Your personal guide to everything LEGO! As decades have passed, the LEGO brick has brung a since of nostalgia to parents and excitement to children. Explore the unique history of the LEGO brick within the 190 pages of The Toy That Changed Our Lives.
For more than one thousand years, Christians and Muslims lived side by side, sometimes at peace and sometimes at war. When Christian armies seized Jerusalem in 1099, they began the most notorious period of conflict between the two religions. Depending on who you ask, the fall of the holy city was either an inspiring legend or the greatest of horrors. In Crusaders, Dan Jones interrogates the many sides of the larger story, charting a deeply human and avowedly pluralist path through the crusading era.
Expanding the usual timeframe, Jones looks to the roots of Christian-Muslim relations in the eighth century and tracks the influence of crusading to present day. He widens the geographical focus to far-flung regions home to so-called enemies of the Church, including Spain, North Africa, southern France, and the Baltic states. By telling intimate stories of individual journeys, Jones illuminates these centuries of war not only from the perspective of popes and kings, but from Arab-Sicilian poets, Byzantine princesses, Sunni scholars, Shi’ite viziers, Mamluk slave soldiers, Mongol chieftains, and barefoot friars.
Crusading remains a rallying call to this day, but its role in the popular imagination ignores the cooperation and complicated coexistence that were just as much a feature of the period as warfare. The age-old relationships between faith, conquest, wealth, power, and trade meant that crusading was not only about fighting for the glory of God, but also, among other earthly reasons, about gold. In this richly dramatic narrative that gives voice to sources usually pushed to the margins, Dan Jones has written an authoritative survey of the holy wars with global scope and human focus.
A ground-breaking anthology celebrating Marvel’s beloved Black Panther and his home of Wakanda.
Eighteen short stories penned by an all-star cast of authors such as Sheree Renée Thomas and Nikki Giovanni.
T’Challa faces the gods of his parents. Vampires stalk Shuri and a Dora Milaje in voodoo-laced New Orleans. Erik Killmonger grapples with racism, Russian spies, and his own origins. Eighteen brand-new tales of Wakanda, its people, and its legacy.
The first mainstream superhero of African descent, the Black Panther has attracted readers of all races and colors who see in the King of Wakanda reflections of themselves. Storytellers from across the African Diaspora—some already literary legends, others who are rising stars—have created for this collection original works inspired by the world of the Panther and its inhabitants. With guest stars including Storm, Monica Rambeau, Namor, and Jericho Drumm, these are stories of yesterday and today, of science and magic, of faith and love.
These are the tales of a king and his country. These are the legends whispered in the jungle, myths of the unconquered men and women and the land they love.
These are the Tales of Wakanda.
Troy has fallen and the victorious Greeks are eager to return home with the spoils of an endless war—including the women of Troy themselves. They await a fair wind for the Aegean.
It does not come, because the gods are offended. The body of King Priam lies unburied and desecrated, and so the victors remain in suspension, camped in the shadows of the city they destroyed as the coalition that held them together begins to unravel. Old feuds resurface and new suspicions and rivalries begin to fester.
Largely unnoticed by her captors, the one time Trojan queen Briseis, formerly Achilles’s slave, now belonging to his companion Alcimus, quietly takes in these developments. She forges alliances when she can, with Priam’s aged wife the defiant Hecuba and with the disgraced soothsayer Calchas, all the while shrewdly seeking her path to revenge.
With its easy-to-grasp language and tools, Raising Kids is there for you, from managing family routines, screen time, and homework, to supporting friendships, self-esteem, and resilience. You’ll find out how being “on your spot” leads to fewer conflicts and replaces threats, nagging, and punishment with clear, effective messages that make sense to your kids.
The authors focus on everyday parenting because how we relate to our children day-to-day forms their sense of themselves, their connection to us, and their ways of being in the world. No interaction we have with our kids is too small to strengthen our bond with them, impart our values, build their confidence, and to demonstrate communicating, relating, and caring. You’ll learn how to be on your kids’ side and get them on yours as you navigate daily life.
Thousands of parents with toddlers through adolescents have benefited from the wisdom and reassurance that is now available in this straightforward guide. Along with offering approaches to address the challenges, Raising Kids shows you how to build on what you’re already doing well to maximize the good times in your family life today and in the years ahead.
This is the true story of how El Chapo built the world’s wealthiest and most powerful drug-trafficking operation, based on months’ worth of trial testimony and dozens of interviews with cartel gunmen, Mexican journalists and political figures, Chapo’s family members, and the DEA agents who brought him down.
Over the course of three decades, El Chapo was responsible for smuggling hundreds of tons of cocaine, marijuana, heroin, meth, and fentanyl around the world, becoming in the process the most celebrated and reviled drug lord since Pablo Escobar. El Chapo waged ruthless wars against his rivals and former allies, plunging vast areas of Mexico into unprecedented levels of violence, even as many in his home state of Sinaloa continued to view him as a hero.
This unputdownable book, written by a great new talent, brings El Chapo’s exploits into a focus that previous profiles have failed to capture. Hurowitz digs in deep beyond the legends and delves into El Chapo’s life and legacy—not just the hunt for him, revealing some of the most dramatic and often horrifying moments of his notorious career, including the infamous prison escapes, brutal murders, multi-million-dollar government payoffs, and the paranoia and narcissism that led to his downfall. From the evolution of organized crime in Mexico to the militarization of the drug war to the devastation wrought on both sides of the border by the introduction of synthetic opioids like fentanyl, this book is a gripping and comprehensive work of investigative, on-the-ground reporting.
Help your kids tuck God’s Word into their hearts through this simple and engaging activity for the whole family!
This colorful, interactive card set walks you through 100 Bible verses to help families establish a firm foundation in God’s Word. The front of each card features a single verse to memorize. The back offers three discussion questions, in progressing levels of complexity, to make Scripture accessible to kids of all ages and encourage families to go beyond simply memorizing verses.
The Bible verses are grouped into five themes that will help families foster conversation around:
– Who is God?
– Who is Jesus?
– Who is the Holy Spirit?
– Who am I in Christ?
– How do I grow in Christ?
Packaged in a durable box, and with category tab dividers for easy reference, these sturdy conversation cards are the ideal companion for family dinners, devotionals, or road trips. Explore Scripture as a family in a whole new way!
HBO changed how stories could be told on TV. The Sopranos, Sex and the City, The Wire, Game of Thrones. The network’s meteoric rise heralded the second golden age of television with serialized shows that examined and reflected American anxieties, fears, and secret passions through complicated characters who were flawed and often unlikable. HBO’s own behind-the-scenes story is as complex, compelling, and innovative as the dramas the network created, driven by unorthodox executives who pushed the boundaries of what viewers understood as television at the turn of the century. Originally conceived by a small upstart group of entrepreneurs to bring Hollywood movies into living rooms across America, the scrappy network grew into one of the most influential and respected players in Hollywood. It’s Not TV is the deeply reported, definitive story of one of America’s most daring and popular cultural institutions, laying bare HBO’s growth, dominance, and vulnerability within the capricious media landscape over the past fifty years.
Through the visionary executives, showrunners, and producers who shaped HBO, seasoned journalists Gillette and Koblin bring to life a dynamic cast of characters who drove the company’s creative innovation in astonishing ways—outmaneuvering copycat competitors, taming Hollywood studios, transforming 1980s comedians and athletes like Chris Rock and Mike Tyson into superstars, and in the late 1990s and 2000s elevating the commercial-free, serialized drama to a revered art form. But in the midst of all its success, HBO was also defined by misbehaving executives, internal power struggles, and a few crucial miscalculations.
As data-driven models like Netflix have taken over streaming, HBO’s artful, instinctual, and humanistic approach to storytelling is in jeopardy. Taking readers into the boardrooms and behind the camera, It’s Not TV tells the surprising, fascinating story of HBO’s ascent, its groundbreaking influence on American business, technology, and popular culture, and its increasingly precarious position in the very market it created.
McKinsey & Company is the most prestigious consulting company in the world, earning billions of dollars in fees from major corporations and governments who turn to it to maximize their profits and enhance efficiency. McKinsey’s vaunted statement of values asserts that its role is to make the world a better place, and its reputation for excellence and discretion attracts top talent from universities around the world. But what does it actually do?
In When McKinsey Comes to Town, two prizewinning investigative journalists have written a portrait of the company sharply at odds with its public image. Often McKinsey’s advice boils down to major cost-cutting, including layoffs and maintenance reductions, to drive up short-term profits, thereby boosting a company’s stock price and the wealth of its executives who hire it, at the expense of workers and safety measures. McKinsey collects millions of dollars advising government agencies that also regulate McKinsey’s corporate clients. And the firm frequently advises competitors in the same industries, but denies that this presents any conflict of interest.
In one telling example, McKinsey advised a Chinese engineering company allied with the communist government which constructed artificial islands, now used as staging grounds for the Chinese Navy—while at the same time taking tens of millions of dollars from the Pentagon, whose chief aim is to counter Chinese aggression.
Shielded by NDAs, McKinsey has escaped public scrutiny despite its role in advising tobacco and vaping companies, purveyors of opioids, repressive governments, and oil companies. McKinsey helped insurance companies’ boost their profits by making it incredibly difficult for accident victims to get payments; worked its U.S. government contacts to let Wall Street firms evade scrutiny; enabled corruption in developing countries such as South Africa; undermined health-care programs in states across the country. And much more.
Bogdanich and Forsythe have penetrated the veil of secrecy surrounding McKinsey by conducting hundreds of interviews, obtaining tens of thousands of revelatory documents, and following rule #1 of investigative reporting: Follow the money.
When McKinsey Comes to Town is a landmark work of investigative reporting that amounts to a devastating portrait of a firm whose work has often made the world more unequal, more corrupt, and more dangerous.
Administration of the Justice Sector in Nigeria by Olasupo Shasore (SAN) and Dr Akeem Olajide Bello: Ministering Justice is part road map and part memoir. The book covers amongst others a treatise of the evolution of the Office of the Attorney General in Nigeria; it recommends both new angles to justice sector reform as well as appropriate measures for effective justice sector administration. It is an excellent record of several reform initiatives while also containig the pioneering intervention by the State Law Reform Commission.
Possessed is a new and revealing view of hidden accounts, court evidence, testimony and papers of enquiry showing how colonisation employed “law and justice” to achieve its pernicious objectives – changing the course of African society.
The story begins around 1862, when Henry Pelham-Clinton, the Duke of Newcastle and Secretary of State for Colonies worried that “the original sin of taking possession of Lagos” would lead to meddling by the force of arms of the British Government.
He couldn’t have realised how prophetic his concerns would be…
From Prison to Photography chronicles Seun Akisanmi’s journey from his first entrepreneurial adventure in the United States of America to prison, after committing fraud. His sojourns in the four different prisons he spent time were marked by life-changing encounters with other inmates that greatly impacted his life and changed the course he was on.
After losing the opportunity of having and living the American dream and being deported back to Nigeria, Seun received one last chance to get back on course. He took it and stayed on it until a different kind of passion burnt through his veins, bringing a diversion.
He dared to venture into the photography industry against the counsel of many. In this book, he documents his journey into photography and the challenges that motivated him to organize one of the most impactful photography conferences in Africa: Nigeria Photography Expo & Conference (NiPHEC). From Prison to Photography is an attempt to take you on this journey Seun had knowing very well you will take home multiple life and business lessons.
From beloved actor and producer Omar Epps and writer Clarence A. Haynes comes the biggest epic fantasy of the year. A powerful saga of three teens, the children of refugees from a fallen African utopia, who must navigate their newfound powers in a climate-ravaged New York City. Perfect for fans of Black Panther and Children of Blood and Bone.
For Zuberi, Uzochi, and Lencho, Nubia is a mystery. Before they were born, a massive storm destroyed their ancestral homeland, forcing their families to flee across the ocean to New York City. Nubia, a utopic island nation off the coast of West Africa, was no more, and their parents’ sorrow was too deep for them to share much of their history beyond the folklore.
But New York, ravaged by climate change and class division, is far from a safe haven for refugees, and Nubians live as outcasts, struggling to survive in the constantly flooding lower half of Manhattan, while the rich thrive in the tech-driven sky city known as the Up High.
To many, being Nubian means you’re fated for a life plagued by difficulties and disrespect. But Zuberi, Uzochi, and Lencho are beginning to feel there might be more. Something within them is changing, giving each of them extraordinary powers. Extraordinary and terrifying powers that seem to be tied to the secrets their parents have kept from them.
Dr. Yael Schonbrun calls out the myth of the work-life balance and offers practical strategies that can help us reframe our approach to working and parenting from the inside out. Based in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), these strategies won’t create more hours in the day, but they can shift how we label our experiences, revise the stories we tell ourselves about working and parenting, and recognize the value we get from each role.
Differing values and commitments pull working parents in opposite directions and the social supports families desperately need are lacking. Yet even with these very real challenges, we can find more peace and less stress.
Some of these strategies include:
– Getting clear on our values and using these to help us make what often feel like no-win choices around time and resources
– Practicing mindfulness in both parenting and working
– Subtracting less meaningful obligations from our lives
These steps can help you crush both roles, with examples from the author’s research that show families of many shapes and backgrounds.
A quarter of a century after her memoir, Thinking in Pictures, forever changed how the world understood autism, Temple Grandin—the “anthropologist on Mars,” as Oliver Sacks dubbed her—transforms our awareness of the different ways our brains are wired. Do you have a keen sense of direction, a love of puzzles, the ability to assemble furniture without crying? You are likely a visual thinker.
With her genius for demystifying science, Grandin draws on cutting-edge research to take us inside visual thinking. Visual thinkers constitute a far greater proportion of the population than previously believed, she reveals, and a more varied one, from the photo-realistic object visualizers like Grandin herself, with their intuitive knack for design and problem solving, to the abstract, mathematically inclined “visual spatial” thinkers who excel in pattern recognition and systemic thinking. She also makes us understand how a world increasingly geared to the verbal tends to sideline visual thinkers, screening them out at school and passing over them in the workplace. Rather than continuing to waste their singular gifts, driving a collective loss in productivity and innovation, Grandin proposes new approaches to educating, parenting, employing, and collaborating with visual thinkers. In a highly competitive world, this important book helps us see, we need every mind on board.
Amirah Kassem preaches the power of sprinkles in her wildly creative first book. A modern-day Willy Wonka, Kassem reminds readers that joy can be found in creating something delightful and delicious, that baking a cake for someone is the best thing in the world, and that, when it comes to cake decorating, any mistake can be covered in sprinkles (and everyone will love it anyway!).
With twenty-nine different cakes—from unicorn cakes and donut cakes to cakes that look like reindeer, popcorn, spaghetti, and avocado toast—and packed with photographs, illustrations, and infinite ideas, The Power of Sprinkles is a book for bakers and cake decorators at every age and level.
