"Jessica Laser has given her generation a voice and a name in her masterful, funny and heartbreaking third collection, The Goner School. Members of this school, despairing and hopeful, count themselves among the self-aware, trauma-informed inheritors of a warming, warring planet. They come honestly by their goldfish attention spans and financial precarity. They were formed by artistic and religious traditions before tradition became taboo. If they work from homes they do not own, did they ever grow up? They may marry whom they choose, but what, even, is intimacy? How do they reconcile their daily joys with the horrors on the news? Childhood, the gym, plant medicine ceremonies, PhD programs, Jews, evangelicals, everyone you've slept with, Lake Michigan, the Bay Area, William James and Taylor Swift may seem incongruous, but they all take place in one world from which, try as we might, there is no escape. Look at a still of a person running and you'll see that there's no difference between running toward and running from, especially when the planet is round. In compelling, playful, narrative poems, The Goner School documents one woman's attempt to love the people and things of this world, in all their irreconcilable differences, knowing that she has no other choice"--

Jessica Laser has given her generation a voice and a name in this masterful, funny, and heartbreaking collection, The Goner School. Members of this school, despairing and hopeful, count themselves among the self-aware, trauma-informed inheritors of a warming, warring planet. Childhood, the gym, plant medicine ceremonies, PhD programs, Jews, evangelicals, everyone you’ve slept with, Lake Michigan, the Bay Area, William James, and Taylor Swift may seem incongruous, but they all take place in one world from which, try as we might, there is no escape.

Louis Brawley met UG Krishnamurti in 2002 and spent the following five years travelling with him in the USA, India and Europe keeping a record of this remarkable non-teacher and documenting his own inner struggles as his ideas about life, love and Enlightenment were constantly tossed around and demolished. Louis fell into the role of foil and sidekick to UG’s bizarre interactions with his friends and audience and, as UG’s health deteriorated, he became his informal caregiver. Louis Brawley doesn’t use honeyed platitudes to tell the story of a sage and his devoted follower; instead he tells an often unflattering story of his own struggles and shortcomings and the dynamic uncertainties of life with a man who “tore apart everything human beings have built up inside and out for centuries.” Goner will teach you the meaning of the phrase “paradoxical truth”. UG Krishnamurti gave up everything for truth, but delighted in ridiculous fabrications; he was a teacher who refused to teach, a man who mocked do-gooders but was deeply kind; he was chaste but foul mouthed, he was a man who decried the supernatural … yet there were strange coincidences around him. “…the way he lived, his living quarters and his mode of expression were one continuous movement, a three dimensional, living book of teaching. If you were observant, you could learn from him on contact with no need for explanation.”

Goner follows the lives of four sisters from a progressive household in the Deep South. The narrative begins with their northern mother's arrival in a Louisiana army town as a young newspaper reporter in 1943 and her hasty, unconsidered, marriage to a genteel older man. It follows the naive couple from their disastrous wedding night, to the birth of their first daughter on the same day their house is reclaimed by a returning G.I. The Sobrals migrate from Baton Rouge, to an isolated bayou plantation, and then on to a cotton town caught in the post war boom. Just before their fourth daughter is born, the Sobrals settle in BelleBend, a sleepy little town on the Mississippi River The Sobral sisters grow up listening to the haunting calls of riverboats and the rumbling of sugar cane trucks down the River Road; they attend BelleBend's black church, and endlessly speculate about the relationship between their beautiful, remote mother and kindly absent-minded father. The story follows the girls' childhood adventures--some hilarious and some breathtakingly dangerous--in a time and a place where adults pay little attention to the wanderings of children. Together, the Sobral daughters find Elvis, teen love, and come of age during the early civil rights movement. In their jasmine-scented isolation, the four sisters form a profound and enduring bond. Kennedy's assassination transforms their family in unforeseen ways. In 1980 the four sisters return to their River Road house for their heartbroken father¿s deathwatch. Their beloved and enigmatic mother has recently died. On their last night together, one of the sisters uncovers a devastating secret. Goner examines the ties between real and imagined lives, between character and narrator, and the entwined ways that a family survives by creating its own myth.

This book explains the impacts of Milwaukee’s voucher policy on enrollment and financial health of Milwaukee Public Schools, academic achievement in the city, and ways in which it challenges traditional notions of accountability and democratic control. Ford concludes this has fragmented public education to the point where true aggregate level progress of pupils is impossible and proposes an umbrella governance structure to bring funding and accountability to public Milwaukee schools.

Secondary Education : School admissions, fourth report of session 2003-04, Vol. 2: Oral and written Evidence