Based on a True Story


Book Description

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “Driving, wild and hilarious” (The Washington Post), here is the incredible “memoir” of the legendary actor, gambler, raconteur, and Saturday Night Live veteran. When Norm Macdonald, one of the greatest stand-up comics of all time, was approached to write a celebrity memoir, he flatly refused, calling the genre “one step below instruction manuals.” Norm then promptly took a two-year hiatus from stand-up comedy to live on a farm in northern Canada. When he emerged he had under his arm a manuscript, a genre-smashing book about comedy, tragedy, love, loss, war, and redemption. When asked if this was the celebrity memoir, Norm replied, “Call it anything you damn like.”




Letting Go


Book Description

It's hard to find time for a spiritual recharge in the morning, but Linda Estes is here again to help with her mastery of the one-minute devotional. We like "our stuff," don't we? We hold tight to our material things, our dreams, and our plans for our lives. We have things all lined out in our heads and hearts. Things are going along just fine and then God interrupts our stuff. He asks us to let go of something, or someone, we love. When that happens, we have two choices. We can either go along with God's plan or hang on to our own. Sometimes God asks us to let go of things simply to help us grow in our faith-walk with Him. Other times He asks us to let go so that He can do what Scripture tells us in Ephesians 3:20. God wants to "do far more abundantly beyond all that we ask or think." Only when we are willing to let go of whatever God is asking of us, can He then bless our socks off. When we let God be God and surrender "our stuff" so He can carry out His plan for our lives, that's when we really start living ... God's way. Linda's prayer for you as you read these one-minute devotions is that they will help you find the freedom and blessings in letting go. These books are for everyone who wants to start their day right with God, and make delightful gifts.




Letting Go of Literary Whiteness


Book Description

Rooted in examples from their own and others’ classrooms, the authors offer discipline-specific practices for implementing antiracist literature instruction in White-dominant schools. Each chapter explores a key dimension of antiracist literature teaching and learning, including designing literature-based units that emphasize racial literacy, selecting literature that highlights voices of color, analyzing Whiteness in canonical literature, examining texts through a critical race lens, managing challenges of race talk, and designing formative assessments for racial literacy and identity growth. Book Features: Specific classroom scenarios and transcripts of race-related challenges that teachers will recognize to help situate suggested strategies Sample racial literacy objectives, questions, and assessments to guide unit instruction. A literature-based unit that addresses societal racism in A Raisin in the Sun. Assignments for exploring Whiteness in the teaching of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Questions teachers can use to examine To Kill a Mockingbird through a critical race lens. Techniques for managing difficult moments in whole group discussions. Collaborative glossary and exploratory essay assignments to build understanding of race-based concepts and racial identity development.




We Were Relentless


Book Description

West Bloomfield, MI Life for the able-bodied is difficult enough. There are confusing individual choices to make, the usual minefield of relationships, financial uncertainty, and other challenges of the real world. Imagine how much more difficult it would be for those who have to live with disabilities such as needing a wheelchair to get around, or being blind, or deaf. Author Martin J. Levin shares with readers an inspiring and stirring account of his son's struggles and triumphs in WE WERE RELENTLESS: A Family's Journey to Overcome Disability. Jordan Levin's life started out as a perilous and suspenseful adventure for his parents. Born three months premature, he was so small that he weighed only 31 ounces with tiny hands the size of a man's fingernail. He had to have a series of operations to correct conditions that threatened his grip on life. But hang on he did. And when it seemed that everything would turn out fine, Jordan was diagnosed as being profoundly deaf he could hear sounds with frequencies below a certain threshold, but above that and he was at a loss. Amazingly, even before the diagnosis, young Jordan had the uncanny innate ability to lip-read. So, with the courage and foresight of his parents who were determined to raise him as normally as possible, he learned how to speak, graduated with a B.A. from Michigan State University, and grew up to become a successful and confident man. Later, he would embark on a career as a motivational speaker and personal trainer. More than a fascinating story of a person's triumph over disability, WE WERE RELENTLESS: A Family's Journey to Overcome Disability is also a touching account about a father's and mother's love for their son and how they encouraged him every step of the way to be all that he could be. For more information, log on to www.wewererelentless.com.




Dealing with Our Fears When Letting Go Seems Impossible


Book Description

Life in the twenty-first century is fast-paced, loaded with busy schedules and looming deadlines, making it nearly impossible to keep up, let alone get ahead. With pressures and stresses injected into each day, we find ourselves riddled with insecurities. As Christians, we know full well that we are to fret not, but how in this world? Falling economies and soaring oil prices, wars popping up like flowers after the winter snows, and we are to fret not? Exactly! Three and a half years into their service at this medical post, Dannie became totally blind and there was nothing that could be done. Dannie and Anne-Lise stayed to continue caring for the patients, trusting God to take care of them in this wild jungle environment. Dealing with Our Fears when Letting Go Seems Impossible is liberally sprinkled with true stories from jungle life, serving to illustrate the lessons of the Lord in the area of fretting. Do you find yourself fretting over: having enough faith? knowing Gods plan? waiting on God for an answer? trusting God? letting go of worries? Contained within these pages are these lessons and a model applicable for any Christian who needs to find a way to cope in this stress-filled, high-tech world.




Artificial Unintelligence


Book Description

A guide to understanding the inner workings and outer limits of technology and why we should never assume that computers always get it right. In Artificial Unintelligence, Meredith Broussard argues that our collective enthusiasm for applying computer technology to every aspect of life has resulted in a tremendous amount of poorly designed systems. We are so eager to do everything digitally—hiring, driving, paying bills, even choosing romantic partners—that we have stopped demanding that our technology actually work. Broussard, a software developer and journalist, reminds us that there are fundamental limits to what we can (and should) do with technology. With this book, she offers a guide to understanding the inner workings and outer limits of technology—and issues a warning that we should never assume that computers always get things right. Making a case against technochauvinism—the belief that technology is always the solution—Broussard argues that it's just not true that social problems would inevitably retreat before a digitally enabled Utopia. To prove her point, she undertakes a series of adventures in computer programming. She goes for an alarming ride in a driverless car, concluding “the cyborg future is not coming any time soon”; uses artificial intelligence to investigate why students can't pass standardized tests; deploys machine learning to predict which passengers survived the Titanic disaster; and attempts to repair the U.S. campaign finance system by building AI software. If we understand the limits of what we can do with technology, Broussard tells us, we can make better choices about what we should do with it to make the world better for everyone.




Holding and Letting Go


Book Description

This book explores the social practice of holding each other in our identities, beginning with pregnancy and on through the life span. Lindemann argues that our identities give us our sense of how to act and how to treat others, and that the ways in which we we hold each other in them is of crucial moral importance.




My Travels with Norm


Book Description

Short stories about fishing, hunting, and other miscellaneous activities which revolve around a friendship of more than 45 years.




From Reasons to Norms


Book Description

Metaethics is the inquiry into the nature of morality (or ethics, I use the words ‘morality’, ‘morals’, and ‘ethics’ as synonyms). When we pass moral judgements, what kind of claims are we then making? I speak of this as the semantic metaethical question. a re there moral facts, to be discovered by us and existing independently of our thoughts and conceptualisation? I speak of this as the ontological or me- physical metaethical question. a nd, if there are, can we know about them; and, if we can, how do we get this kind of knowledge? I speak of this as the epistemic metaethical question. a ll these metaethical questions, the semantic, the ontological, and the epistemic ones, are raised and discussed in this book, but they are not the core questions raised. I have been more concerned with another kind of questions, which deserve to be called metaethical as well: what are the problems of morality? a re there many different moral questions, or, do they all, in the final analysis, reduce to only a few, or perhaps just one? t his question is of special importance to a non-naturalist objectivist and realist like the present author, who believes that we do make truth-claims when we pass moral judgements and who believes that there is a truth in these matters so that we must face the possibility that even our most cherished moral judgements may be false.




Changing Norms Through Actions


Book Description

How do international norms evolve? This book focuses on the most important norm in the international system-the norm of sovereignty-and argues that the extent to which norms change depends on the outcome of military intervention.