"An energizing, mobilizing read!"--Dr. Robert Jeffress Test the Water, Take the Plunge and Turn the Tide of Culture If we were created to make an impact, why do most of us feel like we're drowning in problems and fears? Why does making a living feel like fighting the current? The answer, say pastors and culture-makers Christopher and Laura Harris Smith, is simple: You need to find your river of influence. With fresh revelation and contagious excitement, Chris and Laura introduce the groundbreaking twelve cultural rivers of influence. Full of hands-on assessments, thought-provoking questionnaires and dynamic Scripture teachings, this is your map to a river adventure like no other. Along the way Chris and Laura help you · discover your spiritual personality · discern your natural, acquired and spiritual giftings · channel your personality and giftings into your God-appointed purpose · identify--and jump into!--your river of influence · flow with God toward your future · and more! Don't let fear erode your purpose or ebb your eternal impact. It's time to dive in to all He has for you--and make your splash that turns the tides of culture and ripples into eternity. Features exclusive access to videos and BRAND-NEW spiritual personality and job placement tests.

Investigative journalist Lee Smith's The Plot Against the President tells the story of how Congressman Devin Nunes uncovered the operation to bring down the commander-in-chief. While popular opinion holds that Russia subverted democratic processes during the 2016 elections, the real damage was done not by Moscow or any other foreign actor. Rather, this was a slow-moving coup engineered by a coterie of the American elite, the "deep state," targeting not only the president, but also the rest of the country.

The plot officially began July 31, 2016 with the counterintelligence investigation that the FBI opened to probe Russian infiltration of Donald Trump's presidential campaign. But the bureau never followed any Russians. In fact, it was an operation to sabotage Trump, the candidate, then president-elect, and finally the presidency. The conspirators included political operatives, law enforcement and intelligence officials, and the press.

The plot was uncovered by Nunes, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, and his investigative team. They understood that the target of the operation wasn't just Trump, but rather the institutions that sustain our republic. A country where operatives use the intelligence and security services to protect their privileges by spying on Americans, coordinating with the press, and using extra-constitutional means to undermine an election then undo a presidency is more like the third world than the republic envisioned by the founding fathers.

Without Nunes and his team, the plot against the president -- and against the country -- never would have been revealed. Told from the perspective of Nunes and his crack investigators -- men and women who banded together to do the right thing at a crucial moment for our democracy -- the story of the biggest political scandal in a generation reads like a great detective novel, feels like a classic cowboy movie. The congressman from the cattle capital of California really did fight corruption in Washington. Devin Nunes took on the "deep state."

In "The Christmas Letters," three generations of women reveal their stories of love and marriage in the letters they write to family and friends during the holidays. It's a down-home Christmas story about tradition, family, and the shared experiences of women.

Here, in a letter of her own, Lee Smith explains how she was inspired to write this celebrated epistolary novel:

Dear Friends,

Like me, you probably get Christmas letters every year. I read every word and save every letter. Because every Christmas letter is the story of a life, and what story can be more interesting than the story of our lives? Often, it is the story of an entire family. But you also have to read between the lines with Christmas letters. Sometimes, what is not said is even more important than what is on the page.

In "The Christmas Letters," I have used this familiar format to illumine the lives, hopes, dreams, and disappointments of three generations of American women. Much of the story of "The Christmas Letters" is also told through shared recipes. As Mary, my favorite character, says, "I feel as if I have written out my life story in recipes! The Cool Whip and mushroom soup years, the hibachi and fondue period, then the quiche and crepes phase, and now it's these salsa years."

I wrote this little book for the same reason I write to my friends and relatives every holiday--Christmas letters give us a chance to remember and celebrate who we are.

With warmest greetings, Lee Smith

For new graduates, the key challenge remains how to secure that first career-related job. Full of guidance and tips on how to handle the complex field of job hunting, Kick Start Your Career can help navigate an ever-changing job market and secure your chance at your desired career. It is a valuable investment in your future. It advises the reader on how to: stand out in job applications; use social media for job searching; create resumes and cover letters that stand out; succeed at interviews. It provides a practical, hands on, step-by-step approach. With an integrated Personal Plan that helps create key job search documents it directs soon-to-be graduates towards achieving their career aspirations. Accompanying online resources include examples and templates, which can be downloaded in Word format to help you prepare resumes and other job search documents. This book will help graduates progressively build up job-hunting resources - skills, achievements, resume, cover letter and interview responses - and turn this into a practical outcome: a new job. It is a key companion to any student or recent graduate exploring the job market.

Nobody knows what to do about queer Mormons. The institutional Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints prefers to pretend they don't exist, that they can choose their way out of who they are, leave, or at least stay quiet in a community that has no place for them. Even queer Mormons don't know what to do about queer Mormons. Their lived experience is shrouded by a doctrine in which heteronormative marriage is non-negotiable and gender is unchangeable. For women, trans Mormons, and Mormons of other marginalized genders, this invisibility is compounded by social norms which elevate (implicitly white) cisgender male voices above those of everyone else. This collection of essays gives voice to queer Mormons. The authors who share their stories-many speaking for the first time from the closet-do so here in simple narrative prose. They talk about their identities, their experiences, their relationships, their heartbreaks, their beliefs, and the challenges they face. Some stay in the church, some do not, some are in constant battles with themselves and the people around them as they make agonizing decisions about love and faith and community. Their stories bravely convey what it means to be queer, Mormon, and marginalized-what it means to have no voice and yet to speak anyway.

Contents:
1. School Policy Under the Spotlight 2. Testing the Theory in Testing Policy 3. School Choice and the Illusion of Demcracy 4. The Contribution of Mass Media to Desegregation Policy 5. Research and the Illusion of Rationality 6. Education Policy Inc 7. Finale

This timely and important book is both critical and constructive. As educational policy becomes one of our major political backgrounds and the connection between politics and policy is both underscored and criticized, Mary Lee Smith and her associates take their criticism one decisive step further, examining the transitive relation between politics and actual classroom practice. They show that educational policy serves as political propaganda directed at an electorate desperate for change and refocus current educational debates, casting them in their true partisan light while demonstrating how the public can recognise symbolic policies and participate in the creation of policy that truly serves the public good.

Now in its 8th edition, MATHEMATICS FOR PLUMBERS AND PIPEFITTERS delivers the essential math skills necessary in the plumbing and pipefitting professions. Starting with a thorough math review to ensure a solid foundation, the book progresses into specific on-the-job applications, such as pipe length calculations, sheet metal work, and the builder's level.Broad-based subjects like physics, volume, pressures, and capacities round out your knowledge, while a new chapter on the business of plumbing invites you to consider an exciting entrepreneurial venture. Written by a Master Plumber and experienced vocational educator, MATHEMATICS FOR PLUMBERS AND PIPEFITTERS, 8th Edition includes a multitude of real-world examples, reference tables, and formulas to help you build a rewarding career in the plumbing and pipefitting trade.

Reading Lee Smith ranks among the great pleasures of American fiction . . . Gives evidence again of the grace and insight that distinguish her work. Robert Stone, author of Death of the Black-Haired GirlIt s 1936 when orphaned thirteen-year-old Evalina Toussaint is admitted to Highland Hospital, a mental institution in Asheville, North Carolina, known for its innovative treatments for nervous disorders and addictions. Taken under the wing of the hospital s most notable patient, Zelda Fitzgerald, Evalina witnesses cascading events that lead up to the tragic fire of 1948 that killed nine women in a locked ward, Zelda among them. Author Lee Smith has created, through a seamless blending of fiction and fact, a mesmerizing novel about a world apart--in which art and madness are luminously intertwined."

For new graduates, the key challenge remains how to secure that first career-related job. Full of guidance and tips on how to handle the complex field of job hunting, Kick Start Your Career can help navigate an ever-changing job market and secure your chance at your desired career. It is a valuable investment in your future. It advises the reader on how to: stand out in job applications; use social media for job searching; create resumes and cover letters that stand out; succeed at interviews. It provides a practical, hands on, step-by-step approach. With an integrated Personal Plan that helps create key job search documents it directs soon-to-be graduates towards achieving their career aspirations. Accompanying online resources include examples and templates, which can be downloaded in Word format to help you prepare resumes and other job search documents. This book will help graduates progressively build up job-hunting resources - skills, achievements, resume, cover letter and interview responses - and turn this into a practical outcome: a new job. It is a key companion to any student or recent graduate exploring the job market.

“A memoir that shines with a bright spirit, a generous heart and an entertaining knack for celebrating absurdity.�—The New York Times Book Review“This is Smith at her finest.�—Library Journal, starred review Set deep in the mountains of Virginia, the Grundy of Lee Smith’s youth was a place of coal miners, tent revivals, mountain music, drive-in theaters, and her daddy’s dimestore. When she was sent off to college to gain some “culture,� she understood that perhaps the richest culture she would ever know was the one she was leaving. Lee Smith’s fiction has always lived and breathed with the rhythms and people of the Appalachian South. But never before has she written her own story. Dimestore’s fifteen essays are crushingly honest, wise and perceptive, and superbly entertaining. Together, they create an inspiring story of the birth of a writer and a poignant look at a way of life that has all but vanished.

In this anthology of creative nonfiction, twenty-eight writers set out to discover what they know, and don't know, about the person they call Mother. Celebrated writers Lee Smith and Samia Serageldin have curated a diverse and insightful collection that challenges stereotypes about mothers and expands our notions of motherhood in the South. The mothers in these essays were shaped, for good and bad, by the economic and political crosswinds of their time. Whether their formative experience was the Great Depression or the upheavals of the 1970s, their lives reflected their era and influenced how they raised their children. The writers in Mothers and Strangers explore the reliability of memory, examine their family dynamics, and come to terms with the past. In addition to the editors, contributors include Belle Boggs, Marshall Chapman, Hal Crowther, Clyde Edgerton, Marianne Gingher, Jaki Shelton Green, Sally Greene, Stephanie Elizondo Griest, Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, Eldridge ""Redge"" Hanes, Lynden Harris, Randall Kenan, Phillip Lopate, Michael Malone, Frances Mayes, Jill McCorkle, Melody Moezzi, Elaine Neil Orr, Steven Petrow, Margaret Rich, Omid Safi, James Seay, Alan Shapiro, Bland Simpson, Sharon K. Swanson, and Daniel Wallace.

Languorous sexual drama directed by Clement Virgo, which premiered at the 2005 Toronto Film Festival. Leila (Lauren Lee Smith) and David (Eric Balfour) meet during a hot steamy summer in Toronto. Leila is a strong and demanding young woman who has formed her sexual identity around anonymous one night stands, but when she meets the sensitive David, she finds that she must allow herself to be emotionally vulnerable if she wants to form any kind of relationship with him.

Investigative journalist Lee Smith uses his unprecedented access to
Congressman Devin Nunes, former head of the House Intelligence Committee,
to expose the deep state operation against the president--and the American
people.

Investigative journalist Lee Smith's The Plot Against the President tells the story of
how Congressman Devin Nunes uncovered the operation to bring down the
commander-in-chief. While popular opinion holds that Russia subverted democratic
processes during the 2016 elections, the real damage was done not by Moscow or any
other foreign actor. Rather, this was a slow-moving coup engineered by a coterie of
the American elite, the "deep state," targeting not only the president, but also the
rest of the country.

The plot officially began July 31, 2016 with the counterintelligence investigation that
the FBI opened to probe Russian infiltration of Donald Trump's presidential campaign.
But the bureau never followed any Russians. In fact, it was an operation to sabotage
Trump, the candidate, then president-elect, and finally the presidency. The
conspirators included political operatives, law enforcement and intelligence officials,
and the press.

The plot was uncovered by Nunes, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee,
and his investigative team. They understood that the target of the operation wasn't
just Trump, but rather the institutions that sustain our republic. A country where
operatives use the intelligence and security services to protect their privileges by
spying on Americans, coordinating with the press, and using extra-constitutional
means to undermine an election then undo a presidency is more like the third world
than the republic envisioned by the founding fathers.

Without Nunes and his team, the plot against the president -- and against the country
-- never would have been revealed. Told from the perspective of Nunes and his crack
investigators -- men and women who banded together to do the right thing at a
crucial moment for our democracy -- the story of the biggest political scandal in a
generation reads like a great detective novel, feels like a classic cowboy movie. The
congressman from the cattle capital of California really did fight corruption in
Washington. Devin Nunes took on the "deep state."

Stieg Larsson was an unabashed feminist in his personal and professional life and in the fictional world he created, but The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played with Fire, and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest are full of graphic depictions of violence against women, including stalking, sexual harassment, child abuse, rape, incest, serial murder, sexual slavery, and sex trafficking, committed by vile individual men and by corrupt, secretive institutions. How do readers and moviegoers react to these depictions, and what do they make of the women who fight back, the complex masculinities in the trilogy, and the ambiguous gender of the elusive Lisbeth Salander? These lively and accessible essays expand the conversation in the blogosphere about the novels and films by connecting the controversies about gender roles to social trends in the real world.