Greater Expectations is the book that exposed the low standards that children are confronted with in our homes, our schools, and throughout our culture. It exploded many of the misconceptions about children and how to raise them, including the cult of self-esteem, "child-centered" learning, and other overly indulgent practices that have been watering down the education and guidance that we are providing our young people. It disclosed how the self-centered ethic is damaging our youth. Greater Expectations started America talking about these issues and about how young people need to be provided with challenges and a sense of purpose if we want them to survive and thrive in life. Provocative and challenging, Greater Expectations was a wake-up call, a must-read for anyone concerned about the growing youth crisis in America and what we can do about it.

This is the first and still-definitive account of the origins, impact, culture, and future of the baby-boom generation, the most influential in American history.

One of the finest novels by iconic British author Charles Dickens, this Victorian tale follows the good-natured orphan Pip as he makes his way through life. As a boy, Pip crosses paths with a convict named Magwitch, a man who will heavily influence Pip’s adulthood. Meanwhile, the earnest young man falls for the beautiful Estella, the adoptive daughter of the affluent and eccentric Miss Havisham. Widely considered to be Dickens's last great book, the story is steeped in romance and features the writer's familiar themes of crime, punishment, and societal struggle.

The author of Empire of the Senseless gives the Dickens classic a punk twist, setting it in 1980s New York City. Kathy Acker’s practice of literary appropriation and pastiche made her notorious—as a rebel and a groundbreaker—when Great Expectations was first published in 1982. Here, she begins rewriting Charles Dickens’s classic—splicing it with passages from Pierre Guyotat’s sexually violent Eden, Eden, Eden, among other texts—alongside Acker’s trademark pithy dialogue, as well as prank missives to the likes of Susan Sontag, Sylvère Lotringer, and God. At the center of this form-shifting narrative, Acker’s protagonist collects an inheritance following her mother’s suicide, which compels her to revisit and reinterpret traumatic scenes from the past. Switching perspectives, identities, genders, and centuries, the speaker lustily ransacks world literature to celebrate and challenge the discourse around art, love, life, and death. Praise for Great Expectations “Great Expectations in its boisterousness and strong language and sense of the injustice-of-it-all is closely related to Henry Miller.” —Carolyn See, Los Angeles Times “Acker’s most accomplished experimental work. . . . As she says in Great Expectations, “a narrative is an emotional moving.” It should be, but she’s one of the few people . . . who manage to blend that kind of warmth, gutsiness, and skill.” —Sally O’Driscoll, Village Voice “[Acker’s] most completely unified work of art. . . . One that by its formal concentration and its unified shape at every depth of reading fulfills the sort of demands that Sterne or Canetti makes of the novelist.” —Alain Robbe-Grillet “A postmodern Colette with echoes of Cleland’s Fanny Hill.” —William S. Burroughs

Most of us enter marriage with great expectations of how perfect life together will be. But unless you talk about those expectations, there's little hope of them being met. While you may imagine big family dinners on Sunday afternoons, your spouse may be looking forward to football and pizza on the couch. So how do you resolve these contradicting ideas? The key is to examine your expectations for the many aspects of marriage and talk about them with your spouse. Only then can you begin to build a foundation for your new life together. In Happily Ever After, Toben and Joanne Heim look back to their first year of marriage and share their own struggles and triumphs as they dealt with their expectations. Paired with fresh experiences of newly married couples and the wisdom of couples married for years, they model how couples can learn to communicate with each other about the issues that often define the first year of marriage -- things like money, family history, sex, spirituality, and more. This book is packed with honest anecdotes, intriguing questions, and exercises designed to help you understand and appreciate what makes your spouse different -- and special. Whether you're newly engaged or newly married, build a foundation of understanding that will last a lifetime! Book jacket.

Greater Expectations is the book that exposed the low standards that children are confronted with in our homes, our schools, and throughout our culture. It exploded many of the misconceptions about children and how to raise them, including the cult of self-esteem, "child-centered" learning, and other overly indulgent practices that have been watering down the education and guidance that we are providing our young people. It disclosed how the self-centered ethic is damaging our youth. Greater Expectations started America talking about these issues and about how young people need to be provided with challenges and a sense of purpose if we want them to survive and thrive in life. Provocative and challenging, Greater Expectations was a wake-up call, a must-read for anyone concerned about the growing youth crisis in America and what we can do about it.

A practical teaching guide to improving academic performance and test scores for underrepresented students.