent perspective on a common form of psychological distress, of value to therapists, researchers and students of abnormal psychology.In many ways, the problems for which people seek help do not define 'natural' areas of scientific research, and so it is difficult to combine theoretical and practical interests in one book.The complaints with which I am particularly concerned--panic and fears of public places--can be analysed to reveal scientific questions which have a significance much wider than the explanation of particular complaints made to professionals working in a clinical context.Apart from its obvious social significance, a clinical area is therefore simply a point of departure for scientific investigation.My intention, then, is to use this clinical area as an illustration of how such problems might be tackled from a theoretical perspective which is essentially psychological.**The theoretical position I have adopted owes much to the views of Sarbin (1964, 1968), Mandler (1975) and Averill (1980a,b).In taking anxiety to be a lay construct, I assume that the 'What is?' questions rightly belong to the sociology of knowledge.Of course, the applied psychologist also has substantive issues to consider.For example, How can this individual be helped to report calmness rather than anxiety? or, How can that individual be helped to travel freely on public transport?I suggest that the most positive contribution a social constructivist position has to offer is to dissuade researchers from regarding these real-life problems as reflecting an underlying emotion of anxiety, or, even less helpful, an anxiety disorder.**Biological and medical research on anxiety is also considered in this light.Reductive biological and pathological hypotheses are rejected, but an attempt is made to integrate the biological aspects at a higher level of analysis.For this reason, the book differs from others which tend to confine themselves to a description and explanation of postulated disorders or syndromes.Because the emphasis of this book is essentially conceptual, there is relatively little discussion of assessment and therapy, apart from a general critique of current approaches.**Most experiences described as fear or anxiety in an everyday context have an identifiable source or object.When these experiences are reported as unbearably intense or lead to the avoidance of various situations, they are generally referred to as phobias.In the past 20 years there has been a considerable advance in the technology of reducing and eliminating unwanted phobias.The new methods of imaginal and real-life confrontation are successful in the majority of cases when anxiety is reported in connection with specific eliciting stimuli.The same success cannot be claimed for methods of dealing with complaints of anxiety that appear to be unrelated to identifiable circumstances.In one form of these complaints, a person may suddenly feel overwhelmed by unpleasant sensations which are usually described as a panic attack.Panic and other complaints of anxiety which are perceived as irrational form the principal interest of this book.A second major concern is the problem of fears of public places, often referred to as agoraphobia.Typically, the person who complains of these fears is unable to leave the home unaccompanied, although travel by car, a 'safe' environment, is usually possible.Although agoraphobia is tied to situations, the fear is not reported to be about these situations but is usually expressed as a fear of experiencing a panic attack in these situations.As I will argue, fears of public situations appear to be associated with panic and complaints of anxiety of a nonspecific kind.**FROM THE FOREWORD: This book is a welcome addition to a growing literature that treats perplexing and sometimes disabling conduct from a psychological rather than a biomedical perspective.It is one of an increasing number of treatises that boldly assume that psychological events may be studied in their own right without reducing the phenomena to biological or mentalistic categories.Among other topics, Hallam critically reviews the clinical and experimental work on self-reported anxiety, panic and agoraphobia.He demonstrates with considerable force the disutility of the traditional practice of assigning such phenomena to a world of disordered minds.**Anxiety has been employed as a key concept in many psychoanalytic and psychological theories.Before its use as a theoretical construct, anxiety was a lay construct, a metaphor invented to communicate about vaguely perceived and poorly understood sensory experience.This lay construct, or metaphor, was metonymically transformed by certain theorists seeking a universal intervening variable to account for puzzling conduct.That is to say, the theorists transfigured anxiety to a cause from its original use as a metaphor for effects of interpersonal actions and physiological responses.As a staple of biomedical research and practice, anxiety is a reified metaphor.One of the results of the uncritical use of the reified metaphor was the creation of such unproductive diagnostic categories as anxiety neurosis, anxiety hysteria and anxiety state.Hallam's review of research and practice makes abundantly clear that this metaphor-to-myth transformation has little utility, either as a heuristic for research or as a model for therapy.**Many lessons are to be learned from this book, not the least of which is the demonstration that the lay construct, anxiety, is multireferential.When a clinician asks a client for referents for such complaints as, 'I am anxious' (or 'panicky' or 'agoraphobic'), the client's response is drawn from a limitless pool of vague and ambiguous descriptors.Examples of the interpretations offered by clients include such diverse referents as 'I had the feeling I was about to die', 'I was suffocating, gasping for air', 'My legs became rubbery', 'I was about to faint', 'My brain was racing ahead of my thought', and so on.**From Hallam's detailed analysis of the multireferential nature of anxiety complaints, one could formulate the following rule for praxis:When a client employs 'anxiety' or a similar descriptor in his or her self-report, regard it as metaphoric utterance, not as a statement that demands causal analysis.The metaphoric utterance, that is, the complaint, is a social construction whose building blocks include the client's beliefs, linguistic skills, purposes and concurrent existential or identity problems.**Another lesson to be learned from this book is the continuity of anxiety complaints as reported in clinical settings with those of persons who do not come to the attention of professional helpers.Such continuity is an argument against the identification of anxiety complaints as a psychiatric disorder.For example, the fear of strange places may be universal and not restricted to a clinical population if the definition of strange places is broad enough.**The author holds that the client, like the rest of us, constructs his or her world from perceptions, beliefs, imaginings and rememberings.Thus anxiety is a construction, and it is communicated to others (and to the self) with the aid of metaphoric and metonymic translations.This constructivist view is fast displacing the entrenched biomedical view that treats human beings as passive reactors to stimuli according to still-to-be discovered mechanistic laws.Metaphors drawn from physics, geology and technology, so tightly wove... ... 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This book is a practitioner's guide to psychological treatment of anxiety disorders with the emphasis on panic disorder, particularly among agoraphobics. The authors describe the methods of assessment and treatment that are most effective, based on research in this area, giving guidelines as to which problems to focus on and which treatments to use. "Agoraphobia and Panic" should be of particular interest to mental health clinicians, students in clinical psychology, counselling and social work. ... Read more