The Last Ten Days of the Thirty Days Has September saga is a tale of discovery, gained knowledge and many, many lost Marines. It's a tale of a trail of pain, a bloody path through an unforgiving and miserably uncomfortable jungle of animal and plant predators rocked back and forth and up and down by scathing human killers using weapons of unimaginable power and destruction. These weapons are used to kill other humans but there is nothing sacred about life in the A Shau Valley, as at any moment, any second, any life force can be instantly extinguished no matter how small or large...and yet, also a charnel house where such death can be dragged out for days physically or for fifty years or more mentally. The Last Ten Days of most of the company's Marine's lives will play out across and through a valley that could have existed in thousands of places over thousands of years. To experience actual combat contact is almost invariably to die while doing so. Soldiers and Marines do not go off into combat as boys and girls to return as men and women...they return in plastic bags, aluminum boxes or to psychological institutions and clinics.
‘A playwright of world stature’—Mario Relich, Wasafiri Thirty Days in September remains one of the bravest contemporary Indian plays to seriously deal with child sexual abuse. As a child, Mala was sexually abused by her uncle—a fact she suspects her mother has known about all along despite her refusal to acknowledge it. But the fragile fabric of familial relations is ripped apart when memories of a traumatic past return to haunt both mother and daughter. Performed extensively to critical acclaim and commercial success, this play powerfully explores the brutal severance of the unbreakable bond between adult and child. ‘At last we have a playwright who gives sixty million English-speaking Indians an identity’—Alyque Padamsee ‘Powerful and disturbing’—The New York Times
ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW’ S 10 BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR One of the Best Books of the Year: The Washington Post, The Christian Science Monitor, NPR, Entertainment Weekly, The Economist, The Daily Beast, St. Louis Post-Dispatch In September 1978, three world leaders—Menachem Begin of Israel, Anwar Sadat of Egypt, and U.S. president Jimmy Carter—met at Camp David to broker a peace agreement between the two Middle East nations. During the thirteen-day conference, Begin and Sadat got into screaming matches and had to be physically separated; both attempted to walk away multiple times. Yet, by the end, a treaty had been forged—one that has quietly stood for more than three decades, proving that peace in the Middle East is possible. Wright combines politics, scripture, and the participants’ personal histories into a compelling narrative of the fragile peace process. Begin was an Orthodox Jew whose parents had perished in the Holocaust; Sadat was a pious Muslim inspired since boyhood by stories of martyrdom; Carter, who knew the Bible by heart, was driven by his faith to pursue a treaty, even as his advisers warned him of the political cost. Wright reveals an extraordinary moment of lifelong enemies working together—and the profound difficulties inherent in the process. Thirteen Days in September is a timely revisiting of this diplomatic triumph and an inside look at how peace is made.
Pick up your pencil, embrace your inner artist, and learn how to draw in thirty days with this approachable step-by-step guide from an Emmy award-winning PBS host. Drawing is an acquired skill, not a talent -- anyone can learn to draw! All you need is a pencil, a piece of paper, and the willingness to tap into your hidden artistic abilities. With Emmy award-winning, longtime PBS host Mark Kistler as your guide, you'll learn the secrets of sophisticated three-dimensional renderings, and have fun along the way -- in just twenty minutes a day for a month. Inside you'll find: Quick and easy step-by-step instructions for drawing everything from simple spheres to apples, trees, buildings, and the human hand and face More than 500 line drawings, illustrating each step Time-tested tips, techniques, and tutorials for drawing in 3-D The 9 Fundamental Laws of Drawing to create the illusion of depth in any drawing 75 student examples to encourage you in the process
Off With Their Heads! is the exciting history of Britain in easy to digest, bite-sized chunks, which is sure to inspire a love of history that will last a lifetime.
Follow up book to the extremely successful 30 DAYS HAS SEPTEMBER: COOL WAYS TO REMEMBER STUFF. More cool ways to remember stuff! From acronyms to rhyming lists, this book makes remembering facts a breeze. Full of spelling, punctuation, and grammar memory tips, ways to improve vocabulary, geography hints, and much more!
How the obsession with quantifying human performance threatens business, medicine, education, government—and the quality of our lives Today, organizations of all kinds are ruled by the belief that the path to success is quantifying human performance, publicizing the results, and dividing up the rewards based on the numbers. But in our zeal to instill the evaluation process with scientific rigor, we've gone from measuring performance to fixating on measuring itself—and this tyranny of metrics now threatens the quality of our organizations and lives. In this brief, accessible, and powerful book, Jerry Muller uncovers the damage metrics are causing and shows how we can begin to fix the problem. Filled with examples from business, medicine, education, government, and other fields, the book explains why paying for measured performance doesn't work, why surgical scorecards may increase deaths, and much more. But Muller also shows that, when used as a complement to judgment based on personal experience, metrics can be beneficial, and he includes an invaluable checklist of when and how to use them. The result is an essential corrective to a harmful trend that increasingly affects us all.