If what you thought to be true turned out not to be, when would you want to know? Obviously right away! This book is a compilation of eight commonly held financial "truths" that are generally accepted as hallmarks of a sound financial plan. What if they aren't true? What impact would relying on something that isn't true have on your financial future? For example, we have all accepted the concept of the miracle of compound interest. If the exponential growth potential were the only factor in play - anyone nearing retirement would be wealthy. But there are other factors in play that are often not accounted for, consequently, none of us are as wealthy as we thought we would be when we were first taught the miracle. Inside, find out the truth behind average rates of return, long term investing, qualified plans, buying term insurance and investing the rest, seeing your home as an investment, financing large purchases, and asset accumulation in addition to the miracle of compound interest.
Why is a Methodist minister doing stand up comedy while leading his slightly inebriated patrons in prayer? Is it possible to have more than five successful careers in your lifetime? Yes you can, if you are Reverend Dr. James H. Salmon, M.D., FACS, CPA. Dr. Salmon tells all in his memoirs. Now retired from his many lifetime endeavors, the author has written an irreverent, fascinating, and truly humorous book that entertains, educates, and delights through little triumphs and big tragedies.
In the late 1960s, Patsy Channing, a stunningly beautiful young woman, was suspended from the venerable Mississippi State College for Women for breach of conduct. The resulting scandal reached all the way to the Columbus courthouse, and the press ate it up. But Patsy’s story starts long before that, living with a preoccupied and troubled mother in Memphis, Tennessee. As Patsy grows up, she buries the memories of her unspeakable childhood trauma and is determined to have a normal life. Music becomes her ticket out and a vehicle for the one thing she covets most—a chance to be crowned Miss America. In Confessions of a Southern Beauty Queen, Julie Hines Mabus provides a peek into that world—a world struggling through the civil rights movement, reeling from the death of JFK, and cutting loose with the musical innovations from Memphis and Detroit. Patsy develops a close friendship with a guitarist at Stax Recording Studio, giving her firsthand exposure to the early Memphis Soul Sound created by such greats as Otis Redding, Isaac Hayes, and Sam & Dave. Confessions of a Southern Beauty Queen opens and closes with the end of Patsy’s time at Mississippi State College for Women on that fateful spring morning in 1968 when she entered the Columbus courthouse. Patsy’s story, marked with tragedy and triumph, mirrors that of a growing and evolving South, where change never comes easy.
The first ever, first-person story of America's private, paramilitary contractors at work around the world-from a man who performed these missions himself and has decades of stories to tell. This is a fascinating tale-and potentially the first-to describe the work of American contractors, men who run highly dangerous missions deep inside foreign countries on the brink of war. It will lift the veil and detail the ultimate danger and risk of paramilitary operations (both officially government-sanctioned and not) and show us in very intimate terms exactly what private soldiers do when the government can't act or take public responsibility. GRAY WORK combines covert military intelligence with boots-on-the-ground realism, following Jamie Smith through his CIA training and work as a spy in the State Department, to his co-founding of Blackwater following 9/11, to his decision to leave that company. As the founder and director of Blackwater Security, Smith's initial vision has undeniably shaped and transformed a decade of war. He argues that this gray area-and its warriors who occupy the controversial space between public and private-has become an indispensable element of the modern battlefield.
Warning: No celeb was spared during the writing of this tongue-in-cheek stroll down the red carpet of fashion, fame, ego, and blinding glitter. Written by the man who isn’t afraid to tell Christina Aguilera her hairdo is a disaster, Red Carpet Diaries could make you feel you know more about Hollywood shtick than Nicole Kidman’s stylist. If you begin to get too much pleasure from Cojocaru’s lizard-skin-jumpsuited journey from ridiculed misfit to #2 on Cynthia Rowley’s speed dial, put the book down and turn on an episode of Antiques Roadshow to calm your heart rate.Imbued with style that is pure Steven, and packed with insider gossip from a man who spends his days chatting with the stars, this irresistible memoir is a peek behind the glamorous façade to the real deal—the dirt beneath the red carpet.
In August 1831, in Southampton County, Virginia, Nat Turner led a bloody uprising that took the lives of some fifty-five white people—men, women, and children—shocking the South. Nearly as many black people, all told, perished in the rebellion and its aftermath. Nat Turner and the Rising in Southampton County presents important new evidence about the violence and the community in which it took place, shedding light on the insurgents and victims and reinterpreting the most important account of that event, The Confessions of Nat Turner. Drawing upon largely untapped sources, David F. Allmendinger Jr. reconstructs the lives of key individuals who were drawn into the uprising and shows how the history of certain white families and their slaves—reaching back into the eighteenth century—shaped the course of the rebellion. Never before has anyone so patiently examined the extensive private and public sources relating to Southampton as does Allmendinger in this remarkable work. He argues that the plan of rebellion originated in the mind of a single individual, Nat Turner, who concluded between 1822 and 1826 that his own masters intended to continue holding slaves into the next generation. Turner specifically chose to attack households to which he and his followers had connections. The book also offers a close analysis of his Confessions and the influence of Thomas R. Gray, who wrote down the original text in November 1831. Allmendinger draws new conclusions about Turner and Gray, their different motives, the authenticity of the confession, and the introduction of terror as a tactic, both in the rebellion and in its most revealing document. Students of slavery, the Old South, and African American history will find in Nat Turner and the Rising in Southampton County an outstanding example of painstaking research and imaginative family and community history. "The exhaustive research Allmendinger presents greatly enriches our historical understanding of the Southampton Rebellion through the eyes of its key victims. Nat Turner and the Rising in Southampton County reveals important dimensions of the rebellion's local history and contextualizes the event, as Nat Turner did, within the context of slavery in Southampton County."—Reviews in History "Allmendinger’s great achievement is that he made full use of ‘new’ primary sources related to the uprising of 1831—new sources hitherto hidden in plain sight. Most importantly, he understood the significance of this material and knew exactly how to mine it for valuable new insights into virtually every aspect of Nat Turner’s rebellion."—Reviews in American History "No one has done more to corroborate and sync the details, nor to illuminate Turner’s inspirations and goals. Nat Turner and the Rising in Southampton County is a model of historical methodology, and goes further than any other previous work in helping readers understand Turner’s motives and meaning."—African American Intellectual History Society "We are all in David Allmendinger's debt for the labor of research that has given The Rising in Southampton County its absent material context."—Law and History Review "Though the subject of countless histories, novels, videos, and websites, Nat Turner, the leader of the largest slave insurrection in U.S. history, remains an enigma; yet, in this new and challenging study, the life and times of the legendary revolutionary come into much better focus. A must-read for historians of slave resistance and all others interested in the history of antebellum Virginia and in particular Southampton County."—Register of the Kentucky Historical Society "Allmendinger approaches a well-trodden historical event from a distinctive perspective. [He] provides the most complete historical context surrounding the rebellion. Ultimately, Allmendinger succeeds in providing a more complete understanding of the community of Southampton, Virginia, and offers a better explanation for the motivations that led Turner and his followers down such a bloody path in 1831."—Choice David F. Allmendinger Jr. is professor emeritus of history at the University of Delaware. He is the author of Paupers and Scholars: The Transformation of Student Life in Nineteenth-Century New England and Ruffin: Family and Reform in the Old South.
