Sometimes Like Dimes: Life Lessons in the Steel City is about Thom Slofer, and chronicles his experiences growing up and becoming older in the Hill District neighborhood of Pittsburgh Pennsylvania, USA in the 1980's and 90's. During this time period the people, life passages, and the changing surroundings are described as they affect him. The Hill was once a thriving inner-city neighborhood. World-famous jazz musicians once played in the ballrooms and jazz clubs nightly; the Hill District was to Pittsburgh what Harlem is to New York City. Hard economic times before and after the 1980’s hit the once economically thriving black community at the foot of downtown Pittsburgh hard. The Hill was now nothing more than a snapshot of economic demise. The successes and setbacks through his high school years and into his young adult life are chronicled. Older women he became involved with showed him another way to be despite peer and neighborhood influences. He graduates high school to attend college but drops out and obtains a reasonable job; but the streets and thier infuences are present. He becomes a part-time bartender then begins to carry a gun before loosing his job and succumbing to low self-esteem. He’s then forced to survive on the streets but refuses to take part in any crime. He rises above and eventually beyond the streets, but the lessons "street life" taught stayed within him. Sometimes Like Dimes: Life Lessons in the Steel City not only demonstrates that if every man were to write a book about his experiences every story would be unique; but is also a lens to view what it was like to live life in Southwestern Pennsylvania, USA.

Language "Appealing As Sunlight After a Storm." A sentence should read as if its author, had he held a plough instead of a pen, could have drawn a furrow deep and straight to the end. —Henry David Thoreau Prose consists of ... phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house. —George Orwell Whether it invokes hard work or merely a hen-house, a good simile is like a good picture—it's worth a thousand words. Packed with more than 16,000 imaginative, colorful phrases—from “abandoned as a used Kleenex” to “quiet as an eel swimming in oil”—the Similes Dictionary will help any politician, writer, or lover of language find just the right saying, be it original or banal, verbose or succinct. Your thoughts will never be "as tedious as a twice-told tale" or "dry as the Congressional Record." Choose from elegant turns of phrases “as useful as a Swiss army knife” and “varied as expressions of the human face”. Citing more than 2,000 sources—from the Bible, Socrates, Shakespeare, Mark Twain, and H. L. Mencken to popular movies, music, and television shows—the Similes Dictionary covers hundreds of subjects broken into thematic categories that include topics such as virtue, anger, age, ambition, importance, and youth, helping you find the fitting phrase quickly and easily. Perfect for setting the atmosphere, making a point, or helping spin a tale with economy, intelligence, and ingenuity, the vivid comparisons found in this collection will inspire anyone. Love comforteth like sunshine after rain. —William Shakespeare A face like a bucket —Raymond Chandler A man with little learning is like the frog who thinks its puddle a great sea. —Burmese proverb Peace, like charity, begins at home —Franklin Delano Roosevelt You know a dream is like a river ever changing as it flows. —Garth Brooks Fit as a fiddle —John Ray’s Proverbs He's not to be allowed to fall into his grave like an old dog. —Arthur Miller Ring true, like good china. —Sylvia Plath Music yearning like a God in pain —John Keats Busy as a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest. —Pat Conroy Enduring as mother love —Anonymous

Nobel Laureate Herbert A. Simon has in the past quarter century been in the front line of the information-processing revolution; in fact, to a remarkable extent his and his colleagues' contributions have written the history of that revolution in cognitive psychology. Research in this burgeoning new branch of knowledge seeks to describe with precision the workings of the human mind in terms of a small number of basic mechanisms organized into strategies. Newly developed computer languages express theories of mental processes, so that computers can then simulate the predicted human behavior. This book brings together papers dating from the start of Simon's career to the present. Its focus is on modeling the chief components of human cognition and on testing these models experimentally. After considering basic structural elements of the human information-processing system (especially search, selective attention, and storage in memory), Simon builds from these components a system capable of solving problems, inducing rules and concepts, perceiving, and understanding. These essays describe a relatively austere, simple, and unified processing system capable of highly complex and various tasks. They provide strong evidence for an explanation of human thinking in terms of basic information processes.

Allan Gurganus's Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All became an instant classic upon its publication. Critics and readers alike fell in love with the voice of ninety-nine-year-old Confederate widow Lucy Marsden, one of the most entertaining and loquacious heroines in American literature. Lucy married at the turn of the twentieth century, when she was fifteen and her husband was fifty. If Colonel William Marsden was a veteran of the "War for Southern Independence," Lucy became a "veteran of the veteran" with a unique perspective on Southern history and Southern manhood. Lucy’s story encompasses everything from the tragic death of a Confederate boy soldier to the feisty narrator's daily battles in the Home--complete with visits from a mohawk-coiffed candy striper. Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All is a marvel of narrative showmanship and proof that brilliant, emotional storytelling remains at the heart of great fiction.

Award-winning essayist Lance Morrow writes about the partnership of God and Mammon in the New World—about the ways in which Americans have made money and lost money, and about how they have thought and obsessed about this peculiarly American subject. Fascinated by the tracings of theology in the ways of American money Morrow sees a reconciliation of God and Mammon in the working out of the American Dream. This sharp-eyed essay reflects upon American money in a series of individual life stories, including his own. Morrow writes about what he calls “the emotions of money,” which he follows from the catastrophe of the Great Depression to the era of Bill Gates, Oprah Winfrey, and Donald Trump. He considers money’s dual character—functioning both as a hard, substantial reality and as a highly subjective force and shape-shifter, a sort of dream. Is money the root of all evil? Or is it the source of much good? Americans have struggled with the problem of how to square the country’s money and power with its aspiration to virtue. Morrow pursues these themes as they unfold in the lives of Americans both famous and obscure: Here is Thomas Jefferson, the luminous Founder who died broke, his fortune in ruin, his estate and slaves at Monticello to be sold to pay his debts. Here are the Brown brothers of Providence, Rhode Island, members of the family that founded Brown University. John Brown was in the slave trade, while his brother Moses was an ardent abolitionist. With race in America a powerful subtheme throughout the book, Morrow considers Booker T. Washington, who, with a cunning that sometimes went unappreciated among his own people, recognized money as the key to full American citizenship. God and Mammon is a masterly weaving of America’s money myths, from the nation’s beginnings to the present.

Against the Odds is about surviving the impetuous of tough love, in order to become gratified in the glory of wisdom. Guidance is about the intent for which love is given, fueling the soul for the sanctity of the heart. The First 39 Years is a snapshot of how the soul can evolve, thereby enhancing the personality through the enrichment of the mind.

From National Book Award nominee Laura McNeal comes a gripping, tautly-told novel that is at once hopeful and harrowing. Perfect for fans of We Were Liars and Bone Gap. When Thisbe Locke is last seen standing on the edge of the Coronado Bridge, it looks like there is only one thing to call it. But her sister Ted is not convinced. Despite the witnesses and the police reports and the divers and the fact that she was heartbroken about the way things ended with Clay and how she humiliated herself at that party, Thisbe isn't the type of person to end up just an "incident." While everyone in town prepares to mourn the loss (some more than others), Ted and Fen, the new kid in town, set out to put the pieces together and find her sister. But if Thisbe didn't jump, what happened up on that bridge?