Fifteen

With her usual warmth, perceptiveness, and humor, Newbery Medal winner Beverly Cleary creates the joys and worries of a young girl's first crush. It seems too good to be true. The most popular boy in school has asked Jane out—and she's never even dated before. Stan is tall and good-looking, friendly and hard-working—everything Jane ever dreamed of. But is she ready for this? Suppose her parents won't let her go? What if she's nervous and makes a fool of herself? Maybe he'll think she's too young. If only she knew all the clever things to say. If only she were prettier. If only she were ready for this...

New York Times best selling author Lisa Scottoline's visceral thriller, Every Fifteen Minutes, brings you into the grip of a true sociopath and shows you how, in the quest to survive such ruthlessness, every minute counts. Dr. Eric Parrish is the Chief of the Psychiatric Unit at Havemeyer General Hospital outside of Philadelphia. Recently separated from his wife Alice, he is doing his best as a single Dad to his seven-year-old daughter Hannah. His work seems to be going better than his home life, however. His unit at the hospital has just been named number two in the country, and Eric has a devoted staff of doctors and nurses who are as caring as Eric is. But when he takes on a new patient, Eric's entire world begins to crumble. Seventeen-year-old Max has a terminally ill grandmother and is having trouble handling it. That, plus his OCD and violent thoughts about a girl he likes makes Max a high risk patient. Max can't turn off the mental rituals he needs to perform every fifteen minutes that keep him calm. With the pressure mounting, Max just might reach the breaking point. When the girl is found murdered, Max is nowhere to be found. Worried about Max, Eric goes looking for him and puts himself in danger of being seen as a "person of interest" himself. Next, one of his own staff turns on him in a trumped up charge of sexual harassment. Is this chaos all random? Or is someone systematically trying to destroy Eric's life?

Zeke would love to be invisible. His mother is struggling to make ends meet and stuck with a no-good boyfriend. Zeke knows he and his mom will be stuck forever if he doesn't find some money fast. When Zeke starts working at a local pizza place, he meets labor activists who want to give him a voice, and the living wage he deserves for his work. Zeke has to decide between living the quiet life he's carved for himself and raising his voice for justice.

The life and songs of singer-songwriter Momus during his time at Creation records and beyond. Momus - the stage name of musician Nicholas Currie - is one of the most prolific and talented indie songwriters of the last forty years. His work is controversial, influential and highly regarded. From aspiring indie pop star of the 1980s to Japanese chart success in the 1990s through many experimental works to the present day, he has been a constant in the search for intelligent, thinking person's pop. Jarvis Cocker asked him to produce his band Pulp, the NME memorably awarded his album "Hippopotamomus" 0/10, Creation Records dropped him when he proved too dangerous for them, and his more controversial work led to astounding legal tussles. His personal life has involved scandal and heartbreak and he lost an eye following an infection, resulting in his distinctive eye-patch. His songs including "The Hairstyle of the Devil", "The Guitar Lesson" and "I Want You but I Don't Need You" are acclaimed and have been covered by artists including Amanda Palmer and Steven Wilson.

“Rolf shows that raising the minimum wage to $15 is both just and necessary, lest the American dream of middle class prosperity turn into a nightmare” (David Cay Johnston, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist). Combining history, economics, and commonsense political wisdom, The Fight for $15 makes a deeply informed case for a national fifteen-dollars-an-hour minimum wage as the only practical solution to reversing America’s decades-long slide toward becoming a low-wage nation. Drawing both on new scholarship and on his extensive practical experiences organizing workers and grappling with inequality across the United States, David Rolf, president of SEIU 775—which waged the successful Seattle campaign for a fifteen dollar minimum wage—offers an accessible explanation of “middle out” economics, an emerging popular economic theory that suggests that the origins of prosperity in capitalist economies lie with workers and consumers, not investors and employers. A blueprint for a different and hopeful American future, The Fight for $15 offers concrete tools, ideas, and inspiration for anyone interested in real change in our lifetimes. “The author’s plainspoken approach and stellar scholarship illuminate in-depth discussions about the deliberate policy decisions that began to decimate the middle class at the start of the 1980s as well as the insidious new ways in which big business continues to attack American workers today via stagnant wages, rampant subcontracting, unpredictable scheduling, and other detrimental practices associated with the so-called ‘share economy.’” —Kirkus Reviews “David Rolf has become the most successful advocate for raising wages in the twenty-first century.” —Andy Stern, senior fellow at Columbia University’s Richard Paul Richman Center for Business, Law, and Public Policy

This book is edited based on a series of lectures on Chinese cultural history delivered at the Peking University in 2004. It stands out with its distinctive methodology and unique stand, and is popular with readers, with 17 reprints for the Chinese edition since 2006.Before the 1980s, traditional culture was often the target of criticisms and put in a negative light in China. After the 1980s, due to the belief that traditional culture can contribute to modernization, people decided to 'take its essence and discard its dregs'. As of today, most books on this theme have been written in accordance with this principle.However, in this book, the author argues that many problems have emerged from the modernization of the Western society, and thus the need for reflection and re-examining. Traditional Chinese culture is a source for comparison and reflection. As such, when we discuss traditional culture nowadays, not only should we excavate its long-hidden meanings, but we should also develop contrastive resources to facilitate our collaborative development in future.The discussions in this book adopt a vertical structure that begins with how Chinese define a human, followed by topics on the human body, Qi, food, male and female, home and state, the relationship between heaven and human beings, ritual systems, historical consciousness, thinking patterns, the art of expressing sentiments, commitments to the politics of virtues and achievements, and cultural practices. In every chapter, there is also a horizontal method of comparison on Chinese, Western and Indian cultures, to foreground the particularities and advantages of the Chinese culture.Apart from elaborating on the major characteristics of traditional Chinese culture, there is also a discussion on how the modern disdain for and misunderstandings of the traditional culture originated from the West. The author also elaborates on Montesquieu's views of China and the various misconceptions and misunderstandings of the traditional Chinese legal systems. Finally, it ends with the author's thoughts on the revitalization of the Chinese civilization.

The “Pilgrim” was one of the smallest, but one of the best of that flotilla, which James W. Weldon sent each season, not only beyond Behring Strait, as far as the northern seas, but also in the quarters of Tasmania or of Cape Horn, as far as the Antarctic Ocean. She sailed in a superior manner. Her very easily managed rigging permitted her to venture, with a few men, in sight of the impenetrable fields of ice of the southern hemisphere. Captain Hull knew how to disentangle himself, as the sailors say, from among those icebergs, which, during the summer, drift by the way of New Zealand or the Cape of Good Hope, under a much lower latitude than that which they reach in the northern seas of the globe. It is true that only icebergs of small dimensions were found there; they were already worn by collisions, eaten away by the warm waters, and the greater number of them were going to melt in the Pacific or the Atlantic....FROM THE BOOKS.

Life is full of great experiences. But what have you learned frombthem? Are they helping you become the person you want to be? Are any preventing you from accomplishing your dreams? James Quinn uses these provocative questions to guide us through fifteen universal life experiences: Birth Family Love Faith Friendship Service Envy Anger Greed Fear Forgiveness Kindness Joy Hope Death These life experiences help you discover new strengths about yourself that may surprise, or even, shock you. Life experiences are past, present, and future, but regardless of when they occur, they can and do change our lives. The challenge is to use our experiences to grow in healthy ways. Fifteen Real-Life Experiences: A Journey in Christian Living provides down-to-earth advice on how we can use our experiences to guide us in our Christian faith. Book includes questions and action plans for individual and group reflection. "Dr. Quinn has brought before us fifteen life experiences which we all encounter in ways that enable us to come to grip with the value they offer. It is one of the most helpful tools I have seen both personally and for group interaction. Everyone could profit from spending time with his insight." -W.D. "Dub" Rogers, PhD, Family Christian Counseling "Life can become our greatest teacher if only we ask the right questions. James Quinn has applied the teaching style of Proverbs to remind us of the power that God has placed into our world as we pay attention to the lessons life can teach." -Dr. Guy C. Ames, District Superintendent of Ardmore, Oklahoma Conference, United Methodist Church, and Senior Pastor, Chapel Hill United Methodist Church (1994-2006) "This is a reflective, thought-provoking look at how our life experiences and Christian faith shape and should shape who we are as God's children." -Suzann Wade, Diaconal Minister and Christian Educator

Wildly original, funny and moving, The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August is an extraordinary story of a life lived again and again from World Fantasy Award-winning author Claire North. Harry August is on his deathbed. Again. No matter what he does or the decisions he makes, when death comes, Harry always returns to where he began, a child with all the knowledge of a life he has already lived a dozen times before. Nothing ever changes. Until now. As Harry nears the end of his eleventh life, a little girl appears at his bedside. "I nearly missed you, Doctor August," she says. "I need to send a message." This is the story of what Harry does next, and what he did before, and how he tries to save a past he cannot change and a future he cannot allow.