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When it comes to food, Americans seem to have a pretty great deal. Our grocery stores are overflowing with countless varieties of convenient products. But like most bargains that are too good to be true, the modern food system relies on an illusion. It depends on endless abundance, but the planet has its limits. So too does a healthcare system that must absorb rising rates of diabetes and obesity. So too do the workers who must labor harder and faster for less pay. Through beautifully-told stories from around the world, Kevin Walker reveals the unintended consequences of our myopic focus on quantity over quality. A trip to a Costa Rica plantation shows how the Cavendish banana became the most common fruit in the world and also one of the most vulnerable to disease. Walker’s early career in agribusiness taught him how pressure to sell more and more fertilizer obscured what that growth did to waterways. His family farm illustrates how an unquestioning belief in “free markets” undercut opportunity in his hometown. By the end of the journey, we not only understand how the drive to produce ever more food became hardwired into the American psyche, but why shifting our mindset is essential. It starts, Walker argues, with remembering that what we eat affects the wider world. If each of us decides that bigger isn’t always better, we can renegotiate the grand food bargain, one individual decision at a time.

“Jack and the Beanstalk,” “Little Jack Horner,” and “Jack the Giant Killer” are all famous tales and rhymes featuring the same hero, a character who often appears in legends, fairy tales, and nursery rhymes. Unlike moralizing fairy tale heroes, however, Jack is typically depicted as foolish or lazy, though he often emerges triumphant through cleverness and tricks. With their roots traced back to England, Jack tales are an important oral tradition in Appalachian folklore. It was in his Appalachian upbringing that Kevin D. Cordi was first introduced to Jack through oral storytelling traditions. Cordi’s love of storytelling eventually led him down a career path as a professional storyteller, touring the US for the past twenty-seven years. In addition to his work as a storyteller, Cordi worked a second job in an unrelated field—a high school teacher—and for many years, he kept his two lives separate. Everything changed when Cordi began telling stories in the classroom and realized he was connecting with his students in ways he had not previously. Cordi concluded that storytelling, storymaking, and drama can be used as systems of learning instead of as just entertainment. In You Don’t Know Jack: A Storyteller Goes to School, Cordi describes the process of integrating storytelling into his classroom. Using autoethnographic writing, he reflects upon the use of storytelling and storymaking in order to promote inquiry and learning. He argues that engaging with the stories of others, discovering that one voice or identity should not be valued over the other, and listening, especially listening to stories of difference, are of utmost importance to education and growth.

A chronological history of the United States Bankruptcy Court for the Eastern District of Michigan, the site of the city of Detroit’s landmark bankruptcy case. Bankruptcy law is a major part of the American legal landscape. More than a million individuals and thousands of businesses sought relief in the United States' ninety-three bankruptcy courts in 2014, more than twenty-seven thousand of them in the Eastern District of Michigan. Important business of great consequence takes place in the courts, yet they ordinarily draw little public attention. In Adversity and Justice: A History of the United States Bankruptcy Court for the Eastern District of Michigan, Kevin Ball takes a closer look at the history and evolution of this court. Using a variety of sources from newspaper accounts and interviews to personal documentation from key people throughout the court's history, Ball explores not only the history of the court from its beginning in the late nineteenth century but also two major courthouse scandals and their significant and long-lasting effects on the court. The first, in 1919, resulted in the removal of a court referee for a series of small infractions. The second was far more serious and resulted in the resignation of a judge and criminal convictions of the court's chief clerk, one of his deputies, and one of Detroit's most prominent lawyers. The book culminates with a comprehensive account of the city of Detroit's own bankruptcy case that was filed in 2013. Drawing on the author's expertise as both a longtime bankruptcy attorney and a political scientist, the book examines this landmark case in its legal, social, historical, and political contexts. Anyone with an interest in bankruptcy, legal history, or the city of Detroit's bankruptcy case will be attracted to this thorough case study of this court.

This book provides a deep insight into urban regeneration schemes and explores the parameters of what is deemed a sustainable development, before appraising existing schemes’ evaluation models for the sustainable return on investment. The authors present a new practical evaluation tool that suggests quantifiable benefits for all urban regeneration stakeholders. This new method enables the gauging of the full sustainable impact, from a given outlay of money invested in a housing-led urban regeneration scheme, through an evidence-based proof and can be used to: Better fulfil sustainability criteria in terms of all three aspects of the triple bottom line and contribute in a more sustainable way to address the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goal 11 Reduce financial waste and plug the gap created by the recent economic shortfall which is impacting on housing associations, tenants and communities alike Evaluate historical housing-led urban regeneration schemes and model future schemes. The method can be used as a strategic decision making or management tool, with schemes being able to be planned in, prioritised or carried out in a targeted and strategic manner; and it can be used for modelling purposes, for publicity purposes and alongside existing tools. This book provides a unique method of fully and sustainably evaluating housing-led urban regeneration schemes, useful for planners, strategic management, local authorities, housing associations, the construction industry and built environment students alike.

Coordination chemistry is the study of compounds formed between metal ions and other neutral or negatively charged molecules. Coordination chemistry includes areas of inorganic solid state chemistry, organometallic chemistry and bioinorganic chemistry, as well as applications to analytical chemistry, catalysis, industrial chemistry and materials science.

Master Powerful Ways to Find Purpose, Fulfillment, and Greatness at Work! Four great books show you how to find purpose, fulfillment, and greatness at work--no matter where you work or how fast your workplace is changing! Imagine the leaders of one of New York’s top real-estate firms coming together every Monday morning to hear…the moral and spiritual thoughts of a Rabbi. Wouldn’t you like to hear the paths Alan Lurie traced for his listeners, how he helped them bring together their spiritual and business lives, the sacred and the profane? Five Minutes on Mondays compiles these talks for the first time, sharing Lurie’s deep and profound inspiration on the challenges we all face--at work and in life. Lurie draws on millennia of philosophy, theology, and science to help us answer our deepest questions, comfort our deepest yearnings, and become better people: more connected to each other and to the Greater Purpose. Next, in Touchdown! Achieving Your Greatness on the Playing Field of Business (and Life), Dr. Kevin Elko shows how to build your success one brick at a time…so when it happens, it happens huge. America’s #1 performance consultant, Elko shares all he’s learned working with legendary athletes such as Emmitt Smith, championship coaches like Nick Saban, and thousands of the world’s top businesspeople. If you’re good, he’ll make you great. If you’re great, he’ll make you the best! Next, Four Secrets to Liking Your Work offers the first practical, start-to-finish program for transforming your work life: all the tools, tricks, ideas, examples, and proven research you need to make your work life more fulfilling and joyful, wherever you work--starting right now. Finally, in Your Job Survival Guide: A Manual for Thriving in Change, Gregory Shea, Ph.D., and Robert Gunther help you thrive amidst the challenges of your permanent “whitewater world” of change at work. Drawing on extensive research, they show how to protect your career, improve your resilience, and rediscover play and adventure as you “ride the workplace rapids.” From inspirational business leaders, trainers, and authors, including Alan Lurie, Kevin Elko, Edward Muzio, Deborah Fisher, Erv Thomas, Gregory Shea, and Robert Gunther

Virginia's American Revolution focuses on the remaking of colonial Virginia into a republican society. It considers this topic with a focus on particular episodes, such as the Richmond Ratification Convention of 1788 and the adoption of the Virginia Resolutions of 1798, that b...

"In Lands of Likeness, philosopher, theologian, and poet Kevin Hart utilizes the history of Christian thought and secular philosophy to develop a novel and profound hermeneutics of contemplation. Drawing in particular on the work of Arthur Schopenhauer, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Edmund Husserl, Hart traces the development of notions of contemplation in modernity and refines the approaches he finds there. Utilizing his refined approach, Hart trains our attention on modern poems from G. M. Hopkins, Wallace Stevens, A. R. Ammons, Geoffrey Hill and others as sites for a kind of contemplative reading that phenomenology can make precise. Delivered in its original form as the prestigious Gifford Lectures, Lands of Likeness is a revelatory meditation on contemplation for the modern world"--