Since she first burst onto the international music scene,Melissa Etheridge has released seven albums that have sold morethan 25 million copies worldwide, garnering not only publicadoration for her uncompromising honesty but numerous criticalawards, including two Grammys and the prestigious ASCAP Songwriterof the Year award. The Truth Is . . . is a highly chargedautobiography—a bold and unflinching account of an extraordinarylife that Melissa describes as only she can: from her Kansas roots,through her early love of music, to her brilliant rise tosuperstardom in a male-dominated rock world. Melissa openlydiscusses the massive impact of her publicly coming out, arevelation that only increased her popularity, making her a highlyvisible spokesperson for the gay and lesbian community. TheTruth Is . . . shares Melissa Etheridge’s fascinating storywith unprecedented candor and insight.

In the first book to focus on the traumatic effects caused bycliques in our schools, an acclaimed parenting-advice team offers afresh perspective and an innovative eight-step program to turnaround the culture of cruelty that torments all students. There have always been "in crowds," but today's social pressuresforce children into explosive, destructive, and evenlife-threatening situations. No matter what role your child playsin this schoolhouse drama--clique leader, victim, or innocentbystander--this book is a must-read. Giannetti and Sagarese havehoned in on this little-understood phenomenon and come up withinsights that parents can use immediately. Read Cliques tounderstand: * Who the clique leaders are in your child's school * What you can do NOW to help your child avoid abuse * Times during the day when cliques are visible to adults * Where in your school you should start to lobby for change * Why your "innocent bystander" may not be so innocent * How you c

The Ultimate Guide to Surviving and Thriving in the Dorm Dorm life offers you a great chance to meet new people and trynew things. But leaving the comforts of home for the first time toenter the roommate-having, small-room-sharing,possibly-coed-bathroom-using world of the dorms can be overwhelmingand intimidating. The College Dorm Survival Guide offers expert advice and theinside scoop on: ? Choosing the right residence hall for you ? Getting along with your roommate (and handling conflict) ? Bathroom, laundry, and dining hall survival ? Dealing with stress, depression, and safety issues From avoiding the dreaded Freshman 15 to decorating your space,this informative and funny guide gives experts' advice oneverything you need to know to enjoy dorm living to thefullest.

From the woman who became chairman of the flagship office ofthe largest advertising agency network in the world comes a wryreality check on how to get ahead and thrive in thetestosterone-driven business arena. Nina DiSesa is a master communicator, a ceiling crasher, and oneof the most successful women in the corporate world. She is also abig-time realist who has figured out that S M-seduction andmanipulation-is the secret to winning over (and surpassing) the bigguys. In Seducing the Boys Club, DiSesa shows that you can, infact, leave your male colleagues in the dust-but not by followingthe rules you learned in business school. By playing the roles of den mother, fraternity brother, littlesister, and hard-nosed boss, DiSesa navigated the choppy,macho-minded waters of the workplace. All the "bad boys" in herlife-and there are many-have provided a wealth of devilishlyamusing stories and cautionary tales that DiSesa is only too happyto pass on. Ah, revenge can be sweet, but the truth is that sh

For William Ayers, noted educator and activist, "the allure ofteaching, that ineffable magic drawing me back to the classroomagain and again, issues from an ideal that lies directly at itsheart: Teaching, at its best, is an enterprise that helps humanbeings reach the full measure of their humanity." In Teaching Toward Freedom, Ayers illuminates the hope as well asthe conflict that characterize the entire project of education: howit can be used in authoritarian and dehumanizing ways in theservice of the state, the church, or a restrictive existing socialorder-an idea he abhors-or, as he envisions it, as an undertakingto help students become more fully human, more engaged, moreparticipatory, more free. Drawing on his own classroom experiencesand those of his many colleagues, as well as on popular culture,film, poetry, and novels, Ayers redraws the lines concerning how weteach and why, and the surprising things we uncover when we allowstudents to become visible, vocal authors of their own texts andcreators of

Finally, homeschoolers have a comprehensive guide to designinga homeschool curriculum, from one of the country's foremosthomeschooling experts. , Rebecca Rupp presents a structured plan toensure that your children will learn what they need to know whenthey need to know it, from preschool through high school. Based onthe traditional pre-K through 12th-grade structure, Home LearningYear by Year features: The integral subjects to be covered within each grade Standards for knowledge that should be acquired by your child ateach level Recommended books to use as texts for every subject Guidelines for the importance of each topic: which knowledge isessential and which is best for more expansive study based on yourchild's personal interests Suggestions for how to sensitively approach less academic subjects,such as sex education and physical fitness

Each woman has a special spiritual destiny, as unique andinalienable as the rhythms that govern her life. Maria Harristeaches women how to dance to the music of their own souls anddiscover the spiritual steps that can transform their lives.

People know Bill Moyers from his many years of path-breakingjournalism on television. But he is also one of America's mostsought-after public speakers. In this collection of speeches,Moyers celebrates the promise of American democracy and offers apassionate defense of its principles of fairness and justice. Moyers on Democracy takes on crucial issues such as economicinequality, our broken electoral process, our weakened independentpress, and the despoiling of the earth we share as our commongift.

One day in Ventura, California, Jonell McLain saw a beautifuldiamond necklace in a jewelry store window and wondered: Why arepersonal luxuries so plentiful yet accessible to so few? What if weshared what we desired? Several weeks, dozens of phone calls, andone great leap of faith later, Jonell and twelve other women boughtthe necklace together–to be passed along among them all. The dazzling treasure weaves in and out of each woman’s life,reflecting her past, defining her present, making promises for herfuture. Lending sparkle in surprising and unexpected ways, thenecklace comes to mean something dramatically different to each ofthe thirteen women. With vastly dissimilar histories and lives,they transcend their individual personalities and politics to jointogether in an uncommon journey–and what started as a quirky socialexperiment becomes something far richer and deeper.

From the man who catapulted the Covenant with Black America to number one on the New York Times bestseller listcomes a searing memoir of poverty, ambition, pain andatonment. Tavis Smiley grew up in a family of thirteen in rural Indian,where money was scarce and the sight of other black faces evenscarcer. Always an outsider because of his race, economicbackground, and Pentecostal religious beliefs, he was sustained byhis family’s love. But one day his world was shattered when hisfather brutally beat him, sending him to the hospital and then intofoster care for a period of time. In What I Know for Sure ,Smiley recounts how he overcame his painful history and became oneof America’s most popular media figures.

On the heels of her acclaimed book In an Instant, the #1 New York Times bestseller she wrote with her husband, ABCNews anchor Bob Woodruff, and with the same candor and charm, LeeWoodruff now chronicles her life as wife, mother, daughter, sister,and friend. Woodruff’s deeply personal and, at times, uproariouslyfunny stories highlight such universal topics as family, marriage,friends, and how life never seems to go as planned. From raisingteenagers (“Now with a boy and girl on the precipice of seriousadolescence, the bathroom door is sealed tighter than a governmentnuclear testing ground”) to how she copes with tragedy (“Swimmingsurrounds me in the velvet wet of a bluish green world where I candive deep down and sob with no trace”), Perfectly Imperfect: ALife in Progress is the testimonial of a woman who embraces thechaos of her surroundings, discovers the splendor of life’s flaws,and accepts that perfection is as impossible to achieve as aspotless kitchen floor.

The novelist Beverly Lowry was mourning her son’s death in ahit-and-run accident when she came across a newspaper story aboutKarla Faye Tucker, the infamous Houston murderer who was then ondeath row. The article captured Tucker’s innocent beauty, thestunning brutality of her crimes — committed with a pickaxe — andthe stories of her spiritual awakening on death row. Struck bythese apparent contradictions, Lowry found herself inexplicablydrawn to Tucker, who some ten years later would become the firstwoman to be executed in Texas since 1863. Lowry eventually began to visit Tucker in prison, and over thecourse of several years she listened to the tragic story of herlife before the murders and, in turn, told Karla Faye about her ownlife and the life and death of her son Peter. Crossed Over is amemoir of this time, a moving account of an unlikely but profoundand genuine friendship created in the confines of a visiting roomon death row. Now with a new foreword that recounts Tucker’s lastdays

The gripping and inspiring story of two extraordinarywomen--from their imprisonment by the Taliban to their rescue byU.S. Special Forces. When Dayna Curry and Heather Mercer arrived in Afghanistan, theyhad come to help bring a better life and a little hope to some ofthe poorest and most oppressed people in the world. Within a fewmonths, their lives were thrown into chaos as they became pawns inhistoric international events. They were arrested by the rulingTaliban government for teaching about Christianity to the peoplewith whom they worked. In the middle of their trial, the events ofSeptember 11, 2001, led to the international war on terrorism, withthe Taliban a primary target. While many feared Curry and Mercercould not survive in the midst of war, Americans nonetheless prayedfor their safe return, and in November their prayers wereanswered. In Prisoners of Hope, Dayna Curry and Heather Mercer tell thestory of their work in Afghanistan, their love for the people theyserved, their arrest, t

David Dornstein was twenty-five years old, with dreams ofbecoming a great writer, when he boarded Pan Am Flight 103 onDecember 21, 1988. Thirty-eight minutes after takeoff, a terroristbomb ripped the plane apart over Lockerbie, Scotland. Almost adecade later, Ken Dornstein set out to solve the riddle of hisolder brother’s life, using the notebooks and manu*s thatDavid left behind. In the process, he also began to create a newlife of his own. The Boy Who Fell Out of the Sky is theunforgettable story of one man’s search for the truth about hisbrother--and himself.

As a movie actress Lucille Ball was, in her own words, “queenof the B-pluses.” But on the small screen she was asuperstar–arguably the funniest and most enduring in the history ofTV. In this exemplary biography, Stefan Kanfer explores the rootsof Lucy’s genius and places it in the context of her conflicted andsometimes bitter personal life. Ball of Fire gives us Lucy in all her contradictions. Here is thebeauty who became a master of knock-down slapstick; the controlfreak whose comic alter ego thrived on chaos, the worshipful TVhousewife whose real marriage ended in public disaster. Here, too,is an intimate view of the dawn of television and of the Americathat embraced it. Charming, informative, touching. andlaugh-out-loud funny, this is the book Lucy’s fans have beenwaiting for.

The island is nearly deserted, haunting, beautiful. Across aslip of ocean lies South Carolina. But for the handful of familieson Yamacraw island, America is a world away. For years the peoplehere lived proudly from the sea, but now its waters are not safe.Waste from industry threatens their very existence–unless, somehow,they can learn a new life. But they will learn nothing withoutsomeone to teach them, and their school has no teacher. Here is PAT CONROY’S extraordinary drama based on his ownexperience–the true story of a man who gave a year of his life toan island and the new life its people gave him.

In her popular “Power Tools for Women” workshop, managementconsultant Joni Daniels teaches women how to be more effective andefficient at work and at home. The key is to tap into the metaphorof the tool kit. Too few women grow up wielding power tools andenjoying the sense of accomplishment and self-sufficiency theyimpart. With her new book, Daniels equips you with eleven powertools—invaluable skills you can transport between work and home.With conviction and a dose of humor, she explains how and when touse them to be more successful in every part of your life. Your newtool kit includes: * The Demolition Hammer: to break the rules * The Electrical Sensor: to follow your intuition * The Power Drill: to get the right information * Safety Goggles: to create your vision of success . . . andmore Whether you’re juggling work/life responsibilities, reenteringthe employment market, or striving to achieve your goals, this bookwill give you the right tools for the job.

"[Rosenthal] told a stunning, tragic story and called each oneof us to account for averting our eyes—and hearts—and voices."-MikeWallace, 60 Minutes It remains one of the most notorious deaths in New York Cityhistory not because of who was murdered but because of thecircumstances: 28-year-old Kitty Genovese was brutally murdered, inan attack that took nearly thirty minutes and had thirty-eightwitnesses...not one of whom did a thing to stop the murderer oreven call for help. A.M. Rosenthal, who would later become one of the most famous andcontroversial editors The New York Times has ever had, was thenewspaper's city editor then; the murder happened on his beat. Hefirst published this book in 1964, the year of the murder. It ispart memoir, part investigative journalism, and part publicservice.

The cyberspace revolution, globalization, and the ever more rapid pace at which new knowledge is created are among the recent developments which challenge our universities. While they have adapted rather slowly in the past to changing circumstances, there is now an urgent need for them to adjust rapidly in order to fulfill their mission. Success will heavily depend on the presence of an appropriate system of governance, which is becoming more complex as the cyberspace revolution makes university structures less hierarchical. This book examines the contours and dimensions of university governance in research-intensive universities, seeks to develop cogent governance principles, and offers appropriate initiatives and recommendations. The authors, current and former heads of leading research-intensive universities in Western Europe and the United States, all share the defining concern that the fundamental changes of today pose serious challenges for universities and their system of governance. Contributors inclu

Gr 8 Up-In this gritty novel of World War II, 16-year-old Erik Brandt is forced to fight for the emaciated German army, and because of his knowledge of the Russian language, he is sent to the Russian front. The train trip that Erik and the other young men take is symbolic of their transition from child to man. These boys are sent to the front with only a few weeks of basic training and the directions to kill or be killed. After the first battle, Erik makes the life-altering decision to take the uniform of a dead Russian soldier and pretends to be Russian for most of his remaining time as a soldier, surviving serious wounds and finding the love of his life while he recuperates in a war hospital. There he pretends to have amnesia and takes the moniker "Soldier X." When the hospital is attacked, Erik and his girlfriend escape. After a harrowing journey filled with enemy encounters, they find a safe house in Czechoslovakia and eventually make their way to Berlin. The story is framed with a prologue and epilogue f

On September 20, 1998, Jose Vigoa, a child of Fidel Castro’srevolution, launched what would be the most audacious and ruthlessseries of high-profile casino and armored car robberies that LasVegas had ever seen. In a brazen sixteen-month reign of terror, heand his crew would hit the crème de la crème of Vegas hotels: theMGM, the Desert Inn, the New York—New York, the Mandalay Bay, andthe Bellagio. The robberies were well planned and executed, and thepolice–“the stupids,” as Vigoa contemptuously referred to them–wereall but helpless to stop them. But Lt. John Alamshaw, thetwenty-three-year veteran in charge of robbery detectives, was notgiving up so easily. For him, Vigoa’s rampage was a personalaffront. And he would do whatever it took, even risk his badge, tobring Vigoa down.

"Fascinating, gossipy, entertaining. . . ." -- New York Times Book Review They are ten outstanding women of the century. Each had an aura,including Thelma Brenner, the first great dame her daughter everknew. Their lives were both gloriously individual and yet somehowuniversal. They were mighty warriors and social leaders, women ofaspiration who persevered. They lived through the Great Depressionand a world war. Circumstances did not defeat them. They played onBroadway and in Washington. They had glamour, style, andintelligence. They dressed up the world. "Vivid, intimate portraits . . . a splendid tribute to ten of thecentury's grandest, most powerful women." --Us "These women were our geishas, whispering in our ears to influenceall aspects of American life." --Susan Salter Reynolds, Los Angeles Times "Delectable, classy . . . a runaway hit." --Liz Smith "An engrossing introduction to a way of life that's now extinct,for better or for worse." --Chicago Sun-Times