Losing the Way

Losing the Way PDF Author: Kristen Skedgell
Publisher: Bay Tree Publishing
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 228

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Book Description
A riveting and finely crafted true story, Losing the Way recounts how the daughter of East Coast intellectuals was recruited into a well-known rightwing Bible cult, The Way International, where she was manipulated, betrayed, and abused, before being rescued by the worldly mother she rejected. Skedgell shows how easily an idealistic young person can be swept away by a spiritual quest and the quiet malevolence lurking beneath the religious exterior of a false leader.

Losing the Way

Losing the Way PDF Author: Kristen Skedgell
Publisher: Bay Tree Publishing
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 228

Get Book Here

Book Description
A riveting and finely crafted true story, Losing the Way recounts how the daughter of East Coast intellectuals was recruited into a well-known rightwing Bible cult, The Way International, where she was manipulated, betrayed, and abused, before being rescued by the worldly mother she rejected. Skedgell shows how easily an idealistic young person can be swept away by a spiritual quest and the quiet malevolence lurking beneath the religious exterior of a false leader.

Losing Our Way

Losing Our Way PDF Author: Bob Herbert
Publisher: Anchor
ISBN: 0385535899
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 297

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Book Description
From longtime New York Times columnist Bob Herbert comes a wrenching portrayal of ordinary Americans struggling for survival in a nation that has lost its way In his eighteen years as an opinion columnist for The New York Times, Herbert championed the working poor and the middle class. After filing his last column in 2011, he set off on a journey across the country to report on Americans who were being left behind in an economy that has never fully recovered from the Great Recession. The portraits of those he encountered fuel his new book, Losing Our Way. Herbert’s combination of heartrending reporting and keen political analysis is the purest expression since the Occupy movement of the plight of the 99 percent. The individuals and families who are paying the price of America’s bad choices in recent decades form the book’s emotional center: an exhausted high school student in Brooklyn who works the overnight shift in a factory at minimum wage to help pay her family’s rent; a twenty-four-year-old soldier from Peachtree City, Georgia, who loses both legs in a misguided, mismanaged, seemingly endless war; a young woman, only recently engaged, who suffers devastating injuries in a tragic bridge collapse in Minneapolis; and a group of parents in Pittsburgh who courageously fight back against the politicians who decimated funding for their children’s schools. Herbert reminds us of a time in America when unemployment was low, wages and profits were high, and the nation’s wealth, by current standards, was distributed much more equitably. Today, the gap between the wealthy and everyone else has widened dramatically, the nation’s physical plant is crumbling, and the inability to find decent work is a plague on a generation. Herbert traces where we went wrong and spotlights the drastic and dangerous shift of political power from ordinary Americans to the corporate and financial elite. Hope for America, he argues, lies in a concerted push to redress that political imbalance. Searing and unforgettable, Losing Our Way ultimately inspires with its faith in ordinary citizens to take back their true political power and reclaim the American dream.

Moving Up Without Losing Your Way

Moving Up Without Losing Your Way PDF Author: Jennifer M. Morton
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691216932
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 190

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Book Description
"Upward mobility through the path of higher education has been an article of faith for generations of working-class, low-income, and immigrant college students. While we know this path usually entails financial sacrifices and hard work, very little attention has been paid to the deep personal compromises such students have to make as they enter worlds vastly different from their own. Measuring the true cost of higher education for those from disadvantaged backgrounds, Moving Up without Losing Your Way looks at the ethical dilemmas of upward mobility--the broken ties with family and friends, the severed connections with former communities, and the loss of identity--faced by students as they strive to earn a successful place in society"--Dust jacket.

Beeswing

Beeswing PDF Author: Richard Thompson
Publisher: Algonquin Books
ISBN: 1643751700
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
A Rolling Stone Best Music Book of 2021 “Thompson is a master showman . . . [Beeswing is] everything you’d hope a Richard Thompson autobiography would be . . . It’s both major and minor, dirge and ditty, light on its feet but packing a punch.” —The Wall Street Journal Now Featuring an Interview with Elvis Costello In this moving, immersive, and long-awaited memoir, beloved international music legend Richard Thompson recreates the spirit of his early years, where he found, and then lost, and then found his way again. Considered one of the top twenty guitarists of all time, Thompson also belongs in the songwriting pantheon alongside Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, and Randy Newman. Here the British folk musician takes us back to the late 1960s, a period of great change and creativity for both him and the world at large. During the pivotal years of 1967 to 1975, just as he was discovering his passion for music, he formed the band Fairport Convention with some schoolmates and helped establish the genre of British folk rock. It was a thrilling period of massive tours, where Thompson was on the road in both the UK and the US, crossing paths with the likes of Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, and Jimi Hendrix, as well as a time of heady and explosive creativity for Thompson, who wrote some of his most famous songs during this time. But as Thompson reveals, those eight years were also marked by upheaval and tragedy. Honest, moving, and compelling, Beeswing vividly captures the life of a remarkable man and musician during a period of artistic intensity, in a world on the cusp of change. “An absorbing, witty, often deliciously biting read, as all rock memoirs should be.” —Los Angeles Review of Books

The Right Way to Lose a War

The Right Way to Lose a War PDF Author: Dominic Tierney
Publisher: Little, Brown
ISBN: 0316254878
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 338

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Book Description
Why has America stopped winning wars? For nearly a century, up until the end of World War II in 1945, America enjoyed a Golden Age of decisive military triumphs. And then suddenly, we stopped winning wars. The decades since have been a Dark Age of failures and stalemates-in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan-exposing our inability to change course after battlefield setbacks. In this provocative book, award-winning scholar Dominic Tierney reveals how the United States has struggled to adapt to the new era of intractable guerrilla conflicts. As a result, most major American wars have turned into military fiascos. And when battlefield disaster strikes, Washington is unable to disengage from the quagmire, with grave consequences for thousands of U.S. troops and our allies. But there is a better way. Drawing on interviews with dozens of top generals and policymakers, Tierney shows how we can use three key steps-surge, talk, and leave-to stem the tide of losses and withdraw from unsuccessful campaigns without compromising our core values and interests. Weaving together compelling stories of military catastrophe and heroism, this is an unprecedented, timely, and essential guidebook for our new era of unwinnable conflicts. The Right Way to Lose a War illuminates not only how Washington can handle the toughest crisis of all-battlefield failure-but also how America can once again return to the path of victory.

My Losing Season

My Losing Season PDF Author: Pat Conroy
Publisher: Bantam
ISBN: 0553898183
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 418

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Book Description
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A deeply affecting coming-of-age memoir about family, love, loss, basketball—and life itself—by the beloved author of The Prince of Tides and The Great Santini During one unforgettable season as a Citadel cadet, Pat Conroy becomes part of a basketball team that is ultimately destined to fail. And yet for a military kid who grew up on the move, the Bulldogs provide a sanctuary from the cold, abrasive father who dominates his life—and a crucible for becoming his own man. With all the drama and incandescence of his bestselling fiction, Conroy re-creates his pivotal senior year as captain of the Citadel Bulldogs. He chronicles the highs and lows of that fateful 1966–67 season, his tough disciplinarian coach, the joys of winning, and the hard-won lessons of losing. Most of all, he recounts how a group of boys came together as a team, playing a sport that would become a metaphor for a man whose spirit could never be defeated. Praise for My Losing Season “A superb accomplishment, maybe the finest book Pat Conroy has written.”—The Washington Post Book World “A wonderfully rich memoir that you don’t have to be a sports fan to love.”—Houston Chronicle “A memoir with all the Conroy trademarks . . . Here’s ample proof that losers always tell the best stories.”—Newsweek “In My Losing Season, Conroy opens his arms wide to embrace his difficult past and almost everyone in it.”—New York Daily News “Haunting, bittersweet and as compelling as his bestselling fiction.”—Boston Herald

This Is How You Lose the Time War

This Is How You Lose the Time War PDF Author: Amal El-Mohtar
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1534431012
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
* HUGO AWARD WINNER: BEST NOVELLA * NEBULA AND LOCUS AWARDS WINNER: BEST NOVELLA * “[An] exquisitely crafted tale...Part epistolary romance, part mind-blowing science fiction adventure, this dazzling story unfolds bit by bit, revealing layers of meaning as it plays with cause and effect, wildly imaginative technologies, and increasingly intricate wordplay...This short novel warrants multiple readings to fully unlock its complexities.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review) From award-winning authors Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone comes an enthralling, romantic novel spanning time and space about two time-traveling rivals who fall in love and must change the past to ensure their future. Among the ashes of a dying world, an agent of the Commandment finds a letter. It reads: Burn before reading. Thus begins an unlikely correspondence between two rival agents hellbent on securing the best possible future for their warring factions. Now, what began as a taunt, a battlefield boast, becomes something more. Something epic. Something romantic. Something that could change the past and the future. Except the discovery of their bond would mean the death of each of them. There’s still a war going on, after all. And someone has to win. That’s how war works, right? Cowritten by two beloved and award-winning sci-fi writers, This Is How You Lose the Time War is an epic love story spanning time and space.

Our Latest Longest War

Our Latest Longest War PDF Author: Aaron B. O'Connell
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022626579X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 387

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Book Description
American and Afghan veterans contribute to this anthology of critical perspectives—“a vital contribution toward understanding the Afghanistan War” (Library Journal). When America went to war with Afghanistan in the wake of 9/11, it did so with the lofty goals of dismantling al Qaeda, removing the Taliban from power, remaking the country into a democracy. But as the mission came unmoored from reality, the United States wasted billions of dollars, and thousands of lives were lost. Our Latest Longest War is a chronicle of how, why, and in what ways the war in Afghanistan failed. Edited by prize-winning historian and Marine lieutenant colonel Aaron B. O’Connell, the essays collected here represent nine different perspectives on the war—all from veterans of the conflict, both American and Afghan. Together, they paint a picture of a war in which problems of culture, including an unbridgeable rural-urban divide, derailed nearly every field of endeavor. The authors also draw troubling parallels to the Vietnam War, arguing that ideological currents in American life explain why the US government has repeatedly used military force in pursuit of democratic nation-building. In Afghanistan, as in Vietnam, this created a dramatic mismatch of means and ends that neither money, technology, nor weapons could overcome.

From Here to There

From Here to There PDF Author: Michael Bond
Publisher: Belknap Press
ISBN: 0674244575
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 313

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Book Description
A Wired Most Fascinating Book of the Year “An important book that reminds us that navigation remains one of our most underappreciated arts.” —Tristan Gooley, author of The Lost Art of Reading Nature’s Signs “If you want to understand what rats can teach us about better-planned cities, why walking into a different room can help you find your car keys, or how your brain’s grid, border, and speed cells combine to give us a sense of direction, this book has all the answers.” —The Scotsman How is it that some of us can walk unfamiliar streets without losing our way, while the rest of us struggle even with a GPS? Navigating in uncharted territory is a remarkable feat if you stop to think about it. In this beguiling mix of science and storytelling, Michael Bond explores how we do it: how our brains make the “cognitive maps” that keep us orientated and how that anchors our sense of wellbeing. Children are instinctive explorers, developing a spatial understanding as they roam. And yet today few of us make use of the wayfinding skills that we inherited from our nomadic ancestors. Bond tells stories of the lost and found—sailors, orienteering champions, early aviators—and explores why being lost can be such a devastating experience. He considers how our understanding of the world around us affects our psychology and helps us see how our reliance on technology may be changing who we are. “Bond concludes that, by setting aside our GPS devices, by redesigning parts of our cities and play areas, and sometimes just by letting ourselves get lost, we can indeed revivify our ability to find our way, to the benefit of our inner world no less than the outer one.” —Science “A thoughtful argument about how our ability to find our way is integral to our nature.” —Sunday Times

Lost in the Meritocracy

Lost in the Meritocracy PDF Author: Walter Kirn
Publisher: Anchor
ISBN: 0307279456
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 226

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Book Description
A New York Times Notable Book A Daily Beast Best Book of the Year A Huffington Post Best Book of the Year From elementary school on, Walter Kirn knew how to stay at the top of his class: He clapped erasers, memorized answer keys, and parroted his teachers’ pet theories. But when he launched himself eastward to an Ivy League university, Kirn discovered that the temple of higher learning he had expected was instead just another arena for more gamesmanship, snobbery, and social climbing. In this whip-smart memoir of kissing-up, cramming, and competition, Lost in the Meritocracy reckons the costs of an educational system where the point is simply to keep accumulating points and never to look back—or within.