Does your family talk about money? Do your kids understand your money values? Do you and your mate agree on how you spend and invest your money? Do you know if your parents are financially secure? These are the questions that Carrie Schwab-Pomerantz and her father, Charles Schwab, ask at the beginning of this invaluable family financial primer. The authors acknowledge that these are difficult questions but stress that families must grapple with them and come up with answers. Despite the proliferation of the financial news media, money remains a taboo subject in most families. Often the mere thought of talking about money with a family member causes enormous personal stress and confusion. But it doesn’t have to be that way. The goal of this father-daughter collaboration is to bring solid financial advice into the context of family, where it can be explored, understood, and implemented to the benefit of everyone. The first essential thing that must happen is conversation, and It Pays to Talk is filled with advice about how to start talking. The authors are both working parents with a combined sixty-five years of knowledge and experience in the investment field. In this book they present a road map that every family can follow as they develop and implement an investment strategy and money-management plan. They begin by covering the fundamental principles that every investor needs to understand in order to succeed for the long term, and then they move on to cover joining forces in marriage; building your family’s wealth regardless of market conditions; investing for your children’s future and raising money-savvy kids; retirement planning; estate planning for you and your parents; and dealing with the unexpected—insurance, divorce, and investing a windfall. Throughout the book, the authors offer advice about how to start the often difficult conversations that lead to smart decision-making, as well as how to talk gently, intelligently, and respectfully about the many issues that define and shape our attitudes about money. It does pay to talk. This valuable and expert book will get you started and help you at every stage of your family’s investment career.

Pay Attention Say Thank You” is a delightful guide to living a happy life – full of joy, even when things aren’t going so well. Learn how to live happily, more vibrantly, more creatively and more joyfully by practicing seven techniques, some as simple as paying attention, saying thank you and being quiet. Warm and engaging, this book addresses issues of forgiveness, fear, the need for quiet reflection or meditation and for gratitude. The author provides plenty of examples and exercises.

Props are integral to the success of any movie or TV show. Weapons, books, newspapers, eyeglasses, military gear, medical equipment—virtually anything that a character holds, reads, uses, or shoots on screen is provided by the props department. The right prop can become an iconic plot point on which the entire story pivots, turning that item into a fabled piece of Hollywood history. The wrong prop can expose a film or a TV show as a shoddy production, making the story more laughable than believable. Even worse is a prop breaking, or not showing up when the cameras are ready to roll. Such a scenario is the worst nightmare for someone like Dean Goodine, who has spent nearly four decades putting props into the hands of actors and using these items to help bring imaginary worlds to life. Dean has worked on everything from Oscar-nominated feature films like Unforgiven to network TV shows like Stargate SGI to streaming hits like A Series of Unfortunate Events to small independent films. In this book, Dean details the highs and lows of his thirty-six years in props, giving readers a firsthand look at what it takes to deliver the goods on screen. It’s full of humourous stories and hair-raising moments, and it features many names that you will recognize along the way. When it comes to recognizing excellence in the film industry, no awards are ever given for props, but by the time you reach the end of this book, no doubt, you’ll agree there should be.

This collection offers empirical studies and theoretical essays about human communication in everyday life. The writings come from many of the world's leading researchers and cut across academic boundaries, engaging scholars and teachers from such disciplines as communication, sociology, anthropology, linguistics, and education. Chapters emphasize empirical, qualitative studies of people's everyday uses of talk-in-interaction, and they feature work in such areas as sociolinguistics, conversation analysis, discourse analysis, and ethnography. The volume is dedicated to and highlights themes in the work of the late Robert Hopper, an outstanding scholar in communication who pioneered research in Language and Social Interaction (LSI). The contributors examine various features of human interaction (such as laughter, vocal repetition, and hand gestures) occurring naturally within a variety of settings (at a dinner table, a doctor's office, an automotive repair shop, and so forth), whereby interlocutors accomplish aspects of their interpersonal or institutional lives (resolve a disagreement, report bad medical news, negotiate a raise, and more), all of which may relate to larger social issues (including police brutality, human spirituality, death, and optimism). The chapters in this anthology show that social life is largely a communicative accomplishment and that people constitute the social realities experienced every day through small and subtle ways of communicating, carefully orchestrated but commonly taken for granted. In showcasing the diversity of contemporary LSI research, this volume is appropriate for scholars and graduate students in language and social interaction, communication, sociology, research methods, qualitative research methods, discourse analysis, conversation analysis, linguistics, and related areas.