On a Wednesday afternoon, Owen Masterson asks me to marry him. I've never met the man before. All I wanted was a job repackaging his image. He needs to ramp up his cool-factor to attract partnerships with better designers for his family's department store. But he wants me to be his temporary trophy wife instead. I need to get out from under my grandfather's control and don't really care how I do it. Honestly, I'll rock the hell out of being a temporary trophy wife. So maybe I'll marry him for a year, even though he has no social skills and he's a lot older than me. But I'm not going to fall for him. I hope.

All I wanted was a job repackaging his image. He needs to ramp up his cool-factor to attract partnerships with better designers for his family's department store. But he wants me to be his temporary trophy wife instead. I need to get out from under my grandfather's control and don't really care how I do it. Honestly, I'll rock the hell out of being a temporary trophy wife. So maybe I'll marry him for a year, even though he has no social skills and he's a lot older than me. But I'm not going to fall for him.

On a Wednesday afternoon, I ask Trevor Bentley to marry me. He might be the most arrogant, obnoxious man I know, but I need him to be my husband for a year. There are reasons. He's not going to be a real husband. Just part-time. Yes, I have to live with him. And, okay, I also have to share his bed. And, sure, he's the sexiest and most exciting thing to ever happen to my controlled, organized life. But still... It's only a part-time marriage. I'm not going to give him my heart. I know what I'm doing, and I'm too smart to fall for my husband. I hope.

On a Wednesday afternoon, I ask Damian Winters to marry me. To be clear, it's not a proposal. It's a business transaction. I have a sticky family situation, and the simplest way to deal with it is to pay him to be my husband for six months. Damian used to work as an escort so he knows how to keep things professional. We don't have to be friends. We don't even have to get along. I need someone fill a husband role, and he'll do just fine. It doesn't matter if he's the hottest man I've ever met. Work takes up all my time and energy, so I don't have room in my life for complications. I'm not going to fall into bed with him. And I'm definitely not going to fall in love. I hope.

Why do Jews win so many Nobel Prizes and Pulitzer Prizes? Why are Mormons running the business and finance sectors? Why do the children of even impoverished and poorly educated Chinese immigrants excel so remarkably at school? It may be taboo to say it, but some cultural groups starkly outperform others. The bestselling husband and wife team Amy Chua, author of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, and Jed Rubenfeld, author of The Interpretation of Murder, reveal the three essential components of success – its hidden spurs, inner dynamics and its potentially damaging costs – showing how, ultimately, when properly understood and harnessed, the Triple Package can put anyone on their chosen path to success.

Fashion blogger McKenna Bell has spent far too long protecting herself after the way her ex-fiancé left her at the altar. Loving again, trusting again, well, that's just not in the cards. Now her ex is back in town, demanding custody of her dog. McKenna decides to even the score by finding her own hot young thing-- a trophy husband-- and declares her intentions on her daily blog. Chris has all the assets: he's handsome, successful, and turns her inside out with a kiss to end all kisses. Now McKenna must choose between getting even and protecting her heart from hurt, or letting go of her fears of a new beginning.

This book is about the family lives of some 10,000 children and adults who live in an all-Negro public housing project in St Louis. The Pruitt-Igoe project is only one of the many environments in which urban Negro Americans lived in the 1960s, but the character of the family life there shares much with the family life of lower-class Negroes as it has been described by other investigators in other cities and at other times, in Harlem, Chicago, New Orleans, or Washington D.C. This book is primarily concerned with private life as it is lived from day to day in a federally built and supported slum. The questions, which are treated here, have to do with the kinds of interpersonal relationships that develop in nuclear families, the socialization processes that operate in families as children grow up in a slum environment, the informal relationships of children and adolescents and adults with each other, and, finally, the world views (the existential framework) arising from the life experiences of the Pruitt-Igoeans and the ways they make use of this framework to order their experiences and make sense out of them. The lives of these persons are examined in terms of life cycles. Each child there is born into a constricted world, the world of lower class, Negro existence, and as he grows he is shaped and directed by that existence through the day-to-day experiences and relationships available to him. The crucial transition from child of a family; to progenitor of a new family begins in adolescence, and for this reason the book pays particular attention to how each new generation of parents expresses the cultural and social structural forces that formed it and continue to constrain its behavior. This book, in short, is about intimate personal life in a particular ghetto setting. It does not analyze the larger institutional, social structural, and ideological forces that provide the social, economic, and political context in which lower-class Negro life is lived. These larger macro sociological forces are treated in another volume based on research in the Pruitt-Igoe community. However, this book does draw on the large body of literature on the structural position of Negroes in American society as background for its analysis of Pruitt-Igoe private life.