Elaine's family has just moved back to Grand Rapids, Michigan. Living in a new house on a different street promises to be lots of fun! Elaine and her sister, Marcia, hope that there will be nice kids in their new neighborhood, and there are'except for Monica. Even though they try to like her, they just can't. But shy, quiet Joanie from down the street does something that changes everything.Camp meeting is the highlight of every summer, and this year is no different. Meeting up with old friends, weathering a fierce thunderstorm, and waging war on unsuspecting camp guards add to the fun. The excitement doesn't stop once the family returns home: a tornado shakes the house, Elaine takes a trip to the hospital, and someone must save Marcia from drowning.Winter brings heaps of snow, and the girls build a snow fort down the street. A snowball fight breaks out'girls against boys! At a family reunion, Uncle Steve recalls a long-forgotten tale of a mysterious stranger and tire tracks in the snow.This is Elaine's story'the fifth in a series of six true stories about Adventist girls: Ann, Marilla, Grace, Ruthie, Elaine, and Erin. Elaine was born in 1961. Her daughter, Erin, is a teenager today. When Erin was born, Grandmother Ruth wanted her to know that she was a sixth-generation Adventist, as well as a thirteenth-generation American girl whose ancestors helped to establish their country, the United States of America. But most of all she wanted Erin to know that her greatest heritage is that she is a child of the heavenly King'royalty indeed'and so are you!

Cincinnati's East End river community has been home to generations of working-class people. This racially mixed community has roots that reach back as far as seven generations. But the community is vulnerable. Developers bulldoze "raggedy" but affordable housing to build upscale condos, even as East Enders fight to preserve the community by participating in urban development planning controlled by powerful outsiders. This book portrays how East Enders practice the preservation of community. Drawing on more than six years of anthropological research and advocacy in the East End, Rhoda Halperin argues for redefining community not merely as a place, but as a set of culturally embedded and class-marked practices that give priority to caring for children and the elderly, procuring livelihood, and providing support for family, friends, and neighbors. These practices create the structures of community within the larger urban power structure. Halperin uses different genres to weave the voices of East Enders throughout the book. Poems and narratives offer poignant insights into the daily struggles against impersonal market forces that work against the struggle for livelihood. This firsthand account questions commonly held assumptions about working-class people. In a fresh way, it reveals the cultural construction of marginality, from the viewpoints of both "real East Enders" and the urban power structure.

This is my first attempt at writing a book and most certainly will be my last. I have had much encouragement how to do it, even though I have had no experience ,somehow I have “Gotter” done because my son and his wife Karen, by stating that his business had to get new phones and they were required to Upgrade the whole system, and my old flip phone will no longer have any service, so I am getting you a new smart phone and putting it on Buildings Inc.‘s account. l said “NO”l don’t know how to run them. They said it’ll be great you can just talk into it and it writes it down for you and then you’ll be able to write your book; and so I wrote two chapters and it wasn’t going very well, so they said what you really need is a tablet so we went and got one and it did work some better. But the pictures won’t stay in place and they keep pushing the words around.

"Don't let them kill me." These are the first words spoken by elderly patient Helga Klemens to the transporter arriving to take her down for a simple hip surgery. Luke assures the frightened woman no one is going to harm her, chalking the bizarre declaration up to nerves and medication issues. After safely delivering her to the O.R., Luke's final words to Helga are, "Don't worry. You'll be fine," unaware she will be dead within the hour. On the same Sunday afternoon, newspaper reporter Jennifer Malone is looking into the case of a John Doe residing in the hospital's morgue. Once her interview with the coroner is complete, Jennifer is stopped by a distraught Luke and his security guard girlfriend, Maryanne, who are both shocked at the news of Helga's untimely death. Over the following five fast-paced days, Jennifer will use all of her investigative skills to determine exactly what happened in the O.R. However, when a second unidentified body washes ashore, Jennifer's attention is sidetracked wondering if there's a serial killer on the loose. Could the three seemingly unrelated deaths be linked? Abandoned is populated by memorable characters, each caught in a web of lies, unaware the secrets they hold may result in a life or death struggle for someone they love.

Elaine Stritch: The End of Pretend is a book about an extraordinary life. It chronicles the twilight of actress Elaine Stritch's career, offering a rare first-person and no-holds-barred glimpse into the private persona of a Broadway legend. Told primarily in Stritch's own words, The End of Pretend provides an unvarnished portrait of this brutal and most honest truth teller. Her personality commands the page with full force. Both hysterical and mesmerizing, John Bell renders Stritch in a fashion that is true to life, punctuating his narrative with her infamous humor, her infamous foul mouth, and her infamous foulmouthed humor. Most fascinating is Bell's ability to get Stritch to talk, with harrowing honesty, about her journey through increasing states of vulnerability: facing the end of her career, leaving New York, and navigating the gauntlet of physical ailments that led to the end of her life. Ultimately, The End of Pretend is a treatise on mortality. Readers will be surprised at Stritch's life-affirming messages and her ability to "make friends with the end of pretend and leave the building with a little dignity."

Coeditors Elizabeth Patton and Mimi Choi argue that an in-depth examination of media images of housework from the mid-nineteenth century to the early twenty-first century is long overdue. Modern depictions often imply that certain concerns can be resolved through excessive domesticity, reflecting some of the complicated and unfinished issues of second-wave feminism. Home Sweat Home: Perspectives on Housework and Modern Relationships reveals how widespread the cultural image of “perfect” housewives and the invisibility of household labor were in the past and remain today. In this collection of essays, contributors explore the construction of women as homemakers and the erasure of household labor from the middle-class home in popular representations of housework. They concentrate on such matters as the impact of second-wave feminism on families and gender relations; of popular culture—especially in film, television, magazines, and advertising—on our views of what constitutes home life and gender relations; and of changing views of sexuality and masculinity within the domestic sphere. Home Sweat Home will interest students and scholars of gender, cultural, media, and communication studies; sociology; and American history and appeal to anyone curious about housework, gender relations and popular culture.

Turning the Tables

Taken together, these essays redefine the preconceived notion of Soviet happiness as the product of official ideology imposed from above and expressed predominantly through collective experience, and provide evidence that the formation of the concept of individual happiness was not contained by the limitations of important state projects, controlled by state policies and aimed toward the creation of a new society.