“One of the best of the tough sleuths” tangles with blackmail and murder in Miami Beach in this hardboiled detective tale by one of the all-time greats (The New York Times). The day he met Phyllis Brighton, Mike Shayne saved her from jumping out a window—and he has been rescuing her ever since. First he helped her beat a murder rap; now he’s trying to pry her away from the sleaziest lawyer in Dade County: Harry Grange. A mouthpiece for every crook in Miami, Grange is running a blackmail racket when Shayne sees him with Phyllis on his arm at a local gambling hall. Shayne warns his friend to ditch her crooked beau, but she is too proud to take his advice. Unfortunately for her, the relationship will end with murder. Shayne gets the call just after he gets back to his office. Harry Grange has been found dead on the sands of Miami Beach. Even worse, Shayne’s gun is missing and his friend Larry Kincaid may have used it to gun down the blackmailing lawyer. To save his friends, Mike Shayne will have to outsmart the cleverest killer in town. Adapted into the film Michael Shayne, Private Detective, this classic PI novel is part of the long-running mystery series that also inspired a 1940s radio show and translations around the world. The Private Practice of Michael Shayne is the 2nd book in the Mike Shayne Mysteries, but you may enjoy reading the series in any order.

A mentally ill woman is accused of killing her mother in this classic Mike Shayne novel from the legendary detective author. Mike Shayne has just poured himself a drink when Phyllis Brighton tries to throw herself out the window of his downtown apartment. Luckily, he blocks her just before she can launch herself over the sill. She tried to warn him she was crazy, but he didn’t listen. Her doctor and her new stepfather, on the other hand, both believe Phyllis is suffering from a kind of Electra complex— a fixation with her mother that is so intense that Phyllis would rather kill her than share her with anyone else. Shayne agrees to do whatever he can to keep Phyllis from killing her mother, but that doesn’t ensure that the woman will live. When Mrs. Brighton is found with a knife buried in her back, all signs point to the Phyllis’s guilt. But this hard-boiled private investigator didn’t stop someone from jumping out a window just to send her to the electric chair. And it doesn’t take a degree in psychology to find a killer—it takes brains, eyes, and two strong fists. Mike Shayne is just the man for the job. Dividend on Death is the 1st book in the Mike Shayne Mysteries, but you may enjoy reading the series in any order.

Behavioral research is making a significant impact on many academic disciplines. Its status as the source of some of the most profound research in the social sciences is unparalleled. Therefore, it is not surprising that interest in Behavior and Operational Research (OR) is burgeoning, even though understanding the relationship between knowledge, behavior and action has been an academic preoccupation in OR since the beginning of the discipline. This book introduces the idea of Behavioral OR, where the theoretical and empirical developments in the behavioral field are making an impression on OR academics and practitioners alike. The book provides a much needed overview that connects together theory, methodology and practice and offers the “state of the art” on Behavioral Operational Research theory and practice. The book not only includes chapters by leading academics, but also includes rich and insightful real-life case studies by practitioners.

The honeymoon is over—and it’s time for Mike Shayne to prepare for Miami’s killing season For years, Mike Shayne has tangled with the toughest crooks the country has to offer, outsmarting some and outpunching the rest. He was good at his job, but he had no one to come home to—until he met Phyllis. After rescuing his damsel in distress more than once, the hard-boiled PI found himself falling in love, and before he knew it, they were married and on their honeymoon in Cuba. Unfortunately for the lovebirds, their migration home to Miami marks the height of tourist season, when every gangster in America travels south to play. He may be a married man, but Mike Shayne won’t be spending this balmy winter cozied up at home. When a real-estate developer tries to hire Shayne to break into his home as part of an insurance-fraud scam, the scheme quickly turns to murder. With more deaths on the horizon, Shayne will have to be careful if he doesn’t want to celebrate his first wedding anniversary behind bars. The Uncomplaining Corpses is the 3rd book in the Mike Shayne Mysteries, but you may enjoy reading the series in any order.

Like the game of baseball, life is quirky and unpredictable, as Shane Hunter discovers in the spring of his sophomore year. Suddenly and without warning his life of privilege is turned upside down. And just as suddenly, life begins to seem utterly without fairness or purpose to him. Exciting, well-written sports scenes transport readers right into the stands while complex issues engage their hearts and minds. For here is a novel of loss, of morality, and of the rare, redemptive power of baseball. Can speaking the truth really determine lives? Just how does one accept, move on, and begin doing the right thing?

An enraging, necessary look at the private prison system, and a convincing clarion call for prison reform.” —NPR.org New York Times Book Review 10 Best Books of 2018 * One of President Barack Obama’s favorite books of 2018 * Winner of the 2019 J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize * Winner of the Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism * Winner of the 2019 RFK Book and Journalism Award * A New York Times Notable Book A ground-breaking and brave inside reckoning with the nexus of prison and profit in America: in one Louisiana prison and over the course of our country's history. In 2014, Shane Bauer was hired for $9 an hour to work as an entry-level prison guard at a private prison in Winnfield, Louisiana. An award-winning investigative journalist, he used his real name; there was no meaningful background check. Four months later, his employment came to an abrupt end. But he had seen enough, and in short order he wrote an exposé about his experiences that won a National Magazine Award and became the most-read feature in the history of the magazine Mother Jones. Still, there was much more that he needed to say. In American Prison, Bauer weaves a much deeper reckoning with his experiences together with a thoroughly researched history of for-profit prisons in America from their origins in the decades before the Civil War. For, as he soon realized, we can't understand the cruelty of our current system and its place in the larger story of mass incarceration without understanding where it came from. Private prisons became entrenched in the South as part of a systemic effort to keep the African-American labor force in place in the aftermath of slavery, and the echoes of these shameful origins are with us still. The private prison system is deliberately unaccountable to public scrutiny. Private prisons are not incentivized to tend to the health of their inmates, or to feed them well, or to attract and retain a highly-trained prison staff. Though Bauer befriends some of his colleagues and sympathizes with their plight, the chronic dysfunction of their lives only adds to the prison's sense of chaos. To his horror, Bauer finds himself becoming crueler and more aggressive the longer he works in the prison, and he is far from alone. A blistering indictment of the private prison system, and the powerful forces that drive it, American Prison is a necessary human document about the true face of justice in America.

Looks at the emerging phenomenon of online journalism, including Weblogs, Internet chat groups, and email, and how anyone can produce news.

Mounting failures of replication in social and biological sciences give a new urgency to critically appraising proposed reforms. This book pulls back the cover on disagreements between experts charged with restoring integrity to science. It denies two pervasive views of the role of probability in inference: to assign degrees of belief, and to control error rates in a long run. If statistical consumers are unaware of assumptions behind rival evidence reforms, they can't scrutinize the consequences that affect them (in personalized medicine, psychology, etc.). The book sets sail with a simple tool: if little has been done to rule out flaws in inferring a claim, then it has not passed a severe test. Many methods advocated by data experts do not stand up to severe scrutiny and are in tension with successful strategies for blocking or accounting for cherry picking and selective reporting. Through a series of excursions and exhibits, the philosophy and history of inductive inference come alive. Philosophical tools are put to work to solve problems about science and pseudoscience, induction and falsification.

The Tao Te Ching is revered as one of the most powerful cannons of wisdom about leadership and governing, used by teachers, monks, chiefs, generals, and emperors for centuries. The Way with Children, by author M. Shayne Gallagher, offers a “transduction” of the Tao Te Ching into a version useful to those who work with young people as a leader. Any teacher, school administrator, program staff member, coach, mentor, and especially parent, can benefit by gaining an understanding of the principles illuminated by the Tao Te Ching, especially one translated into a version just for them. Written with special care to instruct the instructor, The Way with Children contains a series of passages and poems. It’s a tool designed to help one ponder and re-center to benefit relationships through a discovery of ancient truths. As a student of the Tao Te Ching for more than thirty years and as one who has worked with troubled teenagers in behavioral health programs for nearly as long, the principles have helped Gallagher understand how to work with at-risk youth. He shares those ideas in The Way with Children.