Career & Money

Dolly Parton is instantly recognizable for her iconic style and persona, but how did she create her enduring image? Dolly crafted her exaggerated appearance and stage personality by combining two opposing stereotypes―the innocent mountain girl and the voluptuous sex symbol. Emerging through her lyrics, personal stories, stage presence, and visual imagery, these wildly different gender tropes form a central part of Dolly’s media image and portrayal of herself as a star and celebrity. By developing a multilayered image and persona, Dolly both critiques representations of femininity in country music and attracts a diverse fan base ranging from country and pop music fans to feminists and gay rights advocates. In Dolly Parton, Gender, and Country Music, Leigh H. Edwards explores Dolly’s roles as musician, actor, author, philanthropist, and entrepreneur to show how Dolly’s gender subversion highlights the challenges that can be found even in the most seemingly traditional form of American popular music. As Dolly depicts herself as simultaneously "real" and "fake," she offers new perspectives on country music’s claims of authenticity.

Richard Wainwright, the Liberals and Liberal Democrats: Unfinished Business offers new research on familiar themes involving loyalties of politics, faith and locality. Richard Wainwright was a Liberal MP for seventeen years during the Party's recovery, but his life tells us about much more than this. Wainwright grew up in prosperity, but learned from voluntary work about poverty; he refused to fight in World War Two, but saw war at its cruellest; he joined the Liberal Party when most had given up on it, but gave his fortune to it; lost a by-election but caused the only Labour loss in Harold Wilson's landslide of 1966. He then played a key role in the fall of Jeremy Thorpe, the Lib-Lab Pact and the formation of the SDP-Liberal Alliance and the Liberal Democrats; he represented a unique Yorkshire constituency which reflected his pride and hope for society; and though he gave his life to the battle to be in the Commons, he refused a seat in the Lords. Richard Wainwright is central to the story of the Liberal Party and sheds light on the reasons for its survival and the state of its prospects. At the same time this book is a parable of politics for anyone who wants to represent an apparently lost cause, who wants to motivate people who have been neglected, and who want to follow their convictions at the highest level.

In one of the year's most authentic, down-to-earth memoirs, a former San Francisco police officer provides an all-too-human look at the actual experiences of a real-life cop, offering compelling new meaning to the phrase "officer needs assistance."

When her husband’s ill health forces them to move into an assisted living facility, Anne M. Wyatt-Brown suddenly finds herself surrounded by elderly residents. In this lively and provocative collection, other distinguished gerontologists reflect on Anne’s moving account of her transition to becoming a member of a vibrant and sociable community that offers care-giving support, while encouraging her to pursue her own interests, including exercising, reviewing articles for scholarly journals, serving on committees, and singing. By redefining notions of care and community, undoing the stigmas of aging, and valuing the psychological factors involved in accepting assistance, this volume provides a bold new framework for thinking about aging, continuing care, making the big move to a retirement community, and living with vitality in the new environment.

‘Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few’ – Seventy-five years on the unforgettable words of Winston Churchill ring as powerfully as they did in August 1940 when the young men of the RAF stood as the last line of defense against Hitler’s far more powerful Luftwaffe. This emotional yet factual book describes the three and a half months (10 July – 31 October 1940) battle day-by-day and covers the essential details of every one of the 540 young pilots who died in this critical campaign that saved Britain from invasion by the Nazis. Thanks to the authors painstaking research we are given a short biography of each pilots and learn of their actions and the manner of their deaths, their squadrons and planes. The result is a unique record and fitting memorial of the courage and sacrifice of this select band of heroes. The text is enhanced by photographs of the individuals themselves.

The story of the international struggle to preserve Kafka's literary legacy. Kafka's Last Trial begins with Kafka's last instruction to his closest friend, Max Brod: to destroy all his remaining papers upon his death. But when the moment arrived in 1924, Brod could not bring himself to burn the unpublished works of the man he considered a literary genius-even a saint. Instead, Brod devoted his life to championing Kafka's writing, rescuing his legacy from obscurity and physical destruction. The story of Kafka's posthumous life is itself Kafkaesque. By the time of Brod's own death in Tel Aviv in 1968, Kafka's major works had been published, transforming the once little-known writer into a pillar of literary modernism. Yet Brod left a wealth of still-unpublished papers to his secretary, who sold some, held on to the rest, and then passed the bulk of them on to her daughters, who in turn refused to release them. An international legal battle erupted to determine which country could claim ownership of Kafka's work: Israel, where Kafka dreamed of living but never entered, or Germany, where Kafka's three sisters perished in the Holocaust? Benjamin Balint offers a gripping account of the controversial trial in Israeli courts-brimming with dilemmas legal, ethical, and political-that determined the fate of Kafka's manuscripts. Deeply informed, with sharply drawn portraits and a remarkable ability to evoke a time and place, Kafka's Last Trial is at once a brilliant biographical portrait of a literary genius, and the story of two countries whose national obsessions with overcoming the traumas of the past came to a head in a hotly contested trial for the right to claim the literary legacy of one of our modern masters.

For as long as human societies have existed there have always been people who have always transgressed the laws of their respective societies. It seems that whenever new laws are made, certain people find ways to break them. This book will introduce you to some of the most notorious figures, from all parts of the world, who have committed heinous crimes such as highway robbery, murder, and forgery. Beginning with Bulla Felix, the Roman highwayman, this book traces the careers of medieval outlaws such as Robin Hood and Adam Bell. Early modern murderers also make an appearance, such as Sawney Beane, whose story inspired the cult horror movie The Hills Have Eyes (1977). Learn also about the crimes and daring escapes of Jack Sheppard, an eighteenth-century criminal who escaped from prison on several occasions, and find out if the ‘gentlemanly’ highwayman, Dick Turpin, was truly a gentleman. the ruffian Dick Turpin. This book also includes an appendix of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century thieves’ cant, as well as several historical poems, songs, and ballads relating to the subjects discussed, and the work is prefaced with an essay highlighting the significance of crime literature throughout history.

In her author’s note to the book, Marion Winik writes that in Mexico on the Day of the Dead, “people build altars to their loved ones . . . they go to the cemetery and stay all night, praying, singing, drinking, wailing. They tell the sad stories and the noble ones; they eat cookies shaped like skeletons. They celebrate and mourn at once.” Striking that balance, The Glen Rock Book of the Dead presents snapshot portraits of The Jeweler, The Driving Instructor, The Bad Influence—and roughly fifty others who have touched Winik’s life in some way, from her son’s second-grade teacher to Keith Haring. Winik ties these portraits together with observations that strike chords of both loss and joy—forming not only an autobiography but a story of our time. Known for the honesty that made her debut memoir, First Comes Love, so riveting and powerful, Winik taps into the rich territory of her own life yet again to deliver a lyrical journey that ultimately raises the spirits.

Ils se croyaient immortels, ils étaient célébrés, puis la roue du destin a tourné, ils se sont égarés dans les ornières de l'Histoire, témoins impuissants de leur propre défaite. Descartes, Dumas, Lamartine, Courbet, Kropotkine, Hamsun, Pound, Clemenceau, Fréhel et Sagan, qu'ont-ils en commun si ce n'est leur mort pitoyable et leur gloire retrouvée ?Avec ce sens de l'anecdote tendre et féroce à la fois, Michel Ragon évoque leur vieillesse déchue, leurs illusions, leur aveuglement mais aussi leur génie et leur gloire, et ce mystère fragile, grotesque et dérisoire que revèt toute existence humaine.

Love’s Work is at once a memoir and a work of philosophy. Written by the English philosopher Gillian Rose as she was dying of cancer, it is a book about both the fallibility and the endurance of love, love that becomes real and lasting through an ongoing reckoning with its own limitations. Rose looks back on her childhood, the complications of her parents’ divorce and her dyslexia, and her deep and divided feelings about what it means to be Jewish. She tells the stories of several friends also laboring under the sentence of death. From the sometimes conflicting vantage points of her own and her friends’ tales, she seeks to work out (seeks, because the work can never be complete—to be alive means to be incomplete) a distinctive outlook on life, one that will do justice to our yearning both for autonomy and for connection to others. With droll self-knowledge (“I am highly qualified in unhappy love affairs,” Rose writes, “My earliest unhappy love affair was with Roy Rogers”) and with unsettling wisdom (“To live, to love, is to be failed”), Rose has written a beautiful, tender, tough, and intricately wrought survival kit packed with necessary but unanswerable questions.

In 1883, 12-year old Canowicakte boarded a train on the Rosebud Indian Reservation, beginning a journey his friends said would end at the edge of the world. Raised as a traditional Lakota, he found Carlisle Indian School, with its well-documented horrors, was the end of the world as he knew it. Renamed Chauncey Yellow Robe, he flourished at Carlisle, developed a lifelong friendship with founder Richard Pratt, and went on to work at Indian boarding schools for most of his professional life. Despite his acceptance of Indian assimilation, he was adamant that Indians should maintain their identity and was an outspoken critic of their demeaning portrayal in popular Wild West shows. He was the star and technical director of The Silent Enemy (1930), one of the first accurate depictions of Indians on film. His life embodied a cultural conflict that still persists in American society.

Many readers are already familiar with Madeleine Kunin, the former three-term governor of Vermont, who served as the deputy secretary of education and ambassador to Switzerland under President Bill Clinton. In her newest book, a memoir entitled Coming of Age: My Journey to the Eighties, the topic is aging, but she looks well beyond the physical tolls and explores the emotional ones as well. And she has had an extraordinary life: governor, ambassador, feminist, wife, mother, professor, poet, and much, much more. As recently reported in the New York Times, a girl born today can expect to live to the age of ninety, on average (boys, on the other hand, can expect to live until age eighty-five). Life expectancy, for many, is increasing, yet people rarely contemplate the emotional changes that come alongside the physical changes of aging. Madeleine wants to change that. Coming of Age: My Journey to the Eighties takes a close and incisive look at what it is like to grow old. The book is a memoir, yet most important of all, it is an honest and positive look at aging and how it has affected her life. Cover photo © Todd Lockwood.

Now updated and expanded with a new introduction, over 100 dazzling new photographs, and three all-new chapters covering the pair’s stunning performances at the Sochi and PyeongChang Olympic Games and beyond. Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir, the world’s most decorated ice dancing duo, share the incredible and inspiring story of their path to gold. From the pair’s early competitions and their history-making gold medal performance at the 2010 Winter Games that established them as icons of the sport, to their spellbinding and record-setting performance at the 2018 PyeongChang Olympics, this beautifully illustrated book is as much a spectacular visual history as it is a behind-the-scenes look at the ascent of two of the world’s premier athletes. This new edition of Tessa & Scott: Our Journey from Childhood Dream to Gold contains never-before-published personal photographs and tells for the first time the full story of Tessa and Scott’s post-2010 career, including their medal-winning appearances at the 2014 and 2018 Winter Olympics.

While concentrated on the famous Passio Perpetuae et Felicitatis, this book focuses on an area that has so far been somewhat marginalized or even overlooked by modern interpreters: the recontextualizing of the Passio Perpetuae in the subsequent reception of this text in the literature of the early Church. Since its composition in the early decades of the 3rd century, the Passio Perpetuae was enjoying an extraordinary authority and popularity. However, it contained a number of revolutionary and innovative features that were in conflict with existing social and theological conventions. This book analyses all relevant texts from the 3rd to 5th centuries in which Perpetua and her comrades are mentioned, and demonstrates the ways in which these texts strive to normalize the innovative aspects of the Passio Perpetuae. These efforts, visible as they are already on careful examination of the passages of the editor of the passio, continue from Tertullian to Augustine and his followers. The normalization of the narrative reaches its peak in the so-called Acta Perpetuae which represent a radical rewriting of the original and an attempt to replace it by a purified text, more compliant with the changed socio-theological hierarchies.

In 1883, 12-year old Canowicakte boarded a train on the Rosebud Indian Reservation, beginning a journey his friends said would end at the edge of the world. Raised as a traditional Lakota, he found Carlisle Indian School, with its well-documented horrors, was the end of the world as he knew it. Renamed Chauncey Yellow Robe, he flourished at Carlisle, developed a lifelong friendship with founder Richard Pratt, and went on to work at Indian boarding schools for most of his professional life. Despite his acceptance of Indian assimilation, he was adamant that Indians should maintain their identity and was an outspoken critic of their demeaning portrayal in popular Wild West shows. He was the star and technical director of The Silent Enemy (1930), one of the first accurate depictions of Indians on film. His life embodied a cultural conflict that still persists in American society.

The librarian walks the streets of her beloved Paris. An old lady with a limp and an accent, she is invisible to most. Certainly no one recognizes her as the warrior and revolutionary she was, when again and again she slipped into the Jewish ghetto of German-occupied Vilnius to carry food, clothes, medicine, money, and counterfeit documents to its prisoners. Often she left with letters to deliver, manuscripts to hide, and even sedated children swathed in sacks. In 1944 she was captured by the Gestapo, tortured for twelve days, and deported to Dachau. Through Epistolophilia, Julija Šukys follows the letters and journals—the “life-writing”—of this woman, Ona Šimaitė (1894–1970). A treasurer of words, Šimaitė carefully collected, preserved, and archived the written record of her life, including thousands of letters, scores of diaries, articles, and press clippings. Journeying through these words, Šukys negotiates with the ghost of Šimaitė, beckoning back to life this quiet and worldly heroine—a giant of Holocaust history (one of Yad Vashem’s honored “Righteous Among the Nations”) and yet so little known. The result is at once a mediated self-portrait and a measured perspective on a remarkable life. It reveals the meaning of life-writing, how women write their lives publicly and privately, and how their words attach them—and us—to life.

This book lucidly explains how the Parallel Lives of Plutarch (c. AD 45-120) are more than mere `sources' for history. The Lives offer us a unique insight into the reception of Classical Greece and Republican Rome in the Greek world of the second century AD. They also explore and challenge issues of psychology, education, morality, and cultural identity.

"My grandfather was one of the first white men to set foot in Kenya when it was a newly discovered, barren and dangerous place. Neither he or his family ever imagined that he would fall under the spell of Africa and remain there for the rest of his life..." Anthea Ramsay was inspired to write her grandparents' story after being left their diaries, photographs and letters which described the terrible dangers and hardships they endured in East Africa in the early 1900s. The Forgotten Pioneer records their experiences as early pioneers, followed by the lives of their children, Anthea's parents, and the life of the author herself. There is never a dull moment in Anthea's family history, from one generation to the next. She describes the difficulty of her grandparents' experiences through a time when there were no hospitals or medicines and illnesses such as black water fever and typhoid were rife, her parents' decadent lives on the edge of the Happy Valley set and their connections with the murder of Lord Erroll, and finally her own experiences growing up in Africa and living in the shadow of the Mau Mau rebellion. The Forgotten Pioneer takes the reader on an enchanting journey, tracing the family through four generations. From her grandfather leaving his home in Kent to live in a tent and face many close encounters with man-eating lions and hostile African tribes with poisoned arrows, to her eldest daughter returning to Kenya to live and farm with her family, it seems each generation has been equally captivated by this magical place. A unique timeline of one family's history in East Africa, The Forgotten Pioneer makes a captivating read for anyone who has experienced or is interested in Africa.

Discover the daring aviation pioneers who made the dream of powered flight a reality, forever changing the course of history. Aviator Lincoln Beachey broke countless records: he looped-the-loop, flew upside down and in corkscrews, and was the first to pull his aircraft out of what was a typically fatal tailspin. As Beachey and other aviators took to the skies in death-defying acts in the early twentieth century, these innovative daredevils not only wowed crowds, but also redefined the frontiers of powered flight. Higher, Steeper, Faster takes readers inside the world of the brave men and women who popularized flying through their deadly stunts and paved the way for modern aviation. With heart-stopping accounts of the action-packed race to conquer the skies, plus photographs and fascinating archival documents, this book will exhilarate readers as they fly through the pages.

The president has been the figurehead of the United States since the time when our country was a small band of thirteen fledgling colonies until its current position as a world superpower. The forty-four leaders of our nation have had fascinating, exciting, and sometimes scandalous lives. The Big Book of Presidents illustrates each president’s journey to the White House through facts, anecdotes, illustrations, photographs, inspirational quotes, and more! Find out which president had a faithful dog named Fala, who was the only unmarried president, and which president’s daughter carried around her pet snake in the White House in this fun and fascinating overview of our country’s leaders. Bestselling author Nancy J. Hajeski not only provides engaging information about each president, but also includes timelines of US and world events that place each president’s term in office in a historical context. She also provides useful facts about the White House, Congress, the Supreme Court, presidential assassinations, the first ladies, the vice presidents, and more to help broaden kids’ understanding of our government and the president’s role within in. With updated information on President Barack Obama, this is the perfect introduction to the lives and characters of the US presidents.