Stories pervade our daily lives, from human interest news items, to a business strategy, to daydreams between chores. Stories are what we use to make sense of the world. But how does this work? This text examines this pervasive human habit and suggests ways to think about how we use stories.

In a major reassessment of their work, Evgeny Steiner forcefully demonstrates that the Constructivists were as committed to implementing Utopia - regardless of the human cost - as their establishment counterparts."--BOOK JACKET.

As a follow up to his phenomenal New York Times bestselling memoir, Highest Duty, Captain Chesley B. “Sully” Sullenberger explores exactly what it takes to lead and inspire. In Making a Difference, one of the most captivating American heroes of this century—the courageous pilot who brought the crippled US Airways Flight 1549 safely down in New York’s Hudson River—engages some of the most accomplished men and women in the fields of technology, medicine, education, sports, philanthropy, finance, law, and the military in inspiring conversations on true leadership. With powerful thoughts and invaluable guidance from such notables as former Labor Secretary Robert Reich, legendary baseball manager Tony LaRussa, NASA Flight Director Eugene Kranz, and Gov. Jennifer Granholm, Making a Difference is a potential life-changer that stands with Katie Couric’s The Best Advice I Ever Got, Lee Iaococca’s Where Have All the Leaders Gone, Michael J. Fox’s A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Future, and other classic volumes that celebrate human achievement and triumph over adversity.

Making Stories shows ten acclaimed Australian authors at work.

Cover -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Contributors -- Introduction -- Part One. Community Renewal -- 1. This Is Where We Belong: Maidu Histories on a Shared California Landscape -- 2. Placing Communities, Languages, and Stories on the Contemporary Landscape -- 3. Wéjenim Bíspadà: A Brief History of Maidu Language Keepers and Other Thoughts on Language Revitalization -- Part Two. Creation Narratives of Hánc'ibyjim / Tom Young -- 4. Púktim / Creation -- 5. Hompajtotokymc'om / The Adversaries -- 6. Hybýkʼym Masý Wónom / Love and Death -- 7. K'ódojapem Bom / Worldmaker's Trail -- Part Three. Pronunciation and Lessons -- 8. How to Pronounce Maidu -- 9. Reading the Maidu Language: Nine Beginning Lessons -- Appendix: Place Names and Character Names in the Stories -- Bibliography -- Index

This book is about how people construct career stories: the stories we use to make sense of our work life. Mark Scillio explores the idea of security in the current turbulent employment climate, investigating employment experiences in developed, wealthy countries like Australia, the United States, and the United Kingdom—where careers have become fragmented, complex, and uncertain. Using Anthony Giddens’ notion of ontological security, Scillio develops a concept of career security that goes beyond economic and financial concerns and encompasses the personal and social meaning of work. The ramifications of succeeding (or failing) to forge a good career narrative are explored through a series of detailed case studies.

This book is an essential companion to The Story Cookbook, and provides a compendium of the varied and different ways stories can be analysed in research and inquiry. Drawing from a range of disciplines such as psychology, sociology and literature studies, this book is an invaluable guide for the researcher, consultant or professional keen to use storytelling as inquiry. Created itself as an iterative action inquiry, and sourced from an international assembly of contributors, the 29 chapters provide an array of ways to analyse stories including juxtaposition, circumambulation, strengths-analysis, grounded theory and thematic analysis approaches. Because of the detail in illuminating each analytical method, this book provides a rich diverse and valuable resource for making sense of stories.

Through reconstruction of oral testimony, folk stories and poetry, the true history of Hausa women and their reception of Islam's vision of Muslim in Western Africa have been uncovered. Mary Wren Bivins is the first author to locate and examine the oral texts of the 19th century Hausa women and challenge the written documentation of the Sokoto Caliphate. The personal narratives and folk stories reveal the importance of illiterate, non-elite women to the history of jihad and the assimilation of normative Islam in rural Hausaland. The captivating lives of the Hausa are captured, shedding light on their ordinary existence as wives, mothers, and providers for their family on the eve of European colonial conquest.

This book shares the keys to speaking up, speaking out, and finding victory through strategic visibility. The authors you’ll be introduced to in these pages are taking calculated risks, making strategic moves, and making a living speaking from their hearts. You might call them the difference makers or truth tellers of their industries. Whether you want to reach the unreachable, influence the affluent, or even heal the hurting in a big way, you can’t afford to be the world’s best-kept secret. You must take massive amounts of action and put in the work that will eventually win over the hearts and heads of every audience. From the Foreword by David T. Fagan.

Making Love While Levitating Three Feet in the Air: And Other Stories’s 13 short stories are linked thematically by the recurring idea of flight, in its various definitions and senses. The characters are sometimes in flight from their situations, sometimes from other people, sometimes from themselves. Stories range from contemporary to historical, from realistic to magical realist. The known and the unknown often blur as the characters struggle to understand the unseen forces that move them. Ultimately, the crises that all the characters encounter are psychological or spiritual in some way, however each may define that; as the title of the collection suggests, the characters find themselves levitating somewhere between their deepest desires and an exquisite and terrifying nothingness. No one in these stories “wins” in the traditional sense; there are no tidy answers. But the stories are subtly life affirming in how each character deals with the difficulties of life. Each learns something about himself or herself, however fleeting that knowledge may be, however small a step forward it inspires. Life isn’t static, and neither are these people.