For a girl who doesn’t have much time, every infinitesimal moment counts Brianna is a math whiz. She’s almost certain to be admitted to MIT—that is, if she survives to see her nineteenth birthday. Brianna has cystic fibrosis, and after her friend Molly died six months ago, it’s hard for Brianna to let go of the feeling that she’s next. Numbers make sense to Brianna—they give her something to think about besides her own crummy odds. To her great surprise, it is in math class that she discovers the infinity that exists between eighteen and nineteen. Poignant and true, this story of one extraordinary teenage life is riveting. With Forever Changes, Brendan Halpin has crafted an unparalleled protagonist who will leave an indelible mark on readers.
Widely hailed as a genius, Arthur Lee was a character every bit as colorful and unique as his music. In 1966, he was Prince of the Sunset Strip, busy with his pioneering racially-mixed band Love, and accelerating the evolution of California folk-rock by infusing it with jazz and orchestral influences, a process that would climax in a timeless masterpiece, the Love album Forever Changes. Shaped by a Memphis childhood and a South Los Angeles youth, Lee always craved fame. Drug use and a reticence to tour were his Achilles heels, and he succumbed to a dissolute lifestyle just as superstardom was beckoning. Despite endorsements from the likes of Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton, Leess subsequent career was erratic and haunted by the shadow of Forever Changes, reaching a nadir with his 1996 imprisonment for a firearms offence. Redemption followed, culminating in an astonishing post-millennial comeback that found him playing Forever Changes to adoring multi-generational fans around the world. This upswing was only interrupted by his untimely death, from leukemia, in 2006. Writing with the full consent and cooperation of Arthur's widow, Diane Lee, author John Einarson has meticulously researched a biography that includes lengthy extracts from the singer's vivid, comic, and poignant memoirs, published here for the first time.
'Forever Changes' may be thirty-six years old at the time of this writing, but its hermetic fusion of the personal and the political feels more relevant than ever. It speaks to the present in ways that, say, a Jefferson Airplane record never could, whatever the parallels between the late U60s and our contemporary morass.
5:30 a.m., Brianna Pelletier gets ready for her daily pounding. As she lies on the couch, her dad beats her chest, then her back, coaxing the mucus out of her lungs. The pounding doesn’t take care of everything. Brianna’s held out for a long time, but a body with cystic fibrosis doesn’t last forever. It doesn’t matter that Brianna has a brilliant mathematical mind or that she’s a shoo-in for MIT. Or even that her two best friends are beautiful, popular, and loyal. In the grand scheme of things, none of that stuff matters at all. The standard life, lasting maybe seventy-five years, is no more than a speck in the sum total of the universe. At eighteen, and doubting she’ll make nineteen, Brianna is practically a nonentity. Of course she’s done the math. But in her senior year of high school, Brianna learns of another kind of math, in which an infinitely small, near-zero quantity can have profound effects on an entire system. If these tiny quantities didn’t exist, things wouldn’t make the same sense. Funny, tear-jerking, and memorable, the author’s second novel for teens introduces readers to an extraordinary girl who learns that the meaning of forever can change, and that life – and death – is filled with infinite possibilities. Forever Changes is a 2009 Bank Street - Best Children's Book of the Year.
Between 1893 and 1920 the U.S. government attempted to transform Kiowa children by immersing them in the forced assimilation program that lay at the heart of that era's Indian policy. Committed to civilizing Indians according to Anglo-American standards of conduct, the Indian Service effected the government's vision of a new Indian race that would be white in every way except skin color. Reservation boarding schools represented an especially important component in that assimilationist campaign. The Rainy Mountain School, on the Kiowa-Comanche-Apache Reservation in western Oklahoma, provides an example of how theory and reality collided in a remote corner of the American West. Rainy Mountain's history reveals much about the form and function of the Indian policy and its consequences for the Kiowa children who attended the school. In To Change Them Forever Clyde Ellis combines a survey of changing government policy with a discussion of response and accommodation by the Kiowa people. Unwilling to surrender their identity, Kiowas nonetheless accepted the adaptations required by the schools and survived the attempt to change them into something they did not wish to become. Rainy Mountain became a focal point for Kiowa society.
From the bestselling author of the generation-defining series The Baby-sitters Club comes a series for a new generation! It's a summer the BSC members will never forget. For some, it's time to leave the club. For others, it's time to make a new beginning. Plenty of surprises await them--boyfriend troubles, friendship feuds, tough decisions, and totally unexpected adventures. Throughout it all, one thing is for sure: By the time the summer is over, the BSC will be very different... and better than ever!
Rework shows you a better, faster, easier way to succeed in business. Most business books give you the same old advice: Write a business plan, study the competition, seek investors, yadda yadda. If you're looking for a book like that, put this one back on the shelf. Read it and you'll know why plans are actually harmful, why you don't need outside investors, and why you're better off ignoring the competition. The truth is, you need less than you think. You don't need to be a workaholic. You don't need to staff up. You don't need to waste time on paperwork or meetings. You don't even need an office. Those are all just excuses. What you really need to do is stop talking and start working. This book shows you the way. You'll learn how to be more productive, how to get exposure without breaking the bank, and tons more counterintuitive ideas that will inspire and provoke you. With its straightforward language and easy-is-better approach, Rework is the perfect playbook for anyone who’s ever dreamed of doing it on their own. Hardcore entrepreneurs, small-business owners, people stuck in day jobs they hate, victims of "downsizing," and artists who don’t want to starve anymore will all find valuable guidance in these pages.
Hope changes everything. It can disarm guilt, shatter shame, and put your past in its place. All you have to do is make the choice to let it in. It won’t be easy. It won’t be quick. But it is possible and we serve a God who promises over and over again that anything is possible. Pete Wilson, pastor and the author of Plan B, presents a new look at the power of healing through hope, revealing 4 unique choices that have the potential to change your life forever. With Wilson’s telltale cadence and candor, Let Hope In explores accounts of seemingly hopeless moments in the Bible illustrating God’s ultimate plan for healing by letting hope fill the dark places of your past. Discover how pain that is not transformed becomes transferred. Embrace the freedom of being okay with not being okay. Learn that a life of trusting is far more magnificent than a life of pleasing. Because hurt people hurt people, but free people have the power to free people. So make today the day that you get unstuck. The day you fill your past with the light of hope, the day you say good-bye to regret and shame. The day you choose to change your future and embrace who God created you to be, simply by making the choice to let hope in.
A New Yorker writer’s intimate, revealing account of Tupac Shakur’s life and legacy, timed to the fiftieth anniversary of his birth and twenty-fifth anniversary of his death. In the summer of 2020, Tupac Shakur’s single “Changes” became an anthem for the worldwide protests against the murder of George Floyd. The song became so popular, in fact, it was vaulted back onto the iTunes charts more than twenty years after its release—making it clear that Tupac’s music and the way it addresses systemic racism, police brutality, mass incarceration, income inequality, and a failing education system is just as important now as it was back then. In Changes, published to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of Tupac’s birth and twenty-fifth anniversary of his death, Sheldon Pearce offers one of the most thoughtful and comprehensive accounts yet of the artist’s life and legacy. Pearce, an editor and writer at The New Yorker, interviews dozens who knew Tupac throughout various phases of his life. While there are plenty of bold-faced names, the book focuses on the individuals who are lesser known and offer fresh stories and rare insight. Among these are the actor who costarred with him in a Harlem production of A Raisin in the Sun when he was twelve years old, the high school drama teacher who recognized and nurtured his talent, the music industry veteran who helped him develop a nonprofit devoted to helping young artists, the Death Row Records executive who has never before spoken on the record, and dozens of others. Meticulously woven together by Pearce, their voices combine to portray Tupac in all his complexity and contradiction. This remarkable book illustrates not only how he changed during his brief twenty-five years on this planet, but how he forever changed the world.
