NBA: Beasts of the East/Wonders of the West

NBA: Beasts of the East/Wonders of the West PDF Author: John Smallwood
Publisher: Scholastic Incorporated
ISBN: 9780545367592
Category : Basketball players
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Introduces the NBA teams from the East and West, providing a brief history of the team, notable players, and each team's 2011-2012 standings.

NBA: Beasts of the East/Wonders of the West

NBA: Beasts of the East/Wonders of the West PDF Author: John Smallwood
Publisher: Scholastic Incorporated
ISBN: 9780545367592
Category : Basketball players
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Introduces the NBA teams from the East and West, providing a brief history of the team, notable players, and each team's 2011-2012 standings.

Bestiary

Bestiary PDF Author: Donika Kelly
Publisher: Graywolf Press
ISBN: 155597953X
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 80

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Book Description
Donika Kelly's fierce debut collection, longlisted for the 2016 National Book Award and winner of the 2015 Cave Canem Poetry Prize I thought myself lion and serpent. Thought myself body enough for two, for we. Found comfort in never being lonely. What burst from my back, from my bones, what lived along the ridge from crown to crown, from mane to forked tongue beneath the skin. What clamor we made in the birthing. What hiss and rumble at the splitting, at the horns and beard, at the glottal bleat. What bridges our back. What strong neck, what bright eye. What menagerie are we. What we've made of ourselves. --from "Love Poem: Chimera" Across this remarkable first book are encounters with animals, legendary beasts, and mythological monsters--half human and half something else. Donika Kelly's Bestiary is a catalogue of creatures--from the whale and ostrich to the pegasus and chimera to the centaur and griffin. Among them too are poems of love, self-discovery, and travel, from "Out West" to "Back East." Lurking in the middle of this powerful and multifaceted collection is a wrenching sequence that wonders just who or what is the real monster inside this life of survival and reflection. Selected and with an introduction by the National Book Award winner Nikky Finney, Bestiary questions what makes us human, what makes us whole.

The Cult of Smart

The Cult of Smart PDF Author: Fredrik deBoer
Publisher: All Points Books
ISBN: 1250200385
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
Named one of Vulture’s Top 10 Best Books of 2020! Leftist firebrand Fredrik deBoer exposes the lie at the heart of our educational system and demands top-to-bottom reform. Everyone agrees that education is the key to creating a more just and equal world, and that our schools are broken and failing. Proposed reforms variously target incompetent teachers, corrupt union practices, or outdated curricula, but no one acknowledges a scientifically-proven fact that we all understand intuitively: Academic potential varies between individuals, and cannot be dramatically improved. In The Cult of Smart, educator and outspoken leftist Fredrik deBoer exposes this omission as the central flaw of our entire society, which has created and perpetuated an unjust class structure based on intellectual ability. Since cognitive talent varies from person to person, our education system can never create equal opportunity for all. Instead, it teaches our children that hierarchy and competition are natural, and that human value should be based on intelligence. These ideas are counter to everything that the left believes, but until they acknowledge the existence of individual cognitive differences, progressives remain complicit in keeping the status quo in place. This passionate, voice-driven manifesto demands that we embrace a new goal for education: equality of outcomes. We must create a world that has a place for everyone, not just the academically talented. But we’ll never achieve this dream until the Cult of Smart is destroyed.

Bleeding Orange

Bleeding Orange PDF Author: Jim Boeheim
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0062453211
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
New York Times Bestseller In this candid autobiography, Syracuse head coach and long time college basketball fixture Jim Boeheim reflects on his life, his teachers, and the game he loves. Jim Boeheim walked onto the Syracuse campus as a freshman in 1963 . . . and never walked off. A man who has been written off at various stages of his career and criticized for being disagreeable, Boeheim has experienced it all—triumph, despair, redemption; controversy, heartbreak, and scandal; championships, epic disappointments, colorful personalities, NCAA investigations. His combative personality helped ignite what was arguably the most competitive college basketball conference ever: the Big East of the 1980s, when he and Syracuse battled with Big John Thompson of Georgetown, roly-poly Rollie Massimino of Villanova, feisty Jim Calhoun of Connecticut, and beloved Looie Carnesecca of St. John’s, turning the Big East into a Coaches Conference and the Best Show in College Basketball. Boeheim talks about those days and the coming battles with powerhouses North Carolina and Duke, now that Syracuse has joined the Atlantic Coast Conference. From his association with Syracuse greats Dave Bing (a college teammate), Pearl Washington, and Derrick Coleman, to the Olympics—where he coached players such as LeBron James, Kobe Bryant, and Kevin Durant—Boeheim has learned many lessons that have helped his team and continue to encourage him now as he nears seventy. His unprecedented fifty-year career as a player, assistant, head coach and icon has given him unique insight into coaching and the college game, knowledge he now shares.

Albion's Seed

Albion's Seed PDF Author: David Hackett Fischer
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 9780199743698
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 972

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Book Description
This fascinating book is the first volume in a projected cultural history of the United States, from the earliest English settlements to our own time. It is a history of American folkways as they have changed through time, and it argues a thesis about the importance for the United States of having been British in its cultural origins. While most people in the United States today have no British ancestors, they have assimilated regional cultures which were created by British colonists, even while preserving ethnic identities at the same time. In this sense, nearly all Americans are "Albion's Seed," no matter what their ethnicity may be. The concluding section of this remarkable book explores the ways that regional cultures have continued to dominate national politics from 1789 to 1988, and still help to shape attitudes toward education, government, gender, and violence, on which differences between American regions are greater than between European nations.

Ghost Letters

Ghost Letters PDF Author: Baba Badji
Publisher: Parlor Press LLC
ISBN: 1643171984
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 106

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Book Description
In Ghost Letters, one emigrates to America again, and again, and again, though one also never leaves Senegal, the country of one’s birth; one grows up in America, and attends university in America, though one also never leaves Senegal, the country of one’s birth; one wrestles with one’s American blackness in ways not possible in Senegal, though one never leaves Senegal, the country of one’s birth; and one sees more deeply into Americanness than any native-born American could. Ghost Letters is a 21st century Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, though it is a notebook of arrival and being in America. It is a major achievement. —Shane McCrae

LeBron's Dream Team

LeBron's Dream Team PDF Author: LeBron James
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101427337
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 144

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Book Description
The inspiration for the Peacock Original Movie "Shooting Stars" "A book that will incredibly move and inspire you.” —Jay-Z "An entertaining, well-written reminder that even if he seems to have been around forever, James didn’t go directly from the nursery to the NBA.” —Sports Illustrated The "dream team" was a bunch of kids from Akron, Ohio - LeBron James and his best friends - who first met on a youth basketball team of the same name when they were ten and eleven years old. United by their love of the game and their yearning for companionship, they quickly forged a bond which would carry them through thick and thin (a lot of thin) and, at last, to the brink of a national championship. They were a motley group who faced challenges all too typical of inner-city America. LeBron grew up without a father and had moved with his mother more than a dozen times by the age of 10. Willie McGee, the quiet one, had left both his parents behind in Chicago to be raised by his older brother in Akron. Dru Joyce was outspoken, and his dad, who was ever-present, would end up coaching all five of the boys in high school. Sian Cotton, who also played football, was the happy-go-lucky enforcer, while Romeo Travis was unhappy, bitter, even surly, until he finally opened himself up to the bond his team mates offered. In the summer after seventh grade, the "dream team" tasted glory when they qualified for a national championship tournament in Memphis. But they lost their focus, and had to go home early. They promised each other they would stay together and do whatever it took to win a national title. They had no idea how hard it would be to pursue that promise. In the years that followed, they would endure jealousy, hostility, exploitation, resentment from the black community (because they went to a "white" high school), and the consequence of their own over-confidence. Not least, they would all have to wrestle with LeBron's outsize success, which brought too much attention and even a whiff of scandal their way. But together these five boys became men as they sought a national championship.

Try to Tell the Story

Try to Tell the Story PDF Author: David Thomson
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307473171
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 226

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Book Description
David Thomson, one of our most celebrated film writers, gives us a haunting, fascinating memoir about growing up as an only child in wartime England. He was born in London in the aftermath of the war, where he was raised by his mother, grandmother, and upstairs tenant, Miss Davis. He remembers how his grandmother brought him to a street corner to see Churchill and how the bombed-out houses that still smelled of smoke became his playground. We see Thomson attempt to overcome his profound sadness at being abandonded by his cold and distant father by finding solace in the cinema houses. Movies became his great escape, and the worlds revealed in Red River, The Third Man, and Citizen Kane helped to alleviate his loneliness and bolster his rich imaginative life.

Extreme North: A Cultural History

Extreme North: A Cultural History PDF Author: Bernd Brunner
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393881016
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
An entertaining and informative voyage through cultural fantasies of the North, from sea monsters and a mountain-sized magnet to racist mythmaking. Scholars and laymen alike have long projected their fantasies onto the great expanse of the global North, whether it be as a frozen no-man’s-land, an icy realm of marauding Vikings, or an unspoiled cradle of prehistoric human life. Bernd Brunner reconstructs the encounters of adventurers, colonists, and indigenous communities that led to the creation of a northern “cabinet of wonders” and imbued Scandinavia, Iceland, and the Arctic with a perennial mystique. Like the mythological sagas that inspired everyone from Wagner to Tolkien, Extreme North explores both the dramatic vistas of the Scandinavian fjords and the murky depths of a Western psyche obsessed with Nordic whiteness. In concise but thoroughly researched chapters, Brunner highlights the cultural and political fictions at play from the first “discoveries” of northern landscapes and stories, to the eugenicist elevation of the “Nordic” phenotype (which in turn influenced America’s limits on immigration), to the idealization of Scandinavian social democracy as a post-racial utopia. Brunner traces how crackpot Nazi philosophies that tied the “Aryan race” to the upper latitudes have influenced modern pseudoscientific fantasies of racial and cultural superiority the world over. The North, Brunner argues, was as much invented as discovered. Full of glittering details embedded in vivid storytelling, Extreme North is a fascinating romp through both actual encounters and popular imaginings, and a disturbing reminder of the power of fantasy to shape the world we live in.

The Death of Expertise

The Death of Expertise PDF Author: Tom Nichols
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190469439
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
Technology and increasing levels of education have exposed people to more information than ever before. These societal gains, however, have also helped fuel a surge in narcissistic and misguided intellectual egalitarianism that has crippled informed debates on any number of issues. Today, everyone knows everything: with only a quick trip through WebMD or Wikipedia, average citizens believe themselves to be on an equal intellectual footing with doctors and diplomats. All voices, even the most ridiculous, demand to be taken with equal seriousness, and any claim to the contrary is dismissed as undemocratic elitism. Tom Nichols' The Death of Expertise shows how this rejection of experts has occurred: the openness of the internet, the emergence of a customer satisfaction model in higher education, and the transformation of the news industry into a 24-hour entertainment machine, among other reasons. Paradoxically, the increasingly democratic dissemination of information, rather than producing an educated public, has instead created an army of ill-informed and angry citizens who denounce intellectual achievement. When ordinary citizens believe that no one knows more than anyone else, democratic institutions themselves are in danger of falling either to populism or to technocracy or, in the worst case, a combination of both. An update to the 2017breakout hit, the paperback edition of The Death of Expertise provides a new foreword to cover the alarming exacerbation of these trends in the aftermath of Donald Trump's election. Judging from events on the ground since it first published, The Death of Expertise issues a warning about the stability and survival of modern democracy in the Information Age that is even more important today.