Maxine in the Middle


Book Description

Tired of being neither the oldest nor the youngest child, Maxine decides to leave home.




Unraveled


Book Description

Longlisted for the FT/McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award A groundbreaking chronicle of the birth--and death--of a pair of jeans, that exposes the fractures in our global supply chains, and our relationships to each other, ourselves, and the planet Take a look at your favorite pair of jeans. Maybe you bought them on Amazon or the Gap; maybe the tag says "Made in Bangladesh" or "Made in Sri Lanka." But do you know where they really came from, how many thousands of miles they crossed, or the number of hands who picked, spun, wove, dyed, packaged, shipped, and sold them to get to you? The fashion industry operates with radical opacity, and it's only getting worse to disguise countless environmental and labor abuses. It epitomizes the ravages inherent in the global economy, and all in the name of ensuring that we keep buying more while thinking less about its real cost. In Unraveled, entrepreneur, researcher, and advocate Maxine Bédat follows the life of an American icon--a pair of jeans--to reveal what really happens to give us our clothes. We visit a Texas cotton farm figuring out how to thrive without relying on fertilizers that poison the earth. Inside dyeing and weaving factories in China, where chemicals that are banned in the West slosh on factory floors and drain into waterways used to irrigate local family farms. Sewing floors in Bangladesh and Sri Lanka are crammed with women working for illegally low wages to produce garments as efficiently as machines. Back in America, our jeans get stowed, picked, and shipped out by Amazon warehouse workers pressed to be as quick as the robots primed to replace them. Finally, those jeans we had to have get sent to landfills--or, if they've been "donated," shipped back around the world to Africa, where they're sold for pennies in secondhand markets or buried and burned in mountains of garbage. A sprawling, deeply researched, and provocative tour-de-force, Unraveled is not just the story of a pair of pants, but also the story of our global economy and our role in it. Told with piercing insight and unprecedented reporting, Unraveled challenges us to use our relationship with our jeans--and all that we wear--to reclaim our central role as citizens to refashion a society in which all people can thrive and preserve the planet for generations to come.




Looking Back to See


Book Description

Revealing, entertaining window on the music of the ’50s and ’60s




Made by Maxine


Book Description

Meet Maxine, an inspiring young maker who knows that with enough effort and imagination (and mistakes), it's possible to invent anything. Maxine loves making new things from old things. She loves tinkering until she has solved a problem. She also loves her pet goldfish, Milton. So when it's time for her school's pet parade, she's determined to create something that will allow Milton to march with the other animals. Finally, after trying, trying, and trying again, she discovers just the right combination of recycled odds and ends to create a fun, functional--and absolutely fabulous--solution to her predicament.







October Suite


Book Description

The debut novel by the author of Rattlebone. “Told in a melody all its own, this story touches many lovely and unexpected notes.” —Elizabeth Strout, #1 New York Times bestselling author It is 1950 and October Brown is a twenty-three-year-old first-year teacher thanking her lucky stars that she found a room in the best boardinghouse for Negro women teachers in Wyandotte County, Kansas. During an affair with an unhappily married handyman, October becomes pregnant. With job in jeopardy and her reputation in tatters, October goes back to Ohio to be with her family: her older sister, Vergie, and her aunts who raised the sisters after their mother was killed by their father. After giving birth, she gives the child to Vergie and her husband to raise as their own, then returns to Kansas City to rebuild her life. But something is missing—and, apparently too late, October realizes what she has done . . . The Midwest, the flourishing of modern jazz, and the culture of segregation form a compelling historical backdrop for this timeless and universal tale of one person’s battle to understand and master her own desires, and to embrace the responsibilities and promise of mature adulthood. In October Suite, Clair “has skillfully brought lyricism and word-play to her first novel, a family saga filled with secrets, redemption, and rivalry, as two sisters try to reclaim bonds forged in early childhood tragedy” (Library Journal). “Maxine Clair deserves our admiration for this beautifully written and humane novel.” —The Washington Post “A beautifully imagined novel that pulses with all the colors and sounds of the lives we live.” —Marita Golden, author of The Wide Circumference of Love




Queens of the Resistance: Maxine Waters


Book Description

Part of the four-book Queens of the Resistance series, saluting some of the most beloved boss ladies in Congress: a celebration of Representative Maxine Waters, who reclaimed her time and led the first calls for impeachment Maxine Waters is an icon for a generation of women powerbrokers in politics. She is an “unbought and unbossed” acolyte of all the legendary firebrands, like Shirley Chisholm, Barbara Jordan, Tupac, and Malcolm X. The daughter of a single mom from St. Louis, she’s smart, sassy, and an outright firecracker. She is the first woman of color, and the first person of color, to regulate the boyz at the big banks as the powerful chair of the House Financial Services Committee. Auntie Maxine called out the crimes and corruption of this Oval Office with precision before anyone else dared to take a stand. Make no mistake, she is coming for the “king,” and whenever she aims, Maxine Waters doesn’t miss. With illustrations, deep research, and writing as endlessly quotable as she is, Queens of the Resistance pays tribute to this phenomenal woman. About the series: Each book of the Queens of the Resistance series will be a celebration of the rebellion against the oppression of women and an embracement of the new in the United States government. The series is adorned with sass, discernment, and the badassery of the present and future leadership. The Doomsday Clock is at a minute to midnight, and the patriarchal power grid that lights “the shining city on a Hill” is about to black out. It’s time to yield to the alternative—the power of women.




The Chronicles of Mad Maxine


Book Description

The Chronicles of Mad Maxine tells one woman's story of training to be a lady wrestler at the Fabulous Moolah's School of Professional Wrestling. The novel, set on the 30-acre training camp in Columbia, South Carolina, is a fictionalized account of author Jeannine Mjoseth's experiences in the mid-1980s, when she became skilled at flying head scissors, the soaring suplex and the body slam. Both hardcore wrestling fans and people who've never seen a match will thrill to the raw action both inside and outside of Camp Moolah's training ring. The novel's main character, Pippi, is a passionate young reporter who wants to infiltrate the world of professional wrestling for a live-it, write-it journalism project. But she doesn't just observe the world of slaps, punches and bumps and she can't betray trainees with whom she's developed deep friendships. Instead, she throws herself into training and emerges as Mad Maxine, a 6'2" grappler with a mohawk. At the head of the enterprise is the Fabulous Moolah, an infamous lady wrestler turned manager who has clawed her way to the top from dirt-poor beginnings. Pippi gets a hard lesson about her deceitful ways during her first match for the World Wrestling Federation. Meanwhile, Pippi accepts a dangerous freelance assignment covering a KKK rally for an African American newspaper. Her wrestling and journalism worlds collide when the KKK invades Camp Moolah. Pippi and her wrestling buddies make a narrow escape from the Fabulous Moolah's clutches and speed to Albuquerque. Their mission: to rescue an underaged wrestler who Moolah has pimped out to a podiatrist with a taste for straining lady muscles.




Little Brazil


Book Description

Walking west on 46th Street in Manhattan, just three blocks from Rockefeller Center, one passes Brazilian restaurants, the office of New York's Brazilian newspaper, a Brazilian travel agency, a business that sends remittances and wires flowers to Brazil, and a store that sells Brazilian food products, magazines, newspapers, videos, and tapes. These businesses are the tip of an ethnic iceberg, an unseen minority estimated to number some 80,000 to 100,000 Brazilians in the New York metropolitan area alone. Despite their numbers, the lives of these people remain largely hidden to scholars and the public alike. Now Maxine L. Margolis remedies this neglect with a fascinating and accessible account of the lives of New York's Brazilians. Showing that these immigrants belie American stereotypes, Margolis reveals that they are largely from the middle strata of Brazilian society: many, in fact, have university educations. Not driven by dire poverty or political repression, they are fleeing from chaotic economic conditions that prevent them from maintaining amiddle-class standard of living in Brazil. But despite their class origin and education, with little English and no work papers, many are forced to take menial jobs after their arrival in the United States. Little Brazil is not an insentient statistical portrait of this population writ large, but a nuanced account that captures what it is like to be a new immigrant in this most cosmopolitan of world cities.




The Unicorn Project


Book Description

The Phoenix Project wowed over a half-million readers. Now comes the Wall Street Journal Bestselling Wall Street Journal bestselling The Unicorn Project! “The Unicorn Project is amazing, and I loved it 100 times more than The Phoenix Project…”—FERNANDO CORNAGO, Senior Director Platform Engineering, Adidas “Gene Kim does a masterful job of showing how … the efforts of many create lasting business advantages for all.”—DR. STEVEN SPEAR, author of The High-Velocity Edge, Sr. Lecturer at MIT, and principal of HVE LLC. “The Unicorn Project is so clever, so good, so crazy enlightening!”––CORNELIA DAVIS, Vice President Of Technology at Pivotal Software, Inc., Author of Cloud Native Patterns This highly anticipated follow-up to the bestselling title The Phoenix Project takes another look at Parts Unlimited, this time from the perspective of software development. In The Unicorn Project, we follow Maxine, a senior lead developer and architect, as she is exiled to the Phoenix Project, to the horror of her friends and colleagues, as punishment for contributing to a payroll outage. She tries to survive in what feels like a heartless and uncaring bureaucracy and to work within a system where no one can get anything done without endless committees, paperwork, and approvals. One day, she is approached by a ragtag bunch of misfits who say they want to overthrow the existing order, to liberate developers, to bring joy back to technology work, and to enable the business to win in a time of digital disruption. To her surprise, she finds herself drawn ever further into this movement, eventually becoming one of the leaders of the Rebellion, which puts her in the crosshairs of some familiar and very dangerous enemies. The Age of Software is here, and another mass extinction event looms—this is a story about rebel developers and business leaders working together, racing against time to innovate, survive, and thrive in a time of unprecedented uncertainty...and opportunity. “The Unicorn Project provides insanely useful insights on how to improve your technology business.”—DOMINICA DEGRANDIS, author of Making Work Visible and Director of Digital Transformation at Tasktop ——— “My goal in writing The Unicorn Project was to explore and reveal the necessary but invisible structures required to make developers (and all engineers) productive, and reveal the devastating effects of technical debt and complexity. I hope this book can create common ground for technology and business leaders to leave the past behind, and co-create a better future together.”—Gene Kim, November 2019