Search results for ""Author Matt"

A magical and comedic take on modern love, the power of friendship, and the allure of disguise. In the heart of New York City, a group of artistic friends struggles with society's standards of beauty. At the center are Barb and Lily, two women at opposite ends of the beauty spectrum, but with the same problem: each fears she will never find a love that can overcome her looks. Barb, a stunningly beautiful costume designer, makes herself ugly in hopes of finding true love. Meanwhile, her friend Lily, a brilliantly talented but plain-looking musician, goes to fantastic lengths to attract the man who has rejected her—with results that are as touching as they are transformative. To complicate matters, Barb and Lily discover that they may have a murderer in their midst, that Barb’s calm disposition is more dangerously provocative than her beauty ever was, and that Lily's musical talents are more powerful than anyone could have imagined. Part literary whodunit, part surrealist farce, The Unfortunate Importance of Beauty serves as a smart, modern-day fairy tale. With biting wit and offbeat charm, Amanda Filipacchi illuminates the labyrinthine relationship between beauty, desire, and identity, asking at every turn: what does it truly mean to allow oneself to be seen?

Read more less

The NKJV Unapologetic Study Bible cuts through the confusion with clear answers for today’s most complicated and controversial issues. With timely articles, thoughtful book introductions, insightful quotations, and profiles on some of history’s most unapologetic defenders of the faith, this is a Bible that won’t leave you guessing. You’ll grow in confidence as you discover how to defend your faith and share it with others in a world increasingly at odds with the truth of God’s Word. The Bible doesn’t shy away from the tough topics, and neither should you.Features Include: Book Introductions: Provide key passages and background information for each book Articles: Over 220 articles placed near relevant Scripture passages bring keen biblical insight to the current issues of the day Quotations: Over 70 quotations from historical figures help you understand, first, that the issues of the day are not new; and second, that wise people throughout history have been challenged to live by biblical standards, just as we are today Unapologetic Profiles: Over 50 profiles of historical figures inspire you with biblical faith lived out in the face of seemingly impossible circumstances Indexes: Categorize each of the above features to assist you in a topical study of the issues that matter to you 8.9-point print size

Read more less

The NKJV Unapologetic Study Bible cuts through the confusion with clear answers for today’s most complicated and controversial issues. With timely articles, thoughtful book introductions, insightful quotations, and profiles on some of history’s most unapologetic defenders of the faith, this is a Bible that won’t leave you guessing. You’ll grow in confidence as you discover how to defend your faith and share it with others in a world increasingly at odds with the truth of God’s Word. The Bible doesn’t shy away from the tough topics, and neither should you.Features Include: Book Introductions: Provide key passages and background information for each book Articles: Over 220 articles placed near relevant Scripture passages bring keen biblical insight to the current issues of the day Quotations: Over 70 quotations from historical figures help you understand, first, that the issues of the day are not new; and second, that wise people throughout history have been challenged to live by biblical standards, just as we are today Unapologetic Profiles: Over 50 profiles of historical figures inspire you with biblical faith lived out in the face of seemingly impossible circumstances Indexes: Categorize each of the above features to assist you in a topical study of the issues that matter to you 8.9-point print size

Read more less

International Bestseller Feeling overwhelmed with work and life demands? Rushing, multitasking, or relying on fancy devices and apps won't help. The answer is to create the conditions for two awesome hours of peak productivity per day. Drawing on cutting-edge neuroscience, Josh Davis, director of research at the NeuroLeadership Institute explains clearly that our brains and bodies operate according to complex biological needs that, when leveraged intelligently, can make us incredibly effective. From what and when we eat, to when we tackle tasks or disengage-how we plan our activities has a huge impact on performance. Davis shows us how we can create the conditions for two awesome hours of effective mental performance by: * Recognizing when to effective flip the switch on our automatic thinking;* Scheduling tasks based on their "processing demand" and recovery time;* Learning how to direct attention, rather than avoid distractions;* Feeding and moving our bodies in ways that prep us for success;* Identifying what matters in our environment to be at the top of our mental game. We are capable of impressive feats of comprehension, motivation, thinking, and performance when our brain and biological systems are functioning optimally. Two Awesome Hours will show you how to be your most productive every day.

Read more less

In this beautiful, practical decorating and entertaining guide, Rachel Ashworth reveals how to make any event a special occasion using her signature Shabby Chic style. In this beautiful, accessible book, Rachel Ashwell, the founder of Shabby Chic, shows that sophisticated entertaining doesn't have to be expensive. Transforming the every day into an elegant extravaganza is a matter of inspiration and imagination, and in Shabby Chic: Sumptuous Settings and Other Lovely Things she offers exciting ideas to help you create beautiful settings of your own. Travel with her to unique locations, including a Chinese grocery store, a local antique mall, a flower market, and flea markets, to search for the perfect accents that will give an event unexpected charm-without breaking the bank. Rachel teaches you how to use inexpensive treasures to enhance ordinary objects-from adding a coat of paint or some ribbons or flowers to decorate chairs and tables, to creating a themed meal, to easily customizing menus and place cards. When it comes to setting a scene, Rachel is an expert, and in Shabby Chic: Sumptuous Settings and Other Lovely Things she offers easy how-to advice for making any occasion extraordinary, including baby showers, weddings, birthday parties, bar mitzvahs, and even old-fashioned family dinners. Illustrated with 200 full-color photos throughout.

Read more less

Banking is under threat. Despite access to fast-paced technology known as FinTech, an antiquated business model and internal organizational paralysis do not allow for the creation of a truly beloved brand and are stifling change. To survive and thrive when their competition is catching up, banks must understand the principles behind Emotional Banking—a cultural change concept that brings the consumer to the center of rethinking banking products and delivery. This book starts with a history of the space then moves into an overview of what FinTech is. After discussing the state of banking today including stories from the biggest names in the industry, the concept of Emotional Banking and Brand are introduced as an answer to the problems outlined above. It concludes with examples of best practices and a hands-on approach on how to change the inertia, become a brand and make customers fall in love with their bank. Some of the questions this book tackles include: · Why don’t banks “care”? · How many banks will survive? · What is FinTech and why does it matter? · Can Banks become beloved brands and find their way to the consumer’s heart? · Why is there a disconnect between what we say and what we do in the industry? · Is inertia in banking a result of broken internal culture? · Which big brand or challenger will be at the top in 5 years?

Read more less

This book compiles and presents a complete package of open-access Python software code for luminescence signal analysis in the areas of radiation dosimetry, luminescence dosimetry, and luminescence dating. Featuring more than 90 detailed worked examples of Python code, fully integrated into the text, 16 chapters summarize the theory and equations behind the subject matter, while presenting the practical Python codes used to analyze experimental data and extract the various parameters that mathematically describe the luminescence signals. Several examples are provided of how researchers can use and modify the available codes for different practical situations. Types of luminescence signals analyzed in the book are thermoluminescence (TL), isothermal luminescence (ITL), optically stimulated luminescence (OSL), infrared stimulated luminescence (IRSL), timeresolved luminescence (TR) and dose response of dosimetric materials. The open-access Python codes are available at GitHub.The book is well suited to the broader scientific audience using the tools of luminescence dosimetry: physicists, geologists, archaeologists, solid-state physicists, medical physicists, and all scientists using luminescence dosimetry in their research. The detailed code provided allows both students and researchers to be trained quickly and efficiently on the practical aspects of their work, while also providing an overview of the theory behind the analytical equations.

Read more less

A widescreen frame in cinema beckons the eye to playfully, creatively roam. Such technology also gives inventive filmmakers room to disrupt and redirect audience expectations, surprising viewers through the use of a wider, more expansive screen. Playful Frames: Styles of Widescreen Cinema studies the poetics of the auteur-driven widescreen image, offering nimble, expansive analyses of the work of four distinctive filmmakers – Jean Negulesco, Blake Edwards, Robert Altman, and John Carpenter – who creatively inhabited the nooks and crannies of widescreen moviemaking during the final decades of the twentieth century. Exploring the relationship between aspect ratio and subject matter, Playful Frames shows how directors make puckish use of widescreen technology. All four of these distinctive filmmakers reimagined popular genres (such as melodrama, slapstick comedy, film noir, science fiction, and horror cinema) through their use of the wide frame, and each brings a range of intermedial interests (painting, performance, and music) to their use of the widescreen image. This study looks specifically at the technological underpinnings, aesthetic shapes, and interpretive implications of these four directors’ creative use of widescreen, offering a way to reconsider the way wide imagery still has the potential to amaze and move us today.

Read more less

Millennia ago, Ginny's family farm was all grass and rock and wild horses. A thousand years hence, it'll all be peacefully underwater. In the matter-of-fact here and now, though, it's a hotbed of lust and resentment, because Ginny's just cheated on her husband with the man who lives next door. When a crowd of locals-including Ginny's bitter sister Ella-turn up to help out on the farm, a day of chores turns into a night of serious drinking, and then of brutal, communal retribution. By morning, Ginny's been left for dead. But dead is the one thing she isn't. With a stolen horse and rifle, she escapes into the mountains, and a small posse of her tormentors gears up to give chase-to bring her home and beg forgiveness, or to make sure she disappears for good? With detours through time, space, myth, and into the minds of a pack of philosophical mules, Pity the Beast heralds the arrival of a major new force in American letters. It is a novel that turns our assumptions about the West, masculinity, good and evil, and the nature of storytelling onto their heads, with an eye to the cosmic as well as the comic. It urges us to write our stories anew-if we want to avoid becoming beasts ourselves.

Read more less

'There is nothing stronger than a broken woman who has rebuilt herself.' Hannah Gadsby, NanetteMulti-awardwinning Hannah Gadsby transformed comedy with her show Nanette, even as she declared that she was quitting stand-up. Now, she takes us through the defining moments in her life that led to the creation of Nanette and her powerful decision to tell the truth - no matter the cost.Gadsby's unique stand-up special Nanette was a viral success that left audiences captivated by her blistering honesty and her ability to create both tension and laughter in a single moment. But while her worldwide fame might have looked like an overnight sensation, her path from open mic to the global stage was hard-fought and anything but linear.Ten Steps to Nanette traces Gadsby's growth as a queer person from Tasmania - where homosexuality was illegal until 1997 - to her ever-evolving relationship with comedy, to her struggle with adult diagnoses of autism and ADHD, and finally to the backbone of Nanette - the renouncement of self-deprecation, the rejection of misogyny, and the moral significance of truth-telling.Equal parts harrowing and hilarious, Ten Steps to Nanette continues Gadsby's tradition of confounding expectations and norms, properly introducing us to one of the most explosive, formative voices of our time.

Read more less

'There is nothing stronger than a broken woman who has rebuilt herself.' Hannah Gadsby, NanetteMulti-awardwinning Hannah Gadsby transformed comedy with her show Nanette, even as she declared that she was quitting stand-up. Now, she takes us through the defining moments in her life that led to the creation of Nanette and her powerful decision to tell the truth - no matter the cost.Gadsby's unique stand-up special Nanette was a viral success that left audiences captivated by her blistering honesty and her ability to create both tension and laughter in a single moment. But while her worldwide fame might have looked like an overnight sensation, her path from open mic to the global stage was hard-fought and anything but linear.Ten Steps to Nanette traces Gadsby's growth as a queer person from Tasmania - where homosexuality was illegal until 1997 - to her ever-evolving relationship with comedy, to her struggle with adult diagnoses of autism and ADHD, and finally to the backbone of Nanette - the renouncement of self-deprecation, the rejection of misogyny, and the moral significance of truth-telling.Equal parts harrowing and hilarious, Ten Steps to Nanette continues Gadsby's tradition of confounding expectations and norms, properly introducing us to one of the most explosive, formative voices of our time.

Read more less

There has been an upward trend in reported cases of sexually transmitted infections (STIs) in the UK. Health Practitioners at all levels need to have an awareness and understanding of STIs and the various issues that surround them. This manual offers a good grounding and insight into many aspects and areas associated with STIs. Using reliable references and the available evidence, the manual itemises changes and improvements that could be made in health care settings in order to help reduce the incidence of STIs and to treat various infections as efficiently as possible. Sexual health must be underpinned by an holistic philosophy, positively endorsing human sexuality and accepting sexual activity as normal and life-enhancing. The manual uses an integrated approach to the contributing factors surrounding STIs and considers the range of influencing dynamics at play. Amongst the various factors discussed, the ethics and legalities of STI-related issues are addressed fully, which will leave the reader confident about where they stand on matters related to patient's with STIs. The Manual of Sexually Transmitted Infections is an excellent and reliable reference tool for all health care professionals, working in the primary, secondary, intermediate and tertiary sectors of health care, the independent sector, and the National Health Service.

Read more less

Tourism is a major global industry and continues to expand at a rapid rate. This two-volume collection of key published articles provides a comprehensive and much needed overview of the economics of tourism. Many of these articles are not readily available as they have been published in a range of non-economics journals. This reflects partly the presence of specialised journals devoted to tourism and partly the interdisciplinary nature of the subject. The editor has prepared an authoritative introduction, which not only presents an overview of the contents of each volume, introducing the subject to a wider non-specialist audience, but also provides insights and critical comments.The first volume concentrates on the basic economics of tourism. It covers the nature and role of tourism economics, determinants of tourism demand and the forecasting of such demand, supply-side aspects of tourism including industrial organization and issues in managerial economics, and public finance and public economics in relation to tourism. The second volume examines wider matters such as impact analyses of tourism, international tourism, tourism in developing countries and its role in economic development, and sustainability and environmental aspects of tourism.This book is a valuable reference for researchers, students and policymakers interested in tourism economics and tourism management, as well as non-specialists seeking an introduction to the subject.

Read more less

In this innovative series of public lectures at Newcastle University, leading contemporary poets speak about the craft and practice of poetry to audiences drawn from both the city and the university. The lectures are then published in book form by Bloodaxe, giving readers everywhere the opportunity to learn what the poets themselves think about their own subject. Where and what is the England in which we imagine we live? How do we authenticate this never-to-be-finished project? What are its imaginative origins, and how do contemporary poets stand in relation to those predecessors such as Eliot, Auden, Larkin and Hughes whose imaginary Englands have left such an imprint on the culture? Journeys to the Interior considers the work of a range of contemporary poets, including Peter Didsbury, Carol Ann Duffy, Paul Farley, Roy Fisher, Daljit Nagra, Jo Shapcott and George Szirtes, examining areas of dissent and signs of affirmation. Can England be seen as, in Langland's words, 'a fair field full of folk'? Is Englishness a matter of 'complicated shame', as Jo Shapcott put it? How do those born elsewhere who have made their homes here describe the experience of England? And if, as Auden said, 'all the poet can do is warn', what warning signs are poets receiving and transmitting in this period of doubt and anxiety?

Read more less

What is at the heart of Cyril Dabydeen's poetry is an acute sense of geography as both space and time. It is a sense that begins in personal biography, of the writer born in Guyana, long settled in Canada and conscious of his ancestral connections to India. Place frequently provides the subject matter and the metaphorical threads that run through the collection. Poems are drawn to hinterlands and interiors both as actual places and as mental landscapes and as a metaphor for the interior life of the poem - frequently independent of the writer's conscious intentions. Poems investigate journeyings and borders that connect to the adventure of engaging with the otherness of encountered people. Poems celebrate identities that can never be other than as multi-layered as the places that shaped them. Cyril Dabydeen writes with lyric grace, but perhaps his most characteristic voice is conversational, often witty and amused in its sharing of experiences as diverse as the incidents of travel, cricket, and the absurd pretensions of the literary world. In these conversations with the reader, the poems make enlightening connections between ancient Greece and Amerindian myth in Guyana; the present and the buried voices of the past. In paying homage to the great Guyanese writer Wilson Harris, Cyril Dabydeen signals that he too is a rejector of absolutes, in search of multiple possibilities.

Read more less

Lincolnshire is England's second-largest county—and one of the least well-known. Yet its understated chronicles, unfashionable towns and undervalued countryside conceal fascinating stories, and unique landscapes: its Wolds are lonely and beautiful, its towns characterful; its marshlands and dynamic coast are metaphors of constant change. From plesiosaurs to Puritans, medieval ghosts to eighteenth-century explorers, poets to politicians, and Vikings to Brexit, this marginal county is central to England's identity. Canute, Henry IV, John of Gaunt and Katherine Swynford all called Lincolnshire home. So did saints, world-famed churchmen and reformers—Etheldreda, Gilbert, Guthlac and Hugh, Robert Grosseteste, John Wycliffe, John Cotton, John Foxe and John Wesley—as well as Isaac Newton, Joseph Banks, John Harrison and George Boole. Lincolnshire explorers went everywhere: John Smith to Jamestown, George Bass and Matthew Flinders to Australia, and John Franklin to a bitter death in the Arctic. Artists and writers have been inspired—including Byrd, Taverner, Stukeley, Stubbs, Eliot and Tennyson—while Thatcher wrought neo-liberalism. Extraordinary architecture testifies to centuries of both settlement and unrest, from Saxon towers to sky-piercing spires; evocative ruined abbeys to the wonder of the Cathedral. And in between is always the little-known land itself—an epitome of England, awaiting discovery.

Read more less

In an era of turbulent ocean geopolitics, where environmental concerns and resource extraction are increasing interest in who owns what at sea, this timely book examines the international politics involved in how states delineate ownership and rights in the ocean. Analysing why some states settle their maritime boundary disputes and why others erupt into conflict, Andreas Østhagen uses the innovative approach of combining international law and international relations theory to examine four countries and their maritime disputes: Australia, Canada, Colombia and Norway. With a focus on marine resources, chapters unpack the dispute dynamics concerning offshore oil and gas, fisheries, and strategic security concerns. Through an examination of what led these states to settle their disputes, this innovative book delineates the wider political and legal factors behind boundary-making at sea and aims to improve the way that society resolves ocean conflicts. Navigating the complexities of international law and conflict resolution at sea, this book will prove a thought-provoking read for students and scholars of geopolitics and law. With ocean-governance an increasingly pressing matter on the political agenda of international negotiations such as UN Climate Change conferences, it will also prove an informative resource for officials engaged in ocean affairs, geopolitics, and the law of the sea.

Read more less

It changed her life. But can she remember everything?On a cold evening Zeb, a single mum in her thirties, is found wandering aimlessly on a remote road. She is dazed, confused and bloodied.She doesn’t know where she is, or how she got there. She has travelled far from home and someone has attacked her. Memory loss means she can trust no-one, and with her assailant unidentified, Zeb is desperate to be reunited with her son Matty, and to ensure their safety. But what will her search for the truth uncover? Will it bring answers, or more questions? And what if the person she can rely on the least… is herself?The Day She Can’t Forget is tense and evocative, perfect for fans of The Sister or Saving Sophie. Packed full of emotion, drama and mystery, it is Meg Carter’s second novel, following her bestselling debut The Lies We Tell. ‘Beautifully written, really intriguing and building to such a powerful and moving conclusion.’ Sophie McKenzieMeg Carter worked as a journalist for twenty years before turning her hand to fiction. Her features have appeared in many newspapers, magazines and online with contributions to titles including You magazine, the Independent, Guardian, Financial Times, and Radio Times. She is on the advisory committee of Women in Journalism. She lives in Bath.

Read more less

'Any writer who can evoke the existential sadness of a lonely cockroach, or make krill thrilling, or describe a snorkelling colleague being engulfed in a "gargantuan cetacean bum detonation" is a real gift to science communication ... thought-provoking' Guardian Everything you ever wanted to know about how animals live together, and what that means for us Some animal societies hold a mirror up to the human world: elephants hold funerals for departed family members. Pinyon jays run collective creches. Rats will go out of their way to help a cold, wet stranger. Other lifestyles can seem intensely alien. Take locusts, surging over the land in their millions, unable to slow down for a moment because the hungry ranks behind will literally bite their legs off if they don't stay one step ahead (actually, you might know a few people like that). But no matter how offputting an animal might be, behavioural scientist Ashley Ward can usually find something worth celebrating. Travelling the world from the Serengeti to the frozen Antarctic ocean, with stops in the muddy fields and streams of his native northern Yorkshire, he brings his curious eye and infectious humour right down to their level. The result is a world-expanding, myth-busting tour of some of nature's greatest marvels, in delightfully broad-minded company.

Read more less

Aside for the secretaries of state, those lofty roles at the Home Office, MOD, Exchequer, and Foreign office, the ministers of the UK are a cast of roles that expand, and contract based on the whims and political needs of the Prime Minister. Within their portfolios those MPs and Lords are immensely powerful - able to reshape whole sectors of British society, grant or refuse government contracts and planning permission, and intervene in matters throughout the country. And yet, few members of the British Public could name every single minister and fewer still could say the extent of each minister's responsibilities. We like to imagine that they are competent, prepared, and entirely in control, and we hold them to standards as though they are. But they are often none of those things. These men and women serve at the pleasure of the Prime Minister. Any misstep or scandal can invite media attention, public outcry, and their swift departure. At the same time, their resignations can shatter political alliances and bring down Prime Ministers and even governments. Their positions are, therefore, both immensely powerful and precarious. In Fifteen Minutes of Power, Peter Riddell draws on interviews with former ministers, conducted on behalf of the Institute of Government, to reveal the fraught existence of these powerful men and women.

Read more less

Elgar Research Agendas outline the future of research in a given area. Leading scholars are given the space to explore their subject in provocative ways, and map out the potential directions of travel. They are relevant but also visionary.Providing a critical overview of cultural economics, this Research Agenda explores the current state of affairs in the field, suggesting methods of improvement for the coherency and progressiveness of future research. Situating work in this area in its historical context, Samuel Cameron draws together a range of international contributors to explore the development of cultural economics.Undertaking a thorough examination of matters of data quality, statistical methodology and the challenge of new developments in technology, chapters examine the different approaches to cultural economics. The book explores the myriad ways in which the topic has been neglected by mainstream economics, and examines reasons why it needs to be considered, evaluated and explored in more detail in our modern world. Current researchers in cultural economics, as well as cultural policies and leisure studies will find this book an invaluable read in exploring different ways to integrate cultural economics into mainstream studies. This Research Agenda will also be an invaluable aid for advanced students to create discussions suitable for essay topics and dissertations. Contributors include: S. Cameron, C. Peukert, J. Snowball, H. Sonnabend, M. Zieba

Read more less

The entwined histories of Blacks and Indians defy easy explanation. From Black Lives Matter protests against Gandhi statues to Kamala Harris's historic election, this relationship--notwithstanding moments of common struggle--seethes with conflicts that reveal important lessons about race in the modern world. Shobana Shankar's groundbreaking intellectual history tackles the controversial question of how Africans and Indians see their differences. Drawing on archival and oral sources from seven countries, she traces how economic tensions surrounding the Indian diaspora in East and Southern Africa collided with the twentieth century's widening Indian networks in West Africa and the Black Atlantic. Decolonisation brought a reckoning with Euro-American racial hierarchies, as well as discord over caste, religion, sex and skin colour, simmering beneath the rhetoric of Afro-Indian solidarity. This book illuminates how postcolonial peoples remade race by reinvigorating cultural movements, from Pan-Africanism to popular devotionalism, in Africa, India and the United States. This new race consciousness was meant as a redemption from the moral dangers of economic rivalry. Yet rising wealth and nationalist amnesia now threaten this postcolonial ethos. Calls to dismantle statues, from Accra to Washington DC, are not merely symbolic. They seek to preserve dissenting histories, and the possibility of alternative futures.

Read more less

The 4am Mystery: that's an actual thing by the way. Even before a global health crisis took the shape of COVID-19, people around the world were finding themselves sleep deprived, awake in the middle of the night. You might be someone who says, no matter what you do, you just can't sleep. Sometimes you know why: your thoughts are racing, or a nightmare has startled you into consciousness. Other nights, you might toss and turn and, just as you finally doze off, the alarm blares. This book was written for you. It explores why you're awake, how you can manage your mind at night, and what might help if it's your dream content wreaking havoc. Drawing on nearly two decades of therapeutic work, research, and an ancient wisdom proven to helpfully manage the mind, Delphi connects the dots between sleep, dreams and our mental health. She particularly highlights the impact of grief and loss on our well-being, which can ultimately affect the quality of our night-time rest - even if no one has died. Her book guides the reader on a journey to make friends with night-time, learning what the dark might have to offer, to achieve a calmer, healthier, happier life.

Read more less

The effectiveness of a good strategy well implemented determines a business' future success or failure. Yet history is full of strategic decisions, big and small, that were ill-conceived, poorly organised and consequently disastrous. This updated guide looks at the whole process of strategic decision-making - from vision, forecasting, and resource allocation, through to implementation and innovation. Strategy is about understanding where you are now, where you are heading and how you will get there. There is no room for timidity or confusion. Although the CEO and the board decide a company's overall direction, it is the managers at all levels of the organisation that will determine how the vision can be transformed into action. In short, everyone is involved in strategy. But getting it right involves difficult choices: which customers to target, what products to offer and the best way to keep costs low and service high. And constantly changing business conditions inevitably bring risks. Even after business strategy has been developed, a company must remain nimble and alert to change, and view strategy as an ongoing and evolving process. The message of this guide is simple: strategy matters, and getting it right is fundamental to business success - this book will show you how.

Read more less

Examines the creation, context, and significance of the first and only East German feature film about homosexuality. It took forty years for East Germany's state-run studios, DEFA, to produce a feature film about homosexuality: Coming Out. The film's story seems radically ordinary today: a young teacher, Philipp, is gay but cannot accept the truth about his sexuality. He starts a relationship with a fellow teacher, Tanja, but falls in love with a man he meets, Matthias, whose confidence in his own self-understanding is alluring for him as well as a challenge. Acclaimed director Heiner Carow created a film that shows the difficulties, both internalized and external, that queer people faced in East Germany. In a quirk of history, Coming Out premiered in German theaters on November 9, 1989, the very night on which the Berlin Wall was opened, which meant the film was initially overshadowed, to say the least, by the earthshaking political events. Yet it remains a popular film and is regularly screened around the world, including prominently at queer film festivals. Kyle Frackman's book examines the film in both the late East German context of its creation and the international context of its reception. This book is openly available in digital formats under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC.

Read more less

An examination of the most significant literary criticism on Wilde at the turn of the century. In 1891, Oscar Wilde defined 'the highest criticism' as 'the record of one's own soul, and insisted that only by 'intensifying his own personality' could the critic interpret the personality and work of others. This book exploreswhat Wilde meant by that statement, arguing that it provides the best standard for judging literary criticism about Wilde a century after his death. Melissa Knox examines a range of Wilde criticism in English -- including the work of Lawrence Danson, Michael Patrick Gillespie, Ed Cohen, and Julia Prewitt Brown. Applying Wilde's standards to his critics, Knox discovers that the best of them take to heart Wilde's idea of the aim of criticism -- 'to see theobject as in itself it really is not.' By this, Wilde appreciates Walter Pater's profound observation that everyone sees through a 'thick wall of personality' and that, therefore, objectivity as conceived by Matthew Arnold does not exist. Admiring Pater, Wilde became a prophet for Freud, his exact contemporary. Their intellectual sympathies, made obvious in Knox's exegesis, help to make the case for Wilde as a modern, not a Victorian. Melissa Knox's book Oscar Wilde: A Long and Lovely Suicide was published in 1994. She teaches at the University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany.

Read more less

Hannah Rosenstein should be happy: after a lonely childhood of traipsing all over the world, she finally has a home as the co-owner of destination inn Carrigan's All Year. But her thoughts keep coming back to Levi "Blue" Matthews: her first love, worst heartbreak, and now, thanks to her great-aunt's meddling will, absentee business partner. When Levi left Carrigan's, he had good intentions. As the queer son of the inn's cook and groundskeeper, he never quite fit in their small town and desperately wanted to prove himself. Now that he's a celebrity chef, he's ready to come home and make amends. Only his return goes nothing like he planned: his family's angry with him, his best friend is dating his nemesis, and Hannah just wants him to leave. Again.Levi sees his chance when a VIP bride agrees to book Carrigan's-if he's the chef. He'll happily cook for the wedding, and in exchange, Hannah will give him five dates to win her back. Only Hannah doesn't trust this new Levi, and Levi's coming to realize Hannah's grown too. But if they find the courage to learn from the past . . . they just might discover the love of your life is worth waiting for.

Read more less

The Mother, the Politician, and the Guerrilla intervenes in discussions on decolonialism and feminism by introducing the example of the Kurdish Women’s Freedom Movement. Üstündağ shows how the practices and the concepts of the movement contribute to debates on how the past, present, and future can be critically rethought in revolutionary ways. In the movement’s images, figures, voices, bodies, and their reverberations Üstündağ elaborates a new political imagination that has emerged in Kurdistan through women’s acts and speech. This political imagination unfolds between flesh, body, voice, language. It is the result of Kurdish women’s desire to find new ways of being and becoming, between the necessary and the possible. Focusing on the figures of the mother, the woman politician and woman guerilla, Üstündağ argues that the Kurdish Women’s Freedom Movement changes what politics consists of, including its matter, relationality, temporality, and spatiality. Although anchored in the specific Kurdish experiences, the book puts the movement into conversation with feminist political theory, psychoanalysis, Black Studies, Queer Studies, and Decolonial Studies. In solidarity with the Kurdish Movement’s tradition of resistance to History with a capital H that Kurds have built through reiterated performance, the book seeks to establish what new entanglements with wide-ranging thought the movement offers as a provocation for contemporary politics.

Read more less

Oneida Utopia is a fresh and holistic treatment of a long-standing social experiment born of revival fervor and communitarian enthusiasm. The Oneida Community of upstate New York was dedicated to living as one family and to the sharing of all property, work, and love. Anthony Wonderley is a sensitive guide to the things and settings of Oneida life from its basis in John H. Noyes’s complicated theology, through experiments in free love and gender equality, to the moment when the commune transformed itself into an industrial enterprise based on the production of silverware. Rather than drawing a sharp boundary between spiritual concerns and worldly matters, Wonderley argues that commune and company together comprise a century-long narrative of economic success, innovative thinking, and abiding concern for the welfare of others. Oneida Utopia seamlessly combines the evidence of social life and intellectual endeavor with the testimony of built environment and material culture. Wonderley shares with readers his intimate knowledge of evidence from the Oneida Community: maps and photographs, quilts and furniture, domestic objects and industrial products, and the biggest artifact of all, their communal home. Wonderley also takes a novel approach to the thought of the commune’s founder, examining individually and in context Noyes’s reactions to interests and passions of the day, including revivalism, millennialism, utopianism, and spiritualism.

Read more less

The desire to erase the religions of Indigenous Peoples is an ideological fixture of the colonial project that marked the first century of Canada’s nationhood. While the ban on certain Indigenous religious practices was lifted after the Second World War, it was not until 1982 that Canada recognized Aboriginal rights, constitutionally protecting the diverse cultures of Indigenous Peoples. As former prime minister Stephen Harper stated in Canada’s apology for Indian residential schools, the desire to destroy Indigenous cultures, including religions, has no place in Canada today. And yet Indigenous religions continue to remain under threat. Framed through a postcolonial lens, What Has No Place, Remains analyses state actions, responses, and decisions on matters of Indigenous religious freedom. The book is particularly concerned with legal cases, such as Ktunaxa Nation v. British Columbia (2017), but also draws on political negotiations, such as those at Voisey’s Bay, and standoffs, such as the one at Gustafsen Lake, to generate a more comprehensive picture of the challenges for Indigenous religious freedom beyond Canada’s courts. With particular attention to cosmologically significant space, this book provides the first comprehensive assessment of the conceptual, cultural, political, social, and legal reasons why religious freedom for Indigenous Peoples is currently an impossibility in Canada.

Read more less

Argues for the queer potential of video games While popular discussions about queerness in video games often focus on big-name, mainstream games that feature LGBTQ characters, like Mass Effect or Dragon Age, Bonnie Ruberg pushes the concept of queerness in games beyond a matter of representation, exploring how video games can be played, interpreted, and designed queerly, whether or not they include overtly LGBTQ content. Video Games Have Always Been Queer argues that the medium of video games itself can—and should—be read queerly. In the first book dedicated to bridging game studies and queer theory, Ruberg resists the common, reductive narrative that games are only now becoming more diverse. Revealing what reading D. A. Miller can bring to the popular 2007 video game Portal, or what Eve Sedgwick offers Pong, Ruberg models the ways game worlds offer players the opportunity to explore queer experience, affect, and desire. As players attempt to 'pass' in Octodad or explore the pleasure of failure in Burnout: Revenge, Ruberg asserts that, even within a dominant gaming culture that has proved to be openly hostile to those perceived as different, queer people have always belonged in video games—because video games have, in fact, always been queer.

Read more less

Camelids are vital to the cultures and economies of the Andes. The animals have also been at the heart of ecological and social catastrophe: Europeans overhunted wild vicuña and guanaco and imposed husbandry and breeding practices that decimated llama and alpaca flocks that had been successfully tended by Indigenous peoples for generations. Yet the colonial encounter with these animals was not limited to the New World. Llamas beyond the Andes tells the five-hundred-year history of animals removed from their native habitats and transported overseas. Initially Europeans prized camelids for the bezoar stones found in their guts: boluses of ingested matter that were thought to have curative powers. Then the animals themselves were shipped abroad as exotica. As Europeans and US Americans came to recognize the economic value of camelids, new questions emerged: What would these novel sources of protein and fiber mean for the sheep industry? And how best to cultivate herds? Andeans had the expertise, but knowledge sharing was rarely easy. Marcia Stephenson explores the myriad scientific, commercial, and cultural interests that have attended camelids globally, making these animals a critical meeting point for diverse groups from the North and South.

Read more less

LONGLISTED FOR THE JAMES CROPPER WAINWRIGHT PRIZE FOR WRITING ON CONSERVATION. How should we restore nature and species, and why does it matter? What is lost when we choose not to engage in restoration of the natural world? And which parts of ourselves might we also lose if we choose not to help restore and renew the natural world before it's too late? In this collection, Karen Lloyd explores abundance and loss in the natural world, relating compelling stories of restoration, renewal and repair, describing how those working on the front lines of conservation are challenging the inevitability of biodiversity loss, as well as navigating her own explorations of the meaning of abundance in the Anthropocene. In an era of urgent ecological challenge, this timely book reveals the places that people are coming together to bring species and habitats back from the edge of extinction. Yet, elsewhere, many other species are being allowed to disappear forever. To understand why, she examines how humans have chosen to entangle themselves in nature and considers the ways we perceive the natural world. A book about ways of seeing, as Lloyd explores attitudes towards meaningful restoration, she weaves her insightful and joyous narrative through a diverse range of inspiring landscapes, from Romania’s Carpathian mountains and the Hungarian Steppe to Perthshire’s rivers and the dune forests of the Netherlands.

Read more less

A.D. 2088. Missionary daughter Abigail Caldwell emerges from the jungle for the first time in her thirty-four years, the sole survivor of a mysterious disease that killed everyone else in her village. After receiving a curious message from her grandfather, Abby goes to America, only to discover a nation that has that has become completely secularized and all religion has died away. A curious message from her grandfather assigns her a surprising mission: re-introduce God to America, no matter how insurmountable the odds.But a larger threat looms. The world's leading artificial intelligence industrialist has perfected a technique for downloading the human brain into a silicon form. Brain transplants have begun, and with them comes the promise of eternal existence. Abby and Professor Creighton Daniels, a historian troubled by the mystery of his father's sudden death, uncover a plot to force the entire planet to convert to this 'transhuman' status--and forever lose all possibility of a connection with God. Together, they begin to unravel the conspiracy, attracting the attention of the powerful and devious men behind it. In a race for their lives, Abby and Creighton search for the truth while humanity's spiritual future hangs in the balance.

Read more less

_______________ 'Devastating … Any reader with a heart will weep buckets' - Sunday Times Book of the Week 'Impossible to put down' - The Times 'An outstanding and daring achievement' - Irish Examiner _______________ SHORTLISTED FOR THE COSTA CHILDREN’S BOOK AWARD SHORTLISTED FOR THE YA BOOK PRIZE SHORTLISTED FOR THE CBI BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD SHORTLISTED FOR THE CLiPPA AWARD LONGLISTED FOR THE CILIP CARNEGIE MEDAL _______________ They think I hurt someone. But I didn’t. You hear? Cos people are gonna be telling you all kinds of lies. I need you to know the truth. Joe hasn't seen his brother for ten years, and it's for the most brutal of reasons. Ed is on death row. But now Ed's execution date has been set, and Joe is determined to spend those last weeks with him, no matter what other people think ... From Carnegie Medal winner Sarah Crossan, this poignant, stirring, huge-hearted novel asks big questions. What value do you place on life? What can you forgive? And just how do you say goodbye? _______________ Experience every emotion with the finest verse novelist of our generation... Don't miss Sarah Crossan's other irresistibly page-turning books Toffee, One, Apple and Rain, and The Weight of Water.

Read more less

Talking mergers and acquisitions for small- to mid-sized companies can sound exciting as the architects behind the deals are wide-eyed with effective growth strategies. But these complex transactions carry significant risk, no matter how simple or appealing they may look on the outside, and it is absolutely vital for all involved in the deal to make sure they are guarding themselves against costly mistakes that have been the downfall for many leaders and organizations before them. Complete with expert advice, case studies, checklists, and sample documents, Mergers and Acquisitions from A to Z walks you through every step of the process--from valuation to securities laws to closing and successful integration. Updated with the latest trends and regulatory developments, the fourth edition explains further how to conduct due diligence, calculate the purchase price, understand the roles and risks for boards, and more. When done correctly and cautiously, while fully educated on all avenues of the process, your company’s next merger or acquisition should be an exciting, profitable time as you take steps to eliminate rivals, extend territory, and diversify offerings. But you must first be prepared! Don’t make another deal without this trusted resource and its strategic and legal guidance by your side.

Read more less

An elegant and counterintuitive guide to achieving perfect timing Timing is everything. Whether we are making strategic business decisions or the smallest personal choice, we must decide not only what to do, but when to do it. Act too early—or too late—and the results can be disastrous. Based on a 20-year investigation into more than 2,000 timing issues and errors, When presents a single and practical approach for dealing with timing in life and business. Good timing, Albert argues, is not just a matter of luck, intuition, or past experience—all of which may be unreliable—but a skill. He describes that skill and details the tools and methods needed to conduct a successful timing analysis. The book is the first to offer an efficient and comprehensive way to think through any timing issue Filled with dozens of lively stories illustrating good and bad timing in all walks of life—business, warfare, medicine, sports, entertainment and the arts Written by Stuart Albert, one of the foremost timing experts in the world and developer of the first practical, research-based method for turning the skill of timing into a competitive advantage Engaging and counterintuitive, When will show everyone, regardless of the work they do, or the life they live, that "it's all in the timing."

Read more less

Faith + Planning = The Best Season Yet. Looking for a planner that helps you achieve your goals AND grow your faith? The Best Season Planner is a three-month daily planner to set goals with God and grow in your faith. Designed to help you feel "on top" of your days and weeks, achieve your goals, and stay rooted in your faith the whole way, this planner combines practical planning and faith-growing practices to help you pursue your God-sized dreams. HOW IT WORKS · Set three-month goals with God: Determine what you want to accomplish over the next three months. · Create weekly action plan and prayer requests: Make progress toward what matters and send out prayer requests for the week. · Stay on track each day: With a daily journal to organize your "to dos," practice gratitude, and soak in Scripture. · Reflect on your progress: Look back at the prior week to remember all you accomplished and give yourself a personal check-in. · Carry Sunday sermon into the week: With a space to jot down sermon notes to fuel you for the week ahead. You deserve a plan you can believe in, with God as your guide--let's start your best season yet!

Read more less

Contemporary continental thought is marked by a move away from the “linguistic turn” in twentieth-century European philosophy, as new materialisms and ontologies seek to leave behind the thinking of language central to poststructuralism as it has been traditionally understood. At the same time, biopolitical philosophy has brought critical attention to the question of life, examining new formations of life and death. Within this broader turn, Derridean deconstruction, with its apparent focus on language, writing, and textuality, is generally set aside. This book, by contrast, shows the continued relevance of deconstruction for contemporary thought’s engagement with resolutely material issues and with matters of life and the living. Trumbull elaborates Derrida’s thinking of life across his work, specifically his recasting of life as “life death,” and in turn, survival or living on. Derrida’s activation of Freud, Trumbull shows, is central to this problematic and its consequences, especially deconstruction’s ethical and political possibilities. The book traces how Derrida’s early treatment of Freud and his mobilization of Freud’s death drive allow us to grasp the deconstructive thought of life as constitutively exposed to death, the logic subsequently rearticulated in the notion of survival. Derrida’s recasting of life as survival, Trumbull demonstrates, allows deconstruction to destabilize inherited understandings of life, death, and the political, including the dominant configurations of sovereignty and the death penalty.

Read more less

What is the body when it performs music? And what, conversely, is music as it reverberates through or pours out of a performing body? Tekla Bude starts from a simple premise—that music requires a body to perform it—to rethink the relationship between music, matter, and the body in the late medieval period. Progressing by way of a series of case studies of texts by Richard Rolle, Walter Hilton, Margery Kempe, Geoffrey Chaucer, William Langland, and others, Bude argues that writers thought of "music" and "the body" not as separate objects or ontologically prior categories, but as mutually dependent and historically determined processes that called each other into being in complex and shifting ways. For Bude, these "sonic bodies" are often unexpected, peculiar, even bizarre, and challenge our understanding of their constitutive parts. Building on recent conversations about embodiment and the voice in literary criticism and music theory, Sonic Bodies makes two major interventions across these fields: first, it broadens the definitional ambits and functions of both "music" and "the body" in the medieval period; and second, it demonstrates how embodiment and musicality are deeply and multiply intertwined in medieval writing. Compelling literary subjects, Bude argues, are literally built out of musical situations.

Read more less

This book tells the story of the struggle to imagine new forms of justice after Nuremberg. Returning to the work of Hannah Arendt, Lyndsey Stonebridge traces the emergence of a critical aesthetics of judgment in a group of writers - often hard to place in the 'between' of modernism and contemporary writing - including Elizabeth Bowen, Muriel Spark, Iris Murdoch and Martha Gellhorn. From Nuremberg to the Eichmann trial, from the Paris Peace Conference to attempts to legislate for the world's newly stateless through the discourse of human rights, Stonebridge shows that these ethically-driven women intellectuals were drawn to the law because of its promise of historical justice, yet critical of its political blindness and suspicious of its moral claims. This book returns to the work of Hannah Arendt as the starting point for a new theorisation of the relation between law and trauma. It provides a new context for understanding the continuities between late modernism and postwar writing through a focus on justice and human rights. It offers a model of reading between history, law and literature which focuses on how matters of style and genre articulate moral, philosophical and political ambiguities and perplexities. It makes a significant contribution to the rapidly developing fields of literary-legal and human rights studies.

Read more less

Today, interest in networks is growing by leaps and bounds, in both scientific discourse and popular culture. Networks are thought to be everywhere – from the architecture of our brains to global transportation systems. And networks are especially ubiquitous in the social world: they provide us with social support, account for the emergence of new trends and markets, and foster social protest, among other functions. Besides, who among us is not familiar with Facebook, Twitter, or, for that matter, World of Warcraft, among the myriad emerging forms of network-based virtual social interaction? It is common to think of networks simply in structural terms – the architecture of connections among objects, or the circuitry of a system. But social networks in particular are thoroughly interwoven with cultural things, in the form of tastes, norms, cultural products, styles of communication, and much more. What exactly flows through the circuitry of social networks? How are people's identities and cultural practices shaped by network structures? And, conversely, how do people's identities, their beliefs about the social world, and the kinds of messages they send affect the network structures they create? This book is designed to help readers think about how and when culture and social networks systematically penetrate one another, helping to shape each other in significant ways.

Read more less

In virtually all the countries of the world, men, and to a lesser extent women, are today dressed in very similar clothing. This book gives a compelling account and analysis of the process by which this has come about. At the same time it takes seriously those places where, for whatever reason, this process has not occurred, or has been reversed, and provides explanations for these developments. The first part of this story recounts how the cultural, political and economic power of Europe and, from the later nineteenth century North America, has provided an impetus for the adoption of whatever was at that time standard Western dress. Set against this, Robert Ross shows how the adoption of European style dress, or its rejection, has always been a political act, performed most frequently in order to claim equality with colonial masters, more often a male option, or to stress distinction from them, which women, perhaps under male duress, more frequently did. The book takes a refreshing global perspective to its subject, with all continents and many countries being discussed. It investigates not merely the symbolic and message-bearing aspects of clothing, but also practical matters of production and, equally importantly, distribution.

Read more less

Many communities in the United States have been abandoned by the state. What happens when natural disasters add to their misery? This book looks at the broken relationship between the federal government and civil society in times of crises. Mutual aid has gained renewed importance in providing relief when hurricanes, floods and pandemics hit, as cuts to state spending put significant strain on communities struggling to survive. Harking back to the self-organised welfare programmes of the Black Panther Party, radical social movements from Occupy to Black Lives Matter are building autonomous aid networks within and against the state. However, as the federal responsibility for relief is lifted, mutual aid faces a profound dilemma: do ordinary people become complicit in their own exploitation? Reframing disaster relief through the lens of social reproduction, Peer Illner tracks the shifts in American emergency aid, from the economic crises of the 1970s to the Covid-19 pandemic, raising difficult questions about mutual aid's double-edged role in cuts to social spending. As sea levels rise, climate change worsens and new pandemics sweep the globe, Illner's analysis of the interrelations between the state, the market and grassroots initiatives will prove indispensable.

Read more less

Women remain the disadvantaged sex throughout the world, despite centuries of progress toward equality. We are so close to a tipping point, as women have never held more power: women control social media, influence their families' buying and consuming habits, and are a powerful force in elections. But many times, individuals may see or experience a women's issue at work or in the world at large and feel they can't do anything about it. So how do we harness women's personal and collective power to bring about change and finally achieve gender equality?To business leader Claudia Chan, the key lies in empowering women to achieve their own personal potential while reigniting engagement in the feminist movement. It's not just about you--stepping up in your own life lets you lift other women up with you and paves the way for others to follow. In THIS IS HOW WE RISE, Chan shares how to get beyond the limiting beliefs that hold you back, transform feminine traits once thought of as weakness into assets, and cultivate the internal habits to succeed and lead. Then, she shows how to put that personal power to work at a wider level by identifying the issues that really matter to you, raising awareness, and getting authentically involved.

Read more less

SHORTLISTED FOR THE CHILDREN'S AWARD, INDIE BOOK AWARDS 2024On the night of a full moon, a small tropical dingo cub is born. And it is her destiny to travel far from home to change things for her kind.Kimmi sleeps with her mama at her back, her aunty at her front and her three brothers squeezed in beside her. They are a family. But when the farmer who took her father returns to threaten the rest of them, Kimmi is separated from her mama.In an incredible act of determination, Kimmi's mama runs over mountain tops and dusty red earth to spend one last day with her cub and share with her the knowledge that will one day make her a queen.This is Kimmi's story, the story of how she became Queen of the Dingoes in a sanctuary that saves them from extinction. It is her mama's story, too. But mostly it is a story that goes back thousands of years, and follows the long line of female dingoes they belong to.An inspiring true story of survival and courage from one of Australia's best-loved writers. 'Parrett blends matter-of-fact content with a confidently poetic voice . . . For readers aged 8+' BOOKS+PUBLISHING'A lyrically told tale of survival and resilience for younger readers' SATURDAY AGE

Read more less

This iconoclastic and fundamental work, Eric Nordlinger's last, advocates a new variant of isolationism, a "national strategy" confining U.S. military actions largely to North America and to neighboring sea-and air- lanes but encouraging international activism and engagement in nonsecurity realms. In Nordlinger's view, disengaging from security commitments on distant shores would liberate the United States to use its resources and decision-making powers to act more effectively abroad in matters of economic policy and human rights. A national strategy would then become a powerful new method of encouraging international ideals of democracy, and isolationism would be freed of its previous associations with appeasement, weakness, economic protectionism, and self-serving nationalism. Nordlinger draws on the recent historical record to show that a national strategy would have lessened the perils of earlier decades, including those of the Cold War. While real dangers did exist during this period, engaged strategies, such as containment, too often exacerbated them. The United States could have effectively and far less expensively helped to deter Communist aggression in Europe and Asia by encouraging other nations to make larger investments in their own protection. Marshaling impressive empirical evidence in defense of a controversial position, this final work by a leading scholar of international affairs is essential reading for scholars, practitioners, and lay readers alike.

Read more less

Perhaps no event in American history arouses more impassioned debate than the abolition of slavery. Answers to basic questions about who ended slavery, how, and why remain fiercely contested more than a century and a half after the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment. In The Long Emancipation, Ira Berlin draws upon decades of study to offer a framework for understanding slavery’s demise in the United States. Freedom was not achieved in a moment, and emancipation was not an occasion but a near-century-long process—a shifting but persistent struggle that involved thousands of men and women.“Ira Berlin ranks as one of the greatest living historians of slavery in the United States… The Long Emancipation offers a useful reminder that abolition was not the charitable work of respectable white people, or not mainly that. Instead, the demise of slavery was made possible by the constant discomfort inflicted on middle-class white society by black activists. And like the participants in today’s Black Lives Matter movement, Berlin has not forgotten that the history of slavery in the United States—especially the history of how slavery ended—is never far away when contemporary Americans debate whether their nation needs to change.”—Edward E. Baptist, New York Times Book Review

Read more less