Industrial Press, Inc.

• Three New Chapters: In-depth technical guidance on Health & Safety, Sustainability, and Asset Management, addressing critical and emerging industry topics.
• Thoroughly Revised Content: All chapters have been reorganized and expanded to provide more information on PVC pipe and fittings.
• Updated Standards and References: Includes the latest AWWA and ASTM standards information, with all chapter references revamped to incorporate the latest research and findings on PVC pipe.
• User-Friendly Calculations: Presented in US Customary units with conversion tables for Système International (SI) as well as guidance on utilizing new online design calculators.

Though Michel Foucault is one of the most important thinkers of the twentieth century, little is known about his early life. Even Foucault’s biographers have neglected this period, preferring instead to start the story when the future philosopher arrives in Paris.

Becoming Foucault is a historical reconstruction of the world in which Foucault grew up: the small city of Poitiers, France, from the 1920s until the end of the Second World War. Beyond exploring previously unexamined aspects of Foucault’s childhood, including his wartime ordeals, it proposes an original interpretation of Foucault’s oeuvre. Michael Behrent argues that Foucault, in addition to being a theorist of power, knowledge, and selfhood, was also a philosopher of experience. He was a thinker intent on making sense of the events that he lived through. Behrent identifies four specific experiences in Foucault’s childhood that exercised a decisive influence on him and that, in various ways, he later made the subject of his philosophy: his family’s deep connections to the medical profession; his upbringing in a bourgeois household; the German Occupation during World War II; and his Catholic education.

Behrent not only reconstructs the specific nature of these experiences but also shows how reference to them surfaces in Foucault’s later work. In this way, the book both sheds light on a formative period in the philosopher’s life and offers a unique interpretation of key aspects of his thought.

There is a newer edition of this bestselling title. Click here for the new 6th Edition.

The collaborative result of thousands of hours of research and review, the contents of the 5th edition are numerically formatted by section and subsection, as well as by figure and table designation. This allows easy reference and quick access. The Handbook of PVC Pipe Design and Construction is a must-have reference for design engineers, public and private pipe utility managers, and students. A more complete text on PVC pipe is not available.

The most thorough and far-reaching revision yet, the new 5th edition of the Handbook of PVC Pipe Design and Construction is the most comprehensive and up-to-date reference on PVC pipe and fittings. It provides practical engineering and construction information, as well as recommendations applicable to the design and use of primarily underground PVC piping systems in both pressure and non-pressure applications. Previous editions have been used by engineers all across North America and around the globe in the utility and consulting engineering sectors, as well as in universities and technical institutions.

Features 

New to the Fifth Edition

• Four new chapters:
  • PVC Pressure Pipe Installation
  • PVC Non-Pressure Pipe Installation
  • Trenchless Installation of PVC Pipe
  • Molecularly Oriented Polyvinyl Chloride Pipe (PVCO)
• Updated and improved graphs and tables
• More open page format
• Valuable updates

• 40% additional questions throughout the book, making it easier for those preparing to sit for a professional maintenance and reliability exam to learn and study pertinent topics.
• New chapter on standards, with particular focus on ISO 55000.
• Discussion of new and future trends, such as Industry 4.0, Maintenance 4.0, IIOT, and their impact on productivity.
• An affiliated Workbook is available for sale separately (978-0-8311-3648-2).

Reviews

“I have been a student of M&R for many years, though always in non-technical positions as a professional marketer for products and services companies in the industrial space. I realized whenever I studied Maintenance and Reliability Best Practices in preparation for the CMRP exam, that I was on the right track. Thank you for allowing me to successfully pass the exam as a result of your book on top of the nearly eight years I’ve been in the industry. I appreciate you very much.  I just received notice that I passed the CMRP from The Society for Maintenance and Reliability Professionals! Thank you for the opportunity to learn from you and for your encouragement. I’m very proud to be a CMRP!”—Amy Campbell, CMRP

“All you need to do is open this book to any page, and the powerful wisdom of Ramesh Gulati is readily available! Make sure you get the new third edition loaded with bonus knowledge and experience.”— Terrence O’Hanlon

“I enjoyed your book tremendously and after reading it several times (along with 20 years of maintenance experience), I was able to take and pass the CMRP certification. Thank you!”—Steve J. Firko, CMRP

Carol Loeb Shloss creates a compelling portrait of a complex relationship of a daughter and her literary-giant father: Ezra Pound and Mary de Rachewiltz, Pound’s child by his long-time mistress, the violinist Olga Rudge. Brought into the world in secret and hidden in the Italian Alps at birth, Mary was raised by German peasant farmers, had Italian identity papers, a German-speaking upbringing, Austrian loyalties common to the area and, perforce, a fascist education.

For years, de Rachewiltz had no idea that Pound and Rudge, the benefactors who would sporadically appear, were her father and mother. Gradually the truth of her parentage was revealed, and with it the knowledge that Dorothy Shakespear, and not Olga, was Pound’s actual wife. Dorothy, in turn, kept her own secrets: while Pound signed the birth certificate of her son, Omar, and claimed legal paternity, he was not the boy’s biological father. Two lies, established at the birth of these children, created a dynamic antagonism that lasted for generations.

Pound maneuvered through it until he was arrested for treason after World War II and shipped back from Italy to the United States, where he was institutionalized rather than imprisoned. As an adult, de Rachewiltz took on the task of claiming a contested heritage and securing her father’s literary legacy in the face of a legal system that failed to recognize her legitimacy. Born on different continents, separated by nationality, related by natural birth, and torn apart by conflict between Italy and America, Mary and Ezra Pound found a way to live out their deep and abiding love for one another.

Let the Wind Speak is both a history of modern writers who were forced to negotiate allegiances to one another and to their adopted countries in a time of mortal conflict, and the story of Mary de Rachewiltz’s navigation through issues of personal identity amid the shifting politics of western nations in peace and war. It is a masterful biography that asks us to consider cultures of secrecy, frayed allegiances, and the boundaries that define nations, families, and politics.

An unusual, searching, and poignant memoir of one man's quest to make sense of depression

George Scialabba is a prolific critic and essayist known for his incisive, wide-ranging commentary on literature, philosophy, religion, and politics. He is also, like millions of others, a lifelong sufferer from clinical depression. In How To Be Depressed, Scialabba presents an edited selection of his mental health records spanning decades of treatment, framed by an introduction and an interview with renowned podcaster Christopher Lydon. The book also includes a wry and ruminative collection of "tips for the depressed," organized into something like a glossary of terms—among which are the names of numerous medications he has tried or researched over the years. Together, these texts form an unusual, searching, and poignant hybrid of essay and memoir, inviting readers into the hospital and the therapy office as Scialabba and his caregivers try to make sense of this baffling disease.

In Scialabba's view, clinical depression amounts to an "utter waste." Unlike heart surgery or a broken leg, there is no relaxing convalescence and nothing to be learned (except, perhaps, who your friends are). It leaves you weakened and bewildered, unsure why you got sick or how you got well, praying that it never happens again but certain that it will. Scialabba documents his own struggles and draws from them insights that may prove useful to fellow-sufferers and general readers alike. In the place of dispensable banalities—"Hold on," "You will feel better," and so on—he offers an account of how it's been for him, in the hope that doing so might prove helpful to others.

Now available in its sixth edition, The Potter's Dictionary of Materials and Techniques presents a comprehensive survey of all aspects of making ceramics for craft potters and ceramic artists. With its sound, practical explanations of ceramic processes, this indispensable reference book has gained a reputation as "the potter's bible." Professional potters, beginners, students, and collectors will find authoritative information clearly and logically presented.

Frank and Janet Hamer explain the sources and character of materials, the behavior of clays and glaze minerals during forming and firing processes, forming methods, and glaze construction. In addition to brief outlines and detailed articles with cross references to illustrations, color photographs illustrate glaze effects and surfaces featured in the work of inventive, contemporary potters. The varied techniques of Raku, maiolica, crystalline glazes, salt and soda, stoneware, and porcelain are also presented.

This new edition features over 500 full-color photographs and illustrations. With more than 300 diagrams to clarify everything in the ceramic world, in its sixth edition The Potter's Dictionary of Materials and Techniques will continue to serve as the authority on all things ceramic.

Precision Industrial Lubrication provides a technical framework for implementing precision lubrication as a core reliability discipline. The major theme is the transition from reactive, one-size-fits-all lubrication practices to condition-based, application-specific strategies driven by field data, digital tools, and engineering rigor. The scope of the work spans lubricant selection, equipment compatibility, contamination control, delivery systems, condition monitoring integration, supplier qualification, and program sustainability with the latest industry standards included throughout.

The driver for this publication is the persistent gap between theoretical lubrication standards and field execution. Failures due to lubricant misfit, contamination, improper handling, and procedural drift remain prevalent despite the availability of high-performance products and modern tools. Industry developments—including electrification, IIoT, regulatory tightening, and rising expectations around uptime—demand a smarter, more integrated approach. This work addresses that need with field-tested strategies, technical specifications, case studies, and alignment with industry standards. It preaches the need for “mindful maintenance.”

The manual is engineered for reliability engineers, maintenance professionals, asset managers, and technical procurement staff. It will be used as a reference for specifying lubricants and equipment, auditing lubrication programs, writing procedures, training technicians, and integrating lubrication into CMMS, ERP, and reliability platforms. Rounding out this extraordinary package are more than 100 essential reference tables, charts, and key takeaways related to the book on an affiliated website.

Unique Features

• Serves as both a practical field guide and a technical design manual.
• Covers what the author calls “Buddhist friction” and the Seven-Fold Path of Principles of Mindful Maintenance.
• An affiliated website, www.precisionindustriallubrication.com, boasts a wealth of data useful to lubrication and reliability engineers.

• Includes over 760 illustrations and 70 tables in two volumes.
• Offers sections on numerical control; grinding wheels (that includes the newest abrasive materials); single point cutting tools and tool wear; basic drilling machine setups; and formulas for estimating the power required for planing.
• Provides detailed discussions on methods of setting up the workpiece on milling machines, horizontal boring machines, planers and shapers. 

The RCM Solution is a straightforward, no-nonsense presentation of what RCM is and how it can be applied to maximize the productivity and safety of physical assets. It introduces and thoroughly embraces the proven power of RCM’s basic principles and follows a common-sense and practical approach to implementation.

A significant portion of this book is dedicated to SAE JA1011-compliant RCM. Yet, the author also introduces other asset management processes that embody RCM principles when the full rigor of RCM isn’t warranted. The RCM Solution therefore presents a total solution for implementing RCM in any organization. 

Features

This book will be an invaluable guide to anyone responsible for physical asset management, at any level of authority, from an organization’s maintenance manager to the organization’s leader.

• The principles are presented generically and are equally applicable to any industry that has physical assets to care for, such as defense, manufacturing, mining, plastics, and power generation.
• Besides, instructors teaching reliability engineering at colleges and universities will find this book a useful complement to their primary text.

• The only book that covers all the topics for the ICML certification course.
• Includes the industry standard API-614 throughout.
• Contains practice questions for the ICML exam at the end of each chapter, along with additional ones on the affiliated website.

Updated to account for ISO 55000, Benchmarking Best Practices for Maintenance, Reliability and Asset Management, Third Edition,  now includes an overview of this seminal and long-awaited standard and identifies the specific points where ISO 55000 will impact maintenance and reliability. New graphics to enhance the text’s main points have been added throughout.

As with past editions, the third edition provides a logical, step-by-step methodology that will enable any company to properly benchmark its maintenance function. It presents an overview of the benchmarking process, a detailed form for surveying and “grading” maintenance management, and a database of the results of more than 100 companies that have used this survey. Widely used, Benchmarking Best Practices for Maintenance, Reliability and Asset Management, Third Edition, has proven to be an invaluable planning guide and on-the-job reference for maintenance managers, plant engineers, operations managers, and plant managers.

Features 

• Updated for ISO 55000
• Provides a clear, concise benchmarking methodology
• Clearly explains and interprets current maintenance benchmarks
• New graphics enhance the text’s explanations and descriptions
  

Features
 
The new risk-based focus of RCM3 features the following principles:
 
• The proactive management of physical and economic risks.
• Updated approach for testing and managing of protective systems.
• Based on the requirements of the fourth industrial revolution (Industry 4.0) and its challenges.
• Covers new expectations and new maintenance techniques for fourth-generation maintenance.
• Places reliability & risk management mainstream with organizational objectives and management systems.
• Aligned and integrated with International ISO Standards for Physical Asset Management and Risk Management (ISO 55000 & ISO 31000).
• Now part of an integrated asset strategy for full life-cycle management of physical assets.

Providing readers with a clear rationale for doing maintenance, this completely updated edition and unique guide is written in a language and style that practicing engineers and managers can understand and apply easily. Effective Maintenance Management examines the role of maintenance in minimizing the risks relating to safety or environmental incidents, adverse publicity, and loss of profitability. In addition to discussing risk reduction tools, it explains their applicability to specific situations so the readers can select the tool that fits their requirements. Aiding to bridge the gap between designers/maintainers and reliability engineers, this guide is sure to help businesses utilize their assets effectively, safely, and profitably.

Features

• Provides a risk reduction model which links maintenance to these risks.
• Enables readers to make the link between maintenance on one hand and safety, profitability, and asset life on the other.
• Examines risks faced during the life cycle of a process plant.
• Discusses a high cost, high downtime maintenance activity, namely plant shutdowns.
• Provides an in-depth look at qualitative and quantitative risks.
• Includes a table of codes that can be used directly or adapted for use in most maintenance management systems.
• Keeps mathematics to a minimum.
• Includes chapter previews and summaries, a list of acronyms, and a glossary of terms.

Designers at all levels of experience need a handy, comprehensive reference that helps them get the job done faster... and better. Machine Designers Reference by J. Marrs fulfills the need, and then some. This hardcover 716-page volume benefits from the author's 20 years of experience as a working mechanical designer. The result is 12 chapters organized in a very practical way (click the TOC button, above). This popular work is packed with essential charts and tables.

The author’s pragmatic intention with Machine Designers Reference is a volume that supports and compliments today’s software programs and the Internet links most commonly relied upon by mechanical designers in the field. At the same time, the book is exceptionally useful to mechanical engineering students and fresh graduates seeking to excel at the curriculum or advance their career in design. Machine Designers Reference complements the coverage offered by standard textbooks in the field. It serves effectively as a bridge between the academic experience and practical design employment in the industry.

Features

• One-of-a-kind tool speeds mechanical design work
• Selection, sizing and tolerances for mechanical parts and assemblies
• Concise best practices for mechanical design, supported by charts and tables
• U.S. and metric units are presented for reader convenience
• Thorough representation of metric hardware

Addressing the elements of reliability using a new and creative approach for the first time in one source, this book is intended to simplify the assessment of reliability by first identifying the current expectations then assessing the current practices to determine if expectations are realistic or if they are not supported by programs and practices. It combines the most effective and efficient of those approaches into a single activity that shows managers what they have a right to expect and what they do not. Most often, this discovery comes as the result of painful failures and production losses. This unique book and the process it describes will allow the discovery of this misalignment to take place at a more convenient and less costly time. Designed to be easy to read, this resource is perfect for busy people who have little time for long and tedious texts or courses that take them away from their workplace. Reliability Engineers, Maintenance and Reliability Managers, Engineering Managers, Plant and Corporate Senior Staff and Executives looking ways to enhance performance, and Consultants who may want to enrich their portfolio by adding this tool will all benefit from the information found in this resource.

Features

• Provides the reader with a clear description of the overall concept of Aligning Reliability Expectations.
• Contains both simple examples and the methodology needed to determine if the programs at each step during the lifecycle of a plant or system will adequately create or maintain reliability.
• Describes how to organize a Wide-Hart assessment.
• Describes how to conduct a Wide-Hart assessment.
• Describes how to communicate results of a Wide-Hart assessment.
• Describes steps in organizing for correcting weaknesses found during the Wide-Hart assessment.
• Contains the Control Document for organizing the assessment and corrective action and the Assessment form for organizing results from assessment and describing results

Long before the Romantics embraced nature, people in the West saw the human and nonhuman worlds as both intimately interdependent and violently antagonistic. With its peerless selection of ninety-eight original sources concerned with the natural world and humankind's place within it, The Marvels of the World offers a corrective to the still-prevalent tendency to dismiss premodern attitudes toward nature as simple or univocal.

Gathering together medical texts, herbals, and how-to books, as well as scientific, religious, philosophical, and poetic works dating from antiquity to the dawn of the Enlightenment, the anthology explores both mainstream and unconventional thinking about the natural world. Its seven parts focus on philosophy and science; plants; animals; weather and climate; ways of inhabiting the land; gardens and gardening; and European encounters with the wider world. Each section and each of the book's selections is prefaced with a helpful introduction by volume editor Rebecca Bushnell that weaves connections among these compelling pieces of the past. The early writers collected here wrote with extraordinary openness about ways of coexisting with the nonhuman forces that shaped them, Bushnell demonstrates, even as they sought to control and exploit their environment. Taken as a whole, The Marvels of the World reveals how many of these early writers cared as much about the natural world as we do today.

In 1484, humanist philosopher and theologian Marsilio Ficino published the first complete Latin translation of Plato's extant works. Students of Plato now had access to the entire range of the dialogues, which revealed to Renaissance audiences the rich ancient landscape of myths, allegories, philosophical arguments, etymologies, fragments of poetry, other works of philosophy, aspects of ancient pagan religious practices, concepts of mathematics and natural philosophy, and the dialogic nature of the Platonic corpus's interlocutors. By and large, Renaissance readers in the Latin West encountered Plato's text through Ficino's translations and interpretation.

In Plato's Persona, Denis J.-J. Robichaud provides the first synthetic study of Ficino's interpretation of the Platonic corpus. Robichaud analyzes Plato's works in their original Greek and in Ficino's Latin translations, as well as Ficino's non-Platonic writings and correspondence, in the process uncovering new aspects of Ficino's intellectual work habits. In his letters and works, Ficino self-consciously imitated a Platonic style of prose, in effect devising a persona for himself as a Platonic philosopher. Plato's dialogues are populated with a wealth of literary characters with whom Plato interacts and against whom Plato refines his own philosophies. Reading through Ficino's translations, Robichaud finds that the Renaissance philosopher seeks an understanding of Plato's persona(e) among all the dialogues' interlocutors. In effect, Ficino assumed the role of Plato's Latin spokesperson in the Renaissance.

Plato's Persona is grounded in an extensive study of scholarship in Renaissance humanism, classics, philosophy, and intellectual history, and contextualizes Ficino's intellectual achievements within the contemporary Christian orthodox view of Platonism. Ficino was an influential figure in the early Italian Renaissance: the key intermediary between Greek and Latin, and between manuscript and print, giving voice to Plato and access to the ancient frameworks needed to interpret his dialogues.

John G. Johnson, who died in 1917, became a legend soon after his death. His prodigious intellect and energy, his consummate skill in court, his independence of thought and action are still spoken of with the same awe his name provoked when it was considered the magic answer to almost any knotty problem of law.

This is the first attempt to put this remarkable, nationally famous figure between the covers of a book. His career is traced, step by step, from his humble birth, through his rapid rise in legal circles, to the crowning rewards of his later years when he was considered the most brilliant corporation lawyer in America. He is shown as a man of single-minded, tireless devotion to the study and application of the law in all its aspects, who gave equally efficient service to big clients and little. He was one of the last general practitioners of law, handling every kind of case to the total of over 10,000 in his lifetime, but his greatest reputation was made in the early years of the century when he tried the Northern Securities Case before the United States Supreme Court, The Government case against the U. S. Steel Corporation and other legal battles of the antitrust era.

The story of Johnson's life is the story of his legal activities, for he had only one other genuine interest—art collecting. This aspect of his character is also described, but the book deals primarily with Johnson the living symbol of the law who well deserves this lasting record.

Site, Sight, Insight presents twelve essays by John Dixon Hunt, the leading theorist and historian of landscape architecture. The collection's common theme is a focus on sites, how we see them and what we derive from that looking. Acknowledging that even the most modest landscape encounter has validity, Hunt contends that the more one knows about a site and one's own sight of it (an awareness of how one is seeing), the greater the insight. Employing the concepts, tropes, and rhetorical methods of literary analysis, he addresses the problem of how to discuss, understand, and appreciate places that are experienced through all the senses, over time and through space.

Hunt questions our intellectual and aesthetic understanding of gardens and designed landscapes and asks how these sites affect us emotionally. Do gardens have meaning? When we visit a fine garden or designed landscape, we experience a unique work of great complexity in purpose, which has been executed over a number of years—a work that, occasionally, achieves beauty. While direct experience is fundamental, Hunt demonstrates how the ways in which gardens and landscapes are communicated in word and image can be equally important. He returns frequently to a cluster of key sites and writings on which he has based much of his thinking about garden-making and its role in landscape architecture: the gardens of Rousham in Oxfordshire; Thomas Whately's Observations on Modern Gardening (1770); William Gilpin's dialogues on Stowe (1747); Alexander Pope's meditation on genius loci; the Désert de Retz; Paolo Burgi's Cardada; and the designs by Bernard Lassus and Ian Hamilton Finlay.

Florence Nightingale is best known as a woman of action—a founder of modern nursing, a reformer in the field of public health, and a pioneer in the use of statistics. What is not generally appreciated is that Nightingale was deeply engaged in the religious and philosophical thought of her time and that the primary aim of her life was not to reform social institutions but to serve God.

Although Nightingale gave primacy to her spiritual life, few of the books written about her have done so, and, until recently, few of her own writings about religion have been published. This failure to attend to Nightingale's spiritual life began to change during the 1980s, most significantly with the 1994 publication of Suggestions for Thought, her own presentation of her religious views.

At the heart of The Friendship of Florence Nightingale and Mary Clare Moore are forty-seven letters written by Nightingale to Moore—her "Dearest Reverend Mother"—the founding superior of the Roman Catholic Sisters of Mercy in Bermondsey, London; ten letters written by Moore to Nightingale; and five letters written by Nightingale about Clare to other Sisters of Mercy. These letters illustrate the personal lives and spiritual struggles and aspirations of two highly influential women in Victorian England: one working to achieve military and governmental reforms, the other designing and implementing new church-related services to the poor-both bound together by their devotion to those who were neglected, by nursing and other skills, by mature Christian faith, and by their engaging affection for one another.

Joseph Bonaparte, King of Naples and Spain, claimed that he had never wanted the overpowering roles thrust upon him by his illustrious younger brother Napoleon. Left to his own devices, he would probably have been a lawyer in his native Corsica, a country gentleman with leisure to read the great literature he treasured and oversee the maintenance of his property. When Napoleon's downfall forced Joseph into exile, he was able to become that country gentleman at last, but in a place he could scarcely have imagined.

It comes as a surprise to most people that Joseph spent seventeen years in the United States following Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo. In The Man Who Had Been King, Patricia Tyson Stroud has written a rich account—drawing on unpublished Bonaparte family letters—of this American exile, much of it passed in regal splendor high above the banks of the Delaware River in New Jersey.

Upon his escape from France in 1815, Joseph arrived in the new land with a fortune in hand and shortly embarked upon building and fitting out the magnificent New Jersey estate he called Point Breeze. The palatial house was filled with paintings and sculpture by such luminaries as David, Canova, Rubens, and Titian. The surrounding park extended to 1,800 acres of luxuriously landscaped gardens, with twelve miles of carriage roads, an artificial lake, and a network of subterranean tunnels that aroused much local speculation.

Stroud recounts how Joseph became friend and host to many of the nation's wealthiest and most cultivated citizens, and how his art collection played a crucial role in transmitting high European taste to America. He never ceased longing for his homeland, however. Despite his republican airs, he never stopped styling himself as "the Count de Survilliers," a noble title he fabricated on his first flight from France in 1814, when Napoleon was exiled to Elba, nor did he ever learn more than rudimentary English. Although he would repeatedly plead with his wife to join him, he was not a faithful husband, and Stroud narrates his affairs with an American and a Frenchwoman, both of whom bore him children. Yet he continued to feel the separation from his two legitimate daughters keenly and never stopped plotting to ensure the dynastic survival of the Bonapartes.

In the end, the man who had been king returned to Europe, where he was eventually interred next to the tomb of his brother in Les Invalides. But the legacy of Joseph Bonaparte in America remains, and it is this that Patricia Tyson Stroud has masterfully uncovered in a book that is sure to appeal to lovers of art and gardens and European and American history.

At a time when almost all African American college students attended black colleges, philosopher William Fontaine was the only black member of the University of Pennsylvania faculty—and quite possibly the only black member of any faculty in the Ivy League. Little is known about Fontaine, but his predicament was common to African American professionals and intellectuals at a critical time in the history of civil rights and race relations in the United States.

Black Philosopher, White Academy is at once a biographical sketch of a man caught up in the issues and the dilemmas of race in the middle of the last century; a portrait of a salient aspect of academic life then; and an intellectual history of a period in African American life and letters, the discipline of philosophy, and the American academy. It is also a meditation on the sources available to a practicing historian and, frustratingly, the sources that are not. Bruce Kuklick stays close to the slim packet of evidence left on Fontaine's life and career but also strains against its limitations to extract the largest possible insights into the life of the elusive Fontaine.

Desde improbables inconformistas hasta líderes y promotores

En Chasing The Impossible, Rachelle Rutherford, directora ejecutiva de Kids on the Move, desentraña la apasionante historia detrás del surgimiento de esta organización multimillonaria sin fines de lucro dedicada a ayudar a niños con retrasos en el desarrollo y discapacidades. Lo que comenzó como un esfuerzo sincero de dos madres decididas que buscaban apoyo para sus hijos con síndrome de Down se ha convertido en un faro de esperanza para las familias.

Rutherford profundiza y describe la ardua batalla que enfrentan muchas familias al recibir un diagnóstico para su hijo, y la atención continua, que muchos niños necesitarán hasta bien entrada en la edad adulta. Con cruda franqueza, expone la cruda realidad de las comunidades mal equipadas para brindar estructuras de apoyo esenciales para estas familias, dejando al descubierto el costo del estrés y el aislamiento que experimentan.

Sin embargo, en medio de estos desafíos, Rutherford revela el compromiso inquebrantable de Kids on the Move de construir puentes para solventar los vacíos que existen en la atención, combinando la implementación calculada de liderazgo y estrategias de crecimiento con una cultura de contribución y compasión. Desde programas de terapia innovadores hasta redes de apoyo integrales, ella revela las iniciativas innovadoras de la organización que han rediseñado el panorama de la atención de la discapacidad.

Pero el viaje está lejos de terminar. En Chasing The Impossible, Rutherford revela planes en el horizonte, una vez más traspasando los límites y revolucionando la definición de excelencia en la atención integral de la discapacidad. Además de emitir un conmovedor llamado a la acción e instar a las comunidades a apoyar a estas familias, el libro sirve no solo como testimonio de resiliencia sino también como un llamado de atención a la acción colectiva.

Con relatos desgarradores y visiones audaces para el futuro, Chasing The Impossible es más que un libro: es un clamor por el cambio, un plan para un futuro donde cada niño tenga la oportunidad de ser visto, conocido y amado.

Unlocking Potential: Lessons from Sports Legends and an Unlikely CEO

What if the standards designed to measure success are the ones holding us back?

In Less than One Percent, Dr. Imamu Tomlinson takes readers on a journey through the paradoxes of success, challenging the conventions that govern how we assess true potential. Drawing from his personal story as an underestimated CEO candidate who rose to lead a multibillion-dollar organization, Tomlinson explores the hidden brilliance of those who don’t fit the mold.

Less than One Percent will inspire you to rethink everything you know about achievement:

• The myth of standards: Examine society’s obsession with metrics and predictability, and how benchmarks for success often leave extraordinary talent overlooked.
• Stories of disruption: Discover how a revolutionist challenged an empire to claim her freedom, why student outcomes aren’t always determined by resources, and how making skating history is a surefire way to avoid the podium.
• The paradox of potential: Learn why what we believe to be true is often at odds with the actual truth—and how embracing the unconventional can lead to greatness.

Through vivid examples, spanning world-class sprinting to tech startups, Tomlinson reveals how success is found outside the lines. Whether you’re a business leader who is ready to embrace innovation, a coach determined to nurture unrecognized talent, or someone who has repeatedly been underestimated, this book will provide the inspiration to defy expectations and risk achieving the unimaginable!

In The Quest: The Definitive Guide to Finding Belonging, Dan J. Berger guides readers through a metaphorical climb to uncover their sense of belonging.

Grounded in Berger’s personal triumph over childhood trauma and his extensive research on the topic, The Quest is a personalized playbook that helps readers fulfill the innate human need for belonging. Berger challenges commonplace myths on the subject and leads readers through interactive exercises to reveal their unique belonging persona.

As the journey progresses, Berger examines traditional and nontraditional paths to belonging, offering readers strategies to enhance their sense of connection and avoid false belonging paths. At the summit, readers are invited to fine-tune their social skills–what Berger calls "Belonging Intelligence"—and evaluate the various aspects of their current environment that influence their sense of belonging.

The book also includes a bonus chapter on how to apply these lessons to the workplace to foster belonging in corporate settings.

The Quest is a guide for anyone seeking to proudly find their place in the world. Whether you’re dealing with loneliness or looking to improve your relationships, this book offers valuable insights and practical tools to help you find your path.

BIG EYES....it isn't just about achieving success; it's about achieving optimum success. You may be wondering, "What's the difference?" While success is personal and means different things to different people, optimum success takes your personal definition to another level. To reach your highest level, open your eyes and envision all of the possibilities. In this book, you are given a simple, easy-to-implement, "how-to" recipe to achieve excellence in every area of your life.

A raucous and raw tale awaits within the pages of Shawn D. Nelson's part-memoir/part-business book, Let Me Save You 25 Years. As the Founder and CEO of Lovesac, Nelson unveils a magnificent and unvarnished account of his entrepreneurial journey spanning a quarter-century. With unapologetic honesty, he shares both triumphant victories and humbling defeats, painting a vivid and authentic picture of the entrepreneurial rollercoaster. From its humble beginnings as a college side gig through to its IPO and beyond, the Lovesac saga unfolds quickly through 25 gripping micro-chapters, each accompanied by a nugget of hard-earned wisdom.

These 25 key lessons, born from sweat, tears, and relentless determination, offer invaluable insights for success not only in business but in life as well. The narrative traces the path from those early days to the pinnacle of achievement—going public on the NASDAQ stock exchange—while imparting practical guidance for aspiring achievers in any field." Let Me Save You 25 Years isn't just a book; it's a mentor, a guide, and a source of inspiration for anyone with the ambition to carve their own legacy.

Few that know Mary Grothe today would guess that her childhood was traumatic. That she was raised by an alcoholic mother and abusive father in a filthy house, where tar dripped down the walls from the profusion of cigarette smoke. That at fourteen she watched her childhood auctioned off beneath a big top before fleeing town as a result of her parents’ criminal mistakes. Or that dance, her original love and ticket to freedom, would be taken from her in an instant. That four whole years of darkness followed. That she briefly married a man so toxic that she had to plot a secret escape to free herself.

What many people do know is that, in spite of all the above, she discovered, to her own astonishment and that of everyone around her, that she was something of a sales prodigy. That her success was meteoric. That her name was synonymous with number one.

Until now, most also don’t know that all of this “success” led her straight back down into the darkness. Into alcoholism, and from there into the front porch of her neighbors’ house, behind the wheel of one of her two cars. Or that years of healing, and grinding away in the trenches, would only bring her straight back to her knees. That finally, one fateful Christmas morning, from the pit of the bottom, she found Jesus. That again, she thought she’d forever changed her life, only to learn that doing so is easier said than done.

And that’s just the first half of this book.

But this isn’t an ordinary business book, or an ordinary autobiography. It’s not merely a rollercoaster, either, but an entire theme park full of them: of being a daughter, a partner, a wife, a mother, a Christian, a founder, and a CEO.

Tap into the empowering realms of communication intelligence to unleash your potential and elevate your communicative presence. In her book The CQ Edge, Su Bridgman reveals and synthesizes profound insights, actionable strategies, and practical exercises to cultivate a resilient, captivating communicative essence.

Whether it’s a high-stakes presentation or an intimate conversation, her strategies empower you to express with confidence, resonate with authenticity, and make an impact with every word spoken. In this book, you will find much more than just a learning experience; you will be able to achieve a metamorphosis into the communicator you aspire to be, transforming not just the way you speak, but the way you are heard and remembered by your audiences.

Embark on this enlightening journey and redefine the boundaries of your communicative landscape. Let every communication and presentation be a powerful interaction, where each word you speak conveys a compelling, authentic message. It’s time to begin your odyssey into the domains of The CQ Edge, where your voice becomes the echo of your soul and message, your ideas have impact, and you are able to become the master and architect of unforgettable impressions your listeners will always remember.

A roadmap to unlocking your inner strength, overcoming adversity, and living a life of authenticity and purpose

In her powerful debut book, The Butterfly Code, D'Yanna Craighead takes readers on a transformative journey of personal growth, resilience, and self-discovery. Drawing on her own remarkable life experiences, D’Yanna reveals a profound framework for navigating life's challenges and emerging as the best version of oneself.

D’Yanna’s story begins in the inner city of Pittsburgh, where she grew up in a close-knit family, dreaming of a life beyond her neighborhood. Through hard work and determination, she embarked on a groundbreaking career as a Black woman in technology, defying stereotypes and breaking barriers in a predominantly white male industry. D’Yanna candidly shares about:

• Her struggles with divorce and the challenges of being a single mother
• Navigating the lack of diversity in her technology career
• Experiencing grief after the loss of her father

Through these trials, she discovered the transformative power of embracing change, trusting the process, and looking within for strength and healing. At the heart of The Butterfly Code is Craighead's unique framework for personal evolution, inspired by the metamorphosis of a butterfly:

• The stages of preparation
• Evolution
• Transformation
• Emergence
• Soaring to new heights

D’Yanna’s writing is intimate, honest, and deeply empowering. She shares her story with vulnerability and courage, inviting readers to reflect on their own lives and the possibilities for growth and change. The Butterfly Code is a celebration of the unbreakable human spirit and a powerful reminder that, like the butterfly, we all have the capacity to transform, evolve, and emerge as our best selves.

When was the last time you pushed yourself beyond your comfort zone and dared to fail?

In Disruptable, Allan Young shows you how embracing your different, getting outside your comfort zone, observing the impossible, daring to fail, and taking purposeful action will set you on a path of intentional personal disruption that will change your world forever. If you are ready to face your fears and embrace your failures, you can also enjoy the freedom of limitless growth. Join Allan on his journey of intentional disruption that has led him from a five-year-old entrepreneur to founder and owner of an Inc. 500 company and multiple start-ups that have generated over $500 million in sales.

Live Your Best Day Ever
Success is something everyone wants, yet it often feels elusive. How do you get it? And once you get it, how do you stay at the top?
This book is a practical guide for achieving what you want in life—and doing it in a way that doesn’t burn you out, break your integrity, or steal from your personal and family time. The secret is living a habit-based lifestyle coupled with a shift in mind-set. Broken down into bite-sized, achievable pieces, it’s easier than it sounds. Deliberately designed to be part factual information, part personal-application guide, and part inspiration for further thought, Best Day Ever is divided into thirty-five easy-to-digest chapters that will tell you how to use your power and resources more effectively.
Author Anne-Marie Faiola has been in the trenches, launching and bootstrapping a multimillion-dollar business while also raising a family and being an active community member. Her experience has allowed her to systemize a style and philosophy of working, living, and thinking that empowers her success. In this book, she’s sharing everything she’s learned, so you can pick and choose strategies to boost you to a higher level—or even set you on an entirely new and exciting trajectory. Stop relying on luck. Plan for success. Choose to be happy!

WHEN YOU START WITH LOVE, YOU CAN ACCOMPLISH ANYTHING
In From GED to Harvard Then Inc. 500, be prepared to fall not just for a city but for a couple who firmly believe that the most wildly successful businesses don’t start with a sale or even a product … they start with a desire to engage with others.
When they bought a run-down little market in 1982, the Wolfes didn’t even consider the idea of failing. At seventeen and nineteen years old, Jane and Scott knew that if they were going to succeed, they needed to put their whole heart into their business. And it worked. The Wolfes found that success isn’t as much about what you sell—it’s about the feelings that your team members project and your customers walk away with. In short, it’s about love.
From GED to Harvard Then Inc. 500 walks with the Wolfes through their journey from the early years of Wagner’s Meat, its growth and utter destruction by Hurricane Katrina, their astonishing rebuilding, and the realization of running a New Orleans icon that has a little bit of everything ... and a whole lot of community engagement.

The Farmer’s Code takes you on a hero’s journey of self-development. It follows a path of transformation and growth to help you become your true, highest self. This journey will lead to a greater understanding of the self and a deeper connection to one’s own values and core principles, which paves the way for a long-lasting legacy.

Legacies provide a roadmap for future generations, showing those who follow your footsteps what is possible as they strive to reach their full potential. Filled with personal stories of the struggles and triumphs of one American farming family, the Code shows how legacies are about more than just personal fulfillment. They can have a profound impact on the lives of others by serving as a guiding light to those who are seeking a better way to live. Just as airline passengers are instructed to see to their own oxygen masks first in the event of an emergency before helping others, legacy building has to start with the self. When you are safe, secure, and strong, you are in a much better position to turn outward to help others. It is then that you can help address societal challenges, advance knowledge and innovation, promote social change, or support the important causes you see in your community.

The Farmer’s Code should spark aspirations, ignite passion, and encourage everyone to strive for greatness. By considering the lasting impact you can make, you will be able to live more purposefully and leave a more positive imprint on the world.

A Treasured Gift from a Father to his Son

As a senior in high school, I received a special gift from my father.

As I was about to leave home for college, my father handed me an eleven-page handwritten letter that contained his best advice for his son. The letter contained quotes from Shakespeare, snippets from classic literature, and candid confessions about things that my dad wished he had done differently.

The letter was written by pen but might as well have been written in granite. I still have this letter in a drawer in my bedroom closet and I read parts of it about once a month. To this day, I treasure my father’s words of wisdom.

As we get older, we realize that there are many lessons that life gives us. These lessons in life are invaluable. But these lessons in life are not serving anyone unless we share them with our family, friends, and even strangers.

About three years ago, I began writing the most important lessons that I’ve learned in my life. The life lessons range from almost every aspect of life, including health and nutrition, financial management, faith, professional goal setting, and virtues such as perseverance, sacrifice, and gratitude.

Ninety-seven percent of these life lessons are based upon abject failures, repeated mistakes, and, in some cases, heartbreak, but our mistakes and failures make us who we are. And I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Win Today was inspired by my father, James H. Fisher, Esq., who knew better than anyone that the greatest lessons aren’t taught in a classroom.

How the Sum of One Man’s Experiences Led to a Life Well Lived
How does one create a happy and fulfilled life? For Marty Holleran, who had an ordinary upbringing in Scranton, Pennsylvania in the 1940s, he had great things planned for his future. Faced with a lifetime of personal trials and tribulations, successes, heartbreaks, and struggles, Marty rose above the hardships to achieve his desired life. Well Lived is filled with valuable lessons from his eclectic business career alongside heartfelt recollections of his family and the life-changing lessons he’s learned along the way. Well Lived will help readers to reflect on how their moral compasses, their unconditional love for their families, and their relentless dedication can get them through amazing obstacles.

From the outside looking in, Sallie Holder seemed to have it all. A “Top Professional of the Year” before the age of thirty, she was living a six-figure, wildly “successful” lifestyle by society’s standards. But we all know looks can be deceiving. While smiling and confident on the exterior, Sallie had a secret: she was actually miserable living the life she’d chosen. Only she knew that success felt like a role she was playing, and that on the inside she felt like an imposter who simply wanted to be doing anything other than what she was doing.
How in the world would she make a change at this stage of life? And what in the world would she do? If she made a change, what would everyone think? How could she reject society’s conventional definition of “success?”
Sallie’s journey to answering these questions for herself and others became her mission. While the process included both pain and joy, it has ultimately resulted in her achieving her greatest potential. Now she shares everything she’s learned to help people who feel just as unsatisfied and suspect they too are on the wrong path.
In Hitting Rock Middle, Sallie has created a step-by-step plan to help you start creating the path to your greatest potential – a place that includes true fulfillment and success. Through the journey this book will take you on, you will pinpoint who you are, what you want to do with your life, and how to get out of Rock Middle and into the big, bold, successful career that was waiting for you all along.

From a young paperboy in Southern California to a visionary leader in education and business, David R. Jackson’s story is a testament to adventure, ambition, and perseverance. His passion for travel and world exploration began when he was a teenager and led to:

• Earning his private pilot license at 16
• Skiing the Americas; he traveled down the Pan-American Highway to Chile, across the Andes to Argentina, and then to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil before heading back to California
• Competitive skiing at the collegiate level at Brigham Young University
• Spending a year road tripping and skiing through Europe, the Middle East, the Soviet Union, and Scandinavia

His entrepreneurial spirit led him to launch multiple successful businesses before taking the helm at Fairmont Schools, where he transformed a small institution into a leading private school network. A dedicated philanthropist and faith-driven leader, he has spent decades shaping the educational landscape, serving in leadership roles, and giving back to communities around the world.

Now semi-retired, David continues to travel, having visited over 130 countries, while devoting his time to philanthropy and family. This inspiring memoir chronicles a life of adventure, leadership, and unwavering determination—proving that with vision and courage, anything is possible.

Living Sober in an Industry Ravaged by Addiction
As a child, Steve Palmer never belonged—not in school, not in his troubled home, not with friends. After his father and grandfather passed away, he was sent to a series of rehabs and halfway houses before ending up on the streets. Drugs and alcohol soon became a way of life. Eventually, he would go on to a career running some of the country’s most celebrated and innovative fine dining establishments. But first, he had to learn how to be sober in an industry awash with alcohol and drugs. Thanks to coworkers that were able to love him when he couldn’t love himself, Steve got sober. He escaped addiction alive. Many in the industry do not. No other industry has higher rates of alcohol and drug abuse. People are losing careers and families. They’re losing their health. They’re losing their lives. This is the story of one man who found healing and recovery in the industry that enabled his addiction—and he’s on a quest to help others do the same.

Discover how the nation's largest senior living operator answered the call posed by the greatest public health crisis in one hundred years with courage and resilience.
CEO Cindy Baier shares a mesmerizing, behind-the-scenes look at how Brookdale Senior Living navigated the COVID-19 pandemic as she stood at the helm of a company with $3.5 billion of revenue in 2020. Woven together with her own personal accounts, Cindy highlights the broad symphony of voices and diverse cast of players who proved pivotal in helping save lives during the most challenging crisis the senior living industry has ever faced. The book is chock-full of heartfelt sentiment and granular insights that serve to redefine corporate leadership as the world enters a new normal. Heroes Work Here is the new gold standard for crisis management, a perfect primer for leaders wanting to stay one step ahead of any crisis, and a keen reminder of the wonders that result from a culture of caring.

RESTORATION ENCOMPASSES BODY, MIND, AND SPIRIT
During the early years of her career, Marisa Faircloth had the good fortune to work with some of the best plastic surgeons in the field. She thought then what she knows now: that less invasive procedures are perfect for people who don't want or need drastic changes to their overall appearance. As she tells her clients, radical changes in your appearance are not going to make you beautiful; the lightest of touches can bring out your natural beauty.

Marisa's unique approach to human connection and empathy allows her to provide more than the aesthetic services she offers. Though clients may come in thinking they need beauty services, they often leave feeling full restoration of body, mind, and spirit. Marisa's mission is to uncover the hidden beauty in each person who walks through her door. Whatever she can do to enhance and empower them, she takes the time and effort to do.

Her book gives readers permission to do something nice for themselves, because if it makes them feel better, it makes everyone they touch feel better too. This is why the benefits of self-care are limitless.

Using her decades of experience in aesthetics, she shares with readers how beauty extends beyond the face and body: true beauty comes from the compassion and connection we extend to others.

Take your front row seat as Steve Heard looks back at his “life lived all the way up,” and shares seven decades of adventures and real-life accounts involving some of history’s most influential decision-makers through one of the most rapidlychanging times in American history.

Steve’s story begins before his own birth, chronicling his family’s roots, particularly his great-great-great grandfather, Colonel Stephen Heard. A soldier and a politician, Steve’s namesake fought with George Washington in the French and Indian Wars and the Revolutionary War before becoming the first governor of Georgia.

Steve’s own account opens with his upbringing in Westwood, Massachusetts, his private education at Milton Academy in the 1950s, and his years of sports, friends, and academics at Harvard. Shortly after receiving his degree, Steve was quickly commissioned in the United States Air Force and served three years as an intelligence officer in Spain. While living on the civilian economy and making local connections, he participated in some of the Cold War’s most challenging episodes, a number of which are still largely classified today.

At the close of his eventful three-year tour, Steve became only the third American to fight bulls in Spain as a licensed matador, earning him a framed picture in one of Barcelona’s oldest and best known restaurants, Los Caracoles, among some of Spain’s most well-known, historical matadors.

After his return to the United States in the 1960s, Steve attended Stanford Law School while working as a Santa Clara Deputy Sheriff. Steve then began five successful, eventful decades of practicing international law in several law firms—two of which he started. He investigated and litigated international transborder transactions, including smuggling and financial matters, cases that took him to the farthest reach of Europe, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia.

All The Way Up also reveals Steve’s philanthropic side, serving 20 years on the Board of the New York City Fresh Air Fund, the last 13 of which he was president. He also served several terms on Stanford Law School’s Board of Visitors.

Steve now enjoys his retirement with his wife, Susan, in Seabrook, South Carolina.

Borrowing a line from Teddy Roosevelt, Steve’s lifelong friend and Charleston neighbor, John Winthrop, likes to say, “Steve Heard is truly a classic ‘man in the arena.’”

We all want the autonomy and power to change our lives for the better and yet many of us feel stuck in the same bad habits, patterns, and short-term fixes. We know what we should do, but often we cannot get ourselves to actually do it.

In Unstoppable Brain, Dr. Kyra Bobinet debunks today’s over-dependence on performance-driven tools such as calorie counting, SMART goals, and likes/followers that attempt to motivate us into behavior change. These methods work well in the short term but have a long-term downside of negative emotions and harmful behaviors. Yet despite these poor results, we keep using the same performative approaches over and over. Something is missing.

Emerging research into the neuroscience of behavior and motivation has brought to light to a little-understood area of the brain, the habenula; possibly the most powerful controller of behavior ever found. If left untended, the habenula acts as a failure detector and motivation kill switch that can rob you of positive or lasting change, leaving you stuck in relapse, frustration, and suffering.

Understanding the habenula’s inner workings is must-have knowledge to obtain the freedom and agency for the life you long for. New research reveals that the habenula is a primary gating mechanism for everything that does or doesn't happen in your life, what you do or do not do and. It is among our biggest obstacles to change.

In this book, you will learn that an activated habenula can dominate even the dopamine and reward systems that the scientific world for decades has esteemed the most powerful behavioral drivers. We will explore exactly what is wrong with today’s overly used performative approaches and how you can free yourself to reach your optimal health and best life. Dr. Bobinet unpacks mounting evidence on the habenula and other discoveries that change everything about changing behavior. With this new vision and understanding, your natural tendencies, purpose, and passions can emerge organically and inspire permanent, satisfying, and healthy life change.

Unstoppable Brain frees you from being too performative for others and being too hard on yourself. It provides all you need to restore your sovereignty and empowers you to change your life and habits whenever and however you want. It offers a therapeutic dose of three “medicines” that help you go from stuck to unstoppable. This potent elixir is an antidote to recovering your innate motivation wherever you’ve been stopped by the past or overwhelmed by the future. Most importantly, this book gives you the key to unlock lasting change.

Dr. Bobinet shares relatable examples from her own story and impactful research studies in resounding instruction for a full, vibrant life. Throughout the book, her engaging voice, relatable vulnerability, and empowering message infuse readers with the tools and reinvigorated power to unlock true, lasting change. Become unstoppable!

It’s Not the Score, It’s the Trip tells the tale of a man who was driven, smart, and eager to be wealthy, from his early days with his, by most standards, huge family, led by a father who was his guide, mentor, and hero. He fell in love, twice: once with college friend Nancy Tofanelli and later with the insurance industry. Both relationships were defined by compassion, and each came to define his life.
Brian O’Hara is an ordinary man who landed at a place and time in history that gave him the opportunity for an extraordinary life, and who recognized where he had landed and took the lead during some of the most remarkable years in the history of the financial services world.

Are you so wrapped up in the day-to-day tasks of working hard that you've never stopped to figure out where you want to go? Maybe you have goals for yourself, your family, your career, your business and employees, but you face challenges in realizing your dreams. Maybe you worked hard and had achieved success, but today's economy knocked you down. Can you name all fifty states or even all Ten Commandments? How can you remember 282 success principles for business or for life in general? And why should you when there are really only three simple, yet difficult rules for success? If you'd like to get started, or need to start over, on creating the life you truly want, you can do it. With profound and profoundly simple concepts, this book will point you in the right direction and provide you with a roadmap to your destination. Learn to See the End First and live the Three Simple Yet Difficult Rules of Success and you will succeed! • Deciding what you want and understanding what it looks like when you get there is the hardest work you will ever do, but it is the most important work on the journey. You must see the end first! • If we are too fearful of failure, we can go overboard on the work aspect of becoming successful. We can become workaholics or "successaholics." To be truly successful requires balance. We need to play, not just work. We need to build up those around us and not just our own personal success. • What is important in your life? In your heart? What gives you joy, when do you feel maximized, alive and energized? Take an inventory of what you spend your time doing. There you will either find your passion or you will find what holds you back. Are you living a life of quiet desperation, or are you marching toward those things you hold dear? • Sometimes you have to cut off the avenues of retreat to keep your attitude where it needs to be in that moment.

The true story of how lives were lost, taxpayer money squandered, and reputations destroyed as part of an ill-conceived effort to remake Afghanistan into something akin to our own image.

What started as a project to reconstruct the highway between Kabul and Kandahar evolved into an ambitious effort to provide Afghanistan with new roads, bridges, schools, clinics, power plants, and irrigation projects. These assignments fell to a Texas-based security firm, US Protection & Investigation, LLC (USPI), which in the space of a few years rose to become the most pervasive and effective paramilitary force in Afghanistan.The initiatives required weapons, health and death benefits, ammunition, uniforms, and vehicles, which the underfunded Government of Afghanistan could not supply, but still mandated. Amendment 660 of the Foreign Assistance Act of 1972 prohibited USAID from funding these items. Aware of these Vietnam-era legal restraints, Del Spier of USPI alerted U.S. officials to the implications and was assured repeatedly that a way would be found to solve the problem.

This is the unbelievable true story of a normal American couple, Del and Barbara Spier, in unfriendly enemy territory, in the middle of a war. Unknown to Barbara, Del was forced to take matters into his own hands to accomplish U.S. objectives. He was caught in the crossfire of Afghanistan's endemic corruption, criminals, and ethnic rivalries and Washington's shifting military strategies and bureaucratic inertia. USPI security personnel worked across the country, where they encountered ambushes, IEDs (improvised explosive devices), warlords, drug kingpins, criminals and ordinary Afghans coping with the horrors of everyday life. These horrors struck a humanitarian nerve in the Spiers and without any government assistance they provided clothing, medicine, training, fuel, food and shelter to the unfortunate.As American troops are being withdrawn from Afghanistan, one overriding question will occupy the public for years: How could an endeavor that began with the toppling of the Taliban regime in Kabul a decade ago have evolved into the longest war in American history?

The Spiers' path ultimately led them into a protracted legal battle. USAID turned on the very company that for years had protected its construction sites in Afghanistan and enlisted the FBI and the Justice Department in a three-year, multi-million dollar investigation vendetta against the Spiers and their company. Only dramatic courtroom decisions handed down in March and July 2010 in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C. brought the matter to a surprising conclusion.

The Spiers' tragedy is a microcosm of America's misadventure in Afghanistan.

Have you ever wondered how to lead your teams effectively? In Foundational Leadership, Robert Griggs shares the story of his encounter with Jack Stack, author of The Great Game of Business. This first interaction changed Robert’s life and it formed the basis for an entirely different way to view leadership – one where leaders led with an open book and were willing to share the ins and outs of how a company was run. As Robert shares, this approach, while unsettling in the early days of its implementation at Trinity Products, completely changed the way he and his team did business. Through the utilization of concepts such as profit sharing, benchmarks, scoreboards, and continuous improvement, Robert has created a company that continues to grow from year to year.

Your struggling teenager is going to a residential or wilderness treatment program. Their addictions, learning disabilities, or emotional/behavioral issues have brought you to a moment of decision. Heartsick, anxious, and exhausted, questions bounce endlessly around your mind, "Will this work? Was this really necessary? Will she ever forgive me? Can we handle him at home when the time comes?" Dr. Tim Thayne delivers the answers in his groundbreaking book Not by Chance. As an owner/therapist of wilderness and residential programs, Thayne was frustrated when young people made monumental progress, only to return home where things quickly unraveled. His mission became to vastly improve long-term success by crafting and proving a model to coach parents on their power to lead out through full engagement during treatment and management of the transition home. Not by Chance engages readers through solid research, simple exercises, and captivating stories taken from Thayne's own life and the living rooms of hundreds of American homes. This book serves up concrete tools, hope, confidence, and stamina for families, professionals and mentors.

Topics include:
• Why good programs work
• How to boost—not undermine—treatment
• Nine dangers waiting after discharge
• How to identify natural mentors for your teen
• What to do when the testing begins
• When and how to grant back privileges and freedoms
• How to ease your young adult's transition from treatment to independent living
• When you know you've succeeded

If you are even considering out-of-home treatment for your teen, do not gamble with the outcomes. Not by Chance should claim its rightful place on your nightstand. www.notbychance.com

The Forever Home provides the foundation to confidently explore what you want, plan your dream home, and find the right professionals to make it a reality.

Renowned architect Kevin Harris will guide you through his proven, step-by-step process to design and build a house that fits you so well it becomes your forever home. No matter where you travel, your forever home is the place you feel complete.

Inside these pages, you’ll learn how to:
• Determine when it makes sense to hire an architect
• Evaluate and assemble the design team and construction team that’s right for you
• Understand the residential construction process
• Use the Hierarchy of Design to make the most important decisions first
• Recognize the pitfalls and avoid many common, but ill advised cost-saving schemes

The Forever Home will pave the way for you to design and build not only the home of your current dreams, but the home that will be perfect for your children, grandchildren, aging parents, and even you later in life.

“An extraordinary story of resilience. In his moving memoir, Stephen Thompson opens up about how he broke cycles of abuse, poverty, and neglect to build a better life. It’s filled with lessons for anyone who’s ever questioned their resolve.”—Adam Grant, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Hidden Potential and Think Again

Left with a gift, in a motel room in Reno

The Rubik’s cube was left behind, and so were they. It was January 1980, in a motel room in Reno. Stephen Jon Thompson was just nine years old, left behind with his four younger siblings, the youngest just a year old. Their mother had left two days before to go to the laundromat. She never returned. Now the power was out, the Nilla wafers were running low, and the Rubik’s cube that his mother had brought home from her waitressing job could not be solved. Stephen, the oldest, had a bigger problem to solve, what to do with the four young souls he was now in charge of. He finally determined they all needed to get out of that motel room. He dialed the front desk. Thus begins Hotel Goodbyes, Stephen Jon Thompson’s gripping memoir about making it in America against incredible odds.

Few knew of Stephen’s past. Maybe he didn’t know it himself. For his colleagues at companies like Google, Apple, Amazon, or Nike, he was a successful human resource executive, who had an uncanny ability to read people, to find the right person for the job, and to convince them that it was right for them. More than anything, they remember his infectious smile. But that grinning face hid a difficult past, a childhood spent in dingy motel rooms, dreary foster homes, and a cold, concrete juvenile home. It took Stephen years to tell his story, to write his memoir, to come to grips with a childhood he would just as soon forget. But when his young son came home with a school assignment to tell his family history, Stephen knew he needed to come clean. He could no longer bury the past, not to his friends and co-workers, and not to his two sons, to whom this book is dedicated.

Hotel Goodbyes is one man’s journey to come to grips with his past. From Ohio to California to Nevada and back, Stephen takes us on his journey from foster child to wildfire fighter to college graduate to blackjack dealer to state assembly candidate to successful technology executive. Along the way, he reconnects with his younger siblings and tracks down his Aunt Ouida, his mother’s sister, to find the answer to the question he has always had: why did his mother leave that day and never come back? In the end, Stephen determines that his mother abandoned him, but also left him with a gift, a gift of a better life.

Paul Owhadi’s improbable entrepreneurial journey began as a first-generation immigrant coming to America with just a few hundred dollars in his pocket. Having learned a remarkable level of self-reliance, as a child sent to a French boarding school at age four, he was educated in London—and then headed to New York City and a whole new life.

After an education and a career in urban planning and city management—one of the youngest city managers in the country—he excelled at creating and transforming cities for the betterment of its people. But it was an unexpected opportunity in the private sector which set Paul on his entrepreneurship path. He took the extraordinary opportunity granted to him to explore the world of property development, discovering a passion for both real estate development and creating companies. He also faced devastating setbacks that would test his mettle and fortitude. Along the way, he formed his own business approach—one combining a passion for innovation and outside-the-box thinking. With the support of family and a fierce work ethic, he conquered his sector. But he also traveled the globe—using intellectual curiosity as his guide.

This is the story of a man who used every challenge to inspire and guide him; this is the inspirational tale of an entrepreneur who grabbed at every opportunity to create a life of passion and innovation.

Breaking through stereotypes, Dr. Esther M. Alegria challenges the notion that promotions are limited to the privileged few. Raised in a low-income area with scarce resources, she overcame obstacles to achieve a thriving career in the pharmaceutical industry.

In From Just Esther to Poly-Esther, Dr. Alegria emphasizes the keys to transforming a vision into reality: passion, persistence, and a willingness to seize opportunities—and a lot of laughter. As she reflects on her humble origins and tells the story of her career, she shares valuable insights and traits for readers to integrate into their lives to find their own sense of self-awareness and fulfillment.

With heartfelt sincerity and playful humor, Dr. Alegria encourages personal growth, empowering others to forge their unique paths. Discover how her journey from adversity to success can inspire you to unlock your true potential.

Grab the controller! Save the World!
One of the gaming industry’s leading women describes how gaming can be a force for global good.

Play is in our DNA, but gaming has always had a bad rap. Since the first humans carved a game board into the dirt, we’ve been told that playing around isn’t a useful way to spend our time. But gaming is as natural as we are. We game to experiment with ideas and to learn. We play to create new worlds so we can change this one. Gaming pushes us to imagine what more we can become. In Push Play: Gaming for a Better World, Dr. Songyee Yoon, Chief Strategy Officer at NCSOFT, lays out how gaming can help us craft a better world together.

While gaming has global implications, it has largely been created by, marketed to and associated with men. The gaming industry’s perception as a “boys club” has kept many talented women from pursuing their passions in STEM. As a leader and expert in the video game industry, Dr. Yoon shares her own experience in this male dominated field and her quest for a more diverse and equitable tech community. From encouraging more female lead characters in games to creating more supportive environments for working mothers, Dr. Yoon works to break down barriers for those who have been shut out of opportunities in STEM. After all, the game only gets better with more players.

Through stories from her career in the gaming industry and her deep passion for tech, she outlines how innovations in gaming push industries forward and create a more equitable world for everyone.

• Learn how gaming inspires Artificial Intelligence to consider everyone’s perspective.
  
• Master tips and tricks from gaming that can be used to lead diverse and thriving business teams.
  
• Explore the digital worlds of Massively Multiplayer Online Games and understand why we need digital communities where all humans can participate.
  

So, get those thumbs flexing with Push Play to unlock your power to play.

At fifty-seven, Dr. Carol Turner was in peak health and avidly participating in the full gamut of outdoor sports that Colorado has to offer. Then, on her way to watch her sons compete in the state’s annual high school mountain bike championship, she pulled into a gas station, received a call from her doctor, and learned that she had cancer. As a doctor herself, she instantly knew that what was to come would have personal and universal significance, and started taking notes immediately, from the passenger seat of the car. Those notes turned into this book―a candid, unvarnished chronicle of her cancer journey, from diagnosis to recovery.

In Waldy, Myelo, & Me, Dr. Turner courageously shares her remarkable journey of resilience, hope, and triumph over two rare blood disorders: Waldenstrom's Macroglobulinemia and Myelodysplastic Syndrome. With unwavering determination and a heart full of positivity, Dr. Turner takes readers on a compelling ride through her experiences, offering insights and inspiration for anyone facing similar health challenges.

• A Personal Chronicle of Triumph: Join Dr. Turner as she navigates the intricate web of medical diagnoses, treatment protocols, and emotional highs and lows. Through her candid narrative, readers will witness the power of the human spirit in the face of adversity.
• Navigating the Unknown: Gain valuable insights into coping strategies, communication with medical professionals, and the importance of building a robust support system. Dr. Turner's story sheds light on how to approach the unknown with courage and strength.
• Fostering Hope and Positivity: Discover how Dr. Turner’s unyielding optimism and determination became instrumental in her healing journey. Waldy, Myelo, & Me is a testament to the transformative effects of maintaining a positive mindset in the midst of life's challenges.
• Empowering Others: Dr. Turner’s story isn't just about her own journey – it's about empowering others to advocate for their health, seek knowledge, and find solace in shared experiences. Readers will find a wellspring of encouragement to face their health battles head-on.
• A Beacon of Resilience: Waldy, Myelo, & Me stands as a beacon of resilience, offering a heartwarming reminder that even in the darkest times, there is light to be found. Dr. Turner’s unwavering spirit serves as an example of the incredible strength we all possess within.

Dr. Turner's Waldy, Myelo, & Me is an empowering testament to the human spirit's capacity to overcome life's most daunting challenges. With candor, wisdom, and a touch of humor, this book is a must-read for anyone seeking inspiration and guidance on their own path to healing and resilience.

In his latest book. bestselling author, experienced financial services consultant, and actor Charlie Epstein tells his story from the beginning. From his earliest days as a class clown all the way to his 2022 performance of his one-man show, Yield of Dreams, Charlie gives readers a peek behind the curtain and inspires them to make their wishes come true. Through his triumphs, stumbles, and recoveries, Charlie presents a life story that will encourage anyone to face one hurdle at a time and push through to follow their dreams. With humor and wit, Charlie reflects on the past while dispensing advice to anyone hoping to take control of their financial future.

“Oh Yeah … Watch This!” is the story of the making of a man. Born amid tragedy, Lloyd Edward “Ed” Allen Jr. endured an abused and lonely boyhood to become a Naval Flight officer, the Captain of an aircraft carrier, and a Navy Rear Admiral. After his experience in the corporate world, he founded the Executive Success Group, coaching executives, sharing his insights on leadership and achieving business results.

In this powerful and poignant memoir, Allen brings those insights, and much more, to a wider audience. Here you will meet another Ed Allen who was grappling with the lingering pains of the past that drove him to accomplishment. He shares not only the accolades but the anguish. Even as he rose to more senior levels in the military and in business, this was a soul in search of self. You see a hurting man looking upward and asking, “Why?” – and he takes you with him on a journey of forgiveness and closure.

Few other memoirs have dealt so honestly with what it means to be human. “On the way to higher ground,” Allen tells us in the opening pages, “I often slipped and fell and shouted in pain, but I grew stronger as I climbed to where, at long last, I could see the view.” To anyone thinking that making it to the mountaintop is an impossible dream, this is Allen’s challenge: “Oh Yeah ...Watch This!”