The Incredible Story of a Country Music Legend Few artists have left a more indelible mark on America’s musical landscape than Charlie Daniels. Readers will experience a soft, personal side of Charlie Daniels that has never before been documented. In his own words, he presents the path from his post-depression childhood to performing for millions as one of the most successful country acts of all time and what he has learned along the way. The book also includes insights into the many musicians that orbited Charlie’s world, including Elvis Presley, Bob Dylan, Willie Nelson, Tammy Wynette and many more. Charlie was officially inducted into The Country Music Hall of Fame in 2016, shortly before his 80th birthday. He now shares the inside stories, reflections, and rare personal photographs from his earliest days in the 1940s to his self-taught guitar and fiddle playing high school days of the fifties through his rise to music stardom in the seventies, eighties and beyond. Charlie Daniels presents a life lesson for all of us regardless of profession: “Walk on stage with a positive attitude. Your troubles are your own and are not included in the ticket price. Some nights you have more to give than others, but put it all out there every show. You're concerned with the people who showed up, not the ones who didn't. So give them a show and…Never look at the empty seats!”

Organized baseball has survived its share of difficult times, and never was the state of the game more imperiled than during the Great Depression. Or was it? Remarkably, during the economic upheavals of the Depression none of the sixteen Major League Baseball teams folded or moved. In this economist's look at the sport as a business between 1929 and 1941, David George Surdam argues that although it was a very tough decade for baseball, the downturn didn't happen immediately. The 1930 season, after the stock market crash, had record attendance. But by 1931 attendance began to fall rapidly, plummeting 40 percent by 1933. To adjust, teams reduced expenses by cutting coaches and hiring player-managers. While even the best players, such as Babe Ruth, were forced to take pay cuts, most players continued to earn the same pay in terms of purchasing power. Baseball remained a great way to make a living. Revenue sharing helped the teams in small markets but not necessarily at the expense of big-city teams. Off the field, owners devised innovative solutions to keep the game afloat, including the development of the Minor League farm system, night baseball, and the first radio broadcasts to diversify teams' income sources. Using research from primary documents, Surdam analyzes how the economic structure and operations side of Major League Baseball during the Depression took a beating but managed to endure, albeit changed by the societal forces of its time.

An epidemic of empty seats has broken out in churches all across America. It has infected storefront churches on side streets, mainstream churches on Main Street, and megaministries sprawling across suburban campuses on multiple streets. Every Sunday, virtually everywhere in the United States, preachers are forced to stand in the pulpit and preach to empty seats. What has caused this situation, and how can it be changed? In this study, author C. Dexter Wise III addresses the issue of declining church attendance first by identifying nine key contributors to it, examining what these factors are and how they generate empty seats. He then goes on to offer more than one hundred concrete, practical steps that local churches can take to fill those empty seats with people on fire for the Lord, revolutionizing their entire ministries. With this guidance, which focuses on the contribution of both preachers and congregations, countless loss souls may flow into churches, full of the Word, the spirit, and the power of God. This guide explores the reasons that churches in the United States are facing declines in attendance and offers more than one hundred practical ways to fill these empty seats again.

They were all stars in their hometowns. Then they were drafted to play minor league ball, thinking it would be an easy ride to playing in the big time. Little did they know that they'd be vying for a spot with every other talented kid who aspired to play professional baseball. Young, inexperienced, immature, and without the support of their families and friends, they're often faced with split-second decisions. Not always on the baseball diamond.

A day like any other, Madison Mitchell is expecting business as usual. That is until she discovers a huge amount of money is missing from the account of one of her most dangerous clients. The only person she can think of who would have had access to do such a thing is her business partner, Frank Jensen. But when she goes to confront him at his apartment, she encounters an unexpected situation. To complicate matters, the great love of Madison's life, Ben Shepherd is back in town. It's been years since she left Ben and she's committed to not returning to him. Faced with Ben's good looks and charm, Madison's resolve is weakened. Everything hangs in the balance for Madison, her business, her relationship and if she doesn't come up with that money, her life.

Colorful, prolific stage, film, and television producer Michael "Chalky" White was born in Scotland was sent, at the age of seven, to a Swiss private school which he hated. He studied at the Sorbonne, worked on Wall Street, and as assistant to Sir Peter Daubeny, making contacts with Brecht's Berliner Ensemble, the Moscow Art Theatre and the Comédie Française--internationally renowned companies then at their peak. In 1960, he brought Merce Cunningham and John Cage to London for the first time and created a new market for modern dance. A legendary social butterfly, he was an enthusiastic and generous host who delighted in mixing up stars from film, theater, fashion and rock music with aristocrats and civilians, keeping Swinging London swinging. In his recitation of the events of his extraordinary showbusiness life, White describes how he helped put the Monty Python team on the map and made a fortune on The Rocky Horror Show and A Chorus Line. Fabulous fun for theater fans.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Chinese Conference on Pattern Recognition, CCPR 2012, held in Beijing, China, in September 2012. The 82 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 137 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on pattern recognition theory; computer vision; biometric recognition; medical imaging; image and video analysis; document analysis; speech processing; natural language processing and information retrieval.