Eating Glass


Book Description

Even as we celebrate what we have achieved, applaud ourselves for daring greatly, and shrug off failure, we are dying inside. Because, nobody has really, honestly told us what failure feels like, and the truth is, it is terrifying and it is lonely and it hurts like hell. "Fail fast, fail often, fail forward" We live in an age that acknowledges the importance of failure and resilience to success. Yet, in our rush to bounce back from setbacks, we often miss that the journey through failure and renewal can be a difficult one that plays out over months or years. In this moving memoir, Air Force officer and entrepreneur Mark D. Jacobsen tells the story of his ambitious moonshot effort to use emerging drone technology to break sieges and deliver humanitarian aid in war-torn Syria. Even as his small volunteer team achieved breakthrough successes, cascading challenges brought down the effort and took Mark past the limits of his strength. In the two years that followed, amidst a grueling PhD program and a difficult faith transition, Mark learned to walk failure's path and find new life on the other side. Eating Glass is a compassionate and profound guide that will speak to any dreamer or achiever who is navigating the aftermath of a failure experience. It provides steady assurance that we are never alone in our journeys and that our seasons of failure are fertile times in which we grow.




Smoking Cigarettes, Eating Glass


Book Description

"A fiercely honest and beautifully written book." —Paul Austin, author, Beautiful Eyes and Something for the PainA cautionary tale of careless psychiatric diagnosis, treatment, and resilienceSawyer's memoir is a harrowing, heroic, and redeeming story of her battle with mental illness, and her triumph in overcoming it. In 1960, as a suicidal teenager, Sawyer was institutionalized, misdiagnosed, and suffered through 89 electroshock treatments before being transferred, labeled as "unimproved." The damage done has haunted her life. Discharged in 1966, after finally receiving proper psychiatric care, Sawyer kept her past secret and moved on to graduate from Yale University, raise two children, and become a respected psychotherapist. That is, until 2001, when she reviewed her hospital records and began to remember a broken childhood and the even more broken mental health system of the 1950s and 1960s.




Secrets of the Sideshows


Book Description

"Joe Nickell - once a carnival pitchman, then a magician, private detective, and investigative writer - has pursued sideshow secrets for years and has worked the famous carnival midway at the Canadian National Exhibition. For this book, he interviewed showmen and performers, collected carnival memorabilia, researched published accounts of sideshows and their lore, and even performed some classic sideshow feats, such as eating fire and lying on a bed of nails as a cinderblock was broken on his chest. The result of these varied efforts, Secrets of the Sideshows tells the captivating story of the magic, tricks - real or illusory - and performers of the world's midway shows."--BOOK JACKET.




The Glass Hotel


Book Description

INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the bestselling author of Station Eleven and Sea of Tranquility, an exhilarating novel set at the glittering intersection of two seemingly disparate events—the exposure of a massive criminal enterprise and the mysterious disappearance of a woman from a ship at sea. “The perfect novel ... Freshly mysterious.” —The Washington Post Vincent is a bartender at the Hotel Caiette, a five-star lodging on the northernmost tip of Vancouver Island. On the night she meets Jonathan Alkaitis, a hooded figure scrawls a message on the lobby's glass wall: Why don’t you swallow broken glass. High above Manhattan, a greater crime is committed: Alkaitis's billion-dollar business is really nothing more than a game of smoke and mirrors. When his scheme collapses, it obliterates countless fortunes and devastates lives. Vincent, who had been posing as Jonathan’s wife, walks away into the night. Years later, a victim of the fraud is hired to investigate a strange occurrence: a woman has seemingly vanished from the deck of a container ship between ports of call. In this captivating story of crisis and survival, Emily St. John Mandel takes readers through often hidden landscapes: campgrounds for the near-homeless, underground electronica clubs, service in luxury hotels, and life in a federal prison. Rife with unexpected beauty, The Glass Hotel is a captivating portrait of greed and guilt, love and delusion, ghosts and unintended consequences, and the infinite ways we search for meaning in our lives. Look for Emily St. John Mandel’s bestselling new novel, Sea of Tranquility!




An account of the manners and customs of the modern Egyptians


Book Description

"An account of the manners and customs of the modern Egyptians" by Edward William Lane. Published by Good Press. Good Press publishes a wide range of titles that encompasses every genre. From well-known classics & literary fiction and non-fiction to forgotten−or yet undiscovered gems−of world literature, we issue the books that need to be read. Each Good Press edition has been meticulously edited and formatted to boost readability for all e-readers and devices. Our goal is to produce eBooks that are user-friendly and accessible to everyone in a high-quality digital format.







Strange Deaths


Book Description




7 Foot Man-Eating Chicken


Book Description

In any field of endeavor there are numerous paths to success. The business or profession of representing professional basketball players is no exception. We all choose through our experiences which path we are willing to travel in order to achieve that success. My profession is loaded with stories of payoffs and out and out bribery. (See the current FBI investigations) While I am an extremely competitive individual and one could say I have thrived in the industry, I choose not to cheat. This has led me down a path of less financial reward but of a much more interesting and diverse clientele. When you represent over 200 basketball players who just happen to be among the finest athletes in the World, you are in for some interesting situations. In 7 Foot Man-Eating Chicken I have picked out several of those bizarre occurrences. I believe I have put them in a form that is interesting as well as comical and sometimes very poignant.




On Understanding Grammar


Book Description

On Understanding Grammar covers the interdependencies among the various aspects of linguistics and the human language. This eight-chapter text considers some pertinent topics in linguistics, such as discourse-pragmatics, diachronic syntax, topology, creology, method, and ontology. Chapter 1 describes the notions of fact, theory, and explanation, particularly about how these notions manifest themselves in actual practice. Chapter 2 redefines syntax in terms of communicative function and discourse-pragmatics, and about the relation between the function of grammatical devices and their formal properties. Chapter 3 deals with discourse-pragmatics and how it transcends the narrow bounds of deductive logic, as well as the function and ontology of negation in language, and how those relate to the fundamental information-theoretic principle of figure versus ground. Chapter 4 explores the two major aspects of case systems, namely, the semantic role and pragmatic function, and how the two interact in determining the typological characteristics of grammars. Chapter 5 examines the relation between discourse and syntax based on diachronic, ontogenetic, phylogenetic viewpoints. Chapter 6 tackles the relation between synchronic grammar and diachronic change, while Chapter 7 describes the relationship between human language and its phylogenetic evolution. Chapter 8 is about language and ontology, as well as the relation between cognition and the universe. This book will prove useful to linguistics and language researchers.




Pragmatics


Book Description