The Best of Both Worlds is the true story of how childhood misery and trauma helped Gordon Smith discover a gift that has helped many people throughout the world. He has helped those who are in mourning come to terms with death and bereavement by working as a medium to put people in touch with their loved ones who have passed over. Gordon held off telling the story of his discovery of spiritual powers, as he believed his mother would have hated people knowing the poverty they came from or the abuse that her son suffered. After her death, Gordon decided it was time to tell his incredible story from humble beginnings all the way to becoming an internationally praised medium working for some of the most famous and powerful people in the world. His previous volume of memoirs Spirit Messenger was a massive bestseller but only now is he able to tell the unvarnished astonishing truth.

Can a murdered person come back from the grave to tell her autobiography through the voice of a psychic medium? During the summer of 1980, a young Canadian beauty, Dorothy Stratten, and her husband, Paul Snider, were murdered in Los Angeles under mysterious circumstances and a shroud of cover-up. Many lives would change drastically as people abandoned the Playboy ship en masse in the aftermath. This book offers theological insight into sexual abuse, hedonism, PTSD trauma, stress-related illness, human trafficking, codependence and forgiveness.

A STORY OF GROWING UP IN BOTH WORLDS, HEARING AND DEAF, NURTURED WITH LOVE AND INDEPENDENCE. HOW A FAMILY SUCCEEDED IN A LIFE FULL OF ALL THE TRIALS AND TRIBULATIONS OF SO-CALLED "NORMAL" FAMILIES, BUT MAINLY OF ALL THE PLEASURES AND GRATIFICATION. A BOOK OF LOVING ANECDOTES, WITH APPEAL FOR ALL PEOPLE FASCINATED WITH THE LANGUAGE OF "SIGN."

Mixed-member electoral systems may well be the electoral reform of the 21st century. In the view of many electoral reformers, mixed systems offer the best of both the traditional British single-seat district system and PR systems. This book seeks to evaluate: why these systems have recently appealed to many countries with diverse electoral histories; and how well expectations for these systems have been met. - ;Mixed-member electoral systems may well be the electoral reform of the 21st century. In the view of many electoral reformers, mixed-member systems offer the best of both the traditional British single-seat district system and PR systems. This book seeks to evaluate: why mixed-member systems have recently appealed to many countries with diverse electoral histories; and how well expectations for these systems have been met. Each major country, which has adopted a mixed system thus, has two chapters in this book, one on origins and one on consequences. These countries are Germany, New Zealand, Italy, Israel, Japan, Venezuela, Bolivia, Mexico, Hungary, and Russia. In addition, there are also chapters on the prospects for a mixed-member system being adopted in Britain and Canada, respectively. The material presented suggests that mixed-member systems have been largely successful thus far. They appear to be more likely than most other electoral systems to generate two-bloc party systems, without in the process reducing minor parties to insignificance. In addition, they are more likely than any other class of electoral system to simultaneously generate local accountability as well as a nationally-oriented party system. Mixed-member electoral systems have now joined majoritarian and proportional systems as basic options which must be considered whenever electoral systems are designed or redesigned. Such a development represents a fundamental change in thinking about electoral systems around the world. - ;An important and timely contribution ... an excellent reference book that provides unique and extensive coverage of a diverse range of cases. - Japanese Journal of Political Science;The book provides a useful classification of some electoral system elements in two dimensions: inter-party (majoritarian vs. proportional) and intra-party (candidates vs. parties dominance), as well as ten single-country good reading studies. - West European Politics;The core of the book, especially the section on how MMP systems came to be introduced in the ten case study countries, will have lasting value for its detail ... the editors' contributions are excellent: they have done much more than simply collate a series of chapters. As a whole, the book will provide an important reference work for the study of what, in their words, 'might prove to be the electoral reform of the twenty-first century'. - Representation

In the longest story in this collection, an eleven-year-old girl has a strange adventure in an overgrown garden, and probably saves the world from a fate worse than any conventional apocalypse. Her parents would undoubtedly think that she’s been dreaming if she attempted to explain what had happened, but that’s what parents do, because they think it’s what they ought to do. The other stories all describe similarly equivocal victories, which sometimes don’t appear to the other characters in the stories to be victories at all—but they are: every last one of them. You just have to look at them the right way—and it really is worth doing that? After all, who among us really wants to get stuck in the way things want to seem? Eight scintillating stories of science fiction by a master of the genre!

HOW TO DESCRIBE BECKY ROTH: UNEMPLOYED, STRESSED, PREGNANT After losing her job at a greasy diner, Becky needed to support herself, but no one was looking for a pregnant vegetarian chef during a snowstorm in small-town Connecticut. Except Carter Prescott III, who’d been the best man at a wedding a few months ago where he and Becky had indulged in a little too much cake…and lovemaking. Now that he was going to be a father, he had to convince her he was ready for marriage and a baby. But no one was more surprised than Carter when his feelings of obligation turned into full-blown passion and need. Suddenly, he was a man on a mission—marriage!

Yu-Tang Daniel Lew had a long and distinguished career as a diplomat, editor and professor. He served as consul general in Vancouver, minister in Brazil, and ambassador to New Zealand and at the United Nations. He also devoted many years to teaching-first at Tsing Hua University in Beijing in 1948, later at Mackinac College in Michigan in the late '60s and then at the Chinese Culture University in Taiwan from 1976 until his death in 2005. In 1974, he established the Sino-American Relations quarterly and was its editor-in-chief for all of its 30 years. A long admirer of Abraham Lincoln, Dr. Lew founded the Lincoln Society in 1984 to promote Lincoln's ideals of democracy among the Chinese. He also spent his final years teaching children the spirit of "Liang-zhi", espoused first by the philosopher Mencius. The oldest of six siblings, Dr. Lew was born on October 26, 1913 in Guangzhou, China. He attended Seattle's Broadway High School and obtained his doctorate at Harvard University. Married to Yalan Chang Lew, they had three sons.