Shorty grew up in a family of dealers and now that she thinks she’s grown she wants in on the game…but at what cost? Being raised in the game by conniving, money-hungry, married-to-the-streets parents, the only thing seventeen-year-old Porsha Jackson was sheltered from was fairy tales. Calvin, her father, is one of the most feared and respected drug dealers in the city, and Trinity, her mother, has a reputation for a firm hand and on-point aim. From hustling and grinding to balancing a few hours of school a week to keep social services off the family’s back, Porsha has been groomed from an early age to hold her own and help run the family’s business. Now that she’s a few months away from turning eighteen, she’s anxious to be grown and have freedom from Cal and Trin’s control. All she wants is to have a lavish apartment and cuddle up with her secret boo, Elvin “Street” Thomas, who also happens to be one of her father’s most trusted street hustlers. By the time she finds out she’s too grown and in way over her head, the snake has already slithered his way into her heart, and the Jackson family will be hit with the worst luck ever.
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • MORE THAN 5 MILLION COPIES SOLD The first ever self-development book to help millions of people around the globe transform their lives using humor, irreverence, and the occasional curse word—now updated and expanded for its 10th anniversary with a brand-new foreword, reader's guide, and more! In this refreshingly entertaining guide to reshaping your mindset and your life, mega-bestselling author and world-traveling success coach Jen Sincero serves up 27 bite-sized chapters full of hilarious and inspiring stories, sage advice, loving yet firm kicks in the rear, and easy-to-implement exercises to help you: Identify and change the self-sabotaging beliefs and behaviors that stop you from getting what you want. Shift your energy and attract what you desire. Create a life you totally love. And start creating it NOW. Make some damn money already. The kind you've never made before. By the end of You Are a Badass, you’ll understand how to blast past what’s holding you back, make some serious changes, and start living the kind of life that once seemed impossible.
When author Kevin LaChapelle begins his career as a police officer in El Cajon, California, he fulfills a lifelong dream. But the dream soon turns into a nightmare when he discovers corruption within the ranks of the El Cajon Police Department. Please God, Don't Let My Badge Tarnish is the story of LaChapelle's struggle to work in the department after his shocking discovery. Rather than turn his back on the scandal and save his career, LaChapelle begins a courageous fight to bring the officers to justice. At the same time, he earns awards for his work in helping young people turn away from gangs and violence. In 1994, at the urging of his fellow citizens, LaChapelle runs for the local school board. Soon he is engaged in a new battle after he uncovers major financial problems in the district and discovers that greedy officials are siphoning money intended to fund school programs. In the wake of these two major battles, LaChapelle founds the Special Investigations Agency, which is dedicated to helping communities nationwide fight corruption in their local government officials and uncover scams against citizens, particularly the elderly and disadvantaged minorities. His fight for justice continues today.
A daring, firsthand, and utterly-unscripted account of crisis in America, from Ferguson to Flint to Cliven Bundy's ranch to Donald Trump's unstoppable campaign for President--at every turn, Pulitzer-prize winner and bestselling author of Detroit: An American Autopsy, Charlie LeDuff was there In the Fall of 2013, long before any sane person had seriously considered the possibility of a Trump presidency, Charlie LeDuff sat in the office of then-Fox News CEO Roger Ailes, and made a simple but prophetic claim: The whole country is bankrupt and on high boil. It’s a shitshow out there. No one in the bubbles of Washington, DC., New York, or Los Angles was talking about it--least of all the media. LeDuff wanted to go to the heart of the country to report what was really going on. Ailes baulked. Could the hard-living and straight-shooting LeDuff be controlled? But, then, perhaps on a whim, he agreed. And so LeDuff set out to record a TV series called, "The Americans," and, along the way, ended up bearing witness to the ever-quickening unraveling of The American Dream. For three years, LeDuff travelled the width and breadth of the country with his team of production irregulars, ending up on the Mexican border crossing the Rio Grande on a yellow rubber kayak alongside undocumented immigrants; in the middle of Ferguson as the city burned; and watching the children of Flint get sick from undrinkable water. Racial, political, social, and economic tensions were escalating by the day. The inexorable effects of technological change and globalization were being felt more and more acutely, at the same time as wages stagnated and the price of housing, education, and healthcare went through the roof. The American people felt defeated and abandoned by their politicians, and those politicians seemed incapable of rising to the occasion. The old way of life was slipping away, replaced only by social media, part-time work, and opioid addiction. Sh*tshow! is that true, tragic, and distinctively American story, told from the parts of the country hurting the most. A soul-baring, irreverent, and iconoclastic writer, LeDuff speaks the language of everyday Americans, and is unafraid of getting his hands dirty. He scrambles the tired-old political, social, and racial categories, taking no sides--or prisoners. Old-school, gonzo-style reporting, this is both a necessary confrontation with the darkest parts of the American psyche and a desperately-needed reminder of the country's best instincts.
(Limelight). "If I want to send a message, I'll call Western Union." This famous line has been attributed to various movie moguls, yet while these moguls ruled the Hollywood studio system, movies were in the midst of a golden age of dialogue. Films included more messages, ideas, themes, and pontifications than they ever have since. Although producers trembled at commands from the front office, writers (the low men and women on the totem pole) went quietly to their typewriters and, as the subversive revolutionaries that most writers are, turned out prose that did send messages. How could they resist? They had the biggest and best platform in the world: Hollywood movies. The 200 speeches collected in Ready for My Close-Up! are from some of the best and a few of the worst films ever made. From Groucho Marx's "I shot an elephant in my pajamas" to Julia Roberts's "What it takes to be a movie star," here is the wit and wisdom of the great Hollywood screenwriters.
NATIONAL BESTSELLER What would actually make America great: more people. If the most challenging crisis in living memory has shown us anything, it’s that America has lost the will and the means to lead. We can’t compete with the huge population clusters of the global marketplace by keeping our population static or letting it diminish, or with our crumbling transit and unaffordable housing. The winner in the future world is going to have more—more ideas, more ambition, more utilization of resources, more people. Exactly how many Americans do we need to win? According to Matthew Yglesias, one billion. From one of our foremost policy writers, One Billion Americans is the provocative yet logical argument that if we aren’t moving forward, we’re losing. Vox founder Yglesias invites us to think bigger, while taking the problems of decline seriously. What really contributes to national prosperity should not be controversial: supporting parents and children, welcoming immigrants and their contributions, and exploring creative policies that support growth—like more housing, better transportation, improved education, revitalized welfare, and climate change mitigation. Drawing on examples and solutions from around the world, Yglesias shows not only that we can do this, but why we must. Making the case for massive population growth with analytic rigor and imagination, One Billion Americans issues a radical but undeniable challenge: Why not do it all, and stay on top forever?
NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FINALIST • The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Looming Tower—and a Texas native—takes us on a journey through the most controversial state in America. • “Beautifully written…. Essential reading [for] anyone who wants to understand how one state changed the trajectory of the country.” —NPR Texas is a red state, but the cities are blue and among the most diverse in the nation. Oil is still king, but Texas now leads California in technology exports. Low taxes and minimal regulation have produced extraordinary growth, but also striking income disparities. Texas looks a lot like the America that Donald Trump wants to create. Bringing together the historical and the contemporary, the political and the personal, Texas native Lawrence Wright gives us a colorful, wide-ranging portrait of a state that not only reflects our country as it is, but as it may become—and shows how the battle for Texas’s soul encompasses us all.
A paradigm-shifting book in the vein of Sapiens that brings a crucial Indigenous perspective to historical and cultural issues of history, education, money, power, and sustainability—and offers a new template for living. As an indigenous person, Tyson Yunkaporta looks at global systems from a unique perspective, one tied to the natural and spiritual world. In considering how contemporary life diverges from the pattern of creation, he raises important questions. How does this affect us? How can we do things differently? In this thoughtful, culturally rich, mind-expanding book, he provides answers. Yunkaporta’s writing process begins with images. Honoring indigenous traditions, he makes carvings of what he wants to say, channeling his thoughts through symbols and diagrams rather than words. He yarns with people, looking for ways to connect images and stories with place and relationship to create a coherent world view, and he uses sand talk, the Aboriginal custom of drawing images on the ground to convey knowledge. In Sand Talk, he provides a new model for our everyday lives. Rich in ideas and inspiration, it explains how lines and symbols and shapes can help us make sense of the world. It’s about how we learn and how we remember. It’s about talking to everyone and listening carefully. It’s about finding different ways to look at things. Most of all it’s about a very special way of thinking, of learning to see from a native perspective, one that is spiritually and physically tied to the earth around us, and how it can save our world. Sand Talk include 22 black-and-white illustrations that add depth to the text.
Amoral, cunning, ruthless, and instructive, this multi-million-copy New York Times bestseller is the definitive manual for anyone interested in gaining, observing, or defending against ultimate control – from the author of The Laws of Human Nature. In the book that People magazine proclaimed “beguiling” and “fascinating,” Robert Greene and Joost Elffers have distilled three thousand years of the history of power into 48 essential laws by drawing from the philosophies of Machiavelli, Sun Tzu, and Carl Von Clausewitz and also from the lives of figures ranging from Henry Kissinger to P.T. Barnum. Some laws teach the need for prudence (“Law 1: Never Outshine the Master”), others teach the value of confidence (“Law 28: Enter Action with Boldness”), and many recommend absolute self-preservation (“Law 15: Crush Your Enemy Totally”). Every law, though, has one thing in common: an interest in total domination. In a bold and arresting two-color package, The 48 Laws of Power is ideal whether your aim is conquest, self-defense, or simply to understand the rules of the game.
