A story where constructive action triumphs over destructive action. The villain who becomes a hero, learns that it is more interesting and a lot more fun to create something that improves the environment rather than something that destroys it. The story offers an opportunity for discussion of family members about the choice we all have to make our world more beautiful or to destroy it. The villain of the story makes decisions which turn him or her into a hero. The illustrations and writing are designed to encourage children to try writing and illustrating a book themselves.

What are the features of the school environment that make students' of color incorporation greater at some schools than at others? Prudence L. Carter seeks to answer this basic but bedeviling question through a rich comparative analysis of the organizational and group dynamics in eight schools located within four cities in the United States and South Africa - two nations rebounding from centuries of overt practices of racial and social inequality. Stubborn Roots provides insight into how school communities can better incorporate previously disadvantaged groups and engender equity by addressing socio-cultural contexts and promoting "cultural flexibility." It also raises important and timely questions about the social, political, and philosophical purposes of multiracial schooling that have been greatly ignored by many, and cautions against narrow approaches to education that merely focus on test-scores and resources.

"There are simply not enough texts that look comparatively at the two foremost experiments with questions of race, culture, and and class in the English-speaking world, the United States and South Africa. Prudence Carter's work is simultaneously scholarly and compassionate. It helps us see, in these two benighted but globally important societies, how easily things break, but also how well, when structures are in place and when human agency takes flight, individuals and the groups to which they belong flourish and grow."---Crain Soudien, Deputy Vice-Chancellor, University of Cape Town --

A young British -Brazilian woman from South London navigates growing up between two cultures and into a fuller understanding of her body, relying on signposts such as history, family conversation, and the eyes of the women who have shaped her: mother, grandmother, and aunt. During her trips to Brazil, sometimes alone, often with family, our narrator accesses a different side of herself that is as much of who she is as anything else. -- adapted from back cover

In this book the author examines the stubborn philosophical belief in moral responsibility, surveying the philosophical arguments for it, but focusing on the system that supports these arguments: powerful social and psychological factors that hold the belief in moral responsibility firmly in place.--Publisher's description.

The editor of this book has brought together contributions designed to capture the essence of post-communist politics in East-Central Europe and Eurasia. Rather than on the surface structures of nominal democracies, the nineteen essays focus on the informal, often intentionally hidden, disguised and illicit understandings and arrangements that penetrate formal institutions. These phenomena often escape even the best-trained outside observers, familiar with the concepts of established democracies. Contributors to this book share the view that understanding post-communist politics is best served by a framework that builds from the ground up, proceeding from a fundamental social context. The book aims at facilitating a lexical convergence; in the absence of a robust vocabulary for describing and discussing these often highly complex informal phenomena, the authors wish to advance a new terminology of post-communist regimes. Instead of a finite dictionary, a kind of conceptual cornucopia is offered. The resulting variety reflects a larger harmony of purpose that can significantly expand the understanding the “real politics” of post-communist regimes. Countries analyzed from a variety of aspects, comparatively or as single case studies, include Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Hungary, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Poland, Romania, Russia, and Ukraine.

“Many a reader longing for a sense of homecoming in the realm of romantic fantasy will find it in A Strange and Stubborn Endurance.”—Jacqueline Carey “Stolen me? As soon to say a caged bird can be stolen by the sky.” Velasin vin Aaro never planned to marry at all, let alone a girl from neighboring Tithena. When an ugly confrontation reveals his preference for men, Vel fears he’s ruined the diplomatic union before it can even begin. But while his family is ready to disown him, the Tithenai envoy has a different solution: for Vel to marry his former intended’s brother instead. Caethari Aeduria always knew he might end up in a political marriage, but his sudden betrothal to a man from Ralia, where such relationships are forbidden, comes as a shock. With an unknown faction willing to kill to end their new alliance, Vel and Cae have no choice but to trust each other. Survival is one thing, but love—as both will learn—is quite another. Byzantine politics, lush sexual energy, and a queer love story that is by turns sweet and sultry, Foz Meadows' A Strange and Stubborn Endurance is an exploration of gender, identity, and self-worth. It is a book that will live in your heart long after you turn the last page. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

This work introduces renowned linguistics scholar Anatoly Liberman's comprehensive dictionary and bibliography of the etymology of English words. The English etymological dictionaries published in the past claim to have solved the mysteries of word origins even when those origins have been widely disputed. An Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology "by contrast, discusses all of the existing derivations of English words and proposes the best one. In the inaugural volume, Liberman addresses fifty-five words traditionally dismissed as being of unknown etymology. Some of the entries are among the most commonly used words in English, including man, boy, girl, bird, brain, understand, key, ever, " and yet." Others are slang: mooch, nudge, pimp, filch, gawk, " and skedaddle." Many, such as beacon, oat, hemlock, ivy," and toad," have existed for centuries, whereas some have appeared more recently, for example, slang, kitty-corner, " and Jeep." They are all united by their etymological obscurity. This unique resource book discusses the main problems in the methodology of etymological research and contains indexes of subjects, names, and all of the root words. Each entry is a full-fledged article, shedding light for the first time on the source of some of the most widely disputed word origins in the English language. "Anatoly Liberman is one of the leading scholars in the field of English etymology. Undoubtedly his work will be an indispensable tool for the ongoing revision of the etymological component of the entries in the Oxford English Dictionary."" --Bernhard Diensberg, OED" consultant, French etymologies Anatoly Liberman is professor of Germanic philology at the University of Minnesota. He has published many works, including 16 books, most recently Word Origins . . . and How We Know Them: Etymology for Everyone."

Juma is a young Remnant growing up in a world that he knows is in trouble. A world with a lot of rules and hidden secrets, which his kind has accepted and suppressed over the generations, because of fear. Fear that has been engrained, from the ones that they have now learned to respect; the Elders. But Juma is developing his light, trying his best to keep the Elders unaware of what he is, what he knows, and what he is destined to one day do. He is forced to confront the inevitable, when events out of his control, begin to unravel. He has to enlist the help from his friends, who may harbor their own destructive secrets, and find a way to stop the destruction of his world. Along his journey more truths are revealed and those he feared, become more trustworthy than those he loves. He finds out the hard way that some secrets are best left in the past.

Breathlessly action-packed and boasting a winning combination of thrills, humour and mysticism, the Destroyer is one of the bestselling series of all time.