Behind Blue Curtains

When Lizzy Hershberger turns fourteen, her schooling ends at eighth grade, and she has no choice but to leave home to work as an unpaid maid for another family. To avoid being rejected by her ultra-conservative Swartzentruber Amish family and community, Lizzy is forced to abandon her dreams because they are "too worldly." After being raped by a man who becomes a deacon in her community, Lizzy makes her first attempt at "jumping the fence" to pursue a non-Amish lifestyle. But without any modern life experience or education, Lizzy considers whether the risks of this unpredictable and dangerous world are worth losing the ties to her Amish friends and family forever. Almost thirty years later, after she has created a new life for herself, her small community is rocked by disturbing sexual assault allegations. Lizzy must decide whether to keep silent for her newly-created family's sake or come forward against the church to advocate for the Amish children she left behind. In 2019, Lizzy Hershberger successfully brought her abuser to justice in an extraordinarily rare case addressing sexual abuse in the Amish church. She faced death threats and intense pressure to stop telling her story. Lizzy refused to back down, and she forged ahead to spark a national movement bringing awareness to the prevalence of sexual assault in isolated communities protected by religious liberties. This gripping true crime memoir reveals the truth behind one of America's most revered and secretive religious sects-hidden behind the blue curtains of the Amish lifestyle.

Jacqueline Keys was ostracized from her small hometown of Pine Springs, Texas when she was seventeen, sent away because she was gay. Her family was the largest employer in the county, owning Pine Springs Lumber, and her father was mayor of this small town. Her mother could not accept the fact that her only child was gay, could not tolerate the gossip about her family. So, with a hundred dollars in her pocket and a one-way bus ticket out of town, Jacqueline was told not to come back until she had come to her senses. And that included being prepared to marry the son of a business associate of the family. Fifteen years later—long after she'd hitch-hiked to Los Angeles, long after she'd worked nights to put herself through college, and long after she'd written her first best seller, No Place For Family—Jacqueline is persuaded to go back to the tiny town of Pine Springs after her father's death. The quick trip she'd envisioned for the funeral turns into weeks as she learns her father's business is suddenly hers to manage. And she is also again face-to-face with the woman who, as a teen, had been Jackie's first crush. She and Kay had been inseparable as kids, and later as teens. They find themselves falling back into their old habits, and Jackie is soon fighting the same feelings she'd had when she was seventeen. But living behind the pine curtain, Kay is afraid of her love for Jackie, afraid of what her family will say, afraid of how the town will react. Jackie refuses to hide, refuses to crawl back into the closet, so once again, she leaves Pine Springs...alone.

"My all-time favorite. Astonishing." (Stephen King) Down the Rabbit Hole is the first book in the Echo Falls mystery series by bestselling crime novelist Peter Abrahams. Perfect for middle school readers looking for a good mystery. Welcome to Echo Falls, home of a thousand secrets. In Down the Rabbit Hole, eighth grader Ingrid Levin-Hill is in the wrong place at the wrong time. Or at least her shoes are. And getting them back will mean getting tangled up in a murder investigation as complicated as the mysteries solved by her idol, Sherlock Holmes. With soccer practice, schoolwork, and the lead role in her town's production of Alice in Wonderland, Ingrid is swamped. But as things in Echo Falls keep getting curiouser and curiouser, Ingrid realizes she must solve the murder on her own—before it's too late. "Deft use of literary allusions and ironic humor add further touches of class to a topnotch mystery," said School Library Journal. "Intriguing twists." Publishers Weekly agreed: "The fresh dialogue and believable small-town setting will tempt fans to visit Echo Falls again." The next book in this Edgar Award-nominated series in Behind the Curtain, followed by Into the Dark.

At forty-four, Tom Jokinen decided to quit his job in order to become an apprentice undertaker, setting out to ask the questions: What is the right thing to do when someone dies? With the marketplace offering new options (go green, go anti-corporate, go Disney, be packed into an artificial reef and dropped in the Atlantic...), is there still room for tradition? In a year of adventures both hair-raising and hilarious, Jokinen finds a world that is radically changed since Jessica Mitford revised The American Way of Death, more surprising than Six Feet Under, and even funnier and more illuminating than Stiff. If Bill Bryson were to apprentice at a funeral home, searching for the meaning of life and death, you'd have Curtains.

Beginning in the 1930s, men and a handful of women came from India's many communities-Marathi, Parsi, Goan, North Indian, and many others--to Mumbai to work in an industry that constituted in the words of some, "the original fusion music." They worked as composers, arrangers, assistants, and studio performers in one of the most distinctive popular music and popular film cultures on the planet. Today, the songs played by Mumbai's studio musicians are known throughout India and the Indian diaspora under the popular name "Bollywood," but the musicians themselves remain, in their own words, "behind the curtain"--the anonymous and unseen performers of one of the world's most celebrated popular music genres. Now, Gregory D. Booth offers a compelling account of the Bollywood film music industry from the perspective of the musicians who both experienced and shaped its history. In a rare insider's look at the process of musical production from the late 1940s to the mid 1990s, before the advent of digital recording technologies, Booth explains who these unknown musicians were and how they came to join the film music industry. On the basis of a fascinating set of first-hand accounts from the musicians themselves, he reveals how the day-to-day circumstances of technology and finance shaped both the songs and the careers of their creator and performers. Booth also unfolds the technological, cultural, and industrial developments that led to the enormous studio orchestras of the 1960s-90s as well as the factors which ultimately led to their demise in contemporary India. Featuring an extensive companion website with video interviews with the musicians themselves, Behind the Curtain is a powerful, ground-level view of this globally important music industry.

In this clear-minded but sobering book, Michael M. Kaiser assesses the current state of arts institutions-orchestras; opera, ballet, modern dance, and theater companies; and even museums. According to Kaiser, new developments in the twenty-first century, including the Internet explosion, the death of the recording industry, the near-death of subscriptions, economic instability, the focus on STEM education in schools, the introduction of movie-theater opera, the erosion of newspapers, the threat to serious arts criticism, and the aging of the donor base have together created tremendous challenges for all arts organizations. Using Michael Porter's model of industry structure to describe how industries evolve, Kaiser argues persuasively that unless steps are taken now, midsized performing arts institutions will have all but evaporated by 2035. Only the largest arts organizations will survive, with tickets priced for the very wealthy and programming limited to the most popular and lucrative productions. Kaiser concludes with a call to arms. With three extraordinary decades' experience as an arts administrator behind him, he advocates passionately for risk-taking in programming and more creative marketing, and details what needs to happen now-building strong donor bases, creating effective boards, and collective action-to sustain the performing arts for generations to come.

Behind the Murder Curtain is the true story of Bruce Sackman, Special Agent in Charge of the Department of Veterans Affairs Office of Inspector General. Sackman’s main responsibilities had been investigating white-collar crimes such as embezzlement when he is drawn into the macabre world of doctors and nurses who murder their patients. Sackman evolves from an investigator of routine cases to the world’s leading expert on Medical Serial Killers—MSKs—doctors and nurses who ply their evil trade hidden behind the privacy curtain at a patient’s bedside. Behind the Murder Curtain tells how this dedicated investigator brought down four MSKs in Veterans Hospitals while developing the RED FLAGS PROTOCOL, which is now taught to investigators and forensic nurses throughout the world as a tool for stopping an MSK.

The expatriate, one of America's greatest black writers, giving a bold assessment of the world's outlook on race, a report of the Bandung Conference of 1955.

Disagreeing with the beliefs of Amish traditions and upbringing, the pressure became too much for her to bear. Forced to make a personal decision, Emma found the courage to leave the only life she had ever known. She had no idea the emotional turmoil she'd inflict on her family and friends.

When Lizzy Hershberger turns fourteen, her schooling ends at eighth grade, and she has no choice but to leave home to work as an unpaid maid for another family. To avoid being shunned by her ultra-conservative Swartzentruber Amish family and community, Lizzy is forced to abandon her dreams as "too worldly." After being raped by an Amish deacon over two dozen times, Lizzy makes her first attempt at "jumping the fence" to pursue a non-Amish lifestyle. But without any modern life experience or education, Lizzy must decide whether the risks of this unpredictable and dangerous world are worth losing the ties to her Amish friends and family forever. Almost thirty years later, after she has created a new life for herself, her small community is rocked by disturbing sexual assault allegations. Lizzy is must decide whether to keep silent for her newly-created family's sake or come forward against the church to advocate for the Amish children she left behind.In 2019, Lizzy Hershberger successfully brought her abuser to justice in an extraordinarily rare case addressing sexual abuse in the Amish church. She faced death threats and intense pressure to stop telling her story. Lizzy refused to back down and forged ahead to spark a national movement bringing awareness to the prevalence of sexual assault in isolated communities protected by religious liberties. This gripping true crime memoir reveals the truth behind one of America's most revered and secretive religious sects-hidden behind the blue curtains of the Amish lifestyle. In 2019, Lizzy Hershberger successfully brought her abuser to justice in an extradorinarily rare case addressing sexual abuse in the Amish church. She faced death threats and intense pressure to stop telling her story. Lizzy refused to back down and forged ahead to spark a national movement bringing awareness to the prevalence of sexual assault in isolated communities protected by religious liberties. This gripping true crime memoir reveals the truth behind one of America's most revered and secretive religious sects-hidden behind the blue curtains of the Amish lifestyle.