Author Maurice Harvey returns with another collection of exciting firsthand stories from his time as a missionary and as the Bible Society photojournalist. He recounts many of his firsthand experiences over the years as an international photojournalist in Into the Great Unknown. The memoir begins with Maurice leaving the safety of his New Zealand home as a young man in the 1960s and heading into deepest Africabound for the war-ravaged Congo region. From there, the story continues as Maurice travels across the African continent, through post-Communist Eastern Europe, and then into Asia. His final stop is the mysterious and formidable state of North Korea. Told with compassion and charm, these stories reflect an eye for the quirky as well the poignant. Leaving New Zealand isolated and far away from everywhere else, was for a young man in 1960, truly an adventure into the unknown. But with the strong assurance that God was with him, it became an adventure of excitement and great enjoyment.

Stress testing has become the risk management tool du jour in the wake of the global financial crisis. In countries where the information reported by financial institutions is considered to be of sufficiently good quality, and supervisory and regulatory standards are high, stress tests can be of significant value. In contrast, the proliferation of stress testing in underdeveloped financial systems with weak oversight regimes is fraught with uncertainties, as it is unclear what the results actually represent and how they could be usefully applied. In this paper, problems associated with stress tests using weak data are examined. We offer a potentially more useful alternative, the "breaking point" method, which also requires close coordination with on-site supervision and complemented by other supervisory tools and qualitative information. Excel spreadsheet templates of the stress tests presented in this paper are provided.

The inspiring story of how an urban woman came to own and operate a remote fishing lodge nestled deep in the British Columbian wilderness. When Caroll Simpson fell in love with a cabin located on pristine Babine Lake in BC, many miles away from her home in Washington State, she knew her life was about to change. After convincing her husband to abandon their dream of living aboard a sailboat, they began the complicated process of buying the lodge and moving north. For two years, their adventure was a blissful dream. Then, tragedy struck. Following the sudden death of her husband, Simpson was forced to decide her next move alone, amidst deep grief—would she sell the lodge, or would she stay, continuing the process of pursuing Canadian citizenship and running this remote lodge by herself? No easy feat, given accessing the lodge in summer required a forty-mile round trip by boat and, in the winter, a passage on an ice breaker barge and a treacherous snowshoe trek. This heartfelt memoir tells Simpson's story—of living in the remote wilderness and managing the lodge, becoming an accidental environmental activist, fending off wild animals, working as an angling guide and finally, at the height of her career, fighting off a proposed mining operation and participating in the development of a government land plan as a spokesperson for the wilderness tourism industry.

"This is a guide for canoeing, kayaking or rafting the section of the Rio Grande in Big Bend National Park beginning at Terlingua Creek, the exit point for Santa Elena Canyon, and ending at the bridge at La Linda, the starting point for trips through the Lower Canyons."--Introduction.

OPRAH’S BOOK CLUB PICK • Born to an American myth and raised in the wilds of Graceland, Lisa Marie Presley tells her whole story for the first time in this raw, riveting, one-of-a-kind memoir faithfully completed by her daughter, Riley Keough. In 2022, Lisa Marie Presley asked her daughter to help finally finish her long-gestating memoir. A month later, Lisa Marie was dead, and the world would never know her story in her own words, never know the passionate, joyful, caring, and complicated woman that Riley loved and now grieved. Riley got the tapes that her mother had recorded for the book, lay in her bed, and listened as Lisa Marie told story after story about smashing golf carts together in the yards of Graceland, about the unconditional love she felt from her father, about being upstairs, just the two of them. About getting dragged screaming out of the bathroom as she ran toward his body on the floor. About living in Los Angeles with her mother, getting sent to school after school, always kicked out, always in trouble. About her singular, lifelong relationship with Danny Keough, about being married to Michael Jackson, what they had in common. About motherhood. About deep addiction. About ever-present grief. Riley knew she had to fulfill her mother’s wish to reveal these memories, incandescent and painful, to the world. To make her mother known. This extraordinary book is written in both Lisa Marie’s and Riley’s voices, a mother and daughter communicating—from this world to the one beyond—as they try to heal each other. Profoundly moving and deeply revealing, From Here to the Great Unknown is a book like no other—the last words of the only child of an American icon.

In TheGreat Unknown, award-winning historian and journalist Greg Robinson offers a fascinating and compulsively readable collection of biographical portraits of extraordinary but unheralded figures in Japanese American history: men and women who made remarkable contributions in the arts, literature, law, sports, and other fields. Recovering and celebrating the stories of noteworthy Issei and Nisei and of their supporters, TheGreat Unknown provides powerful evidence of the diverse experiences and substantial cultural, political, and intellectual contributions of Nikkei throughout the country and over multiple decades. What is more, The Great Unknown reshapes our understanding of the Asian American experience. By focusing attention on exceptional figures who deviated from social norms, Robinson subverts stereotypes of ethnic Japanese and other Asians as conformist or colorless. The collection also highlights a set of recurring themes absent from conventional histories—including the lives of Japanese Americans outside the West Coast, the role of women in shaping community life, encounters between Japanese American and African American communities during the struggle for civil rights, and the evolving status of queer community members.

What is your name? Where did you come from? And where are you going? In this immersive novel set in 1840s Britain and France, these questions probe at the essence of what it means to be human. A wet nurse in a lively Scottish household goes by an assumed name, but longs to know the identity of her father. A quarryman furtively extricates a remarkable fossil from an island off the Northumberland coast and promptly smuggles it abroad to Paris. A sensational best-selling book that shatters cherished notions about the universe and everything in it triggers widespread argument and speculation—but its author’s name is a well-guarded secret. Another book, roundly ignored, neatly sets forth in an obscure appendix the principle that will become the centerpiece of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. All these threads—some historical, others fictional—converge and illuminate one another in unexpected ways in the climactic revelations of this brilliant story.

“An engaging voyage into some of the great mysteries and wonders of our world." --Alan Lightman, author of Einstein’s Dream and The Accidental Universe “No one is better at making the recondite accessible and exciting.” —Bill Bryson Brain Pickings and Kirkus Best Science Book of the Year Every week seems to throw up a new discovery, shaking the foundations of what we know. But are there questions we will never be able to answer—mysteries that lie beyond the predictive powers of science? In this captivating exploration of our most tantalizing unknowns, Marcus du Sautoy invites us to consider the problems in cosmology, quantum physics, mathematics, and neuroscience that continue to bedevil scientists and creative thinkers who are at the forefront of their fields. At once exhilarating, mind-bending, and compulsively readable, The Great Unknown challenges us to consider big questions—about the nature of consciousness, what came before the big bang, and what lies beyond our horizons—while taking us on a virtuoso tour of the great breakthroughs of the past and celebrating the men and women who dared to tackle the seemingly impossible and had the imagination to come up with new ways of seeing the world.