I have been a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for quite some years and they and some of my friends in the film industry have asked me to write something about the experiences and the stories about the more than 40 feature films I worked on in over 40 years.

Funny, thoughtful, and deeply moving—with a unique blend of fantasy and actual science—this novel explores both personal grief in the face of family loss and collective grief in the face of climate crisis, and how the only way to move forward is through friendship of all kinds. In Shajarpur, everyone is always happy. The weather is always perfect. But newcomer Savi, a lonely teenager, doesn’t know what happiness means anymore. If she were to make a list of things that were the absolute worst, moving to Shajarpur would be right on top. Well, right after missing her father, who just died of a heart attack. As Savi grapples with loss in a strange new town, she discovers something startling. Not only can she communicate with her father’s plants—all forty-two of them—she can talk to the giant ficus tree behind her school. Savi soon learns that Tree (as they are known) knew her father as well and that their friendship was at the heart of a magical network of animals and plants working together to protect Shajarpur. However, Tree is in danger, along with everything else, and needs Savi’s help. As she joins with all kinds of living things to save the town, Savi is shocked to find she is happy again, even if forces of nature are beyond her control.

This book focuses on the myriad ways that people collectively remember or forget shared pasts through popular dance. In dance classes, nightclubs, family celebrations, tourist performances, on television, film, music video and the internet, cultural memories are shared and transformed by dancing bodies adapting yesterday’s steps to today’s concerns. The book gathers emerging and seasoned scholarly voices from a wide range of geographical and disciplinary perspectives to discuss cultural remembering and forgetting in diverse popular dance contexts. The contributors ask: how are Afro-diasporic memories invoked in popular dance classes? How are popular dance genealogies manipulated and reclaimed? What is at stake for the nation in the nationalizing of folk and popular dances? And how does mediated dancing transmit memory as feelings or affects? The book reveals popular dance to be vital to cultural processes of remembering and forgetting, allowing participants to pivot between alternative pasts, presents and futures.

This a collection of memories that cover a major part of what started out as a very ordinary life. But somehow. and certainly not by design, it became a life filled with extraordinary people and exceptional experiences. For the most part it is a memoir of my long time relationship and engagement to Jack L. Warner, the last "Warner Brother". An untold story. My first brush with Jack Warner took place when I was six years old and he was a grown man running Warner Brothers; the studio he and his brothers had built. Three decades later, he became the most important person in my life. It was a long road filled with extraordinary chance encounters. Even before Jack, my life's experiences were anything but ordinary. This memoir is about friendships, personal relationships and observations of the private lives of some of the most interesting and talented people in the world of entertainment and beyond. The possibility of my life being touched by any of them was very slim. The most recognizable names who became friends and took me into their confidence were, Fredrick Loewe, Fred Zinneman, Winthrop Rockefeller, Arthur Godfrey, Frank Sinatra, Mervyn Leroy, Peter Lawford, Jonas Salk and a couple of infamous, compelling and not very ordinary scoundrels. These friendships and events cover a span of over twenty five years. I had the good fortune to have had many interesting people fill a large part of what would have been a very ordinary life. I have often wondered..why me? But then..why not me ? "One man who has kept a sharp eye for over three generations on the effects of celluloid on the chemistry of society, is Jack Warner, head of Warner Brother Pictures." "In his decades, Jack Warner furnished dreams and memories that will live beyond us all."

La Colonia is half a square mile of land separated from the rest of Oxnard by the railroad tracks and home to the people who keep an agricultural empire running. In decades past, milpas of corn and squash grew in tiny front yards, kids played in the alleys and neighbors ran tortillerias out of their homes. Back then, it was the place to get the best raspadas on Earth. It was a home to Cesar Chavez and a campaign stop for presidential candidate Robert Kennedy. As one Colonia native put it, "We may not have had what the other kids had, but we were just as rich." Through the voices of the people, the authors share the challenges and triumphs of growing up in this treasured place.

Inspired by the website that the New York Times hailed as "redefining mourning," this book is a fresh and irreverent examination into navigating grief and resilience in the age of social media, offering comfort and community for coping with the mess of loss through candid original essays from a variety of voices, accompanied by gorgeous two-color illustrations and wry infographics. At a time when we mourn public figures and national tragedies with hashtags, where intimate posts about loss go viral and we receive automated birthday reminders for dead friends, it’s clear we are navigating new terrain without a road map. Let’s face it: most of us have always had a difficult time talking about death and sharing our grief. We’re awkward and uncertain; we avoid, ignore, or even deny feelings of sadness; we offer platitudes; we send sympathy bouquets whittled out of fruit. Enter Rebecca Soffer and Gabrielle Birkner, who can help us do better. Each having lost parents as young adults, they co-founded Modern Loss, responding to a need to change the dialogue around the messy experience of grief. Now, in this wise and often funny book, they offer the insights of the Modern Loss community to help us cry, laugh, grieve, identify, and—above all—empathize. Soffer and Birkner, along with forty guest contributors including Lucy Kalanithi, singer Amanda Palmer, and CNN’s Brian Stelter, reveal their own stories on a wide range of topics including triggers, sex, secrets, and inheritance. Accompanied by beautiful hand-drawn illustrations and witty "how to" cartoons, each contribution provides a unique perspective on loss as well as a remarkable life-affirming message. Brutally honest and inspiring, Modern Loss invites us to talk intimately and humorously about grief, helping us confront the humanity (and mortality) we all share. Beginners welcome.

Poetry is as old as human, and as equally organized and chaotic as him. Nothing is as formidably indefinable as poetry. The only difference between prose and poetry is not their verticality; otherwise, all Japanese would be poetry! Defining is limiting. Verse may be definable but poetry is not. Every poet explains poetry as he understands it, and I see it as a flare of fused flow of feeling, fact, and fancy, funneled through a flowery figurative fabric fastidiously fashioned in a flash. It is a dream amid awakening; a chronic fidgeting hither and thither in search of a cornucopia of themes and motifs to be narrated stylishly into outlandish language. The poet hoists his lexical muscles amid his bathroom whistles and the daily bustles and nightly hustles, or amid foliar rustles. The great Italian Romantic poet, Giacomo Leopardi, clarified the function of poetry as not representational but creative. The poet sees the world as it is not; he forges a world, which is not. He is a creator, not an imitator. If the classic axiom of mimesis were to mainstream, poetry would be deemed as a tautologous tact. Therefore, every poem must sound idiosyncratic. And this truth irreducibly finds foothold in poems composed by Siavash Saadlou who has been capable of taming his feelings into melodious aromatic chunks of words, and who has been really able to gather rosebuds while he may. He owns a world like no other. He holds in hand a double-barreled gun; one shooting literary ammunitions, the other shooting literal questions. Characteristically he has much to say, and in an attempt to divide labor, he has committed part of his statements to poetry, which is not the only medium of his expression. Meantime, his bilingual mind can equally accommodate and procure phraseologies and figments that are genuine and unequalled. His motifs are far from simplistic Don Juanism or juvenile calf-love but sophisticated subject matters such as the perennial crusade between fact and fiction. What vexes him colossally are contradictions. Some of the oxymoronic strophes are so virgin brimming with antithetic notions, such as "the thief must have needed the bicycle more than we did"; or the bizarre dialog between two non-conversing entities, or the sense of alienation when love mouths combinations of language and slanguagethe sublime and the subliminal; pieta-like allusive images like "my grandfather died of cancer as I held him in my arms"; ethical references such as "smoking kills"; fresh phrases like "the sound of your breath; the build-up to another kiss"his depiction of the absurdity of life and the way his poetry "encapsulates nothingness" as an in-built refrain. All the above make him sound like a poet for all seasons. (Alireza Ameri, Ph.D.)

Jim Meehan, British psychologist, poet and amateur philosopher, was asked by one of his mentors, eminent American psychologist Dr. William E. Hall, to consider what attitudes are essential to the establishment of trust, which Hall regarded as being at the heart of all good human relationships. Meehan came up with ten words in the form of two promises that provide the title for this book, “I mean you no harm; I seek your greatest good.” The book starts as Meehan attempts to answer the question he is often asked, “Where do these words come from?” Born in Liverpool in the same hospital and same year as Paul McCartney, Meehan uses McCartney’s account of the composition of his bestselling song, “Yesterday,” to describe a similar experience that gave birth to his ten-word mantra, which captures the heart of trust. Meehan offers some possible biographical contributing factors. Beginning with a section aptly titled, “My Yesterdays,” he explores some early childhood relationships and experiences in Liverpool toward the end and shortly after the Second World War and investigates his adolescence, which was spent mainly in Birmingham, England’s second largest city. He then turns his attention to the influence of five mentors who definitely meant him no harm and sought his greatest good to examine how instrumental they could have been in the formulation of the words. Having exhausted his search for the origin of the expression, he then discusses the meaning of trust and how the two promises, when exchanged with other people, start a journey toward total mutual trust. Meehan defines different forms of trust, draws on the views of certain philosophers, psychologists and exemplars of trust and addresses the current global crisis of trust or, rather, lack of trust. He also includes a few anecdotes that describe the meaningfulness of the ten words to others. At the beginning of his account, Meehan explains how these two promises have developed legs of their own and have traveled widely since first being written in 1997. He finishes the book by posing the question, “Where are the words going?” Certainly, the book could be said to have given the ten words some wings or at least some more legs. In his epilogue, he provides attempts he has made to catch the essentials of total mutual trust and related concepts in verse.

(Piano/Vocal/Guitar Artist Songbook). This songbook includes all 15 songs from the 2006 release, Jackson's first ever gospel album. Songs: Blessed Assurance * How Great Thou Art * I'll Fly Away * In the Garden * The Old Rugged Cross * Softly and Tenderly * What a Friend We Have in Jesus * and more.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A fascinating exploration of the intricacies of how we remember, why we forget, and what we can do to protect our memories, from the Harvard-trained neuroscientist and bestselling author of Still Alice. “Using her expertise as a neuroscientist and her gifts as a storyteller, Lisa Genova explains the nuances of human memory”—Steven Pinker, Johnstone Professor of Psychology, Harvard University, author of How the Mind Works Have you ever felt a crushing wave of panic when you can't for the life of you remember the name of that actor in the movie you saw last week, or you walk into a room only to forget why you went there in the first place? If you're over forty, you're probably not laughing. You might even be worried that these lapses in memory could be an early sign of Alzheimer's or dementia. In reality, for the vast majority of us, these examples of forgetting are completely normal. Why? Because while memory is amazing, it is far from perfect. Our brains aren't designed to remember every name we hear, plan we make, or day we experience. Just because your memory sometimes fails doesn't mean it's broken or succumbing to disease. Forgetting is actually part of being human. In Remember, neuroscientist and acclaimed novelist Lisa Genova delves into how memories are made and how we retrieve them. You'll learn whether forgotten memories are temporarily inaccessible or erased forever and why some memories are built to exist for only a few seconds (like a passcode) while others can last a lifetime (your wedding day). You'll come to appreciate the clear distinction between normal forgetting (where you parked your car) and forgetting due to Alzheimer's (that you own a car). And you'll see how memory is profoundly impacted by meaning, emotion, sleep, stress, and context. Once you understand the language of memory and how it functions, its incredible strengths and maddening weaknesses, its natural vulnerabilities and potential superpowers, you can both vastly improve your ability to remember and feel less rattled when you inevitably forget. You can set educated expectations for your memory, and in doing so, create a better relationship with it. You don't have to fear it anymore. And that can be life-changing.