Fourteen Authors share their experiences with failure! Divorce, Bankruptcy both personal and businesses, Lost Jobs, and Personal Dignity are discussed candidly with insights to illustrate that these life changing events were not fatal even though they were not fun. Their stories show that failures can be used as steps along the way to a better, more fulfilling future if you can open yourself to the learn the lessons that they teach.

The author reinvented his career using the techniques shared in this work. What you are holding in your hand, the concepts and anecdotes, is what he used to find his way through the chaos of change and onto the path of new opportunity and success. It's the book he wish he'd had in his hands twenty years ago. He's hoping it will help you.

Many contemporary American middle schools are stuck in a state of "arrested development," failing to implement the original concept of middle schools to a varying, though equally corruptive degrees. The individual chapters of the book outline in detail how to counter this dangerous trend, offering guidance to those who seek immediate, significant, internal reforms before we lose the unique value of middle schools for our nation's adolescents.

An original investigation into how tradition has developed over the centuries into our modern understanding of the term.

From West Side Story in 1957 to Road Show in 2008, the musicals of Stephen Sondheim (1930–2021) and his collaborators have challenged the conventions of American musical theater and expanded the possibilities of what musical plays can do, how they work, and what they mean. Sondheim's brilliant array of work, including such musicals as Company, Follies, Sweeney Todd, Sunday in the Park with George, and Into the Woods, established him as the preeminent composer/lyricist of his, if not all, time. Stephen Sondheim and the Reinvention of the American Musical places Sondheim's work in two contexts: the exhaustion of the musical play and the postmodernism that, by the 1960s, deeply influenced all the American arts. Sondheim's musicals are central to the transition from the Rodgers and Hammerstein-style musical that had dominated Broadway stages for twenty years to a new postmodern musical. This new style reclaimed many of the self-aware, performative techniques of the 1930s musical comedy to develop its themes of the breakdown of narrative knowledge and the fragmentation of identity. In his most recent work, Sondheim, who was famously mentored by Oscar Hammerstein II, stretches toward a twenty-first-century musical that seeks to break out of the self-referring web of language. Stephen Sondheim and the Reinvention of the American Musical offers close readings of all of Sondheim's musicals and finds in them critiques of the operation of power, questioning of conventional systems of knowledge, and explorations of contemporary identity.

In The Reinvention of Love Anthony Low argues that cultural, economic and political change transformed the way poets from Sidney to Milton thought and wrote about love. Examining the interface between social, political and economic practices and individual psyches, as reflected in literary texts, Professor Low illuminates the connections between material circumstances, perceptions, and ideals. Through detailed readings of the work of Sidney, Donne, Herbert, Crashaw, Carew, and Milton, he shows how from the late sixteenth century poets struggled to replace the older Petrarchan tradition with a form of love in harmony with a changing world, and to reconcile human love and sacred devotion. Donne fled the social world; Carew made new accommodations with it; Milton revised it. For Milton, sacred love, cut off from communal norms, verges on hatred, while married love takes on the burden of assuaging loneliness in a threatening world.

Based on a global survey of innovative firms and on 50 in-depth case studies, Innovation Reinvented identifies six patterns or 'games' of innovation, each commanding best-of-class strategies and best practices.