In life there many paths one can take but the most meaningful path, is the one you pave for yourself. However, it is also the most difficult path to take. But life is already hard, so why not live it on your own terms? This book is about an Alpha child, who is too foolish to allow life to take control of him. He refuses to be controlled by his circumstances. And therefore, he defies all logic by always pressing forward when there is no hope. In this book you will learn that there is no such thing as a “challenge free life”. Life is hard and it will never be easy, so you have to toughen up. But most importantly, you have to live. And to live is to do the liveliest thing and that is to be yourself at all times. So, release yourself to the world and leave nothing behind because you only have one chance at this life. This is a tale of an Alpha child and it is based on a true story. ABOUT THE AUTHOR Benjamin Nengwani is an author, speaker, market disruptor and a versatile coach.
From the brilliant mind of Michaela Coel, creator and star of I May Destroy You and Chewing Gum and a Royal Society of Literature fellow, comes a passionate and inspired declaration against fitting in. When invited to deliver the MacTaggart Lecture at the Edinburgh International Television Festival, Michaela Coel touched a lot of people with her striking revelations about race, class and gender, but the person most significantly impacted was Coel herself. Building on her celebrated speech, Misfits immerses readers in her vision through powerful allegory and deeply personal anecdotes—from her coming of age in London public housing to her discovery of theater and her love for storytelling. And she tells of her reckoning with trauma and metamorphosis into a champion for herself, inclusivity, and radical honesty. With inspiring insight and wit, Coel lays bare her journey so far and invites us to reflect on our own. By embracing our differences, she says, we can transform our lives. An artist to her core, Coel holds up the path of the creative as an emblem of our need to regard one another with care and respect—and transparency. Misfits is a triumphant call for honesty, empathy and inclusion. Championing “misfits” everywhere, this timely, necessary book is a rousing coming-to-power manifesto dedicated to anyone who has ever worried about fitting in.
A book that argues that lessons in creativity, innovation, salesmanship, and entrepreneurship can come from surprising places: pirates, bootleggers, counterfeiters, hustlers, and others living and working on the margins of business and society. Who are the greatest innovators in the world? You're probably thinking Steve Jobs, Thomas Edison, Henry Ford. The usual suspects. This book isn't about them. It's about people you've never heard of. It's about people who are just as innovative, entrepreneurial, and visionary as the Jobses, Edisons, and Fords of the world. They’re in the crowded streets of Shenzhen, the prisons of Somalia, the flooded coastal towns of Thailand. They are pirates, computer hackers, pranksters, and former gang leaders. Across the globe, diverse innovators operating in the black, grey, and informal economies are developing solutions to a myriad of challenges. Far from being "deviant entrepreneurs" that pose threats to our social and economic stability, these innovators display remarkable ingenuity, pioneering original methods and practices that we can learn from and apply to move formal markets. This book investigates the stories of underground innovation that make up the Misfit Economy. It examines the teeming genius of the underground. It asks: Who are these unknown visionaries? How do they work? How do they organize themselves? How do they catalyze innovation? And ultimately, how can you take these lessons into your own world?
In this book, Octavio R. González revisits the theme of alienation in the twentieth-century novel, identifying an alternative aesthetic centered on the experience of double exile, or marginalization from both majority and home culture. This misfit modernist aesthetic decenters the mainstream narrative of modernism—which explores alienation from a universal and existential perspective—by showing how a group of authors leveraged modernist narrative to explore minoritarian experiences of cultural nonbelonging. Tying the biography of a particular author to a close reading of one of that author’s major works, González considers in turn Nella Larsen’s Quicksand, Wallace Thurman’s The Blacker the Berry, Jean Rhys’s Quartet, and Christopher Isherwood’s A Single Man. Each of these novels explores conditions of maladjustment within one of three burgeoning cultural movements that sought representation in the greater public sphere: the New Negro movement during the Harlem Renaissance, the 1920s Paris expatriate scene, and the queer expatriate scene in Los Angeles before Stonewall. Using a methodological approach that resists institutional taxonomies of knowledge, González shows that this double exile speaks profoundly through largely autobiographical narratives and that the novels’ protagonists challenge the compromises made by these minoritarian groups out of an urge to assimilate into dominant social norms and values. Original and innovative, Misfit Modernism is a vital contribution to conversations about modernism in the contexts of sexual identity, nationality, and race. Moving beyond the debates over the intellectual legacies of intersectionality and queer theory, González shows us new ways to think about exclusion.
This book challenges the long-held assumption that African American literature aptly reflects black American social consciousness. Offering a novel sociological approach, Washington delineates the social and political forces that shaped the leading black literary works. Washington shows that deep divisions between political thinkers and writers prevailed throughout the 20th century. Visit our website for sample chapters!
Power, Politics, and the African Condition is the third volume of The Collected Essays of Ali A. Mazrui, which will provide readers with a broad spectrum of Ali. A. Mazrui's scholarly writings. The third volume is centered on issues of power and politics at the nexus of Africa's domestic affairs and its international concepts about the disequilibrium of power in the international system and the problems that Africa has confronted globally because of it. Mazrui focuses the reader's attention on the impact that the colonial legacy and African tradition had on state formation, leadership, Africa's political economy, violence and conflict resolution while presenting some of his most interesting and even controversial ideas for building "Pax Africana." Spanning nearly forty years, Mazrui's essays are classic and contemporary statements on the diagnosis and treatment of what he called "The African Condition."
Misfit Toymakers is a Historical Fiction set in the future, back dropped by the secession of Texas from the Union and the states that follow with it, the politics of the fifty years between now and then. It is an intrigue of Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of his Loves, as Joshua Danz discovers, then navigates the waters of international commerce to make a place in the world, looking for a life where terrorists, politicians, millionaires, and thugs arent trying to kill him. Through it all there is the story of love, leadership, personal responsibility and redemption. Joshua Danz, a man conflicted by who he was, is, and is not. He discovers that his is a life of wealth and power that must be learned, not earned. He is the master of a massive, global Enterprise, and yet somehow he is its subject. Also, he is a man of strong desires and dedications; his love, though quiet and covert, is powerful as it drives him to find all truth about himself. As a man with no memories, he discovers that he has been told the story of his life, but then his memories begin to reappear, like a favorite movie, with an additional lifetime attached. All is a jumble as he learns, for certain, who he is and what has happened. He discovers his past, the parts played by others and their intentions. He begins to plot a way out, but not without those he holds dear. He is among the most wealthy, nearly unknown men in the world, torn between women, kingdoms, and lives. Ethyl, the woman he first comes to love, after his recovery is a real piece of work. She is smart, capable, beautiful, sexy, deadly, and wise. She works for him, as his administrative assistant and much more. She makes certain that his every command is carried out, and she protects him with her life a life that is not nearly as long as it looks. Joshua will avenge somehow, if he can only overcome the truth he discovers about her. Doctor Ilyssa Marquez Doc was born in Mexico and is a genuine genius and medical doctor who had her Bachelors at sixteen, Masters at eighteen and before she was thirty had perfected the hardware and surgeries that would rebuild Joshua, almost from scratch. Ilyssa is beautiful, brilliant, and engaging in every way! She is burdened with intrigues as the sponsors of her work on Danz, simply take away her promising future, and she wants it back.
Gaines is a self-described "bourbon-guzzling, pill-popping, penis-addicted, workaholic, tattooed Jew" with a Ph.D. and a pistol permit. "A Misfit's Manifesto" is about living with the contradictions. This is how she did it, and found God in all the unlikely places--like Ramones songs.
