No one will ever be able to predict every twist and turn in the economy or in the financial markets. But over the medium and long terms, the economy is surprisingly predictable.

By studying demographics and other key factors, accurate forecasts can be made for individual industries, real estate markets, and entire economies. These predictions can be used for the greater good so that investors, and government entities can more effectively plan and invest.

In this book, Discover what really drives the economy Use demographic forecasting to better your life, business, and investments Profit during times of inflation and deflation Understand the significance of immigration and domestic migration Examine opportunities in foreign markets And much more Despite the ups and downs in the business cycle, it is possible to cut down economics to its core. Learn what really matters with a book that provides the necessary tools so that everyone can ask the right questions to understand the system.

Women face different psychological issues at different ages. But these issues and the experience of confronting them depend on cultural contexts. Literary works represent these psychological and social conflicts, but the manner of representation varies according to the culture of the author. This book brings together feminism, postcolonial theory, and developmental psychology to analyze how traditional literary forms are transformed by women writing in different cultures. The volume discusses works by such well known authors as Margaret Atwood, Nadine Gordimer, Keri Hulme, and Doris Lessing, along with fiction by less studied writers such as Barbara Burford, Joan Riley, and Jessica Anderson.

By juxtaposing novels from different cultures, the volume highlights the new ways in which women renegotiate their identities at different ages and writers reconfigure novelistic forms. The first chapter looks at the search for adulthood in Tsitsi Dangarembga's "Nervous Conditions, " set in Zimbabwe, and in Margaret Atwood's "Cat's Eye, " set in Canada. The second, on the seach for intimacy, analyzes how Barbara Burford's lesbian novella The Threshing Floor and Keri Hulme's evocation of Maori commensalism in "The Bone People" undo the traditional romance plot. Later chapters offer similar examinations of how various life stages, such as the searches for place, space, and integrity, are treated in other works.

In November of 1891, at the age of twenty-five, John MacDonald Blackstock Hawley arrived in Fort Worth, Texas. A civil engineer from Minnesota, Hawley "hung out his shingle" in 1894 and began a tradition of engineering in Texas that his successors in the firm of Freese and Nichols have continued for one hundred years.
This history of Freese and Nichols focuses on the firm's contributions, design innovations, and "firsts" in water supply, water treatment, and wastewater engineering; transportation design for roads, bridges, and airports; city and regional planning; environmental science; and general civil and environmental engineering. A personal as well as professional account, A Century in the Works offers anecdotes about John Hawley's battle-ax punch and eccentric scientific experiments, Simon Freese's penchant for practical jokes, and Marvin Nichols's "water fights" and genealogical shakeups of his family tree.
The Freese and Nichols story will interest urban and environmental historians, professional engineers, and those working in related fields of hydraulic engineering, municipal and industrial water and sanitary systems, water quality, dam safety, waste management, transportation systems, and urban development.
The student of Texas history will find much of interest here as well. In many ways, the history of Freese and Nichols parallels that of the state for the past one hundred years.
The firm has had a pivotal role in developing Texas water resources since Hawley arrived in the state. And it will be the rare Texas reader who has never gone boating or picnicking at one of the over a hundred Texas lakes engineered by the firm in the intervening century.

Seasons by author Gay Sizemore Sauer is a collection of poignant and wistful short stories and poems that explores the lives, loves, and quiet dignity of the elderly and infirm. In this work, this marginalized and forgotten segment of society finds its metaphor in the form of an incapacitated old woman whose mind is sharp but whose body is wanting. Short on physical stature, she makes up for it with quiet wisdom to spare. We follow her through a year of her life as she deals with memory, reminiscence, wheelchairs, and the infirmities of aging with dignity, humanity, and grace. Along the way author Sauer sprinkles in a tender poem to underscore the drama and complete the emotional moment. Written in masterful, poetic prose, Sauer has delivered a collection of short stories that pushes all the right buttons for fiction fans, while building multi-dimensional characters and flawless emotional moments that will keep any reader spell-bound. This is short fiction that ranks right up there with the best in the genre, and will surely please short story fans, or anyone who just loves good stories well told. Seasons is one page-turner best read with a hanky.

Tom Sizemore has been called many things. Brilliant. Brutal. Fiercely talented. Angry. Drug addicted. In reality, he's all of them. He's a survivor of the Detroit ghetto, the fifty-year-old father of twin boys, and a veteran of dozens of movies. He's also now sober, after his addiction took his life just about as far down as any human being could go.
Through screen-stealing performances in the 1990s movies True Romance, Heat, and Natural Born Killers, Sizemore was so in demand that even when it was widely known that he had a drug problem, directors like Steven Spielberg were offering him roles and begging him to stay sober for them. Robert De Niro personally recruited him for the role of Michael
Cheritto in Heat after asking him to dinner and expressing his admiration. Jack Nicholson, Robert Downey, Jr., and Johnny Depp each went out of their way to befriend him. But this same man went from romancing Elizabeth Hurley and Juliette Lewis to being accused of domestic violence by the world's most famous madam, and moved from a Beverly Hills mansion to a solitary-confinement cell at Chino State Prison and later a desolate, abandoned cabin in a town best known for being where Charles Manson hid Rosemary LaBianca's wallet.
For years, Sizemore's days were filled with overdoses, suicide attempts, and homelessness. The simple fact is that people don't come back from where Tom Sizemore landed--yet miraculously, he did. By Some Miracle I Made It Out of There is a harrowing journey into the heart of addiction, told in riveting and often shocking detail--a terrifying cautionary tale for anyone who's peered over the abyss of drug abuse. By turns gritty and heartbreaking, it is also one man's look at a particular moment in entertainment history--a window into the drug-fueled spotlight that sent Robert Downey, Jr., to jail and killed River Phoenix, Heath Ledger, and Chris Farley and many others far before their time.
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"I CAN'T TELL YOU WHAT I'D GIVE TO BE THE GUY YOU DIDN'T KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT. . . .
I'VE DONE A LOT OF THINGS THAT WOULD MAKE THAT IMPOSSIBLE, AND I KNOW THAT TELLING YOU ALL ABOUT THEM WON'T HELP ME TO BECOME AMERICA'S FAVORITE SON.
BUT IT MAY HELP YOU TO UNDERSTAND HOW EVERYTHING HAPPENED THE WAY IT DID. . . ."
--TOM SIZEMORE