Freak of Nurture


Book Description

In the tradition of authors such as David Sedaris and Ellen DeGeneres, these slice of life stories remind us that even though humans are deeply flawed, we're also pretty funny that way. Kelli Dunham demonstrates that comedy and chaos reign when you combine a great sense of humor with a determination to make bad ideas a fantastic reality. Whether she is hitchhiking across Haiti to help out with disaster relief or volunteering at a convention full of 7,000 screaming Sarah Palin fans, her humorous interpretation of difficult situations is both inspiring and entertaining.




The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game


Book Description

The #1 New York Times Bestseller "Lewis has such a gift for storytelling…he writes as lucidly for sports fans as for those who read him for other reasons." —Janet Maslin, New York Times When we first meet him, Michael Oher is one of thirteen children by a mother addicted to crack; he does not know his real name, his father, his birthday, or how to read or write. He takes up football, and school, after a rich, white, Evangelical family plucks him from the streets. Then two great forces alter Oher: the family’s love and the evolution of professional football itself into a game where the quarterback must be protected at any cost. Our protagonist becomes the priceless package of size, speed, and agility necessary to guard the quarterback’s greatest vulnerability, his blind side.




The Control Freak


Book Description

Presenting practical strategies, this guide is for everyone who has a control freak in their lives--or who is a control freak. Parrott helps readers discover how God gives them grace to deal with difficult people and also face their own need to control.




Victorian Literature and the Victorian State


Book Description

Studies of Victorian governance have been profoundly influenced by Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault's groundbreaking genealogy of modern power. Yet, according to Lauren Goodlad, Foucault's analysis is better suited to the history of the Continent than to nineteenth-century Britain, with its decentralized, voluntarist institutional culture and passionate disdain for state interference. Focusing on a wide range of Victorian writing—from literary figures such as Charles Dickens, George Gissing, Harriet Martineau, J. S. Mill, Anthony Trollope, and H. G. Wells to prominent social reformers such as Edwin Chadwick, Thomas Chalmers, Sir James Kay-Shuttleworth, and Beatrice Webb—Goodlad shows that Foucault's later essays on liberalism and "governmentality" provide better critical tools for understanding the nineteenth-century British state. Victorian Literature and the Victorian State delves into contemporary debates over sanitary, education, and civil service reform, the Poor Laws, and the century-long attempt to substitute organized charity for state services. Goodlad's readings elucidate the distinctive quandary of Victorian Britain and, indeed, any modern society conceived in liberal terms: the elusive quest for a "pastoral" agency that is rational, all-embracing, and effective but also anti-bureaucratic, personalized, and liberatory. In this study, impressively grounded in literary criticism, social history, and political theory, Goodlad offers a timely post-Foucauldian account of Victorian governance that speaks to the resurgent neoliberalism of our own day. -- Janice Carlisle




Kid Dictionary


Book Description

Wishjack: (WISH—jak) v: To blow out the candles on another child's birthday cake. Been a kid? Have a kid? Know a kid? Been left utterly speechless by the wit, wisdom, grossness, and hilarity that accompanies children wherever they go? The Kid Dictionary has the ingenious and hilarious words you need to describe the indescribable: life with kids. Humorous, insightful, and unique, it's perfect for anyone with kids even remotely in their life — from expectant parents to grandparents to aunts and uncles. Finally, the pitch-perfect "why didn't I think of that?" words you've always needed! Brofitti: (broh-FEE-tee) v: The act of scribbling with permanent marker on the face of a younger sibling. Clandesdine: (klan-DES-dyne) v: To hide from one's child while eating a cookie so he doesn't ask for one too.




Hidden Potential


Book Description

#1 New York Times Bestseller “This brilliant book will shatter your assumptions about what it takes to improve and succeed. I wish I could go back in time and gift it to my younger self. It would’ve helped me find a more joyful path to progress.” —Serena Williams, 23-time Grand Slam singles tennis champion The #1 New York Times bestselling author of Think Again illuminates how we can elevate ourselves and others to unexpected heights. We live in a world that’s obsessed with talent. We celebrate gifted students in school, natural athletes in sports, and child prodigies in music. But admiring people who start out with innate advantages leads us to overlook the distance we ourselves can travel. We underestimate the range of skills that we can learn and how good we can become. We can all improve at improving. And when opportunity doesn’t knock, there are ways to build a door. Hidden Potential offers a new framework for raising aspirations and exceeding expectations. Adam Grant weaves together groundbreaking evidence, surprising insights, and vivid storytelling that takes us from the classroom to the boardroom, the playground to the Olympics, and underground to outer space. He shows that progress depends less on how hard you work than how well you learn. Growth is not about the genius you possess—it’s about the character you develop. Grant explores how to build the character skills and motivational structures to realize our own potential, and how to design systems that create opportunities for those who have been underrated and overlooked. Many writers have chronicled the habits of superstars who accomplish great things. This book reveals how anyone can rise to achieve greater things. The true measure of your potential is not the height of the peak you’ve reached, but how far you’ve climbed to get there.




Power Freaks


Book Description

Featuring a "power quiz" to help readers assess their own instinctual drive for power, this handbook teaches how to recognize potentially destructive people in life and develop a strategy to deal with them.




Freak Show


Book Description

This cultural history of the travelling freak show in America chronicles the rise and fall of the industry as attitudes about disability evolved. From 1840 until 1940, hundreds of freak shows crisscrossed the United States, from the smallest towns to the largest cities, exhibiting their casts of dwarfs, giants, Siamese twins, bearded ladies, savages, snake charmers, fire eaters, and other oddities. By today’s standards such displays would be considered cruel and exploitative—the pornography of disability. Yet for one hundred years the freak show was widely accepted as one of America’s most popular forms of entertainment. Robert Bogdan’s fascinating social history brings to life the world of the freak show and explores the culture that nurtured and, later, abandoned it. In uncovering this neglected chapter of show business, he describes in detail the flimflam artistry behind the shows, the promoters and the audiences, and the gradual evolution of public opinion from awe to embarrassment. Freaks were not born, Bogdan reveals; they were manufactured by the amusement world, usually with the active participation of the freaks themselves. Many of the "human curiosities" found fame and fortune, until the ascent of professional medicine transformed them from marvels into pathological specimens.




The Entrepreneurial Journey


Book Description

A Balanced Approach Emotional awareness is critical for entrepreneurs throughout every stage of the business life cycle. As their businesses begin and then mature, entrepreneurs face increasingly complex emotional challenges that they must navigate as they take their businesses from an idea to the maturation period of growth and expansion, to succession planning and divestiture, to the day they step aside. John Waldron has leveraged his own entrepreneurial experience and that of the hundreds of business owners he has counseled to build an essential framework that addresses the important balance between the tangible and intangible complexities of each stage of The Entrepreneurial Journey. To achieve the greatest level of success, you have to balance the technical with the emotional. The Entrepreneurial Journey will help potential entrepreneurs navigate both, so so that they may bring their businesses to their full potential.




Geek Love


Book Description

National Book Award Finalist • Here is the unforgettable story of the Binewskis, a circus-geek family whose matriarch and patriarch have bred their own exhibit of human oddities—with the help of amphetamines, arsenic, and radioisotopes. One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years Their offspring include Arturo the Aquaboy, who has flippers for limbs and a megalomaniac ambition worthy of Genghis Khan . . . Iphy and Elly, the lissome Siamese twins . . . albino hunchback Oly, and the outwardly normal Chick, whose mysterious gifts make him the family’s most precious—and dangerous—asset. As the Binewskis take their act across the backwaters of the U.S., inspiring fanatical devotion and murderous revulsion; as its members conduct their own Machiavellian version of sibling rivalry, Geek Love throws its sulfurous light on our notions of the freakish and the normal, the beautiful and the ugly, the holy and the obscene. Family values will never be the same.