Why young people participate in violent gang behavior The effects of gang violence are witnessed every day on the streets, in the news, and on the movie screen. In all these forums, gangs of young adults are associated with drugs and violence. Yet what is it that prompts young people to participate in violent behavior? And what can be done to extract adolescents from the gangster world of crime, death, and incarceration once they have become involved? In Gangsters: 50 Years of Madness, Drugs, and Death on the Streets of America , Lewis Yablonsky provides answers to the most baffling and crucial questions regarding gangs. Using information gathered from over forty years of experience working with gang members and based on hundreds of personal interviews, many conducted in prisons and in gang neighborhoods, Yablonsky explores the pathology of the gangsters' apparent addiction to incarceration and death. Gangsters is divided into four parts, including a brief history of gangs, the characteristics of gangs, successful approaches for treating gangsters in prison and the community, and concluding with a review and analysis of notable behavioral and social scientific theories of gangs. While condemning their violent behavior in no uncertain terms, Yablonsky offers hope through his belief that, given a chance in an effective treatment program, youths trapped in violent behavior can change their lives in positive ways and, in turn, facilitate positive change in their communities and society at large.

Although organ transplantation is the preeminent medical miracle of the last quarter of a century, Many Sleepless Nights is the first book to go beyond the headlines and describe the patients who have embraced this last chance to hold on to life, the intricate medical procedures that can save them, the surgeons and nurses who work in this emotionally charged world, and the ethics which complicate this miracle high-tech therapy. Lee Gutkind was granted unconditional access to the world's largest transplant center - the University of Pittsburgh's Presbyterian-University and Children's hospitals, where there is an organ transplant every eight hours, 365 days per year. For four years he immersed himself in the frantic night-and-day world of transplantation, living side by side with transplant candidates and recipients, jetting though the night with organ procurement teams, monitoring patients with surgeons and nurses, observing in the operating room, participating in the ethical and psychosocial evaluations of prospective patients which help to determine who will receive scarce organs. During his four years at Presbyterian and Children's Hospitals, Gutkind established close relationships with many patients, and his portrayal of them, living and sometimes dying under unbelievable stress, is a moving and dramatic statement about the capacity of human beings to endure. Many Sleepless Nights also outlines the history of organ transplantation and tells the story of the large and complex medical teams behind the operation. It captures the tension of the search for viable organs; the pressure decisions about which patients, among many, will receive them; and the surgery itself.Its vivid portrayal of the transplant pioneer Thomas Starzl - a man obsessed with saving lives - shows how a major innovator in American medicine functions during days and nights of extreme pressure.

Leonard Wolf, a retired professor now in his early eighties, is the kind of person who likes to use a medieval astrolabe, dress in Basque shepherd's clothing, and convince otherwise sensible people to quit their jobs and follow their passions. Leonard believes that inside everyone is an artist, and that happiness in life depends on valuing and acting upon one's creative impulse. In The Treehouse, her most personal book yet, Naomi Wolf outlines her father's lessons in creating lasting success and happiness, and offers inspiration for the artist in all of us. Drawn from Leonard's lecture notes, the chapters of The Treehouse remind us to "Be Still and Listen," "Use Your Imagination," and "Do Nothing Without Passion," and that "Your Only Wage Will Be Joy" and "Mistakes Are Part of the Draft." This is a journey of self-discovery in which the creative endeavor is paramount. The Treehouse is a stirring personal history, a meditation on fathers and daughters, an argument for honoring the creative impulse, and a unique instruction in the art of personal happiness.

"Nearly every family has a skeleton in its closet, an ancestor who "sins" against custom and tradition and pays a double price. Karen Tintori refused to allow the truth to remain forgotten. This is a book for anyone who shares the conviction that all history, in the end, is family history."--Frank Viviano, author of Blood Washes Blood and Dispatches from the Pacific Century "Many books are called ‘page-turners' by reviewers, but this one will truly have you glued to the turning pages for hours."-- Comunes of Italy Magazine " Unto the Daughters reads like a nonfiction version of the film Godfather II--if it had been told from the point of view of a female Corleone."--Eleni N. Gage, author of North of Ithaka Karen Tintori thought she knew her family tree. Her grandmother Josie had immigrated from Sicily with her parents at the turn of the century. They settled in Detroit, and with Josie's eight siblings, worked to create a home for themselves away from the poverty and servitude of the old country. Their descendants were proud Italian-Americans. But Josie had a sister that nobody spoke of. Her name was Frances, and at age sixteen, she fell in love with a young barber. Her father wanted her to marry an older don in the neighborhood mafia--a marriage that would give his sons a leg up in the mob. But Frances eloped with her barber. And when she returned a married woman, her father and brothers killed her for it. Her family then erased her from its collective memory. Even 80 years and two generations later, Frances and her death were not spoken of, her name was erased from the family genealogy, her pictures burned, and her memory suppressed. Unto the Daughters is a historical mystery and family story that unwraps the many layers of family, honor, memory, and fear to find an honor killing in turn of the century Detroit. "Many books are called ‘page-turners' by reviewers, but this one will truly have you glued to the turning pages for hours. It's a must read for anyone researching their Italian ancestry."-- Comunes of Italy Magazine KAREN TINTORI is a writer and journalist who lives in Michigan with her family. Karen's books include Trapped, a 2002 Chicago Tribune favorite book, and The Book of Names (co-author), among others. Visit her website at: www. karentintori .com

Spanning three continents and four countries, Shooting Water is the remarkable story of the making of Water , the Academy Award-Nominated Film by Deepa Mehta. In February 2000, Devyani Saltzman traveled to the holy city of Benares, India, to reunite with her estranged mother, international award-winning filmmaker Deepa Mehta, and to work on her latest film, Water . But after only a week of shooting, the film became the target of a series of politically-motivated attacks. Protestors destroyed the sets, burned effigies of the director, and made threats on her life. Water was shut down. What began as a journey to heal deep wounds from the past turned into a five-year odyssey to complete a film. This edition includes a new Epilogue by the author, chronicling Waterâs triumph after its tumultuous birth: first, opening the Toronto International Film Festival; then, receiving an Academy Award nomination for Best Foreign Language Film, and, finally, coming full circle with the filmâs national release in India. Reviews: âMore than a document exposing the emergence of deeper feelings between the two women, Shooting Water is a detailed chronicle of the making of one of the most controversial films in Canadian history. In fact, Saltzman marvelously dissects the cultural and political complexities of Indiaâ¦â â The Globe and Mail âA lush, evocative memoir.â â Publishers Weekly (starred review) âA must readâ¦Beautiful and haunting.â - Montreal Gazette âA winner. Shooting Water is a powerful document that examines the nature of rupture, and the capacity of human beings to reach out and rework relationships through love.â - The Sunday Tribune (India) ââ¦A poignant memoir.â - The New York Times ââ¦Saltzman proves herself a deft writer in this deeply evocative memoir.â - Cleveland Plain Dealer âA languid and sensuous exploration of the subcontinent through the eyes of an estranged daughter." - Kirkus Reviews âA gripping memoir. Itâs impossible not to be drawn into the surprisingly revealing journey. â - Inside Entertainment

An acclaimed journalist and novelist explores the legacy and future of American liberalism through the history of his family's politically active history George Packer's maternal grandfather, George Huddleston, was a populist congressman from Alabama in the early part of the century—an agrarian liberal in the Jacksonian mold who opposed the New Deal. Packer's father was a Kennedy-era liberal, a law professor and dean at Stanford whose convictions were sorely—and ultimately fatally—tested in the campus upheavals of the 1960s. The inheritor of two sometimes conflicting strains of the great American liberal tradition, Packer discusses the testing of ideals in the lives of his father and grandfather and his own struggle to understand the place of the progressive tradition in our currently polarized political climate. Searching, engrossing, and persuasive, Blood of the Liberals is an original, intimate examination of the meaning of politics in American lives.

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

Edward Cooper was a hard man to know. Dour and exuberant by turns, his moods dictated the always-uncertain climate of the Cooper household. Now - balding, octogenarian - he makes an unlikely literary muse. But to his now middle-aged son, he looms larger than life, an overwhelming, baffling presence. Edward Cooper made his name as a divorce attorney in LA whose cases were devoured by the tabloids. Now, he is slowly succumbing to dementia. As Bernard attempts to forge a coherent picture of his family history, he uncovers Edward's lawsuits against other family members, and recalls the itemized invoice his father once sent him for the total cost of his upbringing, for the sum of two million dollars. 'Bernard Cooper's The Bill from My Fathe r is a glorious cornucopia of love and pain. Not only is Cooper an exemplary writer but he can parse an emotion down to its most resonant note. This memoir amazes' Alice Sebold, author of The Lovely Bones 'Cooper is a beautiful writer . . . his book is in a class of its own . . . Somehow, this is a story about all parents and their grown-up children and how they manage to keep going through all the insults and mixed messages and botched attempts to express love' Observer 'Cooper's wry, rueful memoir of a lifetime's wrangling with the old guy is memorably moving, emotionally disciplined, devilish in the detail and smartly funny. Read it now' The Times

"The bardo of waking life is a meditation on the Tibetan Buddhist bardo realm, which is viewed as the bridge between lives, the state people enter after death and before rebirth. This book examines waking life and its history and language as if it were a bardo state rather than ultimate reality. Bardo is at once prose poetry, intimate memoir, and anthropological inquiry"--Provided by publisher.

Talks about various aspects and definitions of love.

Does the American Dream still exist when nearly 30 million Americans live in families in which workers find a paycheck and poverty in the same envelope? Just as Michael Harrington's The Other America shocked the nation with its disclosure of poverty in the 1960s, John E. Schwarz and Thomas J. Volgy's The Forgotten Americans exposes the breadth of poverty that exists today among responsible, hardworking Americans. At the end of the prosperous 1980s, the number of Americans living in working-poor families equaled the combined populations of the nation's 25 largest cities. Contrary to conventional wisdom, this situation is not largely confined to minorities, women, the undereducated or young adults. It is commonplace for workers from nearly all segments of society to be employed in low-paying jobs even during good economic times. The Forgotten Americans reveals the betrayal of the hopes and expectations of these industrious people through broad-based factual evidence and the real-life stories of individual families. Their hardship has been ignored at enormous cost to them and the country. Numerous problems at the forefront of national debate--welfare dependency, crime, and the inadequate performance of many American school children--are closely connected to the existence of working poverty on a large scale. Unless corrective action is taken, the country risks the creation of a deeply fractured society arising from the despair of millions of employed people who have discovered that practicing the work ethic yields little reward. The problem is staggering and often misunderstood by politicians, the media, and the public. Once Schwarz and Volgy have outlined the implications of this social and economic tragedy, they propose effective solutions that require simple changes to existing policies--solutions that are politically feasible and can be accomplished without new taxes.

The Staplehurst rail crash of June 9th, 1865 which claimed ten lives, might have passed relatively unnoticed but for the presence of a celebrity passenger among the survivors. Charles Dickens, returning from France on the ill-fated boat train from Folkestone to London, was to be profoundly affected by the experience. In a fascinating exploration of the circumstances surrounding the disaster and probing insight into Dickens' personal life, the writer's great-great-grandson, Gerald Dickens, examines his secret relationship with the actress Ellen Ternan and professional motivation in the years either side of the accident. Questions concerning the conduct of the inquest into the crash and apportioning of blame are raised that remain unresolved even today. Striking parallels are drawn with more recent disasters and the signs of wrestling with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder are evident in the account of Dickens' final years, powerfully reflected in the stirring ghost story The Signalman.

" Inspired by treasured family memoirs and musings, Susan J. Gordon' s work strikes a chord of connections in the hearts of her many readers. Many of her early childhood experiences were instrumental in shaping her lifelong love of writing. " Most of her pieces are about universal topics such as marriage, family life, parenting, being Jewish, family histories, and growing up in a family of divorce. Over the years, they were published in many well-known, popular magazines and newspapers. " ' Childhood is as fleeting as falling leaves,' Gordon says, ' and home is where we can find our way in the dark. There are no secrets in families-- just things no one wants to talk about. The past is always present, I believe, whether or not we are conscious of it.' " -- Anne Garry, former Managing Editor of Victoria " Gordon' s research on the historical context of relatives' lives, and her explorations of family secrets and myths are models for the genealogical community." -- Renee Steinig, genealogist and former president of the Jewish Genealogical Society of Long Island

The Last Half-Century represents the culmination of a lifetime of scholarship by Morris Janowitz. In this comprehensive and systematic analysis of the major trends in American society during the past fifty years, he probes the weakening of popular party affiliations and the increased inability of elected representatives to rule. Centering his work on the crucial concept of social control, Janowitz orders and assesses a vast amount of empirical research to clarify the failure of basic social institutions to resolve our chronic conflicts. For Janowitz, social control denotes a society's capacity to regulate itself within a moral framework that transcends simple self-interest. He poses urgent questions: Why has social control been so drastically weakened in our advanced industrial society? And what strategies can we use to strengthen it again? The expanation rests in part on the changes in social structure which make it more and more complicated for citizens to calculate their political self-interest. At the same time, complex economic and defense problems also strain an already overburdened legislative system, making effective, responsive political rule increasingly difficult. Janowitz concludes by assessing the response of the social sciences to the pressing problem of social control and asserts that new forms of citizen participation in the government must be found.

"This is the first book to consider both deaf and hearing perspectives on the dynamics of adult sibling relationships. Deaf and hearing authors Berkowitz and Jonas conducted individual open-ended interviews. The book documents how the 150-year history of educational decisions and societal attitudes became imbedded in sibling bonds"--

Emmy-winning journalist, congresswoman, and the first single American to adopt internationally, Marjorie Margolies masterfully blends her personal narrative with national history and politics in this call-to-action memoir. Filled with the wisdom Marjorie Margolies gained as an athlete, educator, TV reporter, congressperson, world traveler, adoption advocate, parent, and grandparent, this memoir provides readers with an abundance of upbeat, prescriptive advice and inspiration with Marjorie's trademark self-effacing humor . Today, the world talks a lot about female empowerment, but when Marjorie was breaking through professional glass ceilings, she was unknowingly paving the way for the generations that followed in several different industries. After more than 25 years with NBC, she ran for U.S. Congress in 1991-as a registered Democrat in a historically Republican district of suburban Philadelphia-and she shocked the state and the country by winning by just over 1000 votes. She was the first woman elected in her own right in the state of Pennsylvania, but during her short tenure, Marjorie became the main target of Republicans taunts after she cast the deciding vote to approve President Clinton's budget. And How Are the Children? explores the life of a woman who was hardwired to shift paradigms and break down historic boundaries while managing a busy household and later dealing with heartbreaking tragedies including divorce and the death of a child. Her intention is for women of every generation to recognize themselves in her story and learn how to nurture themselves and the life decisions they have made.

"THE LOVE BOOK", transcendental jewel of American Poetry, banned as part of an illegal program of harassment, arrests, and mass confiscations instituted by then-governor Ronald Reagan, is back in all its notorious glory to claim its rightful place in San Francisco literary history.

The Moral Instruction of Children is a classic parenting handbook/parenting skills guide by Felix Adler. Moral education is everywhere acknowledged to be the most important part of all education; but there has not been the same agreement in regard to the best means of securing it in the school. This has been due in part to a want of insight into the twofold nature of this sort of education; for instruction in morals includes two things: the formation of right ideas and the formation of right habits.

The only country in the world with a line in its national anthem as desperate as “this people has already suffered for its past and its future,” Hungary is a nation defined by poverty, despair, and conflict. Its history, of course, took an even darker and more tragic turn during the Holocaust. But the story of the Jews in Hungary is also one of survival, heroism, and even humor—and that is the one acclaimed author Adam Biro sets out to recover in One Must Also Be Hungarian , an inspiring and altogether poignant look back at the lives of his family members over the past two hundred years. A Hungarian refugee and celebrated novelist working in Paris, Biro recognizes the enormous sacrifices that his ancestors made to pave the way for his successes and the envious position he occupies as a writer in postwar Europe. Inspired, therefore, to share the story of his family members with his grandson, Biro draws some moving pictures of them here: witty and whimsical vignettes that convey not only their courageous sides, but also their inner fears, angers, jealousies, and weaknesses—traits that lend an indelible humanity to their portraiture. Spanning the turn of the nineteenth century, two destructive world wars, the dramatic rise of communism, and its equally astonishing fall, the stories here convey a particularly Jewish sense of humor and irony throughout—one that made possible their survival amid such enormous adversity possible. Already published to much acclaim in France, One Must Also Be Hungarian is a wry and compulsively readable book that rescues from oblivion the stories of a long-suffering but likewise remarkable and deservedly proud people.