Seventeen-year-old Iliad Piper is named after war and angry at the world. Growing up with a violent father and abused mother, she doesn’t know how to do relationships, family or friends. A love-hate friendship with Max turns into a prank war, and she nearly destroys her first true friendship with misfit Mia. She takes off her armour for nobody, until she meets Jared, someone who's as complicated as she is.
The Build-up, Volume 3 of the Stecher Trilogy, picks up the thread of White Mule and In the Money. Although all of the novels deal with the triumphant rise of an immigrant family in the early 1900s, The Build-up is more concerned with the overwhelming drive and ambition of Joe Stecher's wife, Gurlie. After years of hard work, careful planning (and his wife's badgering) Joe's printing business is providing his family with a comfortable income. As soon as her financial goal is realized, Gurlie focuses her attention on another area. Her phenomenal energy is soon earning her all unassailable position as a social leader in a small New Jersey suburb. Her achievement is not without its heartache, however. This story is told with all the gentle humor and exacting detail that mark Williams's prose works.
Artur Yusupov's complete course of chess training stretches to nine volumes, guiding the reader towards a higher chess understanding using carefully selected positions and advice. To make sure that this new knowledge sticks, it is then tested by a selection of puzzles. The course is structured in three series with three levels. The Fundamentals level is the easiest one, Beyond the Basics is more challenging, and Mastery is quite difficult, even for stronger players. The various topics – Tactics, Strategy, Positional Play, Endgames, Calculating Variations, and Openings – are spread evenly across the nine volumes, giving readers the chance to improve every area as they work through the books. This book is the first volume at the Fundamentals level. The Build Up Your Chess series won the prestigious Boleslavsky Medal from FIDE (the World Chess Federation) as the best instructional chess books in the world.
Metal Transfer and Build-up in Friction and Cutting aims to systematize our knowledge of the metal build-up, to describe some of the investigations past and present carried out in SFTI (Tomsk), and to make an effort to explain a number of the phenomena in cutting, scratching, and sliding from the point of view of metal transfer theory. The book opens with a chapter on the temperature of the rubbing interface of two solids. This temperature is needed in order to elucidate the nature of the formation of a build-up in scratching, cutting, and sliding. Separate chapters follow on the seizure phenomena, the role played by a built-up edge in scratching, the built-up edge in metal cutting, metal transfer in friction; the occurrence and nature of the build-up at various speeds, temperatures, and pressures; and the problem of friction between cast iron and steel.
PAUL GOLDBERGER ON THE AGE OF ARCHITECTURE The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao by Frank Gehry, the CCTV Headquarters by Rem Koolhaas, the Getty Center by Richard Meier, the Times Building by Renzo Piano: Pulitzer Prize–winning critic Paul Goldberger’s tenure atThe New Yorkerhas documented a captivating era in the world of architecture, one in which larger-than-life buildings, urban schemes, historic preservation battles, and personalities have commanded an international stage. Goldberger’s keen observations and sharp wit make him one of the most insightful and passionate architectural voices of our time. In this collection of fifty-seven essays, the critic Tracy Kidder called “America’s foremost interpreter of public architecture” ranges from Havana to Beijing, from Chicago to Las Vegas, dissecting everything from skyscrapers by Norman Foster and museums by Tadao Ando to airports, monuments, suburban shopping malls, and white-brick apartment houses. This is a comprehensive account of the best—and the worst—of the “age of architecture.” On Norman Foster: Norman Foster is the Mozart of modernism. He is nimble and prolific, and his buildings are marked by lightness and grace. He works very hard, but his designs don’t show the effort. He brings an air of unnerving aplomb to everything he creates—from skyscrapers to airports, research laboratories to art galleries, chairs to doorknobs. His ability to produce surprising work that doesn’t feel labored must drive his competitors crazy. On the Westin Hotel: The forty-five-story Westin is the most garish tall building that has gone up in New York in as long as I can remember. It is fascinating, if only because it makes Times Square vulgar in a whole new way, extending up into the sky. It is not easy, these days, to go beyond the bounds of taste. If the architects, the Miami-based firm Arquitectonica, had been trying to allude to bad taste, one could perhaps respect what they came up with. But they simply wanted, like most architects today, to entertain us. On Mies van der Rohe: Mies’s buildings look like the simplest things you could imagine, yet they are among the richest works of architecture ever created. Modern architecture was supposed to remake the world, and Mies was at the center of the revolution, but he was also a counterrevolutionary who designed beautiful things. His spare, minimalist objects are exquisite. He is the only modernist who created a language that ranks with the architectural languages of the past, and while this has sometimes been troubling for his reputation . . . his architectural forms become more astonishing as time goes on.
The legendary New York Times bestselling tale of top-down change for anyone trying to navigate today's uncertain business seas. When Captain Abrashoff took over as commander of USS Benfold, it was like a business that had all the latest technology but only some of the productivity. Knowing that responsibility for improving performance rested with him, he realized he had to improve his own leadership skills before he could improve his ship. Within months, he created a crew of confident and inspired problem-solvers eager to take the initiative and responsibility for their actions. The slogan on board became "It's your ship," and Benfold was soon recognized far and wide as a model of naval efficiency. How did Abrashoff do it? Against the backdrop of today's United States Navy, Abrashoff shares his secrets of successful management including: See the ship through the eyes of the crew: By soliciting a sailor's suggestions, Abrashoff drastically reduced tedious chores that provided little additional value. Communicate, communicate, communicate: The more Abrashoff communicated the plan, the better the crew's performance. His crew eventually started calling him "Megaphone Mike," since they heard from him so often. Create discipline by focusing on purpose: Discipline skyrocketed when Abrashoff's crew believed that what they were doing was important. Listen aggressively: After learning that many sailors wanted to use the GI Bill, Abrashoff brought a test official aboard the ship-and held the SATs forty miles off the Iraqi coast. From achieving amazing cost savings to winning the highest gunnery score in the Pacific Fleet, Captain Abrashoff's extraordinary campaign sent shock waves through the U.S. Navy. It can help you change the course of your ship, no matter where your business battles are fought.
The eight-year Reagan presidency not only initiated the largest peacetime military buildup in American history but also altered traditional partisan alignments and revised the policy agenda of the welfare state. In his insightful book, Daniel Wirls clarifies the relationship between defense policy and domestic policy during this period of significant political change when he examines three defense policies, the political coalitions behind them, and their interactions. Wirls discusses the use of the rhetoric and resources of national security to build and maintain Reagan's conservative coalition and undermine Democratic politics; the importance of the peace movement in the mobilization of liberal opposition to the Reagan revolution; and the adoption and promotion of military reform, particularly by members of Congress, in response to the clash between the peace movement and the Reagan administration. He probes the political competition among these institutions and coalitions by examining three major defense policy initiatives--the Strategic Defense Initiative for the Reagan administration, the nuclear freeze proposal from the peace movement and the Democratic party, and the attempts by the military reform lobby in Congress to change the Pentagon's procurement practices--and he weighs the impact of those forces on the defense debate and domestic politics. Treating an inadequately developed aspect of the political process, this book will be of great interest to political scientists and historians concentrating in American domestic politics, security affairs specialists, and military historians.
