1958-

"An inspiring and urgent memoir by the former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine?a pioneering diplomat who spent her career advancing democracy in the post-Soviet world, and who electrified the nation by speaking truth to power during the first impeachment of President Trump. Marie Yovanovitch was at the height of her diplomatic career when it all came crashing down. In the middle of her third ambassadorship?a rarity in the world of diplomacy?she was targeted by a smear campaign and abruptly recalled from her post in Kyiv, Ukraine. In the months that followed, she endured personal tragedy while simultaneously being pulled into the blinding lights of the first impeachment inquiry of Donald Trump. It was a time of chaos and pain, for her and for the nation. Yet Yovanovitch was no stranger to instability and injustice. Born into a family that had survived Soviet and Nazi terror, she first saw the corrosive effect of corruption in Somalia while cutting her teeth as a diplomat in the male-dominated world of the 1980s State Department. She was an eyewitness to the 1993 constitutional crisis in Russia and the street fighting in Moscow. And she rose to the top of her profession in the crucible of the former USSR, where she saw how President Vladimir Putin adeptly exploited corrupt leaders in neighboring countries and undermined their developing democracies. Nowhere was Putin?s aggression clearer than in Ukraine, where Russia meddled in elections, launched cyberattacks, peddled misinformation, illegally annexed Crimea, invaded the Donbas, and attacked Ukrainian ships in the Black Sea. But when Yovanovitch was abruptly recalled from her post and Ukraine?s democratically elected president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, found himself set upon by Trump, it became clear just how dangerously close to the edge America itself had strayed. Through it all, Yovanovitch tirelessly advocated for the Ukrainian people, while advancing U.S. interests and staying true to herself. When she made the courageous decision to participate in the impeachment inquiry?over the objections of the Trump administration?she earned the nation?s respect, and her dignified response to the president?s attacks won our hearts. She has reclaimed her own narrative, first with her lauded congressional testimony, and now with this powerful memoir: the dramatic saga of one woman?s role at the vanguard of American foreign policy during a time of upheaval, for herself and for our country."--Amazon.com.

Presents vital information on the most-studied short stories at the high school and early-college levels. Each entry contains author biography, plot summary, characters, themes, style, historical context, critical overview, and criticism.

Provides critical overviews of the most-studied plays of all time periods, nations, and cultures. Includes discussions of themes, characters, critical reception, dramatic devices and traditions as well as cultural and historical context.

Features analysis of the plays most frequently studied in literature classes. Entries include: introduction providing overview of play; brief biography of playwright; plot summary; discussion of play's principal themes; understandable essays on play's construction; and excerpted critical commentary.

Presents vital information on the most-studied short stories at the high school and early-college levels. Each entry contains author biography, plot summary, characters, themes, style, historical context, critical overview, and criticism.

Look at the life of American fugitive and convicted murder Glen Stewart Godwin who escaped from Folsom State Prison.

The award-winning master biographer chronicles the meteoric rise and enduring influence of the greatest female pop icon of the modern era who has never stopped experimenting, pushing boundaries that changed culture globally, and fiercely defending a person's right to love whomever--and be whoever--they wanted.

"A celebrated Irish writer's magisterial, brilliantly insightful chronicle of the wrenching transformations that dragged his homeland into the modern world. Fintan O'Toole was born in the year the revolution began. It was 1958, and the Irish government?in despair, because all the young people were leaving?opened the country to foreign investment and popular culture. So began a decades-long, ongoing experiment with Irish national identity. In We Don't Know Ourselves, O'Toole, one of the Anglophone world's most consummate stylists, weaves his own experiences into Irish social, cultural, and economic change, showing how Ireland, in just one lifetime, has gone from a reactionary "backwater" to an almost totally open society-perhaps the most astonishing national transformation in modern history"--Provided by publisher.

Finn Murphy chronicles his more than thirty years on the road as a long-haul truck driver, clocking more than a million miles packing, loading, and unloading people's belongings all over America.

""I am a black woman who doesn't play golf, doesn't belong to or go to any club, doesn't like NASCAR, doesn't like country music, and has a Science degree in engineering. I speak differently, very fast, with an accent and a set of vernacular that is New York City, definitely Black tilted. So when someone says I'm going to introduce you to the next CEO of Xerox, and the candidates are lined up against a wall, I would be the first one voted off the island." Where You Are is Not Who You Are is an engaging memoir by Ursula Burns, former Chief Executive Officer of the Xerox Corporation. Her appointment as the first African American woman to head a Fortune 500 company in 2010 drew headlines, which, Ms. Burns insists, missed the real story. "It should have been-How did this happen? How is it possible that the Xerox Corporation produced the first African American woman CEO? Not this spectacular, ridiculous one about, Oh, my god, a black woman making it." How was it possible? Burns writes movingly about her journey from growing up in tenement housing on the Lower East Side of Manhattan to the highest echelon of the corporate world. Her champion was her single Panamanian mother, Racquel Olga Burns, who set no limits on what her children could achieve. A licensed child care provider, Racquel Burns, whose highest annual income was $4,200, managed to send Ursula and her siblings to the local parochial school and to send Ursula on to a Catholic High School where a nun told her she had three choices for her future: a nun, a teacher or a nurse. But Ursula wanted to make money to help her mother. Taking advantage of the opportunities and social programs brought about by the Civil Rights and Women's movements, Ursula was accepted into many colleges, including Yale. Instead she chose to pursue engineering at Brooklyn Poly Tech and then at Columbia graduate school, sponsored by Xerox, where she had been a summer intern. Burns writes about race. Her classmates, and later, her colleagues, almost all white males, "couldn't comprehend how a Black girl could be as smart, and in some cases, smarter than they were. So they made a special category for me. Unique. Amazing. Spectacular. That way they could accept me." Burns writes about gender in the corporate world. "We all start out with two arms and two legs and a head, but it you're born white with two testicles and a penis, you're already way ahead of the game." Burns writes about the current Pandemic, comparing it to the financial crisis of 2007/08. "The whole economic system as we know it, was literally put on stop, not hold, stop. The earlier crisis was difficult to be sure, but the Pandemic has created financial challenges that make that time seem like child's play." She also discusses the fact that 60 percent of the jobs that exist today will be eliminated in the next 10-20 years. Always on the side of the laborer, she celebrates a time when CEOs lived in the communities alongside their workers, while showcasing the ways corporate culture is destroying the spirit of democracy. Burns' 35-year career at Xerox was all about fixing things, from cutting millions of dollars as head of manufacturing to save Xerox from bankruptcy to acquiring a $6 billion business services company to give Xerox a future. She worked closely with President Barack Obama as Chair of his Export council, traveled with him on an official trade mission to Cuba and became one of his greatest admirers. Candid and outspoken, this memoir takes the reader inside the c-suites of corporate America, and reveals it through the lens of a Black woman-someone who puts humanity over greed and justice over lining the pockets of the few"--.