Download or read book Matters of Chance written by Jeannette Haien and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2009-10-13 with total page 452 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Matters of Chance is a glorious, aptivating novel about Morgan and Maude Shurtliff, who fall in love and marry in the years before World WarII. Unable to have children of their own, Morgan and Maude adopt twin girls. The four go home to their beautiful house in the country outside ofNew York City and begin to settle into what they hope will be a long and happy life. When the twins are still young, Morgan is called to serve inWorld War II, leaving Maude to raise her daughters alone. Jeannette Haien has rendered Morgan's war experiences with astonishing detail, just as she has captured the American post-war era with a precision that is unrivaled in recent fiction.
Download or read book Choice or Chance written by Stephen Nowicki and published by Prometheus Books. This book was released on 2016-05-17 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How Much Do You Believe That What Happens to You Is the Result of Your Own Actions—or Do Circumstances Beyond Your Control Largely Determine Your Fate? Locus of Control (LOC) is a phrase used by psychologists to describe a widely effective way of assessing an individual’s potential for success—personal, social, and financial. LOC measures how much you believe what happens to you is the result of your own actions or, conversely, of forces and circumstances beyond your control. People who accept that they are largely in control of their lives tend to do better than those who feel that fate or external factors rule what they do, especially in novel and difficult situations. This book explains LOC research, until now mainly confined to academic circles, in terms easily understandable to the average person. The author, a clinical psychologist who has spent nearly five decades investigating and writing about LOC, helps the reader to explore his or her own locus of control and what those orientations might mean for how life is lived. He discusses the extensively documented relationship between LOC and academic achievement, personal and social adjustment, health, and financial success. Dr. Nowicki notes that there has been an increasing tendency among Americans to feel as though their lives are slipping out of their control, and he identifies ways to reverse this negative trend. He describes how the Locus of Control is learned and demonstrates ways in which it can be changed to yield higher levels of achievement, success, personal satisfaction, and better interactions with others.
Download or read book Matters of Chance written by Gail Albert and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2013-08-06 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This searing novel, a National Book Award finalist, “transforms one woman’s experience with cancer into a work of vision and intelligence” (The Washington Post). “I am thirty-four years old, married, a professor of neurobiology; I have two sons, aged nine and seven. I grew up in Brownsville and I left it behind, and I was diagnosed as having cancer in January. I know that these facts are connected; I have yet to understand how.” Mona’s perfect world is shattered by sudden and serious illness—leaving her searching her past for answers. Fate has led her from a tough Brooklyn girlhood to a happy marriage with a wonderful man, but what has she forgotten along the way? In this classic New York novel of the 1980s, as Mona struggles to understand her own life story, she uncovers the shocking memory of a murder and traces the shape of her own mortality. This stunning work was a finalist for the National Book Award for First Novel; now, its brilliant, ambitious exploration of an unfinished life is about to be discovered by a new generation of readers.
Download or read book Luck written by Ed Smith and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2013-04-01 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For aspiring cricketer Ed Smith, luck was for other people. Ed believed that the successful cricketer made his own luck by an application of will power, elimination of error, and the relentless pursuit of excellence. But when a freak accident at the crease at Lords prematurely ended Ed Smith's international cricketing career, it changed everything - and prompted him to look anew at his own life through the prism of luck.Tracing the history of the concepts of luck and fortune, destiny and fate, from the ancient Greeks to the present day - in religion, in banking, in politics - Ed Smith argues that the question of luck versus skill is as pertinent today as it ever has been. He challenges us to think again about privilege and opportunity, to re-examine the question of innate ability and of gifts and talents accidentally conferred at birth. Weaving in his personal stories - notably the chance meeting of a beautiful stranger who would become his wife on a train he seemed fated to miss - he puts to us the idea that in life, luck cannot be underestimated: without any means of explaining our differing lots in life, the world without luck is one in which you deserve every ill that befalls you, where envy dominates and averageness is the stifling ideal. Embracing luck leads us to a fresh reappraisal of the nature of success, opportunity and fairness.
Download or read book Family Matters written by Rohinton Mistry and published by Emblem Editions. This book was released on 2011-02-18 with total page 482 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Set in Bombay in the mid-1990s, Family Matters tells a story of familial love and obligation, of personal and political corruption, of the demands of tradition and the possibilities for compassion. Nariman Vakeel, the patriarch of a small discordant family, is beset by Parkinson’s and haunted by memories of his past. He lives with his two middle-aged stepchildren, Coomy, bitter and domineering, and her brother, Jal, mild-mannered and acquiescent. But the burden of the illness worsens the already strained family relationships. Soon, their sweet-tempered half-sister, Roxana, is forced to assume sole responsibility for her bedridden father. And Roxana’s husband, besieged by financial worries, devises a scheme of deception involving his eccentric employer at a sporting goods store, setting in motion a series of events that leads to the narrative’s moving outcome. Family Matters has all the richness, the gentle humour, and the narrative sweep that have earned Mistry the highest of accolades around the world.
Download or read book Miller s Children written by James Garbarino and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2018-02-27 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Miller's Children is a comprehensive look at the consequences of the US Supreme Court's decision in the case of Miller v. Alabama, which outlawed mandatory life-without-parole sentences for juvenile murderers. This book describes the author's fieldwork as a psychological expert witness in more than forty resentencing cases of juveniles affected by the Miller decision (and follow-up rulings), providing a wide-ranging review of research on human development in adolescence and early adulthood. It focuses on how and why convicted teenage murderers have been able to accomplish dramatic rehabilitation and transformation, emphasizing the role of spiritual development, education, reflection, and mentoring in that process."--Provided by publisher.
Download or read book Empire of Chance written by Anders Engberg-Pedersen and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2015-03-10 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Anders Engberg-Pedersen shows how the Napoleonic Wars inspired a new discourse on knowledge in the West. Soldiers returning from battle were forced to reconsider what it is possible to know and how decisions are made in a fog of imperfect knowledge. Chance no longer appeared exceptional but normative—a prism for understanding the modern world.
Download or read book What Do You Do with an Idea written by Kobi Yamada and published by . This book was released on 2014-02-01 with total page 36 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A young boy comes up with an idea and he keeps it safe until one day he realizes the amazing power it can have.
Download or read book The World Of Chance written by William Dean Howells and published by Jazzybee Verlag. This book was released on 2020 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 'A Hazard of New Fortunes' Mr. Howells took for his hero the editor of a New York magazine. In 'The World of Chance' the leading character is a young journalist of Midland, a town indefinitely located a day's journey west of New York City. He goes to the metropolis with the manuscript of his first novel, "A Modern Romeo," in his pocket. The adventures of this manuscript, making its way from publisher to publisher, and finally returning to the first one, who had wished to publish it despite the adverse opinions expressed by all his "readers," are of extreme interest. The book is finally issued by Mr. Brandreth, of the Chapley firm, as an almost desperate attempt to retrieve the fortunes of the house. In the two critical points for the author — the acceptance of his manuscript and the first important review of it — chance here plays the leading part. The leading characters of the book comment repeatedly on the apparent importance of mere luck in such matters. But the insistence of the book is upon the extremely large part which apparent luck, and luck only, plays in the literary world. It can hardly be said, however, by anyone who is well acquainted with these matters from the standpoint of the publisher or the author of experience, that Mr. Howells has greatly exaggerated the element of fortune in the case of authors who have their reputation to make. What it is that makes a book sell ; why, when it has reached a certain large sale, it stops just where it does; and will sell no longer ; and why the shrewdest publishers are again and again mistaken in their opinions, favorable or adverse to a manuscript — all these things are mysterious indeed. Mr. Howells does not write as a practical moralist but there is a very large audience waiting for 'The World of Chance', consisting of would- be authors, who will probably learn the force of some very hard and disagreeable facts in the matter of publishing, and take home the moral to themselves with much more thoroughness from a novel like this than from volumes of advice by publishers or authors of experience The socialistic element which has been so prominent in Mr. Howells' works before is seen here in the Hughes family — the four members of which offer as many careful studies in character of a typical reformer's family. Mr. Howells appears to have turned at length from the discipleship of Tolstoy, Bellamy and other social reformers. 'The World of Chance' is in many ways one of the most thoroughly interesting of Mr. Howells' novels, as well as one of the best written.
Download or read book Influence Is Your Superpower written by Zoe Chance and published by Random House. This book was released on 2022-02-01 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rediscover the superpower that makes good things happen, from the professor behind Yale School of Management's most popular class “The new rules of persuasion for a better world.”—Charles Duhigg, author of the bestsellers The Power of Habit and Smarter Faster Better You were born influential. But then you were taught to suppress that power, to follow the rules, to wait your turn, to not make waves. Award-winning Yale professor Zoe Chance will show you how to rediscover the superpower that brings great ideas to life. Influence doesn’t work the way you think because you don’t think the way you think. Move past common misconceptions—such as the idea that asking for more will make people dislike you—and understand why your go-to negotiation strategies are probably making you less influential. Discover the one thing that influences behavior more than anything else. Learn to cultivate charisma, negotiate comfortably and creatively, and spot manipulators before it’s too late. Along the way, you’ll meet alligators, skydivers, a mind reader in a gorilla costume, Jennifer Lawrence, Genghis Khan, and the man who saved the world by saying no. Influence Is Your Superpower will teach you how to transform your life, your organization, and perhaps even the course of history. It’s an ethical approach to influence that will make life better for everyone, starting with you.
Download or read book Everything Matters written by Ron Currie and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2009-06-25 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Startlingly talented . . . he survives the inevitable, apt comparisons to Kurt Vonnegut and writes in a tenderly mordant voice all his own." -Janet Maslin, The New York Times In this novel rich in character, Junior Thibodeau grows up in rural Maine in a time of Atari, baseball cards, pop Catholicism, and cocaine. He also knows something no one else knows-neither his exalted parents, nor his baseball-savant brother, nor the love of his life (she doesn't believe him anyway): The world will end when he is thirty-six. While Junior searches for meaning in a doomed world, his loved ones tell an all-American family saga of fathers and sons, blinding romance, lost love, and reconciliation-culminating in one final triumph that reconfigures the universe. A tour de force of storytelling, Everything Matters! is a genre-bending potpourri of alternative history, sci-fi, and the great American tale in the tradition of John Irving and Margaret Atwood.
Download or read book The Cole Trilogy written by Noah Gordon and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2012-09-11 with total page 2040 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The New York Times–bestselling author’s historical saga of a family of healers—from Dark Ages London to Civil War America to modern-day Boston. In The Physician, an orphan in eleventh-century London, Robert Cole, becomes a fast-talking swindler. As he matures, his strange gift—an acute sensitivity to impending death—never leaves him, and he yearns to become a healer. Arab madrassas are the only authentic medical schools, and he makes his perilous way to Persia. Christians are barred from Muslim schools, but by claiming he is a Jew, he studies under the world’s most renowned physician, Avicenna. Cole’s journey and love for a woman who must struggle against her only rival—medicine—make The Physician a riveting modern classic. In Shaman, Dr. Robert Judson Cole, nineteenth-century descendent of the first Robert Cole, travels from his ravaged Scottish homeland, through the operating rooms of antebellum Boston, to the cabins of frontier Illinois. In the wilderness he befriends the starving remnants of the Sauk tribe, who have fled their reservation. In the process, he absorbs their culture and learns native remedies that enrich his classical medical education. He marries a remarkable settler woman he had saved from illness. The Cole family is drawn into the bloody vortex of the Civil War, and their determination to survive in the midst of wilderness and violence will stay with the reader long after the final page. In Matters of Choice, Roberta Jeanne d’Arc Cole is the latest first-born descendant of Dr. Robert Cole. Favored to be named associate chief of medicine at a Boston hospital, she is married to a surgeon and owns a trophy residence in Cambridge as well as a summer house. But everything melts away. Her gender and her work at an abortion clinic cost her the hospital appointment. Her marriage fails. Crushed, she goes to her farmhouse in western Massachusetts, thinking to sell it, and finds an unexpected life. How she continues to fight for every woman’s right to choose, while acknowledging her own ticking clock and maternal yearning, makes this prize-winning third story of the Cole trilogy relevant and unforgettable.
Download or read book The Book That Matters Most written by Ann Hood and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2016-08-09 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An enthralling novel about love, loss, secrets, friendship, and the healing power of literature, by the bestselling author of The Knitting Circle. Ava’s twenty-five-year marriage has fallen apart, and her two grown children are pursuing their own lives outside of the country. Ava joins a book group, not only for her love of reading but also out of sheer desperation for companionship. The group’s goal throughout the year is for each member to present the book that matters most to them. Ava rediscovers a mysterious book from her childhood—one that helped her through the traumas of the untimely deaths of her sister and mother. Alternating with Ava’s story is that of her troubled daughter Maggie, who, living in Paris, descends into a destructive relationship with an older man. Ava’s mission to find that book and its enigmatic author takes her on a quest that unravels the secrets of her past and offers her and Maggie the chance to remake their lives.
Download or read book Maizy Chen s Last Chance written by Lisa Yee and published by Random House Books for Young Readers. This book was released on 2022-02-01 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEWBERY HONOR AWARD WINNER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST • ASIAN/PACIFIC AMERICAN AWARD FOR YOUTH LITERATURE Twelve year-old Maizy discovers her family’s Chinese restaurant is full of secrets in this irresistible novel that celebrates food, fortune, and family. NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY School Library Journal • Booklist • The Horn Book • New York Public Library Welcome to the Golden Palace! Maizy has never been to Last Chance, Minnesota . . . until now. Her mom’s plan is just to stay for a couple weeks, until her grandfather gets better. But plans change, and as Maizy spends more time in Last Chance and at the Golden Palace—the restaurant that’s been in her family for generations—she makes some discoveries.For instance: You can tell a LOT about someone by the way they order food. People can surprise you. Sometimes in good ways, sometimes in disappointing ways. And the Golden Palace has secrets... But the more Maizy discovers, the more questions she has. Like, why are her mom and her grandmother always fighting? Who are the people in the photographs on the office wall? And when she discovers that a beloved family treasure has gone missing—and someone has left a racist note—Maizy decides it’s time to find the answers.
Download or read book What Matters written by Alison Hughes and published by Orca Book Publishers. This book was released on 2016-09-06 with total page 32 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What happens when one small boy picks up one small piece of litter? He doesn't know it, but his tiny act has big consequences. From the miniscule to the universal, What Matters sensitively explores nature's connections and traces the ripple effects of one child’s good deed to show how we can all make a big difference.
Download or read book Dark Matter written by Blake Crouch and published by Ballantine Books. This book was released on 2016-07-26 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • COMING SOON TO APPLE TV+ • A “mind-blowing” (Entertainment Weekly) speculative thriller about an ordinary man who awakens in a world inexplicably different from the reality he thought he knew—from the author of Upgrade, Recursion, and the Wayward Pines trilogy “Are you happy with your life?” Those are the last words Jason Dessen hears before the kidnapper knocks him unconscious. Before he awakens to find himself strapped to a gurney, surrounded by strangers in hazmat suits. Before a man he’s never met smiles down at him and says, “Welcome back, my friend.” In this world he’s woken up to, Jason’s life is not the one he knows. His wife is not his wife. His son was never born. And Jason is not an ordinary college professor but a celebrated genius who has achieved something remarkable. Something impossible. Is it this life or the other that’s the dream? And even if the home he remembers is real, how will Jason make it back to the family he loves? From the bestselling author Blake Crouch, Dark Matter is a mind-bending thriller about choices, paths not taken, and how far we’ll go to claim the lives we dream of.
Download or read book Snowball s Chance written by John Reed and published by Melville House. This book was released on 2012-07-31 with total page 120 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This unauthorized companion to George Orwell’s Animal Farm is a controversial parable about September 11th by one of fiction’s most inventive and provocative writers Written in 14 days shortly after the September 11th attacks, Snowball’s Chance is an outrageous and unauthorized companion to George Orwell’s Animal Farm, in which exiled pig Snowball returns to the farm, takes charge, and implements a new world order of untrammeled capitalism. Orwell’s “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others” has morphed into the new rallying cry: “All animals are born equal—what they become is their own affair.” A brilliant political satire and literary parody, John Reed’s Snowball’s Chance caused an uproar on publication in 2002, denounced by Christopher Hitchens, and barely dodging a lawsuit from the Orwell estate. Now, a decade later, with America in wars on many fronts, readers can judge anew the visionary truth of Reed’s satirical masterpiece.
