Dad Abroad: One man’s journey as a trailing spouse and stay-at-home dad


Book Description

Thomas A. Squire was a regular guy doing a regular job when his far from regular wife gave him a call with some news. By the end of that five-minute conversation, he had decided to leave his regular job and follow his wife on a posting to Ho Chi Minh City and San Francisco – as a trailing spouse cum stay-at-home dad. Dad Abroad is a light-hearted sharing of a journey that is not usually travelled by men. This book covers the highs and lows, the foibles and contemplations of a regular guy as he navigates new countries, hangs with the kids, mingles with the mums, submits more completely to domestic chores, and tries his best to avoid isolation and talking about nappy changes … and his search for meaning and “flow” in the process.




Reaching for the Stars


Book Description

The book that inspired the new film A Million Miles Away. Born into a family of migrant workers, toiling in the fields by the age of six, Jose M. Hernàndez dreamed of traveling through the night skies on a rocket ship. Reaching for the Stars is the inspiring story of how he realized that dream, becoming the first Mexican-American astronaut. Hernàndez didn't speak English till he was 12, and his peers often joined gangs, or skipped school. And yet, by his twenties he was part of an elite team helping develop technology for the early detection of breast cancer. He was turned down by NASA eleven times on his long journey to donning that famous orange space suit. Hernàndez message of hard work, education, perseverance, of "reaching for the stars," makes this a classic American autobiography.




If All the Seas Were Ink


Book Description

**WINNER of the 2018 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature and the 2018 Sophie Brody Medal for achievement in Jewish literature** **2018 Natan Book Award Finalist** **Finalist for the 2017 National Jewish Book Award in Women's Studies ** The Wall Street Journal: "There is humor and heartbreak in these pages...Ms. Kurshan immerses herself in the demands of daily Talmud study and allows the words of ancient scholars to transform the patterns of her own life." The Jewish Standard:“Brilliant, beautifully written, sensitive, original." The Jerusalem Post:"A beautiful and inspiring book. Both religious and secular readers will find themselves immensely moved by [Kurshan's] personal story.” American Jewish World: “So engrossing I hardly could put it down.” At the age of twenty-seven, alone in Jerusalem in the wake of a painful divorce,Ilana Kurshan joined the world’s largest book club, learning daf yomi, Hebrew for“daily page” of the Talmud, a book of rabbinic teachings spanning about six hundredyears. Her story is a tale of heartache and humor, of love and loss, of marriageand motherhood, and of learning to put one foot in front of the other by turningpage after page. Kurshan takes us on a deeply accessible and personal guided tourof the Talmud. For people of the book—both Jewish and non-Jewish—If All theSeas Were Ink is a celebration of learning, through literature, how to fall in loveonce again.




Trailing


Book Description

Trailing: A Memoir was VOTED ONE OF THE BEST INDIE BOOKS OF 2013!Something unexpected occurs when Kristin Louise Duncombe moves to New Orleans to begin her adult life as a psychotherapist: She falls madly in love with a Médecins Sans Frontières doctor, abandons all of her plans, and follows him on a medical mission to East Africa. Faced with the dual culture shock of Kenya and life with the MSF team, Kristin struggles to craft a new existence in a context of mishap, witchcraft, and the life or death stakes of the MSF world. Just when she has managed to establish a life for herself in Nairobi, a violent carjacking catapults her into a state of acute post-traumatic stress, and her life thereafter devolves into a world of intense anxiety that permeates every aspect of her existence. Forced to examine questions about her relationship, career, and personal identity, she struggles to save her marriage while facing the most difficult fight of her life: saving herself. Duncombe's debut, as humorous as it is harrowing, provides an insider's view of an MSF marriage and the humanitarian crisis in East Africa. Probing deeply into her tumultuous search for identity, she captures the essence of the experience with extraordinary authenticity and honesty. An altogether life-altering journey to the core of the human soul, Trailing: A Memoir is a compulsive page-turner, as fascinating as it is life affirming.




The Quincunx


Book Description

An extraordinary modern novel in the Victorian tradition, Charles Palliser has created something extraordinary—a plot within a plot within a plot of family secrets, mysterious clues, low-born birth, high-reaching immorality, and, always, always the fog-enshrouded, enigmatic character of 19th century—London itself. “So compulsively absorbing that reality disappears . . . One is swept along by those enduring emotions that defy modern art and a random universe: hunger for revenge, longing for justice and the fantasy secretly entertained by most people that the bad will be punished and the good rewarded.”—The New York Times “A virtuoso achievement . . . It is an epic, a tour de force, a staggeringly complex and tantalizingly layered tale that will keep readers engrossed in days. . . . The Quincunx will not disappoint you. It is, quite simply, superb.”—Chicago Sun-Times “A bold and vivid tale that invites the reader to get lost in the intoxicating rhythms of another world. And the invitation is irresistible.”—San Francisco Chronicle “A remarkable book . . . In mood, color, atmosphere and characters, this is Charles Dickens reincarnated . . . It is an immersing experience.”—Los Angeles Times Book Review “To read the first pages is to be trapped for seven-hundred odd more: you cannot stop turning them.”—The New Yorker “Few books, at most a dozen or two in a lifetime, affect us this way. . . . For sheer intricacy and ingenuity, for skill and clarity of storytelling, it is the kind of book readers wait for, a book to get lost in.”—The Philadelphia Inquirer




The Other Wes Moore


Book Description

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the governor of Maryland, the “compassionate” (People), “startling” (Baltimore Sun), “moving” (Chicago Tribune) true story of two kids with the same name: One went on to be a Rhodes Scholar, decorated combat veteran, White House Fellow, and business leader. The other is serving a life sentence in prison. The chilling truth is that his story could have been mine. The tragedy is that my story could have been his. In December 2000, the Baltimore Sun ran a small piece about Wes Moore, a local student who had just received a Rhodes Scholarship. The same paper also ran a series of articles about four young men who had allegedly killed a police officer in a spectacularly botched armed robbery. The police were still hunting for two of the suspects who had gone on the lam, a pair of brothers. One was named Wes Moore. Wes just couldn’t shake off the unsettling coincidence, or the inkling that the two shared much more than space in the same newspaper. After following the story of the robbery, the manhunt, and the trial to its conclusion, he wrote a letter to the other Wes, now a convicted murderer serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole. His letter tentatively asked the questions that had been haunting him: Who are you? How did this happen? That letter led to a correspondence and relationship that have lasted for several years. Over dozens of letters and prison visits, Wes discovered that the other Wes had had a life not unlike his own: Both had had difficult childhoods, both were fatherless; they’d hung out on similar corners with similar crews, and both had run into trouble with the police. At each stage of their young lives they had come across similar moments of decision, yet their choices would lead them to astonishingly different destinies. Told in alternating dramatic narratives that take readers from heart-wrenching losses to moments of surprising redemption, The Other Wes Moore tells the story of a generation of boys trying to find their way in a hostile world.




Treasure Island


Book Description




Career Anchors


Book Description

Career Anchors: Participant Workbook, Fourth Edition Using the Career Anchors Participant Workbook as your guide you will be able to explore and better understand your workplace skills and competencies, career motives and values. With this program, you will gain new insight into your career values and how they relate to your past and future choices. This easy-to-use workbook includes information about career development and a more complete description of the eight career anchors categories. This new edition features updated or new information that addresses issues such as The rapidly changing world of business including more information on globalization, heightened competition, new technologies, greater organizational instability and uncertainty and shifting societal values, all of which influence career trajectories and career anchors A more detailed description and elaboration of the eight anchors A Role Mapping Process that helps to consider the various external demands and pressures with suggested action steps. A Work Career and Family/Life Priority Grid that includes suggestions for how the work, family, and personal patterns identified can interact (for better or worse) with each of the eight career anchors A new "looking ahead" section of the workbook that begins with a comprehensive look at how the world of work is changing and what these changes may mean for each of the career anchors Developmental activities that participants can use as next steps in their career development Once you have completed the Career Anchors Self-Assessment, this workbook will be your next-step resource for analyzing and understanding your particular career anchor.




The Minerva


Book Description




Stardust Dads


Book Description

The e-mail Danny and Allison read on their new computer in 1996 looks no different from the millions of others received by Web users around the world, with one glaring exception--it was sent by their dads who died during the 1970s. While residing in the afterworld at an amenity-laden paradise called Midway Manor, guitar-strumming Mickey Parks and piano-playing Lloyd Wallace monitor and manipulate the lives of their adult children on earth from the mid-'70s through the 1990s. Tampering with the facility's sophisticated computer, the dads thrust Mickey's daughter Allison and Lloyd's son Danny into a passionate but sometimes stormy relationship-a relationship steeped in Danny's heavy drinking and entangled in the often-zany world of men's adventure magazine publishing. After carefully implementing a plan to send their son and daughter a gift of knowledge that could enrich their lives forever, the dads' brief contact is cut short. They are banished to another destination in the afterworld, but not before they impart indisputable proof of life after death--and unwittingly put Danny's and Allison's earthbound lives on the line.