When Push Comes To Shove

Issued to coincide with the Twyla Tharp-Mikhail Baryshnikov national tour, premier choreographer Twyla Tharp reveals her extraordinary odyssey that changed contemporary dance. She recounts her unique story, from her childhood to her training in classical ballet to her struggle to find her own vision. Photographs.

The new celebration of women's aggression in contemporary culture, from Kill Bill and Prime Suspect to the artists group Toxic Titties. In the past, more often than not, aggressive women have been rebuked, told to keep a lid on, turn the other cheek, get over it. Repression more than aggression was seen as woman's domain. But recently there's been a noticeable cultural shift. With growing frequency, women's aggression is now celebrated in contemporary culture—in movies and TV, online ventures, and art. In Push Comes to Shove, Maud Lavin examines these new images of aggressive women and how they affect women's lives. Aggression, says Lavin, need not entail causing harm to another; we can think of it as the use of force to create change—fruitful, destructive, or both. And over the past twenty years, contemporary culture has shown women seizing this power. Lavin chooses provocative examples to explore the complexity of aggression, including the surfer girls in Blue Crush, Helen Mirren as Jane Tennison in Prime Suspect, the homicidal women in Kill Bill, and artist Marlene McCarty's mural-sized Murder Girls. Women need aggression and need to use it consciously, Lavin writes. With Push Comes to Shove, she explores the crucial questions of how to manifest aggression, how to represent it, and how to keep open a cultural space for it.

When we ask our kids, “What’d you do in school today?” and they mumble, “Nothin',” they’re telling the truth. Steve Perry gets it. He understands why some parents are panicked about what’s going on in their kids’ classrooms, and how other parents, whose kids supposedly attend the “good” schools, still fear that their children are falling behind. As principal of one of the best performing schools in America – one that sends 100% of its mostly minority students to four-year colleges – Perry delights in proving “the system” wrong. In this solution-oriented manifesto, Perry covers the full range of issues holding back today’s students. He shows parents and principals how to find great teachers (and get rid of the bad ones), how to make readers out of kids who hate to read, how to make the school curriculum thrilling rather than sleep-inducing, how to conduct an all-important education “home audit,” how to “e-organize” if school boards and administrators aren’t getting the message, how to build a “school of the future,” and much more. The era of third-rate education is over. Push has come to shove!

A fast-paced tale of greed—Push Comes to Shove examines the pitfalls and struggles that an honest family faces to survive the perils of financial woes. The bills are due again for Greg “GP” Patterson, but this time, they won’t get paid. He and his wife are facing robbery charges when a simple assault they committed goes bad. After a few days in jail, the Pattersons lose everything they own and risk losing their children forever. Luckily Aunty Jewels bails the Pattersons out, but GP must make some serious moves if he is to provide decent shelter for his family again. A visit to Squeeze, a villainous loan shark, leads to killer interest rates and a murderous default penalty. Nevertheless, GP accepts the terms. When GP gives Jewels the loan money to flip in a high-stakes credit card scheme, she gets robbed for every single dime. Now GP has to figure out how to pay his debt and gain the respect of his family again, but in the meantime, Jewels has already figured out how to make everybody pay. An entertaining, multicultural drama, Push Comes to Shove is a cautionary tale for today’s economically fraught times.

Offers advice on how to deal with bullying, for targets, bullies, and witnesses.

Mascot Books announces the release of Not So Bad After All written by Daniel Amaguana with illustrations by Nabi Bilal. Come along to school with Daniel as he overcomes challenges, stands up to bullies, and gains confidence in all the new adolescent experiences! With engaging rhymes and colorful illustrations, this is the perfect book for any kid who could use a self- esteem boost and learn to tackle the social scene at school.

"In the tradition of bestselling explainers like The Tipping Point, [this] book [is] based on cutting edge science that breaks down the idea of extreme conflict--the kind that paralyzes people and places--and then shows how to escape it"--

Thomas McGurrin is a fourth-grade teacher and openly gay man at a private primary school serving Portland, Oregon's wealthy progressive elite when he is falsely accused of inappropriately touching a male student. The accusation comes just as Thomas is thrust back into the center of his unusual family by his younger brother's battle with cancer. Although cleared of the accusation, Thomas is forced to resign from a job he loves during a potentially life-changing family drama. Davison's novel explores the discrepancy between the progressive ideals and persistent negative stereotypes among the privileged regarding social status, race, and sexual orientation and the impact of that discrepancy on friendships and family relations.

Although the decades following World War II stand out as an era of rapid growth and construction in the United States, those years were equally significant for large-scale destruction. In order to clear space for new suburban tract housing, an ambitious system of interstate highways, and extensive urban renewal development, wrecking companies demolished buildings while earthmoving contractors leveled land at an unprecedented pace and scale. In this pioneering history, Francesca Russello Ammon explores how postwar America came to equate this destruction with progress. The bulldozer functioned as both the means and the metaphor for this work. As the machine transformed from a wartime weapon into an instrument of postwar planning, it helped realize a landscape-altering “culture of clearance.” In the hands of the military, planners, politicians, engineers, construction workers, and even children’s book authors, the bulldozer became an American icon. Yet social and environmental injustices emerged as clearance projects continued unabated. This awareness spurred environmental, preservationist, and citizen participation efforts that have helped to slow, though not entirely stop, the momentum of the postwar bulldozer.

Shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and nominated for the Governor-General's Award for Literature, a hilarious, swashbuckling yet powerful tale of pirates, buried treasure and a search for the Fountain of Youth, told in the ribald, philosophical voice of a 500-year-old Jewish parrot. Set in the years around 1492, Yiddish for Pirates recounts the compelling story of Moishe, a Bar Mitzvah boy who leaves home to join a ship's crew, where he meets Aaron, the polyglot parrot who becomes his near-constant companion. From a present-day Florida nursing home, this wisecracking yet poetic bird guides us through a world of pirate ships, Yiddish jokes and treasure maps. But Inquisition Spain is a dangerous time to be Jewish and Moishe joins a band of hidden Jews trying to preserve some forbidden books. He falls in love with a young woman, Sarah; though they are separated by circumstance, Moishe's wanderings are motivated as much by their connection as by his quest for loot and freedom. When all Jews are expelled from Spain, Moishe travels to the Caribbean with the ambitious Christopher Columbus, a self-made man who loves his creator. Moishe eventually becomes a pirate and seeks revenge on the Spanish while seeking the ultimate booty: the Fountain of Youth. This outstanding New Face of Fiction is filled with Jewish takes on classic pirate tales--fights, prison escapes, and exploits on the high seas--but it's also a tender love story, between Moishe and Sarah, and between Aaron and his "shoulder," Moishe. Rich with puns, colourful language, post-colonial satire and Kabbalistic hijinks, Yiddish for Pirates is also a compelling examination of mortality, memory, identity and persecution from one of this country's most talented writers.