When Susan L. Taylor rose to editor in chief of Essence magazine more than a decade ago, she began writing an editorial column in which she shares her thoughts and feelings about how developing one's inner awareness ensures the wisdom and clarity needed to create a deeply satisfying and fulfilling life.The monthly column called "In the Spirit" is one of the most popular in the magazine.Susan L. Taylor connects with the reader in a personal and meaningful way, in a voice that is sisterly, informed, and motivating. She challenges her readers to transcend their fears, to face inevitable challenges in their lives courageously, and to use change as an opportunity to grow. "We limit ourselves because change may well mean dealing with the disapproval of the very people we rely on for support. Often words of inspiration and motivation, but she also suggests specific methods for working through problems and improving our emotional and spiritual health."We are not powerless spectators of life. We are co-creators with God, and all around is are the gifts, the clay, that we can use to shape our world," she says.Susan L. Taylor writes passionately about what she has seen and learned in the course of her travels throughout the United States, Caribbean, and Africa. Her essays have helped many to balance the demanding world of work and business with the personal world of family and friendship. She shares bits of her own life--her loves, her trails, and triumphs--and the lessons she's learned.Many of Susan L. Taylor's readers already collect her editorials and find in them a source of encouragement, self-affirmation, empowerment, and peace of mind. Now they can have new essays and a few previously published favorites elegantly bound in a gift-sized paperback edition to keep for themselves or to give as a gift of love to those who are special to them.

    29 pages of chapter summaries, quotes, character analysis, themes, and more – everything you need to sharpen your knowledge of Naked. This detailed literature summary also contains Topics for Discussion and a Free Quiz on Naked by David Sedaris.

    Historian Norman Cantor explains how and why common law developed out of Roman law, in response to the needs and assumptions of English society and culture from 1000 to 1780, and how it became the basis of the American legal system. Professor Cantor shows that many of the current debates about the jury trial, the adversarial model and other parts of our legal system stem from this history. He highlights the minds and personalities of prominent judicial leaders, from Cicero and Justinian in the ancient world, through Glanville and Bracton in the Middle Ages, to Coke, Blackstone and Bentham in later centuries. A concluding chapter relates the social and cultural history of common law to the American system of Supreme Court Justices John Marshall and Oliver Wendell Holmes and to the legal profession in the United States today."Imagining the Law" is authoritatively based on the extensive amount of recent research and writing in the field of legal history, and on Professor Cantor's reading of thousands of court cases. It is the first book to examine legal history in a cultural and sociological context and thus illuminates one of our most important institutions in a whole new way.

    "No rock critic-living or dead, American or otherwise-has ever written about pop music with the evocative, hyperpoetic perfectitude of Rob Sheffield." So said Chuck Klosterman about Love is a Mix Tape, Sheffield's paean to a lost love via its soundtrack. Now, in Talking to Girls About Duran Duran, Sheffield shares the soundtrack to his eighties adolescence. When he turned 13 in 1980, Rob Sheffield had a lot to learn about women, love, music and himself, and in Talking to Girls About Duran Duran we get a glimpse into his transformation from pasty, geeky "hermit boy" into a young man with his first girlfriend, his first apartment, and a sense of the world. These were the years of MTV and John Hughes movies; the era of big dreams and bigger shoulder pads; and, like any all-American boy, this one was searching for true love and maybe a cooler haircut. It's all here: Inept flirtations. Dumb crushes. Deplorable fashion choices. Members Only jackets. Girls, every last one of whom seems to be madly in love with the bassist of Duran Duran. Sheffield's coming-of-age story is one that we all know, with a playlist that any child of the eighties or anyone who just loves music will sing along with. These songs-and Sheffield's writing-will remind readers of that first kiss, that first car, and the moments that shaped their lives.

    Welcome to laughing until it hurts while covered in bodily fluids. Welcome to simple math at very high stakes. Welcome to an incredibly inappropriate sense of humor. Welcome to serving people on the most stressful days of their lives. Welcome to putting your hands in places you never imagined they'd be. Welcome to your front row seat to the ballad of life and death. That's not the welcome that this nurse was looking for, but that's the one he got. Irreverent and audacious, this brutally honest memoir covers what it’s like to come of age in an American Hospital. Welcome to a rollicking peak behind the curtain to what medical providers, and the health care system, are truly like.

    In these marvellous essays on history, politics and society, cultural critic Nadeem Farooq Paracha upturns various reductive readings of the country by revealing its multi-layered reality. With wit and insight, he investigates past events and their implications for modern-day society. Thus, one piece explores how and why Mohenjo-daro has been neglected as a historical site, and another examines how Muhammad-bin-Qasim, who briefly invaded Sindh in 713 CE, has come to be lionised as the original founder of Pakistan. There is a story about a Pakistani Jimi Hendrix who plays the guitar like a dream and also one about a medieval emperor who lives on in the swear words of a Punjabi peasant. There are essays on Pakistani pop music, on Afro-Pakistanis and on how Jhuley Lal came to be more than just a folk deity for Sindhi immigrants in India. Points of Entry examines the constant struggle between two distinct tendencies in Pakistani civic-nationalism—one modernist, the other theocratic—and the complex society it has birthed.

    Magazine, Bitch was launched in the mid-nineties as a Xerox-and-staple zine covering the landscape of popular culture from a feminist perspective. Both unabashed in its love for the guilty pleasures of consumer culture and deeply thoughtful about the way the pop landscape reflects and impacts women's lives, Bitch grew to be a popular, full-scale magazine with a readership that stretched worldwide. Today it stands as a touchstone of hip, young feminist thought, looking with both wit and irreverence at the way pop culture informs feminism--and vice versa--and encouraging readers to think critically about the messages lurking behind our favorite television shows, movies, music, books, blogs, and the like. BITCHFest offers an assortment of the most provocative essays, reporting, rants, and raves from the magazine's first ten years, along with new pieces written especially for the collection. Smart, nuanced, cranky, outrageous, and clear-eyed, the anthology covers everything from a 1996 celebration of pre-scandal Martha Stewart to a more recent critical look at the "gayby boom"; from a time line of black women on sitcoms to an analysis of fat suits as the new blackface; from an attempt to fashion a feminist vulgarity to a reclamation of female virginity. It's a recent history of feminist pop-culture critique and an arrow toward feminism's future.

    In 1964, he was a seventeen-year-old Ohio high school kid. And he kept a diary.It's all here. The teenage girl who got away. The twenty-seven-year-old woman who didn't. The first beer. The first job. A series of bad haircuts. Friendship and betrayal, griping and groping, a daily account of one boy's struggle -- and all of our struggles -- to forge his way into adulthood with dignity intact, virginity a bad memory, and the day-to-day knowledge that it's not going to get any easier."A delightful book, and like the song Greene cruised to that summer, fun, fun, fun." -- Los Angeles Times Book Review"Everyone who was ever seventeen will love it!" -- Ann Landers

    More than a place to stalk the white-tail, this is a place to get together, chase armadillos, swap campfire stories, listen to quail, make biscuits, and enjoy the antics of ringtails. It's the sort of place where a man is only as good as his dog, where memories last longer, where the hunter's moon is the perfect light for chasing raccoons. Most important, it is a place to recharge the spirit and renew family ties.

    Funny, provocative and shot through with refreshing amounts of common sense, Thinking About It Only Makes It Worse celebrates and commiserates on the state of things in our not entirely glorious nation.

    He saw his country being devastated by war & progress & he waged a private war to save it. His only weapons were words - the poetry for which he is best known &, even more influential, the radio talks that first made him a phenomenon.

    The winningest coach ever in college football, crafter of The Grand Experiment that put honor and academics above all else, finished his days under the dark cloud of shame and unspeakable child abuse. How? Why? What mix of fandom, ego, and unfettered power brought Penn State and its beloved coach to this? Just days after Paterno’s death comes this insightful look at the rise of Penn State under the 46-year reign of the man affectionately known as Joe Pa. Acclaimed writer Jonathan Mahler, author of the bestseller "Ladies and Gentlemen, The Bronx is Burning", has been immersed in reporting the Paterno saga since the scandal broke last fall. His penetrating narrative traces the arc of Paterno’s career from dogged Ivy League quarterback to visionary coach to unassailable icon. Over the years, as his fame and reputation grew, Happy Valley (as State College, Pennsylvania, was often called) morphed into the realm of Paterno; the chant “We Are Penn State” could just as easily have been “We Are Coach Paterno.” It was perhaps inevitable that what Mahler calls “a slow rot” began to pervade Joe Pa’s football program, culminating with the horrific scandal that rocked Penn State and forever altered the Paterno story. "As it all unraveled," Mahler writes, "he seemed to resemble less his hero Aeneas, building a new nation—Penn State Nation—in Happy Valley, than King Lear, clinging stubbornly to the throne when he no longer had the judgment required to remain in it, then succumbing to the grief and anguish that accompanied the collapse of everything he had so painstakingly built."Mahler’s admiring yet honest assessment shows what can happen when a school, and an entire community, falls under a cult of personality. Part eulogy, part post-mortem, part wise appraisal, "Death Comes to Happy Valley" is a thoughtful farewell to the larger-than-life man who was, in fact, merely mortal.***"An elegant book with a perfect ratio of reportage, biography and criticism. It gently pulls Joe Pa off the pedestal upon which he has long stood." — Dwight Garner, The New York Times***Jonathan Mahler is a contributing writer to the "New York Times Magazine" and the author of the bestselling "Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx is Burning: 1977, Baseball, Politics, and the Battle for the Soul of a City" (the basis for the ESPN mini-series “The Bronx Is Burning”) and "The Challenge: How a Maverick Navy Officer and a Young Law Professor Risked Their Careers to Defend the Constitution—and Won."

    Digging up behind-the-scenes dirt on stories the corporate news media overlooks (and don’t get him started on them!), Hightower reveals the real stories behind BushCo’s "Friday Night Massacres," what’s happened to our food, and the Bush plan for empire. With grassroots solutions, drawing on Hightower’s national Rolling Thunder Down- Home Democracy Tour—a traveling festival of rebellion against every tentacle of the corporate-politico power grab—Hightower is tapping into the activist network that is thriving at kitchen tables all over America. This is the real America the rest of the world doesn’t get to see, delivered with Hightower’s own hilarious brand of wit and outrage.

    

    These other subjects include...Caffeine | Ghostbusters | Being Poor | Twitter | Caravans | Obama | Wales | Paul McCartney | The Welfare State | Sherlock | David Cameron Looking Like Ham | Amy Winehouse | ‘The Big Society’ | Big Hair | Nutter-letters | Michael Jackson's funeral | Failed Nicknames | Wolverhampton | Squirrels’ Testicles | Sexy Tax | Binge-drinking | Chivalry | Rihanna’s Cardigan | Party Bags | Hot People| Transsexuals | The Gay Moon Landings