Hard-shelled, career-minded Greta is the newest and least likely member of a sustainable foods cooperative house in Madison, Wisconsin. Shortly after she joins Karin and Hal in their stately residence near campus, the husband Greta left appears on their porch, drunk, and the reason for her sudden appearance becomes clear. Yet the house members already have plenty to occupy them: a series of summer blackouts has unearthed a disquietude lurking just under the surface for each of the three residents. Gas is dwindling, electricity is unreliable, and the natural world around them is in upheaval. The uneasiness of the environ ment mirrors that of Greta, Hal, and Karin as they each make efforts to resolve their own personal crises. With subtle attunement to the hovering uncertainty affecting each of her characters, Wildgen crafts a story both terrifying and beautiful.

This story deals with a retired sewer plant worker who finds a kitten abandoned at the plant. With the aid of the veterinarian and good nursing care, he manages to bring the kitten back into a state of good health. The main characters are Alex Yates and a talking cat named Dexter that is addicted to LAND O’LAKES cheese, has an IQ of 162, and is also a male chauvinist feline. The story reveals how Dexter guides and directs Alex through the trials of using his talents and gifts for the common good. Alex does this by leaping into the bodies of people and actually becoming them. Many times Dexter has to order Alex to leave a body because he’s becoming completely absorbed into the new personality. The writing deals with love, despair, heartache, dependence, and independence. The story reveals to the reader that people mistakenly live for tomorrow while forgetting about today. Although at first Dexter is not allowed to violate man’s free will, he inadvertently skirts around the issue by becoming a police officer for the Culpeper Police Department. In the end, as Dexter believes that his job is done, the story has a shocking ending, which backfires right back at Dexter. This omniscient cat is in for a shock of his own. This is a sequel to Cliff Zane: Guilty as Charged. Reflective words inferred in the writing: We are all born with talents that are gifts from God. We cannot earn or buy them. They are a gift. We all have different gifts. Some have many. Some have few. In the next life we shall be measured by what we did with our gifts. We don’t get to keep what we have. We’re supposed to give it away.

The NFL is the most popular professional sports league in the United States. Its athletes receive multimillion-dollar contracts and almost endless media attention. The league's most important game, the Super Bowl, is practically a national holiday. Making it to the NFL, however, is not about the promised land of fame and fortune. Robert W. Turner II draws on his personal experience as a former professional football player as well as interviews with more than 140 current and former NFL players to reveal what it means to be an athlete in the NFL and explain why so many players struggle with life after football. Without guaranteed contracts, the majority of players are forced out of the league after a few seasons. Over three-quarters of retirees experience bankruptcy or financial ruin, two-thirds live with chronic pain, and too many find themselves on the wrong side of the law. Robert W. Turner II argues that the fall from grace of so many players is no accident. The NFL, he contends, powerfully determines their experiences in and out of the league. The labor agreement provides little job security and few health and retirement benefits, and the owners refuse to share power with the players, making change difficult. And the process of becoming an elite football player--from high school to college and through the pros--leaves athletes with few marketable skills and little preparation for their first Sunday off the field. With compassion and objectivity, Not for Long reveals the life and mind of high school, college, and NFL athletes, shedding light on what might best help players transition successfully out of the sport.

The NFL is the most popular professional sports league in the United States. Its athletes receive multimillion-dollar contracts and almost endless media attention. The league's most important game, the Super Bowl, is practically a national holiday. Making it to the NFL, however, is not about the promised land of fame and fortune. Robert W. Turner II draws on his personal experience as a former professional football player as well as interviews with more than 140 current and former NFL players to reveal what it means to be an athlete in the NFL and explain why so many players struggle with life after football. Without guaranteed contracts, the majority of players are forced out of the league after a few seasons. Over three-quarters of retirees experience bankruptcy or financial ruin, two-thirds live with chronic pain, and too many find themselves on the wrong side of the law. Robert W. Turner II argues that the fall from grace of so many players is no accident. The NFL, he contends, powerfully determines their experiences in and out of the league. The labor agreement provides little job security and few health and retirement benefits, and the owners refuse to share power with the players, making change difficult. And the process of becoming an elite football player--from high school to college and through the pros--leaves athletes with few marketable skills and little preparation for their first Sunday off the field. With compassion and objectivity, Not for Long reveals the life and mind of high school, college, and NFL athletes, shedding light on what might best help players transition successfully out of the sport.

Now in its Fifth Edition, Financial Management for Public, Health, and Not-for-Profit Organizations is the leading textbook on financial management in the government, health, and not-for-profit sectors providing a comprehensive yet practical introduction to the financial decision-making and management skills required of students and practitioners in the field. Assuming readers have no prior training in financial management, authors Steven A. Finkler, Daniel L. Smith, Thad D. Calabrese, and Robert M. Purtell artfully combine the principles and theory and analytics of accounting and finance. Coverage includes cost analysis, budget preparation, budget and variance analysis, management control, and recording and reporting financial information, with an emphasis on preparing and analyzing financial statements. The authors detail the foundational principles of each of the methods introduced in the book, and through step-by-step equations, figures, and exhibits, they illustrate how to execute financial management in practice.

Pedagogically rich, this core textbook in governmental and not-for-profit accounting offers in-depth coverage for advanced accounting courses. The classroom-tested text logically builds student understanding of basic concepts like accountability, typical transactions like recording budgets and property taxes, and carries those concepts through to the detailed production of annual financial statements and conversions to produce government-wide financial statements. Reasonably priced and user friendly, the Martin-West volume is loaded with helpful questions, exercises, problems that include Internet research, case studies, summaries, and boxed items. Key features include: Putting It Together examples walk readers through the process of analyzing and entering typical transactions and developing financial statements Strategically placed interpretive exercises direct readers to apply what they have learned to a variety of situations Ties to the Real Worldinformation from business publications and from actual financial reportsillustrate chapter concepts and accounting concerns Clearly stated, measurable learning objectives focus on specific learning goals

Every day, people make life choices that, ideally, increase their evolutionary fitness the chances of survival and successful reproduction and lead to positive feelings of fulfilment, accomplishment, and happiness. Sometimes, however, individuals experience quite the opposite: feelings of sadness caused by fitness-decreasing choices. Fortunately, many advancements in evolutionary theory and evolutionary psychology have increased humans' capacity as a species to address the question of how to live a life characterized by more positive than negative feelings.Feeling Good reveals anyone can learn how to trigger mechanisms that generate positive feelings and increase positive fitness levels. The key is to employ an evolutionary perspective on how mental mechanisms generate feelings in relation to our life choices.From an insightfully evolutionary perspective, Feeling Good examines how to find and keep a mate, make good career decisions, build a solid social network, deal with death and negative influences, and make life choices in general that can lead to better and more sustainable mental and physical health. Menelaos Apostolou deepens our understanding of human nature by exploring what is good and evil in an evolutionary sense as well as in relation to religious dogmas; and whether making fitness-increasing life choices can lead to more good or more evil acts.

Provisioning for basic human needs is done in three main kind of institutions: the familial household; the commercial enterprise selling goods and services; the institutions of the Welfare State that provide education, medical care and other goods and personal services to all or to some specific groups of citizens in need. The purpose of this book is to study the interplay of these institutions and their impact on well-being, and to analyze key policies and measures that have been implemented in European countries. Institutions determine labour demand (men and women are hired by the institutions of the Welfare State or by market providers of care), the possibilities of consumption (wages earned can be used to buy goods and services only if such goods and services are provided by the market) and allocate people's time, in particular women's time, between paid work and unpaid domestic production and provision of care, shaping both the gender relations and time use of people of both sexes. The proper balance of these institutions is a prerequisite of well-being both of the care givers and of the care receivers, and also for satisfactory gender relations. The chapters in this book focus on the following sub-topics: gender and welfare regimes; gender, well-being and the provision of care in the family and the household; and gender and well-being in the labour market. They emphasise the interdependence of social and labour market policies in the context of fundamental changes in both working patterns (the increase in female labour-force participation rates) and social needs (including population ageing) and demonstrate that we need a more integrated approach to welfare policy which takes account not only of basic welfare entitlements, but also the need for supportive forms of service provision and employment regulation.

The astonishing, powerful debut by the winner of a 2016 Whiting Writers' Award WHEREAS her birth signaled the responsibility as mother to teach what it is to be Lakota therein the question: What did I know about being Lakota? Signaled panic, blood rush my embarrassment. What did I know of our language but pieces? Would I teach her to be pieces? Until a friend comforted, Don’t worry, you and your daughter will learn together. Today she stood sunlight on her shoulders lean and straight to share a song in Diné, her father’s language. To sing she motions simultaneously with her hands; I watch her be in multiple musics. —from “WHEREAS Statements” WHEREAS confronts the coercive language of the United States government in its responses, treaties, and apologies to Native American peoples and tribes, and reflects that language in its officiousness and duplicity back on its perpetrators. Through a virtuosic array of short lyrics, prose poems, longer narrative sequences, resolutions, and disclaimers, Layli Long Soldier has created a brilliantly innovative text to examine histories, landscapes, her own writing, and her predicament inside national affiliations. “I am,” she writes, “a citizen of the United States and an enrolled member of the Oglala Sioux Tribe, meaning I am a citizen of the Oglala Lakota Nation—and in this dual citizenship I must work, I must eat, I must art, I must mother, I must friend, I must listen, I must observe, constantly I must live.” This strident, plaintive book introduces a major new voice in contemporary literature.

“An intense snapshot of the chain reaction caused by pulling a trigger.” —Booklist (starred review) “Astonishing.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review) “A tour de force.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review) A Newbery Honor Book A Coretta Scott King Honor Book A Printz Honor Book A Time Best YA Book of All Time (2021) A Los Angeles Times Book Prize Winner for Young Adult Literature Longlisted for the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature Winner of the Walter Dean Myers Award An Edgar Award Winner for Best Young Adult Fiction Parents’ Choice Gold Award Winner An Entertainment Weekly Best YA Book of 2017 A Vulture Best YA Book of 2017 A Buzzfeed Best YA Book of 2017 An ode to Put the Damn Guns Down, this is New York Times bestselling author Jason Reynolds’s electrifying novel that takes place in sixty potent seconds—the time it takes a kid to decide whether or not he’s going to murder the guy who killed his brother. A cannon. A strap. A piece. A biscuit. A burner. A heater. A chopper. A gat. A hammer A tool for RULE Or, you can call it a gun. That’s what fifteen-year-old Will has shoved in the back waistband of his jeans. See, his brother Shawn was just murdered. And Will knows the rules. No crying. No snitching. Revenge. That’s where Will’s now heading, with that gun shoved in the back waistband of his jeans, the gun that was his brother’s gun. He gets on the elevator, seventh floor, stoked. He knows who he’s after. Or does he? As the elevator stops on the sixth floor, on comes Buck. Buck, Will finds out, is who gave Shawn the gun before Will took the gun. Buck tells Will to check that the gun is even loaded. And that’s when Will sees that one bullet is missing. And the only one who could have fired Shawn’s gun was Shawn. Huh. Will didn’t know that Shawn had ever actually USED his gun. Bigger huh. BUCK IS DEAD. But Buck’s in the elevator? Just as Will’s trying to think this through, the door to the next floor opens. A teenage girl gets on, waves away the smoke from Dead Buck’s cigarette. Will doesn’t know her, but she knew him. Knew. When they were eight. And stray bullets had cut through the playground, and Will had tried to cover her, but she was hit anyway, and so what she wants to know, on that fifth floor elevator stop, is, what if Will, Will with the gun shoved in the back waistband of his jeans, MISSES. And so it goes, the whole long way down, as the elevator stops on each floor, and at each stop someone connected to his brother gets on to give Will a piece to a bigger story than the one he thinks he knows. A story that might never know an END…if Will gets off that elevator. Told in short, fierce staccato narrative verse, Long Way Down is a fast and furious, dazzlingly brilliant look at teenage gun violence, as could only be told by Jason Reynolds.