THE SPEAKING ROCK Dwayne Douglas Johnson, that name may be quiet unfamiliar to most of you, but ‘The Rock’ won’t be. The popular wrestling champion and Hollywood actor needs no introduction. His rising from a delinquent teenager to a footballer turned wrestler and eventually to a Hollywood mogul, have all the entertainments like a movie itself. The winner of seven consecutive WWE world champion, debuted in the main stream motion pictures as the supernatural Scorpion King in the 2001’s Mummy Returns. ‘The Speaking Rock’ brings you a collection of his lively quotes, probably the best lot you could ever get.
A real life struggle of addiction and codependency. While a son battles substance use, a mother desperately learns to let go. You will be shocked and entertained as you read of their separate journeys to freedom.
Author, activist, and TED speaker Ashton Applewhite has written a rousing manifesto calling for an end to discrimination and prejudice on the basis of age. In our youth obsessed culture, we’re bombarded by media images and messages about the despairs and declines of our later years. Beauty and pharmaceutical companies work overtime to convince people to purchase products that will retain their youthful appearance and vitality. Wrinkles are embarrassing. Gray hair should be colored and bald heads covered with implants. Older minds and bodies are too frail to keep up with the pace of the modern working world and olders should just step aside for the new generation. Ashton Applewhite once held these beliefs too until she realized where this prejudice comes from and the damage it does. Lively, funny, and deeply researched, This Chair Rocks traces her journey from apprehensive boomer to pro-aging radical, and in the process debunks myth after myth about late life. Explaining the roots of ageism in history and how it divides and debases, Applewhite examines how ageist stereotypes cripple the way our brains and bodies function, looks at ageism in the workplace and the bedroom, exposes the cost of the all-American myth of independence, critiques the portrayal of elders as burdens to society, describes what an all-age-friendly world would look like, and offers a rousing call to action. It’s time to create a world of age equality by making discrimination on the basis of age as unacceptable as any other kind of bias. Whether you’re older or hoping to get there, this book will shake you by the shoulders, cheer you up, make you mad, and change the way you see the rest of your life. Age pride! “Wow. This book totally rocks. It arrived on a day when I was in deep confusion and sadness about my age. Everything about it, from my invisibility to my neck. Within four or five wise, passionate pages, I had found insight, illumination, and inspiration. I never use the word empower, but this book has empowered me.” —Anne Lamott, New York Times bestselling author
Based on Berg's (1928-90) best selling I Hear America Talking (1976) and Listening to America, presents essays on such aspects of American speech as booze, communications from snail mail to email, fighting words, funerals, health, holidays, pop culture, sex, outer space, sports, transportation, and trash and garbage. The text is amply accompanied by black-and-white photographs and quotations. No bibliography. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
TALKING ROCK Legs, a thirty-something single mother, has had enough of entitled rich men using her for their own purposes. To match her hot body, she creates a confident, in-charge alter ego determined to turn the tables and exploit them. She desires a life of wealth and power and when she meets Charlie Webb, a timid lawyer who is the nephew of a member of the Georgia State Senate, she realizes that 'high life' may finally be within her grasp. Her plan is to use his lack of confidence, his connections, and his ambition to make him a Senator and then marry him. To accomplish this goal, she uses her knowledge of a serial killer who operated in Georgia, Jim Coleman, who killed wealthy fathers and their sons with such skill that the murders were considered suicides. By targeting a random family first, to set the scene and to test Charlie's abilities and commitment, she then moves on to his uncle, the person she needs to eliminate in order to have Charlie appointed to fill his vacant Senate seat. Legs tips off Bill Dean, a prominent newspaper reporter, to ensure all suspicion is placed exactly where she wants it - on Jim Coleman. While the Georgia Bureau of Investigation follows the evidence on a wild goose chase, Legs and Charlie are on the fast track toward making all of their dreams come true.
This book comments on serious social, economic, political, historical, environmental and other issues which have tested our elected governments from both parties. It points out areas of Constitutional conflict, political inertia, selective law enforcement and others that pose a real peril to our republic. Whether in our foreign, economic, immigration, health care, agricultural or other policy choices, it finds a common thread which ties our elected representatives to the service of interests that are special rather than national. At the root of these failed policy and legislative efforts is an equally damaging failure of our electoral system whereby money is dominant and delivers a Congress that enjoys an incumbency reelection rate of over 90%. Not all of our problems are internal, however. The role assigned to America as sole superpower following the collapse of the USSR has been one which called for our assumption, but for which we were psychologically and historically less than suited. The point is not whether others could do better, but rather that it has had a negative impact upon our national character and actions. This book makes clear that unless we are willing to make a real effort to return to the principles and ideals of our founding and literally "pull ourselves together", our enviable experiment in representative democracy will no longer be able to meet the needs of its citizens and will fail due to our lack of will, not its merit.
During an excavation in the 1950s, the bones of a prehistoric woman were discovered in Midland County, Texas. Archaeologists dubbed the woman “Midland Minnie.” Some believed her age to be between 20,000 and 37,000 years, making her remains the oldest ever found in the Western Hemisphere. While the accuracy of this date remains disputed, the find, along with countless others, demonstrates the wealth of human history that is buried beneath Texas soil. By the time the Europeans arrived in Texas in 1528, Native Texans included the mound-building Caddos of East Texas; Karankawas and Atakapas who fished the Texas coast; town-dwelling Jumanos along the Rio Grande; hunting-gathering Coahuiltecans in South Texas; and corn-growing Wichitas in the Panhandle. All of these native peoples had developed structures, traditions, governments, religions, and economies enabling them to take advantage of the land’s many resources. The arrival of Europeans brought horses, metal tools and weapons, new diseases and new ideas, all of which began to reshape the lives of Texas Indians. Over time, Texas became a home to horse-mounted, buffalo-hunting Apaches, Comanches, and Kiowas and a refuge for Puebloan Tiguas, Alabama-Coushattas, Kickapoos and many others. These groups traded, shared ideas, fought and made peace with one another as well as peoples outside of Texas. This book tells the story of all of these groups, their societies and cultures, and how they changed over the years. Author David La Vere offers a complete chronological and cultural history of Texas Indians from 12,000 years ago to the present day. He presents a unique view of their cultural history before and after European arrival, examining their interactions—both peaceful and violent—with Europeans, Mexicans, Texans, and Americans. This book is the first full examination of the history of Texas Indians in over forty years and will appeal to all of those with an interest in Native Americans and the history of Texas.
With its barbecues, new Cadillacs, and $4,000 snakeskin cowboy boots, Texas is all about power and money -- and the power that money buys. This detailed and wide-scope account shows how a group of wealthy Texas Republicans quietly hijacked American politics for their own gain. Getting George W. Bush elected, we learn, was just the tip of the iceberg.... In Follow the Money, award-winning journalist and sixth-generation Texan John Anderson shows how power in Texas has long been vested in the interconnected worlds of Houston's global energy companies, banks, and law firms -- not least among them Baker Botts, the firm controlled by none other than James A. Baker III, the Bush family consigliere. Anderson explains how the Texas political system came to be controlled by a sophisticated, well-funded group of conservative Republicans who, after elevating George W. Bush to the American presidency, went about applying their hardball, high-dollar politicking to Washington, D.C. When George Bush reached the White House, he brought with him not only members of the Texas legal establishment (among them former White House counsel Harriet Miers and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales) but empowered swarms of Republican lobbyists who saw in Bush's arrival a way to make both common cause and big money. Another important Beltway Texan was Congressman Tom DeLay, the famous "Exterminator" of Houston's Twenty-second District, who became majority leader in 2003 and controlled which bills made it through Congress and which did not. DeLay, in turn, was linked to lobbyist Jack Abramoff, who used his relationships with both DeLay and Karl Rove on behalf of his clients, creating a shockingly corrupt flow of millions of dollars among Republican lobby groups and political action committees. Washington soon became infected by Texas-style politics. Influence-peddling, deal-making, and money-laundering followed -- much of it accomplished in the capital's toniest restaurants or on the fairways and beaches of luxurious resorts, away from the public eye. The damaging fallout has, one way or another, touched nearly all Americans, Democrat and Republican alike. Follow the Money reveals the hidden web of influence that links George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and the Texas Republicans to the 2000 recount in Florida; the national tort-reform movement; the controversial late-hour, one-vote passage of the Medicare Reform Act; congressional redistricting schemes; scandals in the energy sector; the destruction of basic constitutional protections; the financial machinery of the Christian right; the manipulation of American-Indian tribe casinos; the Iraq War torture scandals; the crooked management of the Department of the Interior; the composition of the Supreme Court; and the 2007 purges of seasoned prosecutors in the Justice Department. Some of the actors are in federal prison, others are on their way there, and many more have successfully eluded a day of reckoning. Told with verve, style, and a not-so-occasional raised eyebrow, Anderson's account arcs directly into tomorrow's headlines. Startling in its revelations, Follow the Money is sure to spark controversy and much-needed debate concerning which direction this country goes next.
Over five centuries of foreign rule—by Spain, Mexico, and the United States—Native American pueblos have confronted attacks on their sovereignty and encroachments on their land and water rights. How five New Mexico and Texas pueblos did this, in some cases multiple times, forms the history of cultural resilience and tenacity chronicled in Pueblo Sovereignty by two of New Mexico’s most distinguished legal historians, Malcolm Ebright and Rick Hendricks. Extending their award-winning work Four Square Leagues, Ebright and Hendricks focus here on four New Mexico Pueblo Indian communities—Pojoaque, Nambe, Tesuque, and Isleta—and one now in Texas, Ysleta del Sur. The authors trace the complex tangle of conflicting jurisdictions and laws these pueblos faced when defending their extremely limited land and water resources. The communities often met such challenges in court and, sometimes, as in the case of Tesuque Pueblo in 1922, took matters into their own hands. Ebright and Hendricks describe how—at times aided by appointed Spanish officials, private lawyers, priests, and Indian agents—each pueblo resisted various non-Indian, institutional, and legal pressures; and how each suffered defeat in the Court of Private Land Claims and the Pueblo Lands Board, only to assert its sovereignty again and again. Although some of these defenses led to stunning victories, all five pueblos experienced serious population declines. Some were even temporarily abandoned. That all have subsequently seen a return to their traditions and ceremonies, and ultimately have survived and thrived, is a testimony to their resilience. Their stories, documented here in extraordinary detail, are critical to a complete understanding of the history of the Pueblos and of the American Southwest.
