Best of
Read-For-School

2021

Save the Cat!® Writes for TV: The Last Book on Creating Binge-Worthy Content You'll Ever Need


Jamie Nash - 2021
    ​Screenwriter Jamie Nash takes up Snyder’s torch to lay out a step-by-step approach using Blake’s principles so that both new and experienced writers can learn how to: -Use all the nuances, tricks, and techniques of pilot-writing (The Opening Pitch, The Guided Tour, The Whiff of Change) with examples from today’s hottest series -Discover the Super-Secret Keep It On The Downlow TV Pitch Template that combines all the critical points of your amazing TV series into one easy-to-read-over-lunch high-level document -Define the 9 TV Franchise Types -Crack your story using the Save the Cat! beat sheet -Devise high-level series concepts with multi-season potential -Map out and organize TV pilots and multi-season shows -Break down the best and most diverse TV series using examples from Atlanta, Barry, Ozark, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, What We Do in the Shadows, Black-ish, The Mandalorian, Law and Order: SVU and more -Create layered characters who are driven by complex internal struggles It’s time for Save the Cat! Writes for TV to help you create your binge-worthy TV series!

Frankenstein: A Guide to Reading and Reflecting


Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley - 2021
    Frankenstein. The Scarlet Letter. You’re familiar with these pillars of classic literature. You have seen plenty of Frankenstein costumes, watched the film adaptations, and may even be able to rattle off a few quotes, but do you really know how to read these books? Do you know anything about the authors who wrote them, and what the authors were trying to teach readers through their stories? Do you know how to read them as a Christian? Taking into account your old worldview, as well as that of the author?   In this beautiful cloth-over-board edition bestselling author, literature professor, and avid reader Karen Swallow Prior will guide you through Frankenstein. She will not only navigate you through the pitfalls that trap readers today, but show you how to read it in light of the gospel, and to the glory of God.   This edition includes a thorough introduction to the author, context, and overview of the work (without any spoilers for first-time readers), the full original text, as well as footnotes and reflection questions throughout to help the reader attain a fuller grasp of Frankenstein.   The full series currently includes: Heart of Darkness, Sense and Sensibility, Jane Eyre, and Frankenstein. Make sure to keep an eye out for the next classics in the series.

On Being Yukiko


Jeff Chiba Stearns - 2021
    Two of Canada’s most notable Japanese Canadian artists, Jeff Chiba Stearns and Lillian Michiko Blakey, come together in an exciting graphic novel collaboration to tell an intergenerational story on family history and cultural identity.Through the blending of two unique artistic styles, Jeff’s cartoony Hapanimation and Lillian’s mixed media realism, 12-year-old Emma learns about her Japanese roots when her Ba-chan tells her the true-life story of her great-great grandmother Maki, a Japanese picture bride, who journeyed to Canada at the turn of the 20th century.Maki’s story of extreme perseverance and sacrifice inspires Emma, who identifies as a quarter Japanese, to discover a deeper connection to her Japanese Canadian identity...and on being Yukiko.

It's Your Funeral!: Plan the Celebration of a Lifetime--Before It's Too Late


Kathy Benjamin - 2021
    But you can have a blast planning it! Death is scary—but planning your funeral doesn't have to be! It's Your Funeral! will help demystify death, decrease your anxiety, and put the fun back in funeral, whether that means a drunken bacchanal or a somber reflection on just how great you were. Every stage of the legacy planning process is considered, from a burial outfit to a funeral theme. Practical and cheeky questions alike are answered, including: • What is the most eco-friendly burial method? • Can I write my own obituary? • Can my body be shot into space after I die? • How can I manage my digital legacy?Offering a plethora of curious facts, strange stories, and inspiration to help you think outside the coffin, It’s Your Funeral! includes worksheets that will ensure your wishes are recorded for posterity. Planning for death should be the time of your life, so let’s get started!

Kurdish Women's Stories


Houzan Mahmoud - 2021
    Going beyond exoticising stereotypes and patriarchal representations, Kurdish Women's Stories gives twenty-four women authorial freedom to write about their own lived experiences. With contributors ranging from 20 to 70 years of age, we hear stories of imprisonment, exile, disappearances of loved ones, gender-based violence, uprisings, feminist activism and armed resistance, including first-hand accounts of political moments from the 1960s to today. Conceived as part of Culture Project's self-writing program, this book is essential reading for anyone who wants to better understand the struggle of Kurdish women through their own words.

The Great Gatsby: But Nick has Scoliosis


Dick C. Heese - 2021
    

Rise Up!: How You Can Join the Fight Against White Supremacy


Crystal Marie Fleming - 2021
    With her honest, direct tone, Crystal imparts the knowledge and values that unite all antiracists who wish to join the struggle for equality in the hopes of building a more inclusive world: empathy, respect, and tolerance.

Spot Weather Forecast


Kevin Goodan - 2021
    Forest Service elite, a Type 1 Interagency "Hotshot" Crew (the "SEAL Team Six of the firefighting world"), poems weave together memory, urgency, and the passage of time. Features segments from actual incident reports, forcing readers to witness what it's like to stand before an inferno, walking with one foot in the black. An elegy for the self and the damage one sustains fighting wildfires"--

Forest 404


Timothy X. Atack - 2021
    

What Britain Did to Nigeria: A Short History of Conquest and Rule


Max Siollun - 2021
    Thanks to this skewed writing of history, many Nigerians today still have Empire nostalgia and view the colonial period through rose-tinted glasses.Max Siollun offers a bold rethink: an unromanticised history, arguing compellingly that colonialism had few benevolent intentions, but many unjust outcomes. It may have ended slavery and human sacrifice, but it was accompanied by extreme violence; ethnic and religious identity were cynically exploited to maintain control, while the forceful remoulding of longstanding legal and social practices permanently altered the culture and internal politics of indigenous communities. The aftershocks of this colonial meddling are still being felt decades after independence. Popular narratives often suggest that the economic and political turmoil are homegrown, but the reality is that Britain created many of Nigeria’s crises, and has left them behind for Nigerians to resolve.This is a definitive, head-on confrontation with Nigeria’s experience under British rule, showing how it forever changed the country—perhaps cataclysmically.

One Small Hop


Madelyn Rosenberg - 2021
    Report it to the Environmental Police Force. Too bad everyone knows the agency is a joke. B. Leave it be. They're just a bunch of kids—what if they hurt it by moving it? C. Find another real, live bullfrog on the black market. Convince their parents to let them bike to Canada. Introduce the two frogs. Save all of frogkind.Ahab convinces the rest of the group that C is their only real option. Because if they don't save this frog, who will? Their quest, which will involve fake ice cream, real frog spawn, and some very close calls, teaches Ahab that hope is always the logical choice and that science is always better with friends.With humor and empathy, acclaimed author Madelyn Rosenberg builds an all-too-imaginable future ravaged by climate change, where one kid can still lean on his friends and dream up a better tomorrow.

Grokking Machine Learning


Luis G. Serrano - 2021
    No specialist knowledge is required to tackle the hands-on exercises using Python and readily available machine learning tools. Packed with easy-to-follow Python-based exercises and mini-projects, this book sets you on the path to becoming a machine learning expert. Purchase of the print book includes a free eBook in PDF, Kindle, and ePub formats from Manning Publications. About the technology Discover powerful machine learning techniques you can understand and apply using only high school math! Put simply, machine learning is a set of techniques for data analysis based on algorithms that deliver better results as you give them more data. ML powers many cutting-edge technologies, such as recommendation systems, facial recognition software, smart speakers, and even self-driving cars. This unique book introduces the core concepts of machine learning, using relatable examples, engaging exercises, and crisp illustrations. About the book Grokking Machine Learning presents machine learning algorithms and techniques in a way that anyone can understand. This book skips the confused academic jargon and offers clear explanations that require only basic algebra. As you go, you’ll build interesting projects with Python, including models for spam detection and image recognition. You’ll also pick up practical skills for cleaning and preparing data. What's inside     Supervised algorithms for classifying and splitting data     Methods for cleaning and simplifying data     Machine learning packages and tools     Neural networks and ensemble methods for complex datasets About the reader For readers who know basic Python. No machine learning knowledge necessary. About the author Luis G. Serrano is a research scientist in quantum artificial intelligence. Previously, he was a Machine Learning Engineer at Google and Lead Artificial Intelligence Educator at Apple. Table of Contents 1 What is machine learning? It is common sense, except done by a computer 2 Types of machine learning 3 Drawing a line close to our points: Linear regression 4 Optimizing the training process: Underfitting, overfitting, testing, and regularization 5 Using lines to split our points: The perceptron algorithm 6 A continuous approach to splitting points: Logistic classifiers 7 How do you measure classification models? Accuracy and its friends 8 Using probability to its maximum: The naive Bayes model 9 Splitting data by asking questions: Decision trees 10 Combining building blocks to gain more power: Neural networks 11 Finding boundaries with style: Support vector machines and the kernel method 12 Combining models to maximize results: Ensemble learning 13 Putting it all in practice: A real-life example of data engineering and machine learning

Millennials Killed the Video Star: MTV's Transition to Reality Programming


Amanda Ann Klein - 2021
    As an alternative to the twenty-four-hour music-video jukebox the channel had offered during its early years, MTV created an original cycle of scripted reality shows aimed at predominantly white youth audiences including Laguna Beach, The Hills, The City, Catfish, and Jersey Shore. In Millennials Killed the Video Star Amanda Ann Klein examines the historical, cultural, and industrial factors leading to MTV's shift away from music videos to reality programming in the early 2000s and 2010s. Drawing on interviews with industry workers from programs such as The Real World and Teen Mom, Klein demonstrates how MTV generated a coherent discourse on youth and identity by intentionally leveraging stereotypes about race, ethnicity, gender, and class. Klein explores how this production cycle, which showcased a variety of ways of being in the world, has played a role in identity construction in contemporary youth culture—ultimately shaping the ways in which Millennial audiences of the 2000s thought about, talked about, and embraced a variety of identities.

No Ruined Stone


Shara McCallum - 2021
    This collection is timely and timeless as it reframes the complicated genealogies created by colonialism. Erasure is one of the colonizer’s most insidious tools and McCallum’s gorgeous monologues serve to reclaim the voices ignored, unsaid, and unclaimed because of colonialism. These poems offer an intricate history more honest and unforgiving than the tidy myths we’re content to live with.” —Adrian Matejka, author of Map to the Stars“No Ruined Stone imagines what might have happened if Robert Burns had sailed from Scotland in 1786, as planned, to take a job on a slave plantation in Jamaica. Supported by research, it is a subtle, multi-layered verse narrative, voiced mainly by the poet himself and later by his granddaughter, passing for white. The worlds it vividly presents beget reflections on creativity, history, slavery, race and many other issues. It is an exceptional work, a memorable achievement.” —Mervyn Morris “Shara McCallum brings her gorgeous poetics to a story of slavery and colonialism, challenging the historical archive's sheer, unyielding wall by going not over or around it, but fearlessly through. In musical, evocative language, her poems imagine the what-if-that-almost-was of Scotland's best-loved Bard, following Burns into the life he might have lived as a plantation overseer in Jamaica—then seeing his enslaved granddaughter back to Scotland to claim a life reserved for white women.” —Evie Shockley

What She Said


Deanna Templeton - 2021
    Templeton grew up in an ostensibly different environment in 1980s youth, but she recognized in them something of the universality of female adolescence, as they struggled with similar disappointments and challenges she encountered as a young woman. The book combines these modern portraits with gig flyers and Templeton’s own teenage journal entries from the mid to late 80s, in which the familiar experience of growing up is laid bare in all its antagonism, humor and pathos.

The Essential Kerner Commission Report


Jelani Cobb - 2021
    Yet Columbia University professor and New Yorker correspondent Jelani Cobb argues that this prescient report, which examined more than a dozen urban uprisings between 1964 and 1967, has been woefully neglected.In an enlightening new introduction, Cobb reveals how these uprisings were used as political fodder by Republicans and demonstrates that this condensed edition of the Report should be essential reading at a moment when protest movements are challenging us to uproot racial injustice. A detailed examination of economic inequality, race, and policing, the Report has never been more relevant, and demonstrates to devastating effect that it is possible for us to be entirely cognizant of history and still tragically repeat it.

The Son King: Reform and Repression in Saudi Arabia


Madawi Al-Rasheed - 2021
    Domestically, bin Salman's reforms have proven divisive, and his adoption of populistnationalism and fierce repression of diverse critical voices--religious scholars, feminists and dissident youth--have failed to silence a vibrant and well-connected Saudi society.Madawi Al-Rasheed lays bare the world of repression behind the crown prince's reforms. She dissects the Saudi regime's propaganda and progressive new image, while also dismissing Orientalist views that despotism is the only pathway to stable governance in the Middle East. Charting old and newchallenges to the fragile Saudi nation from the kingdom's very inception, this blistering book exposes the dangerous contradictions at the heart of the Son King's Saudi Arabia.

The Man Grave: Poems


Christopher Salerno - 2021
    In perceptive and moving poems, Christopher Salerno explores patriarchy, boyhood, lust, misogyny and homophobia, infertility, and family in an effort to diagnose—and remedy—inherited patterns of manliness. “Have I / made it any further than my father / in his laughter, before his slaughter?” Salerno writes. His new collection is a moving and generous answer.

How White Men Won the Culture Wars: A History of Veteran America


Joseph Darda - 2021
    “If war among the whites brought peace and liberty to the blacks,” Frederick Douglass asked in 1875, peering into the nation’s future, “what will peace among the whites bring?” The answer then and now, after civil war and civil rights: a white reunion disguised as a veterans’ reunion.  How White Men Won the Culture Wars shows how a broad contingent of white men––conservative and liberal, hawk and dove, vet and nonvet––transformed the Vietnam War into a staging ground for a post–civil rights white racial reconciliation. Conservatives could celebrate white vets as deracinated embodiments of the nation. Liberals could treat them as minoritized heroes whose voices must be heard. Erasing Americans of color, Southeast Asians, and women from the war, white men could agree, after civil rights and feminism, that they had suffered and deserved more. From the POW/MIA and veterans’ mental health movements to Rambo and “Born in the U.S.A.,” they remade their racial identities for an age of color blindness and multiculturalism in the image of the Vietnam vet. No one wins in a culture war—except, Joseph Darda argues, white men dressed in army green.