Outlasting the Famine:

Author: Rod McCormick

Following the tragic and unexpected death of his former wife of eighteen years, the author reflects on his life with her; whether the bitter was in fair proportion to the sweet. Wanting to find the perfect person, marry and live happily ever after, one quickly learns that the effort leading to marriage is minor compared to the effort maintaining a modern marriage. He was entranced seeing her the first time. Their feverish romance led to a rushed and chaotic wedding and soon their daughter. Their story was the heartrending attempts leading to a second child and her frustrated attempts at perfecting her life. Struggling with fertility problems along with confidence and career troubles, the couple moves around the country in search of solutions. After years of effort attempting to build the perfect life, the marriage ends in infidelity and divorce. Suddenly being a single father, while resurrecting his trust and confidence in humanity, he has to balance his needs with his children's in order to keep both parents in their lives.

Excerpt from the book:

"The email from him to my wife began: 'My beloved friend and confidant' - which strangely did not jab my gut right away, since the first emotional response to death and dying is denial. It arrived as a cold-hearted explanation of the last year of increasing distance between me and my wife, and petty fault finding about her less than perfect husband...I read on. 'Let's make sure we have plenty of time for us and a lot of time for making love.' That was the sentence that drove metal electrodes into my heart, and the last phrase of the email slammed closed a switch to send a thousand amps of electricity eviscerating my heart: 'I love you' was the ending."

208 Pages  ISBN-13: 978-1469903910  Biography/Personal Memoir

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Searching for Isum:   Over Genealogical Brick Walls

Authored by Rodney V. McCormick

    From Searching for Isum: "I recall vividly as a ten year old going with my father to visit Grandpa McCormick at his home on Mechanic Street in Macomb, Illinois. After eating some of his wonderful Concord grapes off the vine, Grandpa wanted to show us the family bible that was ‘brought over from Ireland during the potato famine.’ His story was that Grandpa’s grandfather Isum was an Irishman, one of ‘five Irish brothers,’ who came to America escaping the potato famine. I got the impression that Grandpa was offering the bible to my father for safe keeping. I, as an audacious – or obnoxious - ten-year-old boy, had the temerity to thumb through the huge bible and to take a look at the copyright date. It was old but not from Ireland. It was copyright 1876 in the United States of America. My father had a good chuckle, and Grandpa was obviously embarrassed."
    Years later as if suddenly possessed by Isum's spirit, the author began a search to find out just who Isum McCormick was and where his family came from. The search led through hundreds of documents, court houses, National Archives, cemeteries, DNA tests and thousands of miles of travel only to yield the fact that the author’s grandpa had no clue about his own grandfather. This book tells the story of finding one's family history and provides tips to amateur genealogists in their search for ancestors.

List Price:$9.95    6" x 9" (15.24 x 22.86 cm)  Black & White on White paper
140 pages     ISBN-13: 978-1461085980   eBook on Kindle or NookBook: Price $8.95

Available on Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble: BN.com.    https://www.createspace.com/3595492

Problems in Problem Solving: Psychological Models of Creative Problem Solving 

Authored by Dr. Rodney V. McCormick Ph.D., Contributions by Dr. John T. Mouw

List Price: $9.95 5.5" x 8.5" (13.97 x 21.59 cm) Black & White on White paper 158 pages 

ISBN-13: 978-1456323936 

ISBN-10: 1456323938  Psychology / Creative Ability

This book reviews the metaphors used by various researchers of cognition and problem solving in their attempt to understand these processes, and to identify both the common underlying pattern of these theories and the unifying metaphor of the metaphor making process known as creative problem solving. Components of Wallas' theory on problem solving along with Piaget's theory, several information processing theories, Neo-Piagetian, factor-analytic, neuropsychological concepts and also "Catastrophe Theory" have been integrated, with redundancies being noted, into a theory to understand creative problem solving processes.

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