Patricia and her husband Patrick are spending the summer in their holiday home in the Languedoc village of Morbignan la Crèbe. One hot Friday afternoon Patrick walks in with the little dog, thinking she is a stray. They have no intention of keeping her. ‘Just for tonight,’ says Patrick. ‘We will take her to the animal shelter tomorrow.’ It never happens. They spend the weekend getting to know and love the little creature, who looks at them appealingly with big brown eyes, and wags her absurd stump of a tail every time they speak to her. On the Monday her owner turns up, alerted by the Mairie. They could have handed her over. Instead Patricia finds herself saying: ‘We like your dog, Monsieur. May we keep her?’ It is the start of what will be four years as Morbignanglais, as they settle into life as permanent residents of the village. “At Home in the Pays d’Oc” is about their lives in Morbignan, the neighbours who soon become friends, the parties and the vendanges and the battles with French bureaucracy. It is the story of some of their bizarre and sometimes hilarious encounters: the Velcro bird, the builder in carpet slippers, the neighbour who cuts the phone wires, the clock that clacks, the elusive carpenter who really did have to go to a funeral.

    10,000 Americans turn 65 each day, and their average life expectancy is another 20 years--and many will live longer. But will they just live or have a meaningful life? The truth is that many--if not most--people approaching the latter years do not have a plan, much less a strategy to thrive instead of just survive. Packed with information based on research as well as common-sense wisdom, here are some examples of what readers will discover: - How retiring at the wrong time increases the likelihood of dying 89%. - What can delay Alzheimer's onset an average of 9 years. - How everything that makes you happy comes in just 3 forms. - Which partner is most likely to initiate divorce after decades of marriage and why.

    Unbelievable. Heartbreaking. Whatever words we choose, they all fall far short of the reality. The loss of a child is a terrible thing. How do we survive this? Can we? Shattered: Surviving the Loss of a Child was written to help. Bestselling author, hospice chaplain, and grief specialist Gary Roe uses his three decades of experience interacting with grieving parents to give us this heartfelt, easy-to-read, and intensely practical book. In Shattered, Roe walks the reader through the powerful impact a child’s death can have - emotionally, mentally, physically, relationally, and spiritually. • Intense, unpredictable emotions can hijack us at a moment’s notice. • Our minds spin. We forget things. It feels like we’re going crazy. • Our bodies get hit. Our health can be impacted. • Our souls feel crushed, shaking our faith and what we think we believe. • Our relationships change. A deep loneliness of the heart can set in. • Our plans and dreams are shattered. We’re now in uncharted territory. Yes, the loss of a child affects everything. In Shattered, you will discover how to… • Manage the massive changes that are occurring in your life • Take care of yourself during this process • Honor your child with your grief • Love those around you, even with a broken heart • Live life as well as possible while in the midst of great pain • Make your child's life count in deep and powerful ways Shattered is not a magic pill. The death of a child cannot be fixed. But comfort, compassion, guidance, and hope can be found in these pages. We will never be the same, but we can survive. And to some degree, we can heal. Shattered can help. Open this book, and let the healing continue.

    Some of the stories motivate, some are spiritual, and some provide strategies for excellence. All promote positive feelings, encouraging confidence, direction and vision. The stories contained in The Magic of Metaphor focus on values, responsibility, and leadership in all its forms. Specially selected to promote change in people's ideas, attitudes, beliefs, visions and behaviours they act as reframes, challenging and disturbing our existing frames of reference, recharting our accustomed maps of the world, and shifting us away from our limited thinking towards new learning and discovery through the use of effective metaphor. Containing sixteen suggestions (or tips) for effective story telling, advice on organisation, style and story telling skills, and a selection of stories that can be adapted and developed, The Magic of Metaphor is an inspirational sourcebook for counsellors, health workers, psychologists, professional speakers, managers, leaders and NLP practitioners, as well as for teachers, trainers, therapists. Providing tools that assist people in making beneficial changes in their lives, the stories contained in this book will bring pleasure and power to all those that listen to or read them.

    Here is a book that will stimulate your thinking and help you to be successful in your work, your study, and in your every day living. Our prayer is that it will also educated the reader in the areas of history, politics, economics and the culture war that is currently upon us. the articles and illustrtions from great thinkers and doers throughout history outlined on these pages, will, if studied and applied to your life, help develop your inner qualities, and that is where your real wealth is.

    If you have not yet bought the original copy, make sure to purchase it before buying this unofficial summary from aBookaDay. SPECIAL OFFER $2.99 (Regularly priced: $3.99) OVERVIEW This review of The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine by Michael Lewis provides a chapter by chapter detailed summary followed by an analysis and critique of the strengths and weaknesses of the book. The main theme explored in the book is how corruption and greed in Wall Street caused the crash of the subprime mortgage market in 2008. Despite being completely preventable, the big firms in Wall Street chose to ignore the oncoming fall in favor of making money. Michael Lewis introduces characters—men outside of the Wall Street machine—who foresaw the crisis and, through several different techniques, were able to predict how and when the market would fall. Lewis portrays these men—Steve Eisman, Mike Burry, Charlie Ledley, and Jamie Mai—as the underdogs, who were able to understand and act upon the obvious weaknesses in the subprime market. Lewis’s overall point is to demonstrate how the Wall Street firms were manipulating the market. They used loans to cash in on the desperation of middle-to-lower class Americans, and then ultimately relied on the government to bail them out when the loans were defaulted. Using anecdotes and interviews from the men who were involved first-hand, the author makes the case that Wall Street, and how they conducted business in regards to the subprime mortgage market, is truly corrupt beyond repair, and the men he profiles in this novel were trying to make the best out of a bad situation. By having the words from the sources themselves, this demonstrates Lewis’s search for the truth behind what actually happened. Ultimately, we as an audience can not be sure if the intentions of these underdogs were truly good, but Lewis does an admirable job presenting as many sides to the story as possible. The central thesis of the work is that the subprime mortgage crisis was caused by Wall Street firms pushing fraudulent loans upon middle-to-lower class Americans that they would essentially not be able to afford. Several people outside of Wall Street were able to predict a crash in the market when these loans would be defaulted on, and bought insurance to bet against the market (essentially, buying short). Over a time period from roughly 2005-2008, the market crashed and huge banks and firms lost billions of dollars, filed for bankruptcy, or were bailed out by the government. These men, the characters of Lewis’s novel, were able to bet against the loans and made huge amounts of money, but it was not quite an easy journey. Michael Lewis is a non-fiction author and financial journalist. He has written several novels—notably Liar’s Poker in 1989, Moneyball in 2003, and The Blind Side in 2006. Born in New Orleans, he attended Princeton University, receiving a BA degree in Art History. After attending London School of Economics and receiving his masters there, he was hired by Salomon Brothers where he experienced much about what he wrote about in Liar’s Poker. He is currently married, with three children and lives in Berkeley, California. SUMMARY PROLOGUE: POLTERGEIST Michael Lewis begins his tale of the remarkable—and strange—men who predicted the immense fall of the housing market by immediately exposing himself as the exact opposite type of person from them. He explains to the reader that he has no background in accounting, business, or money managing.

    In her 2019 account Consent: A Memoir of Unwanted Attention, she re-created, in novelistic detail, the story of being traumatized by her professor’s obsession with her, of how he used his power to try to rob her of her own. Freitas’s story has been hailed as “groundbreaking” (Kirkus) and “an important testament for the #MeToo era” (Publishers Weekly), “illuminat[ing] our ideas about harassment and harm” (Rebecca Traister). But readers’ responses to its publication, and the author’s experience of seeing the public’s response, impressed upon her that there was more to be said: not from the perspective of the naive young woman she was in graduate school, but in the fully empowered voice of the woman—the writer, teacher, and Title IX researcher and lecturer—she has since become. Pulling no punches, she speaks out here, in this searing Scribd Original, in a direct address—a letter—to her stalker.Dear Professor confronts and galvanizes. It is a public accusation and a personal confession. Above all, it is a guide to how to express and claim one’s anger, to use it to good and healthy effect to explode the shame that victims of stalking often feel and the silence they are often forced into. It acknowledges the grief of what was lost through years of trauma—the life that the author’s younger self had planned and invested in, including a very different kind of academic career. And it embraces what’s been gained: empathy, resiliency, adaptability, clarity, and more—all highly useful ingredients, it turns out, in becoming an expert on matters of consent and in successfully pursuing a writer’s life. It asks if either forgiveness or outing her stalker by name (something she’s assiduously avoided in print and at her readings and lectures) is necessary to her healing. Is what her former mentor did to her or may have done to others in any way her responsibility? How much can be expected of victims of such pernicious harassment? And how can Freitas continue to protect herself and her right to choose how she overcomes?At once intimate and incendiary, Dear Professor is an act of liberation and self-love and an invitation to others who’ve been victimized to accept their pain and outrage, assign fault where fault is squarely due, take pride in what must be a uniquely personal journey, and say no, and no again, to censorship, secrecy, and stigma.

    At the time of my arrest, I was a thirty-seven year old Harvard graduate with medical and post-doctoral degrees. I attended one of the finest residency and fellowship training programs in the world at the University of California, San Francisco. I played two sports in college, earned awards at every level of education and training, had wonderful friends and a beautiful three-year-old daughter. Having grown up the son of a restaurant manager and a housewife, I had transcended the humble beginnings of a small Midwestern town to become the quintessential American Dream.Or so I thought. But with my arrest on felony importation charges, everything I had worked so hard for was swept away and the entire trajectory of my life was indelibly altered. I would embark on a three year battle not only for my medical license, but also for my freedom. This journey would lead to intense personal introspection, and in that process, I would discover with ugliness, there was also beauty, and with punishment, mercy.There are many reasons I have written this manuscript, with one of the most important being that I hoped my story would resonate with others who have gone through difficult circumstances as a consequence of a dark side of their personality. With this book, I hope to inspire others to accept and embrace the good and bad, while continually striving for improved self-understanding and acceptance.I have changed names primarily for legal purposes, but the facts are unchanged. Although the events described in the book occurred more than ten years ago, I think about them nearly every day. The shame and humiliation are ever-present. Any simple Google search of my name reveals the truth, and that truth has affected me over and over, despite the years, as it probably should. As the judge told me that day in a federal courtroom, "You have betrayed the public's trust." This is my confessional.

    It has been used primarily by individuals in a daily practice that helps recharge, realign, and rebalance energy in the body. Today Reiki is joining other complementary therapies in the conventional settings of hospitals, hospices, counseling centers, emergency rooms, intensive care units. Nurses, physical therapists, surgeons, midwives, and anesthetists report that Reiki can help manage pain and promote healing. Counselors and caregivers treating those with terminal illness find that Reiki gives patients an increased physical, emotional, and psychological ability to cope. Reiki Energy Medicine explains the body's energy system, and describes how Reiki can be used in a variety of settings to balance energy and create the conditions needed for healing. "Reiki Energy Medicine" is the first book to show how this ancient art of touch therapy can work within our mainstream health care system. As our health-care system challenges institutions to offer high-quality but cost-effective service, Reiki can be an important tool that can help maximize patient care and minimize recovery time. Reiki does not require complicated techniques or extensive training: practitioners of many disciplines are able to easily incorporate it into their specialties.

    Documented by research, it is recommended by hospitals in the US, including Brigham and Women's Hospital, which is a Harvard Medical School teaching hospital and NYU Langone Medical Center in New York. It also includes chapters about using mind-body techniques to reduce the side-effects of chemotherapy, how to prepare children for surgery, and vitamins to speed healing. An updated edition was published in 2012.

    Powerful and passionate, Care Work is a crucial and necessary call to arms.

    With a pastor father and a stay-at-home mother, her 1960s southern upbringing was bucolic--even enviable. But when her brother, only seventeen, died in a waterskiing accident, the slow unraveling of her perfect family began. Though grief overwhelmed the family, twenty-year-old Galli forged onward with her life plans--marriage, career, and raising a family of her own--one she hoped would be as idyllic as the family she once knew. But life had less than ideal plans in store. There was her son's degenerative, undiagnosed disease and subsequent death; followed by her daughter's autism diagnosis; her separation; and then, nine days after the divorce was final, the onset of the transverse myelitis that would leave Galli paralyzed from the waist down. Despite such unspeakable tragedy, Galli maintained her belief in family, in faith, in loving unconditionally, and in learning to not only accept, but also embrace a life that had veered down a path far different from the one she had envisioned. At once heartbreaking and inspiring, Rethinking Possible is a story about the power of love over loss and the choices we all make that shape our lives --especially when forced to confront the unimaginable.

    It's bad for society, especially now. . . . Call me crotchety, but I can't help asking, whatever happened to the social contract?'The get-rich-quick exuberance of the late nineties may have temporarily blinded us to how dependent we are on one another. Subsequent events serve as reminders that the strength of our economy and the security of our society rest on the bonds that connect us. But what, specifically, are these bonds? What do we owe one another as members of the same society?With his characteristic humor, humanity, and candor, one of the nation's most distinguished public leaders and thinkers delivers a fresh vision of politics by returning to basic American values: workers should share in the success of their companies; those who work should not have to live in poverty; and everyone should have access to an education that will better their chances in life.An insider who knows how the economy and government really work, Reich combines realistic solutions with democratic ideals. Businesses do have civic responsibilities, and government must stem a widening income gap that threatens to stratify our nation. And everyone must get involved to help return us to a society that works for everyone.

    Over the past few years, we ve seen facial hair sprouting up on faces everywhere. Men want to experiment with their facial gardens, but it s not always just as easy as putting the razor to rest Any man will surely go back to shaving when his beard starts to itch. When a goatee or mustache looks bad, he ll shave it off, discouraged and unaware of his options. Marginalized facial hair stereotypes prevent every day, normal guys from making facial hair part of their personal style. Men have forgotten about their beards, let alone how to wear and care for them. Until now. The Facial Hair Handbook is a hilarious and informative guide to all aspects of facial hair, for men of all ages and all faces. From making the decision to wear facial hair, to the best way to take it off, all men can finally be stylish and care for their appearance while staying true to who they are: Men.

    And yet we rarely ask ourselves how we got there or what our occupations mean to us. The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work is an exploration of the joys and perils of the modern workplace, beautifully evoking what other people wake up to do each day–and night–to make the frenzied contemporary world function. With a philosophical eye and his signature combination of wit and wisdom, Alain de Botton leads us on a journey around a deliberately eclectic range of occupations, from rocket science to biscuit manufacture, accountancy to art–in search of what make jobs either fulfilling or soul-destroying.Along the way he tries to answer some of the most urgent questions we can ask about work: Why do we do it? What makes it pleasurable? What is its meaning? And why do we daily exhaust not only ourselves but also the planet? Characteristically lucid, witty and inventive, Alain de Botton’s “song for occupations” is a celebration and exploration of an aspect of life which is all too often ignored and a book that shines a revealing light on the essential meaning of work in our lives.