The most anticipated political memoir of the year. A frank account from National MP Judith Collins of the highs and lows of a political life. From her humble beginnings as the youngest daughter of Labour-voting farming parents, Judith Collins has carved a path to almost the very top of New Zealand politics. Collins grew up in rural Walton, Waikato, on a dairy farm. At the age of 10 she entered politics, running for class president. She won. After a successful career as a lawyer, Collins became the MP for Papakura in 2002, alongside fellow new recruit John Key. When Key and National won office in 2008, Collins became the Minister for Police, Corrections and Veterans. Pull No Punches is the candid story of a determined Minister at the centre of New Zealand political life and of a woman who is always resilient in the face of adversity. Funny, forthright and fearless, Collins reveals what it is like to survive-and thrive-for two decades as a senior female politician.
Bust Through Tough Obstacles, Develop a Resilient Mindset, and Forge Bulletproof Self Discipline Do you secretly crave a proven formula for building a bulletproof lifestyle? Are you mentally exhausted by fighting a losing battle with your mind every morning? Do you struggle with focus and mental clarity around your purpose in life? If so, No Punches Pulled is the book you must read now. Bestselling author and personal development trainer, Scott Allan, will teach you lessons that can change your life, and provide you with a winning system for crushing existential self-doubt through building a bulletproof mind. Now you can train your mind to embrace challenges instead of running from them, seize each day knowing it will never return, and learn to build confidence, clarity, and calmness so that you make decisions to live your best life. In No Punches Pulled, you’ll discover how to: Create a vision for achieving your goals with specific action steps to get anything done Create a Mental Blueprint for everything you want, and visualize how you intend to get it Train your mind to change your brain and outwork everyone else Throw away your plan B and go all in with your drive to achieve the impossible Upgrade your mind by forging bulletproof confidence and pushing out of your comfort zone The standards you set for yourself will set the course for your future. You will only become what you know you are worth becoming The time is NOW: Build an uncommon life, thriving, boundless, and abundant. The NPP framework teaches you to keep pushing forward when the rest are behind you. No Punches Pulled is designed to lead the way, to help you forge an unbreakable mind and way of life. You will learn to feed your obsession for doing what you love, and be more creative, courageous, productive, and focused at every level. This book teaches the framework for figuring out exactly what you want and then, deciding what it is you’re willing to do to get it. If you want what everyone around you does not have, you have to be willing to do what everyone around you does not do. Get ready to train to win. Get ready to outwork everyone else.
Offences, Outrages and Other Observations: the best of Bob Jones' New Zealand Herald columns. Every week Bob Jones delivers an upper cut to the foibles, foolishness and outright fatuousness of contemporary life. In this collection of the best of his columns from the NZ Herald, he lines up the pious, the pitiful and the politically correct - and never pulls his punches. Uncompromising and unexpurgated, this is Sir Bob at his mosthonest and hilarious
No one is quite who they seem to be in the twisty, soapy, gasp-inducing world of the Debutantes by Jennifer Lynn Barnes, #1 bestselling author of The Inheritance Games. Think of the White Gloves like the Junior League— by way of Skull and Bones. Reluctant debutante Sawyer Taft joined Southern high society for one reason and one reason alone: to identify and locate her biological father. But the answers Sawyer found during her debutante year only left her with more questions and one potentially life-ruining secret. When her cousin Lily ropes her into pledging a mysterious, elite, and all-female secret society called the White Gloves, Sawyer soon discovers that someone in the group's ranks may have the answers she's looking for. Things are looking up . . . until Sawyer and the White Gloves make a disturbing discovery near the family's summer home—and uncover a twisted secret, decades in the making. ** Check out Jennifer Lynn Barnes’s bestselling The Naturals and Inheritance Games series!!
What does it really take to get a job in academia? Do you want to go to graduate school? Then you're in good company: nearly 80,000 students will begin pursuing a PhD this year alone. But while almost all new PhD students say they want to work in academia, most are destined for something else. The hard truth is that half will quit or fail to get their degree, and most graduates will never find a full-time academic job. In Good Work If You Can Get It, Jason Brennan combines personal experience with the latest higher education research to help you understand what graduate school and the academy are really like. This candid, pull-no-punches book answers questions big and small, including • Should I go to graduate school—and what will I do once I get there? • How much does a PhD cost—and should I pay for one? • What does it take to succeed in graduate school? • What kinds of jobs are there after grad school—and who gets them? • What happens to the people who never get full-time professorships? • What does it take to be productive, to publish continually at a high level? • What does it take to teach many classes at once? • How does "publish or perish" work? • How much do professors get paid? • What do search committees look for, and what turns them off? • How do I know which journals and book publishers matter? • How do I balance work and life? This realistic, data-driven look at university teaching and research will help make your graduate and postgraduate experience a success. Good Work If You Can Get It is the guidebook that anyone considering graduate school, already in grad school, starting as a new professor, or advising graduate students needs. Read it, and you will come away ready to hit the ground running.
One of the Best Books of the Year: Elle, Harper’s Bazaar, Vulture • This uncompromising look at the immigrant experience, and the depravity of one man, is an electrifying page-turner rooted in a magical reality • “Impossible to stop reading” —Vulture When Lucien flees Haiti with his wife, Marie-Ange, and their three children to New York City’s South Ozone Park, he does so hoping for reinvention, wealth, and comfort. He buys a run-down house in a quickly changing community, and begins life anew. Lucien and Marie-Ange call their home La Kay—“my mother’s house”—and it becomes a place where their fellow immigrants can find peace, a good meal, and necessary legal help. But as a severely emotionally damaged man emigrating from a country whose evils he knows to one whose evils he doesn’t, Lucien soon falls into his worst habits and impulses, with La Kay as the backdrop for his lasciviousness. What he can’t begin to fathom is that the house is watching, passing judgment, and deciding to put an end to all the sins it has been made to hold. But only after it has set itself aflame will frightened whispers reveal Lucien’s ultimate evil.
These are the unpublished stories about the stories that you may have read in Singapore newspapers over the years. Above all, they are Singapore media stories as experienced first-hand by a veteran journalist who had to be persuaded to become Editor of a leading newspaper. PN Balji was an active participant in mainstream journalism, having spent nearly 40 years working in five newsrooms. He was part of a hardy generation of newspaper editors who wrestled with editorial issues and made tough decisions, sometimes against the will of authority. He also had a ringside view of his colleagues’ tussles and confrontations with the government. In Reluctant Editor, Balji weaves a compelling narrative, with anecdotes, of an alternative story of how some editors of his generation managed to hold the ground in challenging times. He brings back the drama, mostly played behind the scenes, and attempts to answer the question: What made the editors of the 1970s, 80s and 90s act the way they did? It was a life lived dangerously; some lost their jobs, some had to leave the country and some decided to give in and lived to fight another day.
From the New York Times bestselling author of House of Eve—a 2023 Reese’s Book Club Pick! *A Best Book of the Year by NPR and Christian Science Monitor* Called “wholly engrossing” by New York Times bestselling author Kathleen Grissom, this “fully immersive” (Lisa Wingate, #1 bestselling author of Before We Were Yours) story follows an enslaved woman forced to barter love and freedom while living in the most infamous slave jail in Virginia. Born on a plantation in Charles City, Virginia, Pheby Delores Brown has lived a relatively sheltered life. Shielded by her mother’s position as the estate’s medicine woman and cherished by the Master’s sister, she is set apart from the others on the plantation, belonging to neither world. She’d been promised freedom on her eighteenth birthday, but instead of the idyllic life she imagined with her true love, Essex Henry, Pheby is forced to leave the only home she has ever known. She unexpectedly finds herself thrust into the bowels of slavery at the infamous Devil’s Half Acre, a jail in Richmond, Virginia, where the enslaved are broken, tortured, and sold every day. There, Pheby is exposed not just to her Jailer’s cruelty but also to his contradictions. To survive, Pheby will have to outwit him, and she soon faces the ultimate sacrifice.
AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER! Learn the incredible story of Illinois senator and Iraq War veteran Tammy Duckworth and see what inspired her to follow the path that made her who she is today. In Every Day Is a Gift, Tammy Duckworth takes readers through the amazing—and amazingly true—stories from her incomparable life. In November of 2004, an Iraqi RPG blew through the cockpit of Tammy Duckworth's U.S. Army Black Hawk helicopter. The explosion, which destroyed her legs and mangled her right arm, was a turning point in her life. But as Duckworth shows in Every Day Is a Gift, that moment was just one in a lifetime of extraordinary turns. The biracial daughter of an American father and a Thai-Chinese mother, Duckworth faced discrimination, poverty, and the horrors of war—all before the age of 16. As a child, she dodged bullets as her family fled war-torn Phnom Penh. As a teenager, she sold roses by the side of the road to save her family from hunger and homelessness in Hawaii. Through these experiences, she developed a fierce resilience that would prove invaluable in the years to come. Duckworth joined the Army, becoming one of a handful of female helicopter pilots at the start of Operation Iraqi Freedom. She served eight months in Iraq before an insurgent's RPG shot down her helicopter, an attack that took her legs—and nearly took her life. She then spent thirteen months recovering at Walter Reed, learning to walk again on prosthetic legs and planning her return to the cockpit. But Duckworth found a new mission after meeting her state's senators, Barack Obama and Dick Durbin. After winning two terms as a U.S. Representative, she won election to the U.S. Senate in 2016. And she and her husband Bryan fulfilled another dream when she gave birth to two daughters, becoming the first sitting senator to give birth. From childhood to motherhood and beyond, Every Day Is a Gift is the remarkable story of one of America's most dedicated public servants.
Every military must prepare for future wars despite not really knowing the shape such wars will ultimately take. As former U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates once noted: "We have a perfect record in predicting the next war. We have never once gotten it right." In the face of such great uncertainty, militaries must be able to adapt rapidly in order to win. Adaptation under Fire identifies the characteristics that make militaries more adaptable, illustrated through historical examples and the recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Authors David Barno and Nora Bensahel argue that militaries facing unknown future conflicts must nevertheless make choices about the type of doctrine that their units will use, the weapons and equipment they will purchase, and the kind of leaders they will select and develop to guide the force to victory. Yet after a war begins, many of these choices will prove flawed in the unpredictable crucible of the battlefield. For a U.S. military facing diverse global threats, its ability to adapt quickly and effectively to those unforeseen circumstances may spell the difference between victory and defeat. Barno and Bensahel start by providing a framework for understanding adaptation and include historical cases of success and failure. Next, they examine U.S. military adaptation during the nation's recent wars, and explain why certain forms of adaptation have proven problematic. In the final section, Barno and Bensahel conclude that the U.S. military must become much more adaptable in order to address the fast-changing security challenges of the future, and they offer recommendations on how to do so before it is too late.
