When Charlie's sister decides to marry a country club, rich boy from Dallas, Charlies springs into action to make sure that the wedding isn't ruined by hillbilly relatives and a conniving maid of honor.
Ellie has a bad habit of picking the wrong man; a cheating ex-boyfriend, a mild-mannered foot fetishist, and let's not forget about the hillbilly with the impolite hard-on. But when Sam James, the oh-so-hot bad boy Ellie has sworn to stay away from, keeps turning up like a bad penny, she's going to need more than her psychic senses to see what's coming her way.
Greek mythology meets the Kardashians in Emily Roberson's Lifestyles of Gods and Monsters, a fresh, fast-paced debut young adult novel about celebrity culture, family dynamics, and finding love amidst it all. Sixteen-year-old Ariadne’s whole life is curated and shared with the world. Her royal family’s entertainment empire is beloved by the tabloids, all over social media, and the hottest thing on television. The biggest moneymaker? The Labyrinth Contest, a TV extravaganza in which Ariadne leads fourteen teens into a maze to kill a monster. To win means endless glory; to lose means death. In ten seasons, no one has ever won. When the gorgeous, mysterious Theseus arrives at the competition and asks Ariadne to help him to victory, she doesn’t expect to fall for him. He might be acting interested in her just to boost ratings. Their chemistry is undeniable, though, and she can help him survive. If he wins, the contest would end for good. But if she helps him, she doesn’t just endanger her family’s empire—the monster would have to die. And for Ariadne, his life might be the only one worth saving. Ariadne’s every move is watched by the public and predestined by the gods, so how can she find a way to forge her own destiny and save the people she loves?
The Disquisition: An Equity-Driven Capstone for Leadership Preparation Programs provides a thoughtful, detailed example of a capstone process and paper (The Disquisition) that employs improvement science, critical theory, and critical praxis to prepare educational leaders to disrupt inequity within their organizations. The chapters in this book represent 12 years of collaborative learning among experienced, respected, and award-winning leadership preparation faculty presently at or formerly from Western Carolina University (WCU). It integrates multiple sources of data from research, student feedback, faculty experiences, capstone committee member input, learnings from the Carnegie Project on the Education Doctorate (CPED), and program evaluation data examining the achievement of student learning outcomes. Following foundational chapters that describe the origin and evolution of the disquisition at WCU and its focus on social justice, faculty present six chapters—each one clearly detailing a primary component of the disquisition process and paper including the problem of practice; a causal analysis; identifying the improvement initiative; designing the improvement initiative; evaluating the improvement initiative and reporting results; and implications, recommendations, and leadership lessons learned. Each of these chapters includes a brief introduction to the component; expectations for students as practitioners (leading the work); expectations for students as scholars (evaluating and writing about the work); an excerpt from the disquisition paper outline relevant to the component; example figures, tables, or text from completed disquisition papers; and scholarly resources for scholar-practitioners. The final chapter of the book presents the process for convening a disquisition committee, a description of the IRB process, and the expectations for defending the disquisition at both the proposal defense and the final defense meeting. Although this book is written as a guide for students engaging in the disquisition process and writing the disquisition paper, it serves as a strong model for leadership preparation programs and university administrators who seek to build or refine their capstone (and program) in ways that ensure students are prepared to lead justice-driven transformation across their organizations. Perfect for courses such as: Dissertation-in-Practice Writing; Academic Writing for the Scholar Practitioner; Capstone-Independent Study; Capstone-Student Learning Community; Improvement Science: Data Collection, Analysis & Reporting; Improvement Science: Data Presentation; The Role of the Scholar-Practitioner as Educational Leader
Political Action Committees (PACs) are a prominent and contentious feature of modern American election campaigns. As organizations that channel money toward political candidates and causes, their influence in recent decades has been widely noted and often decried. Yet, there has been no comprehensive history compiled of their origins, development, and impact over time. In The Rise of Political Action Committees, Emily J. Charnock addresses this gap, telling a story with much deeper roots than contemporary commentators might expect. Documenting the first wave of PAC formation from the early 1940s to the mid-1960s, when major interest groups began creating them, she shows how PACs were envisaged from the outset as much more than a means of winning elections, but as tools for effecting ideological change in the two main parties. In doing so, Charnock not only locates the rise of PACs within the larger story of interest group electioneering - which went from something rare and controversial at the beginning of the 20th Century to ubiquitous today - but also within the narrative of political polarization. Throughout, she offers a full picture of PACs as far more than financial vehicles, showing how they were electoral innovators who pioneered strategies and tactics that came to pervade modern US campaigns and reshape American politics. A broad-ranging political history of an understudied American campaign phenomenon, this book contextualizes the power and purpose of PACs, while revealing their transformative role within the American party system - helping to foster the partisan polarization we see today.
United Nations peacekeeping constitutes the second largest military deployment around the world, and the organization's flagship enterprise. Once responsible simply for the job of observing frontiers and monitoring ceasefire agreements, UN missions are now frequently charged with the far more daunting task of 'robust' intervention- penalizing spoilers of peace and protecting civilians from peril. Taking Sides in Peacekeeping explores this transformationand its implications through the first comprehensive conceptual and empirical study of impartiality, a norm long considered to be the bedrock of UN peacekeeping. It reveals how a change in the dominantunderstanding of impartiality has politicized peacekeeping and, in some cases, effectively converted UN forces into one warring party among many. The book incorporates a large body of primary evidence and draws on extensive fieldwork in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, site of the biggest and costliest mission in UN history (1999-2015).
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