Why not kick off the new year with some genuine inspiration about real people? This memoir of how Likins and his wife adopted six disparate children in the 1960s deals with everything from issues of race and mental illness to drug addiction and unwed pregnancy. On each page, though, you see the love and compassion and pride of its author, and you feel reassured that there still are plenty of lovely people among us that don’t necessarily get talked about in the nightly news.