Doreen Woods lives an ordinary life. She is a respected dentist, her son has just graduated from high school, and her husband teaches fifth grade. The one flaw is that her brother, Adam, has MS. Even that isn't all that extraordinary. . . . Then, out of nowhere, Janey Marks shows up, bringing the past with her. In 1971 Doreen was young, idealistic Lucy Johansson. Adam was back from Vietnam, damaged and bitter. Caught up in the anti-war movement Lucy committed a crime that changed everything for both of them. She Was spans America, coast to coast, over four decades, to give us the story of one young woman who, like many of her generation, tried to change the world and how, thirty-four years later, in a world that still needs changing, she must pay the consequences.
A remarkable debut novel that 'dares us to imagine mystery in our lives, in our time㿠book that sends us away refreshed, with the potential to see the sacramental in the everyday' – Boston Globe Told from the viewpoints of four unforgettable characters, The Annunciation of Francesca Dunn is the story of an ordinary girl who is believed to be a modern–day Holy Virgin. At the heart of the story is Francesca: a shy and moody teenager hungry for her absent father's love, she is frightened and intoxicated by her sudden elevation to the rank of divine. Chester is a visionary homeless man who first 'discovers' Francesca and makes himself her protector. Anne is Francesca's no–nonsense mother, whose religion is Darwin and biology. Sid is Francesca's troubled friend, who keeps a few secrets of her own. Tender and tragic, their intersecting stories probe the need to believe, and the relationship between divinity and madness. Beautifully crafted, here is a compelling first novel that heralds the arrival of a powerful new talent.
While advice abounds from a variety of sources before parents embark on their parenting journeys, the only parent preparation we actually receive comes from our family and peer stories. Yet most adults do not realize that in day-to-day challenges of guiding our children, something interesting happens. As we steer our children through life, we reopen our own childhood roads. Just when our child most needs us, we become needy ourselves: as adults and parents, we find that we have unresolved raising issues, basic needs that were not met in our childhoods. Our needs and memories echo and influence many of the parenting decisions we make, even though we’re unaware of those influences at times. Fortunately, children help parents reach their needs as much as their parents help them fulfill their own. Our child ends up guiding us, by connecting us to some earlier time in our life when we encountered distress. We dredge up a lesson, and we adapt by adhering to or changing the story that we tell ourselves about who we are. We re-negotiate the five basic needs that surface from our childhood memories as our youngsters pass through each of the developmental phases. The self-aware parent focuses on creative problem solving by focusing on one interaction at a time. It Takes a Child to Raise a Parent offers an exploration of how our own childhood memories and needs influence and shape our parenting decisions in our adult lives. Offering tips, stories from a variety of families, and step by step exercises, Janis Johnston helps parents better understand and grasp the tools necessary to face parenting challenges head on, and to explore new ways of understanding ourselves, our children, and our family interactions. Expectant parents and current parents interested in understanding their own personality development as well as the many moods of childhood and their own children, will find clear guidelines for understanding their roles in their children’s lives as well as concrete suggestions for how to navigate the choppy waters of raising children.
In this groundbreaking study based on five years of in-depth ethnographic and interdisciplinary research, Troubled in the Land of Enchantment explores the well-being of adolescents hospitalized for psychiatric care in New Mexico. Anthropologists Janis H. Jenkins and Thomas J. Csordas present a gripping picture of psychic distress, familial turmoil, and treatment under the regime of managed care that dominates the mental health care system. The authors make the case for the centrality of struggle in the lives of youth across an array of extraordinary conditions, characterized by personal anguish and structural violence. Critical to the analysis is the cultural phenomenology of existence disclosed through shifting narrative accounts by youth and their families as they grapple with psychiatric diagnosis, poverty, misogyny, and stigma in their trajectories through multiple forms of harm and sites of care. Jenkins and Csordas compellingly direct our attention to the conjunction of lived experience, institutional power, and the very possibility of having a life.
With fine-tuned ethnographic sensibility, Jenkins explores the lived experience of psychosis, trauma, and depression among people of diverse cultural orientations, eloquently showing how mental illness engages fundamental human processes of self, desire, gender, identity, attachment, and meaning. Her studies illustrate the shaping of human reality and subjectivity in light of extreme psychological suffering, and shed light on psycho-political processes of alterity, precarity, and repression in the social rendering of the mentally ill as non-human or less than fully human. Extraordinary Conditions addresses the critical need to empathically engage the experience of persons living with conditions that are culturally defined as mental illness. Jenkins compellingly shows that mental illness is better characterized in terms of struggle than symptoms and that culture matters vitally in all aspects of mental illness from onset to recovery. Analysis at this edge of experience refashions the boundaries between ordinary and extraordinary, routine and extreme, healthy and pathological. The book argues that the study of mental illness is indispensable to anthropological understanding of culture and experience, and reciprocally that understanding culture and experience is critical to the study of mental illness. While anthropology neglects the extraordinary to its theoretical and empirical peril, psychiatry neglects culture to its theoretical and clinical peril"--Provided by publisher.
The latest tools and techniques for accomplishing more in less time with fewer resources. In today’s competitive global environment—where people at all levels need to accomplish more, in less time, with fewer resources—the ability to manage priorities is a key element in personal and professional success. How to Manage Your Priorities, Second Edition, provides managers, team leaders, professionals, and others in the workplace with the tools to master this essential business skill. The second edition, revised and updated with a new chapter on technology-based tools for identifying and organizing priorities, teaches managers the critical benefits of managing their priorities and removing the obstacles that interfere with success. Readers will learn how to: • Identify what’s important • Accomplish more in less time, with fewer resources • Manage your workload to improve your working relationships • Organize a task or project so outcomes meet expectations and objectives • Collaborate with others to make sure deadlines are necessary and reasonable • Improve the quality of your work and reduce stress • Master key strategies for prioritizing tasks and activities • Practice the best planning and scheduling techniques • Use technology to manage your priorities: planning and scheduling tools, project management software, PDAs, organizing systems. This is an ebook version of the AMA Self-Study course. If you want to take the course for credit you need to either purchase a hard copy of the course through amaselfstudy.org or purchase an online version of the course through www.flexstudy.com.
A rich, much-needed remedy for the standardized institutions that comprise too much of our school system today… ideal for teachers and parents intent on resurrecting and fostering students' inherent drive to learn…An essential resource." -Daniel H. Pink, author of DRIVE and A WHOLE NEW MIND “Schools that Learn is a magnificent, grand book that pays equal attention to the small and the big picture - and what's more integrates them. There is no book on education change that comes close to Senge et al's sweeping and detailed treatment. Classroom, school, community, systems, citizenry---it's all there. The core message is stirring: what if we viewed schools as a means of shifting society for the better!" -Michael Fullan, author of Change Leader and Learning Places A new edition of the groundbreaking book that brings organizational learning and systems thinking into classrooms and schools, showing how to keep our nation’s educational system competitive in today’s world. Revised and updated - with more than 100 pages of new material – for the first time since its initial publication in 2000 comes a new edition of the seminal work acclaimed as one of the best books ever written about education and schools. A unique collaboration between the celebrated management thinker and Fifth Discipline author Peter Senge and a team of renowned educators and organizational change leaders, Schools that Learn describes how schools can adapt, grow, and change in the face of the demands and challenges of our society, and provides tools, techniques and references for bringing those aspirations to life. The new revised and updated edition offers practical advice for overcoming the many challenges that face our communities and educational systems today. It shows teachers, administrators, students, parents and community members how to successfully use principles of organizational learning, including systems thinking and shared vision, to address the challenges that face our nation's schools. In a fast-changing world where school populations are increasingly diverse, children live in ever-more-complex social and media environments, standardized tests are applied as overly simplistic "quick fixes," and advances in science and technology continue to accelerate, the pressures on our educational system are inescapable. Schools That Learn offers a much-needed way to open dialogue about these problems – and provides pragmatic opportunities to transform school systems into learning organizations. Drawing on observations and advice from more than 70 writers and experts on schools and education, this book features: -Methods for implementing organizational learning and explanations of why they work -Compelling stories and anecdotes from the “field” - classrooms, schools, and communities -Charts, tables and diagrams to illustrate systems thinking and other practices -Guiding principles for how to apply innovative practices in all types of school systems -Individual exercises useful for both teachers and students -Team exercises to foster communication within the classroom, school, or community group -New essays on topics like educating for sustainability, systems thinking in the classroom, and “the great game of high school.” -New recommendations for related books, articles, videotapes and web sites -And more Schools That Learn is the essential guide for anyone who cares about the future of education and keeping our nation’s schools competitive in our fast-changing world.
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