There are 8 key attitude and action shifts that every great leader makes. From entitlement to honor. From passive to passionate. From unreliable to consistent. Are you willing to make these shifts (and more) and be ready when the “next up” call comes? The Millennial generation is poised to do something. We can either learn, grow, ask for help, and lead honorably into the future, or we can passively wait, feeling entitled for the keys to eventually be given to us. We can do better than that! Let’s take the initiative and rise to the challenge. The future will be filled with leadership transitions at not only the highest levels in businesses, churches, and organizations all over the world, but also at regular, everyday places. Who will be ready to lead existing movements, groups, and causes? Or who will be ready to start the new ones? Using practical, biblical, and contemporary examples and lessons, this book will help existing and burgeoning leaders pinpoint the areas of their lives where they still need to make the shift and learn to lead more effectively.
The world is filled with unexpected opportunities for greatness. While many would crack under the pressure and chaos, Grant Parr knows from his experience as an athlete what it takes to learn how to bend and not break. Conquer the emotional hurricane of reaching your peak performance with Grant's playbook for facing the unfamiliar. In The Next One Up Mindset: How to Prepare for the Unknown, you will learn proven mental performance strategies to align the mind and body, including breathing techniques, visualization, positive affirmations, mantras, goal setting, and more. As a lifelong athlete and coach, Grant understands how to teach others to take control of their mental space and trust their preparation to take on whatever is thrown in their path. Whether you're preparing for the field, the boardroom, or life, The Next One Up Mindset highlights stories and tools that will teach you how to take a different approach to control and conquer any moment.
This book is a love letter to the artists, scenes, and sounds defining North Carolina's extraordinary contributions to American popular music. David Menconi spent three decades immersed in the state's music, where traditions run deep but the energy expands in countless directions. Menconi shows how working-class roots and rebellion tie North Carolina's Piedmont blues, jazz, and bluegrass to beach music, rock, hip-hop, and more. From mill towns and mountain coves to college-town clubs and the stage of American Idol, Blind Boy Fuller and Doc Watson to Nina Simone and Superchunk, Step It Up and Go celebrates homegrown music just as essential to the state as barbecue and basketball. Spanning a century of history from the dawn of recorded music to the present, and with sidebars and photos that help reveal the many-splendored glory of North Carolina's sonic landscape, this is a must-read for every music lover.
Marcos Baez had many loves. First was his mother. Next came baseball. Reggaeton and bachata. A girl stole his heart. Then he realized a love greater still. Learning. "Through the story of Marcos Baez and Fenway High, Steve Marantz shows the humanity and prospects of Latino students in our nation's public schools. Next Up at Fenway gives us a window into how social forces and education policy decisions are playing out in real people's lives - for better and worse - within America's fastest growing demographic. This book is both Americana and a reality check for the 21st century." -Sonia Chang-Diaz, Massachusetts state senator and former teacher
In the tradition of Carl Wilson’s Let’s Talk About Love, an unforgettable account of fame, fandom, and the problem of making art in the twenty-first century In his multi-hyphenate ambitions, the musician who calls himself Juiceboxxx couldn’t be more modern—you might call him a punk rock-rapper-DJ-record executive-energy drink-magnate. Journalist Leon Neyfakh has been something more than a fan of Juiceboxxx’s since he was a teenager, when he booked a show for the artist in a church basement in his hometown of Oak Park, Illinois. Juiceboxxx went on to the tireless, lonely, possibly hopeless pursuit of success on his own terms—no club was too dank, no futon too grubby, if it helped him get to the next, next level. And, for years, Neyfakh remained haunted from afar: was art really worth all the sacrifices? If it was, how did you know you’d made it? And what was the difference, anyway, between a person like Juiceboxxx—who devoted his life to being an artist—and a person like Neyfakh, who elected instead to pursue a stable career and a comfortable, middle-class existence? Much more than a brilliant portrait of a charismatic musician always on the verge of something big, The Next Next Level is a wholly contemporary story of art, obsession, fame, ambition, and friendship—as well as viral videos, rap-rock, and the particulars of life on the margins of culture.
A chronicle of Adams’s rise from alt-country to rock stardom, featuring stories about the making of the albums Strangers Almanac and Heartbreaker. Before he achieved his dream of being an internationally known rock personality, Ryan Adams had a band in Raleigh, North Carolina. Whiskeytown led the wave of insurgent-country bands that came of age with No Depression magazine in the mid-1990s, and for many people it defined the era. Adams was an irrepressible character, one of the signature personalities of his generation, and as a singer-songwriter he blew people away with a mature talent that belied his youth. David Menconi witnessed most of Whiskeytown’s rocket ride to fame as the music critic for the Raleigh News & Observer, and in Ryan Adams, he tells the inside story of the singer’s remarkable rise from hardscrabble origins to success with Whiskeytown, as well as Adams’s post-Whiskeytown self-reinvention as a solo act. Menconi draws on early interviews with Adams, conversations with people close to him, and Adams’s extensive online postings to capture the creative ferment that produced some of Adams’s best music, including the albums Strangers Almanac and Heartbreaker. He reveals that, from the start, Ryan Adams had a determined sense of purpose and unshakable confidence in his own worth. At the same time, his inability to hold anything back, whether emotions or torrents of songs, often made Adams his own worst enemy, and Menconi recalls the excesses that almost, but never quite, derailed his career. Ryan Adams is a fascinating, multifaceted portrait of the artist as a young man, almost famous and still inventing himself, writing songs in a blaze of passion. “Menconi, a veteran music critic based in Raleigh, North Carolina, had a front row seat for alt-country wunderkind Ryan Adams’ rise to prominence—from an array of local bands, to Whiskeytown, and on to a successful and prolific solo career. Here, Menconi enthusiastically revisits those heady days when the mercurial Adams’ performances were either transcendent or tantrum-filled—the author was there for most of them, and he packs his book with tales of magical performances and utterly desperate train wrecks. . . . This interview- and anecdote-laden exposé of the artist's early career will doubtless find a happy home with Adams fans.” —Publishers Weekly
In the seventh book of The Alien Next Door series, Zeke's parents have completed their research on Earth, and Zeke may have to move away! Zeke the alien comes home one day to find his parents packing. They tell him that their mission researching Earth is finished, and they're all going back to Tragas to be assigned to a new planet. Zeke is sad to once again leave and go to an unfamiliar place, especially now that he has great friends on Earth in Harris and Roxy. Harris is just as upset when Zeke tells him, and together, they come up with a plan to try to stop Zeke's departure. Will they be able to stop his family from going back to their home planet?
A lyrical, powerful, and richly textured novel about three lives that intertwine across oceans and time. On the banks of the River Seine in 1899, a young woman takes her final breath before plunging into the icy water. Although she does not know it, her decision will set in motion an astonishing chain of events. It will lead to 1950s Norway, where a grieving toy-maker is on the cusp of a transformative invention, all the way to present-day Ottawa Valley in Canada, where a journalist, battling a terrible disease, risks everything for one last chance to live. Taking inspiration from a remarkable true story, Coming Up for Air is a bold, richly imagined novel about the transcendent power of storytelling and the immeasurable impact of every human life. The legacy of the woman at its heart touches the lives of us all today, and this book reveals just how.
Beyond the safety of New York City's news headlines, Next Stop is a train ride into the heart of the Bronx during the late eighties and early nineties at the height of the crack epidemic, a tumultuous time when hip-hop was born and money-hungry slumlords were burning down apartment buildings with tenants still inside. From one stop to the next, this gritty memoir follows Ivan Sanchez and his crew on their search for identity and an escape from poverty in a stark world where street wars and all-night symphonies of crime and drug-fueled mayhem were as routine as the number 4 train. In the game, the difference between riches and ruin was either a bullet or a lucky turn away. Almost driven insane by the poverty, despair, and senseless violence, Ivan left it all behind and moved to Virginia, but the grotesque images and voices of the dead continued to haunt him. This book honors the memories of those who died. At times heartbreakingly sad and brutal, Next Stop shares with a whole new generation the insights and hard lessons Ivan learned.
Mitzvah Girls is the first book about bringing up Hasidic Jewish girls in North America, providing an in-depth look into a closed community. Ayala Fader examines language, gender, and the body from infancy to adulthood, showing how Hasidic girls in Brooklyn become women responsible for rearing the next generation of nonliberal Jewish believers. To uncover how girls learn the practices of Hasidic Judaism, Fader looks beyond the synagogue to everyday talk in the context of homes, classrooms, and city streets. Hasidic women complicate stereotypes of nonliberal religious women by collapsing distinctions between the religious and the secular. In this innovative book, Fader demonstrates that contemporary Hasidic femininity requires women and girls to engage with the secular world around them, protecting Hasidic men and boys who study the Torah. Even as Hasidic religious observance has become more stringent, Hasidic girls have unexpectedly become more fluent in secular modernity. They are fluent Yiddish speakers but switch to English as they grow older; they are increasingly modest but also fashionable; they read fiction and play games like those of mainstream American children but theirs have Orthodox Jewish messages; and they attend private Hasidic schools that freely adapt from North American public and parochial models. Investigating how Hasidic women and girls conceptualize the religious, the secular, and the modern, Mitzvah Girls offers exciting new insights into cultural production and change in nonliberal religious communities.
