O'Connor offers a diverse range of creative nonfiction writing assignments with authentic audiences--including writer's autobiography; writing about place; memoirs; op-ed essays; blogs; oral histories--and many vibrant examples of student writing. Students often see little connection between their school lives and the lives they lead outside of school. Thesis-driven essays often further this disconnection by emphasizing form over content and by depersonalizing the relationship between writer and audience. By inviting students to mine their personal experiences, teachers can help students not only understand literature better, but also begin to make story-sense out of their own lives. All writing (and all reading) is ultimately autobiographical. In This Time It's Personal, John S. O'Connor encourages us to care as deeply about the texts of our students' personal lives as we do the lives of literary characters and the subject matter we teach in all classes. Rather than allow students to view school passively, as mere consumers of other people's stories, we need to explicitly invite students into the larger community of storytellers. This book features a diverse range of creative nonfiction writing assignments with authentic audiences--including writer's autobiography; writing about place; memoirs; op-ed essays; blogs; oral histories--and many vibrant examples of student writing.
IT'S ONLY A MOVIE is as close to an autobiography by Alfred Hitchcock that you could ever have. Drawn from years of interviews with her subject, his friends and the actors who worked with him on such classics as THE BIRDS, PSYCHO and REAR VIEW WINDOW, Charlotte Chandler has created a rich, complex, affectionate and honest picture of the man and his milieu. This is Hitchcock in his own voice and through the eyes of those who knew him better than anyone could.
Violent crime suddenly becomes personal for New York private investigator, Nathan Marley. A relative of Stella Delgado, Marley's assistant, is arrested for a brutal murder, and unidentified bodies are washed up on a beach. Marley's search for the truth takes him to the Russian American community where he finds a wall of silence. Behind the wall, there is trade in illegal immigration and a lot of dirty money.
An innovative study of gender, emotion, and power, It’s Always Personal is an essential companion for everyone navigating the challenges of the contemporary workplace. How often have we heard “It’s nothing against you, it’s not personal—it’s just business”? But in fact, at work it’s never just business—it’s always personal. In this groundbreaking book, journalist and former corporate executive Anne Kreamer shows us how to get rational about our emotions, and provides the necessary new tools to flourish in an emotionally charged workplace. Combining the latest information on the intricacies of the human brain, candid stories from employees, and the surprising results of two national surveys, It’s Always Personal offers • a step-by-step guide for identifying your emotional type: Spouter, Accepter, Believer, or Solver • Emotion Management Toolkits that outline strategies to cope with specific emotionally challenging situations • vital facts that will help you understand—and handle—the six main emotional flashpoints: anger, fear, anxiety, empathy, joy, and crying • an exploration of how men and women deal with emotions differently “A stimulating read bolstered by snippets of some of the best recent work on emotional intelligence and the science of happiness.”—The Wall Street Journal “So what should be the rules and boundaries for showing how you feel while you work? That’s a question asked and answered in Anne Kreamer’s fascinating book . . . [a] look at an issue that rarely gets discussed.”—The Washington Post “Finally, someone is willing to unpack the morass of anger, anxiety, sadness, and joy that drives the workday. . . . [Kreamer] has hit the ‘It’s about time!’ button.”—Elle “[A] lively, well-researched exploration of emotions on the job.”—Oprah.com “Explores how to be true to your ‘emotional flashpoints—anger, fear, anxiety, empathy, happiness and crying’—without sabotaging your career.”—The New York Times Book Review
What if knowing the answers to five simple questions could give a kid hope?In a world where kids are known by a number on a jersey, digits on a car pool tag, and random usernames, we need more adults who will stop and take the time to know them personally.It's Personal is for volunteers and other leaders who work with children and teenagers. A practical guide for a personal (and more effective and fulfilling) approach to leading kids, It's Personal revisits the story of Zacchaeus and explores Jesus' simple model for how to be personal. Jesus' encounter with Zacchaeus shows us how to engage kids and teenagers personally to give them a renewed sense of identity, belonging, and purpose.Something remarkable can happen when you start seeing people the way Jesus sees them.Taking the time to answer the five questions in this book for a kid or teenager could radically change someone's faith, maybe even yours.
Forget the 10,000 hour rule— what if it’s possible to learn the basics of any new skill in 20 hours or less? Take a moment to consider how many things you want to learn to do. What’s on your list? What’s holding you back from getting started? Are you worried about the time and effort it takes to acquire new skills—time you don’t have and effort you can’t spare? Research suggests it takes 10,000 hours to develop a new skill. In this nonstop world when will you ever find that much time and energy? To make matters worse, the early hours of practicing something new are always the most frustrating. That’s why it’s difficult to learn how to speak a new language, play an instrument, hit a golf ball, or shoot great photos. It’s so much easier to watch TV or surf the web . . . In The First 20 Hours, Josh Kaufman offers a systematic approach to rapid skill acquisition— how to learn any new skill as quickly as possible. His method shows you how to deconstruct complex skills, maximize productive practice, and remove common learning barriers. By completing just 20 hours of focused, deliberate practice you’ll go from knowing absolutely nothing to performing noticeably well. Kaufman personally field-tested the methods in this book. You’ll have a front row seat as he develops a personal yoga practice, writes his own web-based computer programs, teaches himself to touch type on a nonstandard keyboard, explores the oldest and most complex board game in history, picks up the ukulele, and learns how to windsurf. Here are a few of the simple techniques he teaches: Define your target performance level: Figure out what your desired level of skill looks like, what you’re trying to achieve, and what you’ll be able to do when you’re done. The more specific, the better. Deconstruct the skill: Most of the things we think of as skills are actually bundles of smaller subskills. If you break down the subcomponents, it’s easier to figure out which ones are most important and practice those first. Eliminate barriers to practice: Removing common distractions and unnecessary effort makes it much easier to sit down and focus on deliberate practice. Create fast feedback loops: Getting accurate, real-time information about how well you’re performing during practice makes it much easier to improve. Whether you want to paint a portrait, launch a start-up, fly an airplane, or juggle flaming chainsaws, The First 20 Hours will help you pick up the basics of any skill in record time . . . and have more fun along the way.
The Negro Motorist Green Book was a groundbreaking guide that provided African American travelers with crucial information on safe places to stay, eat, and visit during the era of segregation in the United States. This essential resource, originally published from 1936 to 1966, offered a lifeline to black motorists navigating a deeply divided nation, helping them avoid the dangers and indignities of racism on the road. More than just a travel guide, The Negro Motorist Green Book stands as a powerful symbol of resilience and resistance in the face of oppression, offering a poignant glimpse into the challenges and triumphs of the African American experience in the 20th century.
In Mechanism and Mysticism, Louis J. Zanine provides the first full-length study of Theodore Dreiser's interest in modern scientific research and of the impact of scientific ideas on the thought and work of a writer who would gain fame as a deterministic naturalist, but who would end his life as a mystic pantheist. Dreiser was raised in a household dominated by the fanatical Catholic faith of his father and the superstitious beliefs of his mother. In 1894, having rejected the orthodox Christianity of his upbringing, he underwent a significant intellectual and spiritual revolution, precipitated by his discover y of the evolutionary writings of Darwin, Huxley, and Spencer. The concept of an evolutionary universe provided Dreiser with the philosophical framework for the pessimistic naturalism of his early novels (Sister Carrie, Jennie Gerhardt, The Financier). In the next decades, his discovery of scientific mechanism would reveal a universe that was a well-ordered machine, and it is in the context of Dreiser's reading of the mechanistic philosophy of Jacques Loeb and others that Zanine examines An American Tragedy and The Hand of the Potter. The philosophy of mechanism, combined with his under standing of evolutionary thought, provided Dreiser with a scientific world view that gave him a coherent system of beliefs about human beings' place in the universe, their origins, and the bases of their behavior. Yet Zanine demonstrates that Dreiser never fully adopted the stark materialism or atheism of the mechanists. He continued to have a deeply superstitious side, and a number of experiences with fortune tellers, séances, Ouija boards, and spirit apparitions convinced him of the existence of some controlling supernatural force in the universe. During the same years that he was espousing the principles of mechanistic philosophy in correspondence and conversation with Jacques Loeb, Zanine shows Dreiser was also drawn into speculations about the supernatural through his friendship with the eccentric investigator and author, Charles Fort. In an effort to further his understanding of mechanistic philosophy and to reconcile his faith in the supernatural with the facts of modern science, Dreiser began an intensive period of scientific study in 1927. For the next ten years, he befriended many of America's most eminent scientists, and read numerous works on biology, chemistry, physics, and astronomy. In 1937, at the Carnegie Biological Laboratory at Cold Spring Harbor, he experienced a spiritual epiphany in which he was suddenly able to intuit a Divine Being's presence in all of nature. Dreiser's scientific quest had culminated in a mystical conversion that would dominate the remaining eight years of his life. Mechanism and Mysticism offers substantial insight into the character of one of America's leading literary figures. With its unique brand of interdisciplinary research data, it will be of interest to students and scholars of American studies and literature, twentieth-century history, and history of science and religion.
For writers and academics prominent in the field of the New Literatures in English today, the notion of return explodes into rich semantic difference to reveal the diversity of preoccupations underlying the use of the common tongue. From the Caribbean to Australia, Guyana to South Africa, India to Great Britain, literary, political and personal history collaborate in the poetic metamorphosis of an otherwise everyday experience. Now a state of being, now a reading rich with cross-cultural age, return draws from the collective memory, invokes revenants, digs up forgotten history, quests for roots. Just as it creates a dialogue with the past, textual or real, it negotiates turning points and perpetuates reversals. It reclaims territory, tradition and language in its yearning for home. Fraught with the tensions arising from awareness of the impossibility of return, from the exhilarations of imaginary, fictional return - even from the glimmering hope of a possible return - its contemplation can also lead to appreciation of the infinite re-turn, re-newal and re-creation that is the beauty of human experience. Discussion ranges from revenant supernaturalism in West Indian literature and the exploration of return in Australian, African and Indo-Anglian fiction to Caribbean poetry, South African praise poets, and West African drama. Writers treated include Ama Ata Aidoo, Edward Kamau Brathwaite, Jean D'Costa, Bessie Head, Matsemela Manaka, Salman Rushdie, Derek Walcott, and Patrick White. The personal, biographical dimension of physical return is encompassed via the examination of the life and works of such writers as Es'kia Mphahlele and Wole Soyinka, and through autobiographical reflections. The essays, stories and poetry in this collection challenge patterns of conditioned reading and call for a multilayered polylogue with reality.
