Since reluctantly accepting the fact that she's not getting any younger, Rose Mula has been trying to put a positive spin on aging. When a radio interviewer diplomatically described her as "seasoned" instead of old, she retorted, "You mean hot and spicy, right?" Her eclectic career included stints as an executive assistant to the president of a major corporation, a public relations specialist for a prominent hotel company, and a manager of a chain of six New England theaters. Since retiring, she has had more time to indulge in her favorite hobby-writing humorously about every-day irritations that plague us all--especially aging (see "positive spin" above). Her wry observations have appeared on You Tube and in over a hundred publications, including The Christian Science Monitor, The Reader's Digest, The Philadelphia Inquirier, and frequently in The Saturday Evening Post. She also writes a monthly column for Seniorwomen.com. Her previous books-If These Are Laugh Lines I'm Having Way Too Much Fun, The Beautiful People & Other Aggravatons, and Grandmother Goose -Rhymes for a Second Childhood-are available on Amazon.com.

Set in 1960, Nobel Prize winner Peter Handke's Repetition tells of Filib Kobal's journey from his home in Carinthia to Slovenia on the trail of his missing brother, Gregor. He is armed only with two of Gregor's books: a copy book from agricultural school, and a Slovenian - German dictionary, in which Gregor has marked certain words. The resulting investigation of the laws of language and naming becomes a transformative investigation of himself and the world around him. "Handke's eminence, displayed in a substantial oeuvre of plays, novels and poems, is reaffirmed brilliantly by [Repetition]." - Publishers Weekly

GRANDMOTHER GOOSE: RHYMES FOR A SECOND CHILDHOOD is a collection of humorous, seniors-related poems which explore a range of subjects - including coping with the computer age, discrimination against older drivers, and changing fashions ("As hemlines rise and necklines dip, it really is a riddle - if this trend continues, will they meet in the middle?") We all will grow old - if we're lucky. If we're luckier still, we'll be able to laugh about it. GRANDMOTHER GOOSE helps us do just that.

“Hot sex, looking good, scoring journalistic triumphs . . . nothing made Alyssa love herself enough until she learned to cook. There's a racy plot and a surprising moral in this intimate and delicious book.” --Gael Greene, creator of Insatiable-Critic.com and author of Insatiable: Tales from a Life of Delicious Excess Apron Anxiety is the hilarious and heartfelt memoir of quintessential city girl Alyssa Shelasky and her crazy, complicated love affair with...the kitchen. Three months into a relationship with her TV-chef crush, celebrity journalist Alyssa Shelasky left her highly social life in New York City to live with him in D.C. But what followed was no fairy tale: Chef hours are tough on a relationship. Surrounded by foodies yet unable to make a cup of tea, she was displaced and discouraged. Motivated at first by self-preservation rather than culinary passion, Shelasky embarked on a journey to master the kitchen, and she created the blog Apron Anxiety (ApronAnxiety.com) to share her stories. This is a memoir (with recipes) about learning to cook, the ups and downs of love, and entering the world of food full throttle. Readers will delight in her infectious voice as she dishes on everything from the sexy chef scene to the unexpected inner calm of tying on an apron.

“Laugh your cares away with Rose Madeline Mula, one of the Saturday Evening Post’s favorite humor writers.” —Ted Kreiter, editor, Saturday Evening Post “Read this book sitting on the beach, relaxing in a bubble bath, commuting to work on the train, or vegging out on a Sunday afternoon.” —Mary McHugh, author, How Not to Become a Crotchety Old Man “If laughter is the best medicine, you can throw away your prescriptions! This book will replace them all.” —Joan Fontaine, actress, Jane Eyre (1944) “[Rose’s] bubbling wit and humor will tickle your nose and your funny bone like the best vintage wine.” —Russ Gorman, WOON talk show host In her signature self-deprecating and hilarious style, humor essayist Rose Madeline Mula gripes about growing old. Her inability to stick with New Year’s resolutions, the mystery of her clothes shrinking to a smaller size with each passing season, and her susceptibility to infomercials are just a few of the problems pestering Mula. In this collection of comical compositions, readers can skip around from one laugh-out-loud essay to the next while enjoying the author’s endless wit and charm. The animated author recalls the days before cars came equipped with electric windows, when pin boys frequented bowling alleys, and songs were composed with lovely lyrics that the listener could understand. While written with a mature audience in mind, women of all ages will enjoy this relatable book.

A supplemental textbook for middle and high school students, Hoosiers and the American Story provides intimate views of individuals and places in Indiana set within themes from American history. During the frontier days when Americans battled with and exiled native peoples from the East, Indiana was on the leading edge of America’s westward expansion. As waves of immigrants swept across the Appalachians and eastern waterways, Indiana became established as both a crossroads and as a vital part of Middle America. Indiana’s stories illuminate the history of American agriculture, wars, industrialization, ethnic conflicts, technological improvements, political battles, transportation networks, economic shifts, social welfare initiatives, and more. In so doing, they elucidate large national issues so that students can relate personally to the ideas and events that comprise American history. At the same time, the stories shed light on what it means to be a Hoosier, today and in the past.

Named one of Vulture’s Top 10 Best Books of 2020! Leftist firebrand Fredrik deBoer exposes the lie at the heart of our educational system and demands top-to-bottom reform. Everyone agrees that education is the key to creating a more just and equal world, and that our schools are broken and failing. Proposed reforms variously target incompetent teachers, corrupt union practices, or outdated curricula, but no one acknowledges a scientifically-proven fact that we all understand intuitively: Academic potential varies between individuals, and cannot be dramatically improved. In The Cult of Smart, educator and outspoken leftist Fredrik deBoer exposes this omission as the central flaw of our entire society, which has created and perpetuated an unjust class structure based on intellectual ability. Since cognitive talent varies from person to person, our education system can never create equal opportunity for all. Instead, it teaches our children that hierarchy and competition are natural, and that human value should be based on intelligence. These ideas are counter to everything that the left believes, but until they acknowledge the existence of individual cognitive differences, progressives remain complicit in keeping the status quo in place. This passionate, voice-driven manifesto demands that we embrace a new goal for education: equality of outcomes. We must create a world that has a place for everyone, not just the academically talented. But we’ll never achieve this dream until the Cult of Smart is destroyed.

This book describes the living-room artifacts, clothing styles, and intellectual proclivities of American classes from top to bottom.

This report of the President's Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice -- established by President Lyndon Johnson on July 23, 1965 -- addresses the causes of crime and delinquency and recommends how to prevent crime and delinquency and improve law enforcement and the administration of criminal justice. In developing its findings and recommendations, the Commission held three national conferences, conducted five national surveys, held hundreds of meetings, and interviewed tens of thousands of individuals. Separate chapters of this report discuss crime in America, juvenile delinquency, the police, the courts, corrections, organized crime, narcotics and drug abuse, drunkenness offenses, gun control, science and technology, and research as an instrument for reform. Significant data were generated by the Commission's National Survey of Criminal Victims, the first of its kind conducted on such a scope. The survey found that not only do Americans experience far more crime than they report to the police, but they talk about crime and the reports of crime engender such fear among citizens that the basic quality of life of many Americans has eroded. The core conclusion of the Commission, however, is that a significant reduction in crime can be achieved if the Commission's recommendations (some 200) are implemented. The recommendations call for a cooperative attack on crime by the Federal Government, the States, the counties, the cities, civic organizations, religious institutions, business groups, and individual citizens. They propose basic changes in the operations of police, schools, prosecutors, employment agencies, defenders, social workers, prisons, housing authorities, and probation and parole officers.

In eight stories, a master of the form extends and magnifies her great themes—the vagaries of love, the passion that leads down unexpected paths, the chaos hovering just under the surface of things, and the strange, often comical desires of the human heart. Time stretches out in some of the stories: a man and a woman look back forty years to the summer they met—the summer, as it turns out, that the true nature of their lives was revealed. In others time is telescoped: a young girl finds in the course of an evening that the mother she adores, and whose fluttery sexuality she hopes to emulate, will not sustain her—she must count on herself. Some choices are made—in a will, in a decision to leave home—with irrevocable and surprising consequences. At other times disaster is courted or barely skirted: when a mother has a startling dream about her baby; when a woman, driving her grandchildren to visit the lakeside haunts of her youth, starts a game that could have dangerous consequences. The rich layering that gives Alice Munro's work so strong a sense of life is particularly apparent in the title story, in which the death of a local optometrist brings an entire town into focus—from the preadolescent boys who find his body, to the man who probably killed him, to the woman who must decide what to do about what she might know. Large, moving, profound, these are stories that extend the limits of fiction.