A Good Start in Life


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The first sensible guide to interpret the latest information on brain development in straightforward and practical ways.




The best start in life?


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The Government has set itself the challenging target of halving the number of children living in poverty by 2010-11 and eradicating child poverty by 2020. With 2010 fast approaching, Ministers are still committed to the targets, and the Committee wanted to ascertain whether DWP has the right measures in place to meet its objectives. Significant progress has been made, but the target remains challenging: there are still 2.8 million children living in poverty and the most recent data shows a slight increase in this number. The Committee is convinced of the damaging effect of poverty on a child's self-esteem and expectations, and also its effects in contributing to social exclusion. Children growing up in poverty are also more likely to have poorer health and poorer educational outcomes. There are groups of children who have a much higher risk of growing up in poverty, for example if they or a parent are disabled, and there are higher poverty rates amongst Pakistani, Bangladeshi and black children. Getting parents into sustainable work should be the focus of the strategy to lift them and their children out of poverty, but there are concerns that the Jobseekers' Allowance regime is not sufficiently flexible to reflect the complexity of lone parents' lives. To eradicate child poverty by 2020, the Government needs a long-term strategy on benefit income for those who are unable to work. If benefits are uprated in line with inflation, the gap between the incomes of those in work and those on benefits will only get wider, as benefits will not keep pace with earnings. As poverty is measured as a percentage of median earnings, the implications for the 2020 target, in particular, are serious.




A Start in Life


Book Description

An outrageously funny novel of adventure, sex, corruption, and crime from one of the greatest British authors of the twentieth century. Michael Cullen is proud to be a bastard. His first memories are of the war, when his mother welcomed every soldier in Britain into her house, and young Michael hid beneath her bed to let the rocking of the springs lull him to sleep. By the time he’s eighteen, he’s got a pregnant girlfriend, and is staring down a long life of working-class respectability that simply makes him sick. So Michael says goodbye to his girlfriend and his home in Nottingham, and hits the road for London, where he will make his fortune—or die trying. From the nightclubs of Soho to the depths of London’s underworld, Michael can’t help but get into trouble. But whether he’s chauffeuring a vicious gangster or smuggling gold bullion across the channel, he never stops having a wonderful time. Indeed, Michael is something else entirely: a happy bastard with nothing to lose. A rollicking picaresque novel by the legendary author of such classics of kitchen sink realism as The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner and Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, A Start in Life is one of the funniest British novels of the twentieth century. A Start in Life is the 1st book in the Michael Cullen Novels, but you may enjoy reading the series in any order. “A Start in Life is, for my money, the best novel that Sillitoe has yet written.” —New Statesman “The kind of hilarious nonsense that keeps you riveted to deck-chair or arm-chair, depending on the season.” —The Daily Telegraph Praise for Alan Sillitoe “The master of British verbal architecture.” —Rolling Stone Alan Sillitoe (1928–2010) was a British novelist, poet, essayist, and playwright, known for his honest, humorous, and acerbic accounts of working-class life. Sillitoe served four years in the Royal Air Force and lived for six years in France and Spain, before returning to England. His first novel, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, was published in 1958 and was followed by a collection of short stories, The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner, which won the Hawthornden Prize for Literature. With over fifty volumes to his name, Sillitoe was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1997.




A Start in Life


Book Description

CHAPTER I. THAT WHICH WAS LACKING TO PIERROTIN'S HAPPINESS Railroads, in a future not far distant, must force certain industries to disappear forever, and modify several others, more especially those relating to the different modes of transportation in use around Paris. Therefore the persons and things which are the elements of this Scene will soon give to it the character of an archaeological work. Our nephews ought to be enchanted to learn the social material of an epoch which they will call the "olden time." The picturesque "coucous" which stood on the Place de la Concorde, encumbering the Cours-la-Reine,—coucous which had flourished for a century, and were still numerous in 1830, scarcely exist in 1842, unless on the occasion of some attractive suburban solemnity, like that of the Grandes Eaux of Versailles. In 1820, the various celebrated places called the "Environs of Paris" did not all possess a regular stage-coach service. Nevertheless, the Touchards, father and son, had acquired a monopoly of travel and transportation to all the populous towns within a radius of forty-five miles; and their enterprise constituted a fine establishment in the rue du Faubourg-Saint-Denis. In spite of their long-standing rights, in spite, too, of their efforts, their capital, and all the advantages of a powerful centralization, the Touchard coaches ("messageries") found terrible competition in the coucous for all points with a circumference of fifteen or twenty miles. The passion of the Parisian for the country is such that local enterprise could successfully compete with the Lesser Stage company,—Petites Messageries, the name given to the Touchard enterprise to distinguish it from that of the Grandes Messageries of the rue Montmartre. At the time of which we write, the Touchard success was stimulating speculators. For every small locality in the neighborhood of Paris there sprang up schemes of beautiful, rapid, and




Life Is in the Transitions


Book Description

A New York Times bestseller! A pioneering and timely study of how to navigate life's biggest transitions with meaning, purpose, and skill Bruce Feiler, author of the New York Times bestsellers The Secrets of Happy Families and Council of Dads, has long explored the stories that give our lives meaning. Galvanized by a personal crisis, he spent the last few years crisscrossing the country, collecting hundreds of life stories in all fifty states from Americans who’d been through major life changes—from losing jobs to losing loved ones; from changing careers to changing relationships; from getting sober to getting healthy to simply looking for a fresh start. He then spent a year coding these stories, identifying patterns and takeaways that can help all of us survive and thrive in times of change. What Feiler discovered was a world in which transitions are becoming more plentiful and mastering the skills to manage them is more urgent for all of us. The idea that we’ll have one job, one relationship, one source of happiness is hopelessly outdated. We all feel unnerved by this upheaval. We’re concerned that our lives are not what we expected, that we’ve veered off course, living life out of order. But we’re not alone. Life Is in the Transitions introduces the fresh, illuminating vision of the nonlinear life, in which each of us faces dozens of disruptors. One in ten of those becomes what Feiler calls a lifequake, a massive change that leads to a life transition. The average length of these transitions is five years. The upshot: We all spend half our lives in this unsettled state. You or someone you know is going through one now. The most exciting thing Feiler identified is a powerful new tool kit for navigating these pivotal times. Drawing on his extraordinary trove of insights, he lays out specific strategies each of us can use to reimagine and rebuild our lives, often stronger than before. From a master storyteller with an essential message, Life Is in the Transitions can move readers of any age to think deeply about times of change and how to transform them into periods of creativity and growth.




Designing Your Life


Book Description

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER • At last, a book that shows you how to build—design—a life you can thrive in, at any age or stage • “Life has questions. They have answers.” —The New York Times Designers create worlds and solve problems using design thinking. Look around your office or home—at the tablet or smartphone you may be holding or the chair you are sitting in. Everything in our lives was designed by someone. And every design starts with a problem that a designer or team of designers seeks to solve. In this book, Bill Burnett and Dave Evans show us how design thinking can help us create a life that is both meaningful and fulfilling, regardless of who or where we are, what we do or have done for a living, or how young or old we are. The same design thinking responsible for amazing technology, products, and spaces can be used to design and build your career and your life, a life of fulfillment and joy, constantly creative and productive, one that always holds the possibility of surprise.




A Start in Life


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Reproduction of the original.




A Start in Life


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A Start in Life


Book Description

Oscar Husson is a young man with an overdeveloped sense of pride. His mother, who has pampered him excessively, places him on a coach to go spend time with a friend of hers to see if Oscar’s prospects can be improved, but Oscar proceeds to make a fool of himself. Suffering the consequences of his humiliation, his mother pulls other strings to land him a lesser job, where Oscar eventually falls flat again. Forced into the military by his circumstances and his lack of other prospects, he finally redeems himself. At its core a bildungsroman, A Start in Life is filled with the types of side characters that inhabit every Balzac story: the rich, the pretenders striving to be rich, the everyman and woman. The novel opens with an extended journey on a French carriage and the claustrophobic conversation that takes place between the passengers; it closes with another, similar, journey years later that includes most of the same travelers. In between are multiple intrigues involving Oscar, written in the vivid style for which Balzac is known. This book is part of the Standard Ebooks project, which produces free public domain ebooks.




Start in Life


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