Following a childhood of parental abuse, and subsequent homelessness, Nancy Davenport went on to graduate from UCLA Phi Beta Kappa, later receiving her Master's Degree in Social Work. An accomplished poet and artist, she dedicated her life to counseling children and families affected by child abuse. While writing this memoir, Nancy was diagnosed with Lou Gehrig's disease. Suddenly faced with devastating illness, she became determined to complete this work in order to spread her message that child abuse is as likely to be found in a mansion as in a mobile home. Eternal Improv is an inspiring work of profound courage and hope. "What an accomplishment! Nancy Davenport's searing, raw, witty account of a deeply disturbing childhood and brave escape from an abusive father is marked by the wisdom of reflection and the grace of forgiveness. Rising above homelessness and starvation to achieve academic and professional success against tremendous odds, Nancy has written her memoir while struggling daily to live with the invasive consequences of Lou Gehrig's disease. Completing this book demonstrates a strength beyond words, for as she has lost her ability to speak, so her voice booms from the page."-Jacqueline Winspear, author of Maisie Dobbs, Birds Of A Feather, and Pardonable Lies "Nancy Davenport's recollections reveal a writer with a clear eye, a dry wit, and a crusty, resilient spirit. Reading them makes the heart ache."-Linda Hunt, Academy Award-winning actress "Nancy Davenport writes about her childhood abuse, homelessness and debilitating disease without ever dipping into self-pity, victimhood or easy platitudes. Her memoir crackles with wit, irony and wisdom. It's a story of something all too rare in today's world: courage."-Barbara Abercrombie, Instructor in the UCLA Extension Writers' Program and author of Writing Out the Storm
Lotameria and David's mission on Earth was coming to the end. Sam, Susan, and her mother decided to stay on Earth for Sam and Susan's graduation. They will take the second mission in six months. Unbeknownst to them someone was going to die...
Shares the adventures of three friends as seen from the unique point of view of a fourteen year old boy named Donovan who happens to have been born with Down syndrome.
Nancy Reagan describes her life from her happy childhood to her exciting stage and film career to her experiences as the wife of a famous actor, governor, and presidential candidate and expresses hopeful views on America's future.
Eugenics was a term coined in 1883 to name the scientific and social theory which advocated "race improvement" through selective human breeding. In Europe and the United States the eugenics movement found many supporters before it was finally discredited by its association with the racist ideology of Nazi Germany. Examining for the first time how eugenics was taken up by scientists and social reformers in Latin America, Nancy Leys Stepan compares the eugenics movements in Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina with the more familiar cases of Britain, the United States, and Germany.In this highly original account, Stepan sheds new light on the role of science in reformulating issues of race, gender, reproduction, and public health in an era when the focus on national identity was particularly intense. Drawing upon a rich body of evidence concerning the technical publications and professional meetings of Latin American eugenicists, she examines how they adapted eugenic principles to local contexts between the world wars. Stepan shows that Latin American eugenicists diverged considerably from their counterparts in Europe and the United States in their ideological approach and their interpretations of key texts concerning heredity.
Nancy Purington was born in Scott County, Iowa, where the Mississippi river meets the Wapsipinicon and the channel shifts from north/south to east/west before resuming its meandering course to the gulf. The resulting latitudinal platform expands the radiance of sun and moonlight above myriad reflections and patterns of change. Lock and Dam No. 15, the world's largest roller dam, resists the forces of nature competing to rule the way of water. Opposing wills and alluvial harmonies are illuminated in plane geometry and fluid atmospheres. Purington's aesthetic sensibilities combine medieval perspective and modern art intention with traditional and experimental methods. Indigo, lapis, cobalt, cadmium, gold, silver, palladium, sticks, stones, shells, pearls, and digital photographs express the transformational nature of the Mississippi River experience. When Purington puts color and form to paper, using oil, watercolor, pastel, gouache, and gold leaf to render the countless shapes and shades of a wave ebbing and swelling in the Mississippi, she brings the macrocosm of the river into focus. She helps us to see the endless beauty of the river and to contemplate the mystery of a moment, encouraging us to live, to look closer, again and again. -Jane Milosch, Director, Provenance Research Initiative, Smithsonian institution, Washington, D.C.; former chief curator, Renwick Gallery, Smithsonian America Art Museum As an artist, Nancy Purington's very being is centered on the need to create and make order out the emotions engendered by her passion for the beauty of the natural world. Sky, clouds, water, rocks, shells - objects and images gathered, rendered both elemental and elegant. I have always been impressed with Nancy's integrity as an artist. She does not rely on formula, instead relentlessly exploring an idea until it reaches its natural conclusion, sometimes revisiting a work over a period of years. Moonlight on the Mississippi is the culmination of thousands of hours of living by, observing, remembering, dreaming, and otherwise being inspired by the Mississippi River. If you truly love nature, you will find beauty everywhere. --Vincent van Gogh -Barbara Christensen Kamp, Director (1989-2012), Muscatine Art Center Moonlight on the Mississippi features over 140 pieces of Nancy Purington's artwork on 125 pages.
Winner of the Lillian Smith Book Award Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist for the National Book Award The Nation's "Most Valuable Book" “[A] vibrant intellectual history of the radical right.”—The Atlantic “This sixty-year campaign to make libertarianism mainstream and eventually take the government itself is at the heart of Democracy in Chains. . . . If you're worried about what all this means for America's future, you should be.”—NPR An explosive exposé of the right’s relentless campaign to eliminate unions, suppress voting, privatize public education, stop action on climate change, and alter the Constitution. Behind today’s headlines of billionaires taking over our government is a secretive political establishment with long, deep, and troubling roots. The capitalist radical right has been working not simply to change who rules, but to fundamentally alter the rules of democratic governance. But billionaires did not launch this movement; a white intellectual in the embattled Jim Crow South did. Democracy in Chains names its true architect—the Nobel Prize-winning political economist James McGill Buchanan—and dissects the operation he and his colleagues designed over six decades to alter every branch of government to disempower the majority. In a brilliant and engrossing narrative, Nancy MacLean shows how Buchanan forged his ideas about government in a last gasp attempt to preserve the white elite’s power in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education. In response to the widening of American democracy, he developed a brilliant, if diabolical, plan to undermine the ability of the majority to use its numbers to level the playing field between the rich and powerful and the rest of us. Corporate donors and their right-wing foundations were only too eager to support Buchanan’s work in teaching others how to divide America into “makers” and “takers.” And when a multibillionaire on a messianic mission to rewrite the social contract of the modern world, Charles Koch, discovered Buchanan, he created a vast, relentless, and multi-armed machine to carry out Buchanan’s strategy. Without Buchanan's ideas and Koch's money, the libertarian right would not have succeeded in its stealth takeover of the Republican Party as a delivery mechanism. Now, with Mike Pence as Vice President, the cause has a longtime loyalist in the White House, not to mention a phalanx of Republicans in the House, the Senate, a majority of state governments, and the courts, all carrying out the plan. That plan includes harsher laws to undermine unions, privatizing everything from schools to health care and Social Security, and keeping as many of us as possible from voting. Based on ten years of unique research, Democracy in Chains tells a chilling story of right-wing academics and big money run amok. This revelatory work of scholarship is also a call to arms to protect the achievements of twentieth-century American self-government.
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