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#1 New Release in LGBT Studies and Biographies & Memoirs ─ Stories to Help You PersevereLive Through the Hardships: Life is complicated and messy, but every now and then life gives you a syndicated talk show on a major network – and then fires you for being “all icing and no cake.” Then it sends your born-again Christian sister to take you out to lunch on your birthday, only to tell you she suddenly believes you can pray the gay away and that you should’ve used your time on the show do more for Christ. Then, because there’s always another “then,” you receive a tax bill from Uncle Sam that almost sends you out your tenth-floor bathroom window…literally. Luckily, AJ Gibson chose to step back and share his struggles because, well…not today Satan! He knows what it’s like when life feels like a never-ending roller coaster, and in his self-help book Flipping the Script, he doesn’t sugar coat the truth. After all, this isn’t Hollywood, errr…anymore. Know You’re Not Alone: AJ’s journey from a closeted gay boy from Ohio to that guy people kinda, sorta recognize from TV and Hollywood seems glossy, but the truth is anything but. In Flipping the Script, AJ shows how his life has been a series of personal roadblocks and rock bottom moments. Every time he thinks he’s in the clear, he finds a new way to crash and burn. Let’s just say insecurity was once a pretty close friend of his, so he knows what you feel like whenever you find yourself scrolling social media comparing yourself to others. Luckily, he’s a pretty smart guy and moderately witty, always finding his way out of life’s rock bottom moments – and you can too! Turn Bad Situations Around: AJ has a gift for shifting his perspective, turning crappy situations around and finding a way to persevere each time the world seems to be telling him he was born to fail. Through all of the mess, all of the hardships, he somehow manages to keep a smile on his face and a roof over his head. He also knows that we all have problems and he’s here to help. The true stories in Flipping the Script will make you laugh, encourage you to keep fighting for happiness and inspire you to turn your own rock bottom moments into your proudest accomplishments! Feel Empowered: AJ’s “Hollywood” situation may be unique, but his struggles are definitely relatable. After all, you’d be hard-pressed to find a person who has achieved success without problems – especially in the LGBTQ community. As a proud gay man working in the entertainment capital of the world, AJ’s personal and professional stories will leave you feeling empowered and a little less defeated. Flipping the Script will give you the strength to overcome your own personal roadblocks. In his book, AJ shares tips and tricks in the form of “Script Rewrites” at the end of each chapter that will help you persevere and find your true purpose. Flipping the Script will rip your heart out, make you want to fight somebody, and leave you feeling like you can solve world hunger – all in a single chapter. You will: feel deeply connected, knowing you’re not alone in your struggles have simple, real world tools to help you bounce back and live the life you were created to live see yourself as the wonderful, creative, capable human being that you have always been – but forgot somewhere along the way

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‘Extremely fast paced and completely page-turning … will stay in my mind for a long time’ Sunday Times bestseller B P Walter on The Good Neighbour The Removal Man is an utterly unputdownable suspense thriller that imagines your worst house-moving nightmare – and then dials it up to 11. Rose is moving. For her and her son, Noah, this is going to be a fresh start. She’s almost finished packing but Noah is determined to spend one last night camping out in the garden like he used to. Rose agrees as long as he wraps up warm inside their small tent. Four hours later she’s woken by a frantic banging on the window. It’s Noah. There’s someone in the garden. That’s when Rose picks up the kitchen knife. Readers are loving The Removal Man: ‘I literally could not stop reading’Julie, NetGalley ‘I read it over the course of about 8 hours in a single day!’Shasta, NetGalley ‘Geez my poor heart!! It’s still pounding!! I was yelling at my Kindle!! She wasn’t listening to me! It’s gonna take me a minute to calm myself down!’Debbie, NetGalley ‘WOW!! What an action packed, edge of your seat thriller … I barely blinked as I read the entire book in one sitting’Sarah, NetGalley ‘I intended to read a couple of chapters before bed and didn’t look up again until I hit chapter 20’April, NetGalley ‘I read the whole thing in 24 hours’Jacqui, NetGalley ‘OMG WHAT A READ!!! Packed to the rafters with tension and suspense, I literally have no nails left’ Peggy, NetGalley ‘I read this in one sitting’Aria, NetGalley ‘Omg, wow … just wow, this is a fast paced, addictive, rollercoaster ride … with a very bad case of just one more chapter syndrome … I read the whole book in one sitting … would award it far more than five stars if I could’Nicki, NetGalley ‘A no-holds-barred survival thriller that will appeal to fans of No Exit or Mirrorland’Leighton, NetGalley ‘Everyone’s greatest nightmare, but worse! This is one of the scariest thrillers I’ve read in a long time’Joan, NetGalley

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This book addresses perceived lacunae in the historiography of the Land War in late nineteenth-century Ireland, particularly deficiencies or omissions relating to the themes of the title: famine, humanitarianism, and the activities of agrarian secret societies, commonly referred to as Moonlighting. The famine that afflicted the country in 1879-80, one generation removed from the catastrophic Great Famine of the 1840s, prompted different social responses. The wealthier sectors of society, their consciousness and humanitarianism awakened, provided the bulk of the financial and administrative support for the famine-stricken peasantry. Others, drawn from the same broad social stratum as the latter, vented their anger and frustration on the government and the landlords, whom they blamed for the crisis. The concern of marginal men and women for the welfare of their less fortunate brethren was not so much the antithesis of altruism, as a different, more rudimentary way of expressing it.The volume's opening chapter introduces the famine that tormented Ireland's Atlantic seaboard counties in the late 1870s and early 1880s. The four chapters that follow develop the famine theme, concentrating on the role of civic and religious relief agencies, and the local and international humanitarian response to appeals for assistance. The 1879-80 famine kindled benevolence among the diasporic Irish and the charitable worldwide, but it also provoked a more primal reaction, and the book's two closing chapters are devoted to the activities of secret societies. The first features the incongruously named Royal Irish Republic, a neo-Fenian combination in north-west County Cork. The volume's concluding essay links history and literature, positing a connection between agrarian secret society activity during the Land War years and the Kerry playwright George Fitzmaurice's neglected 1914 drama The Moonlighter. This original and engaging work makes a significant contribution to our understanding of modern Irish history and literature.

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Nnedi Okorafor was never supposed to be paralyzed. A college track star and budding entomologist, Nnedi’s lifelong battle with scoliosis was just a bump in her plan - something a simple surgery would easily correct. But when Nnedi wakes from the surgery to find she can’t move her legs, her entire sense of who she is begins to waver. Confined to a hospital bed for months, unusual things begin to happen. Psychedelic bugs crawl her hospital walls; strange dreams visit her nightly. She begins to feel as if she’s turning into a cyborg. Unsure if she’ll ever walk again, Nnedi begins to put these experiences into writing, conjuring up strange, fantastical stories. What Nnedi discovers during her confinement would prove to be the key to her life as a successful science fiction writer: In science fiction, when something breaks, something greater often emerges from the cracks. While she may be bedridden, instead of stopping her journey Nnedi’s paralysis opens up new windows in her mind, kindles her creativity and ultimately leads her to become more alive than she ever could have imagined. Nnedi takes the reader on a journey from her hospital bed deep into her memories, from her painful first experiences with racism as a child in Chicago to her powerful visits to her parents’ hometown in Nigeria, where she got her first inkling that science fiction has roots beyond the West. This was not the Africa that Nnedi knew from Western literature - an Africa that she always read was a place left behind. The role of technology in Nigeria opened her eyes to future-looking Africa: cable TV and cell phones in the village, 419 scammers occupying the cybercafés, the small generator connected to her cousin’s desktop computer, everyone quickly adapting to portable tech devices due to unreliable power sources. Nnedi could see that Africa was far from broken, as she’d been taught, and her experience there planted the early seeds of sci-fi - a genre that speculates about technologies, societies, and social issues - from an entirely new lens. In Broken Places & Outer Spaces, Nnedi uses her own experience as a jumping off point to follow the phenomenon of creativity born from hardship. From Frida Kahlo to Mary Shelly, she examines great artists and writers who have pushed through their limitations, using hardship to fuel their work. Through these compelling stories and her own, Nnedi reveals a universal truth: What we perceive as limitations have the potential to become our greatest strengths - far greater than when we were unbroken.

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This book puts forward a new angle of understanding the society of states in the milieu of the contemporary world. The absence of a regulatory mechanism, i.e., anarchy, has been the fundamental issue of international relations. This book explains how the normative imperatives, information and communication technology (ICT) and nuclear deterrence generated ambiance have poised the states in a society where they are bound to follow certain normative imperatives that dilute the color and meaning of anarchy and obliges the states to act in a certain way. It develops a theoretical proposition with regard to state power defined in terms of the capability of determining the outcomes. The proposition first elaborates how international institutions foster normative imperatives; then, in line with this ontology, it narrows down the focus solely on the power of the states in the contemporary world. It explains how the power that can determine the outcome today is holistic in nature, comprising both materialistic and normative factors. In the next step, it tailors the proposition in a way so as to employ it for a specific empirical work. The book does not end just positing the theoretical proposition; the proposition is testified through some case studies with regard to climate negotiations under the UNFCCC. The empirical part not only serves to examine the plausibility of the theoretical proposition, but it also presents the logic of the major actors and the politics with respect to some of the major issues of climate change, i.e., mitigation, funding policy and mechanism and adaptation. The scholars in this arena, climate activists and climate-conscious people in general would find this book worth reading as it kindles a different angle to understand the issues in the context of the contemporary world and as it elaborates the logic, framing process, and mechanism of reaching outcomes through complex negotiation process. No other work has so far analyzed the issues covering the entire period of 21 apex UNFCCC negotiations that led to the Paris Agreement. Apart from university libraries, this book, thus, has the prospect to be sold in the markets targeting the academicians, climate change experts, bureaucrats, negotiators and the common readers.

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Occupying much of imperial China’s Yangzi River heartland and costing more than twenty million lives, the Taiping Rebellion (1851-64) was no ordinary peasant revolt. What most distinguished this dramatic upheaval from earlier rebellions were the spiritual beliefs of the rebels. The core of the Taiping faith focused on the belief that Shangdi, the high God of classical China, had chosen the Taiping leader, Hong Xiuquan, to establish his Heavenly Kingdom on Earth. How were the Taiping rebels, professing this new creed, able to mount their rebellion and recruit multitudes of followers in their sweep through the empire? Thomas Reilly argues that the Taiping faith, although kindled by Protestant sources, developed into a dynamic new Chinese religion whose conception of its sovereign deity challenged the legitimacy of the Chinese empire. The Taiping rebels denounced the divine pretensions of the imperial title and the sacred character of the imperial office as blasphemous usurpations of Shangdi’s title and position. In place of the imperial institution, the rebels called for restoration of the classical system of kingship. Previous rebellions had declared their contemporary dynasties corrupt and therefore in need of revival; the Taiping, by contrast, branded the entire imperial order blasphemous and in need of replacement. In this study, Reilly emphasizes the Christian elements of the Taiping faith, showing how Protestant missionaries built on earlier Catholic efforts to translate Christianity into a Chinese idiom. Prior studies of the rebellion have failed to appreciate how Hong Xiuquan’s interpretation of Christianity connected the Taiping faith to an imperial Chinese cultural and religious context. The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom shows how the Bible--in particular, a Chinese translation of the Old Testament--profoundly influenced Hong and his followers, leading them to understand the first three of the Ten Commandments as an indictment of the imperial order. The rebels thus sought to destroy imperial culture along with its institutions and Confucian underpinnings, all of which they regarded as blasphemous. Strongly iconoclastic, the Taiping followers smashed religious statues and imperially approved icons throughout the lands they conquered. By such actions the Taiping Rebellion transformed--at least for its followers but to some extent for all Chinese--how Chinese people thought about religion, the imperial title and office, and the entire traditional imperial and Confucian order. This book makes a major contribution to the study of the Taiping Rebellion and to our understanding of the ideology of both the rebels and the traditional imperial order they opposed. It will appeal to scholars in the fields of Chinese history, religion, and culture and of Christian theology and church history.

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If you are looking for the definitive resource to help you measure your students’ achievement, your search is over. PE Metrics: Assessing Student Performance Using the National Standards & Grade-Level Outcomes for K-12 Physical Education, Third Edition, aligns with SHAPE America’s National Standards and Grade-Level Outcomes for K-12 Physical Education, was created by SHAPE America and its writing team, and was reviewed by researchers and teachers with expertise in assessment. The result is a text that you can use with confidence as you help develop physical literacy in your students. Written for physical educators, administrators, and curriculum writers (and for physical education majors and minors), this latest edition offers the following: • 130 ready-to-use assessments for kindergarten through grade 12 (65 elementary, 43 middle school, and 22 high school) • Worksheets, checklists, and rubrics that support the assessments • Guidance on creating your own assessments for any lesson or unit These assessments are aligned with the three SHAPE America lesson planning books for elementary, middle, and secondary school and dovetail with SHAPE America’s The Essentials of Teaching Physical Education. The assessments can be used as they are, or you can modify them or use them as samples in creating assessments that are best suited to your needs. PE Metrics, now in a four-color design, is organized into four main parts: Part I introduces the purpose and uses of assessment, how to develop an assessment plan, and the various types of assessments and tools you can use. Part II contains sample assessments for students in grades K-5, focusing on fundamental motor skills; as such, the elementary-level assessments center heavily on Standard 1. In part III, the emphasis shifts to middle school assessments, with a concentration on Standard 2 and on the categories of dance and rhythms, invasion games, net/wall games, fielding/striking games, outdoor pursuits, aquatics, and individual-performance activities. Part IV offers sample assessments for high school students, with a priority on providing evidence of the knowledge and skills students will need to remain active and fit after they leave high school. This resource provides a comprehensive, performance-based assessment system that enables you to incorporate assessment into every facet of your teaching, create assessments that are unique to your program, and measure your students’ performance against the grade-level outcomes. The assessments are process focused and are designed to measure multiple constructs as well as provide meaningful feedback to students—ultimately helping them to develop holistically across all three learning domains (psychomotor, cognitive, and affective). PE Metrics will help you instill in students the knowledge, skills, and confidence they need to enjoy a lifetime of healthful physical activity.

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