"A superb book." THE HOUSTON CHRONICLE When quiet, shy Amelia Jones reads a desperate message that has fallen out of a barrel organ in the antique shop she just bought, she can't forget the words, "They're going to kill me soon..." Armed only with the woman's first name and the note written years before, Amelia begins a journey into the past, a search that takes her from the protective cocoon she's wrapped herself in to a precarious world where nothing is the way it seems, where fear is second nature, and dark secrets just might uncover murder--her own....

Deeply restless in her privileged life as part of Axminster's high society, Juniper Rose escapes to the wild world of the circus and an adventure that will change her life. Juniper will learn who she is-and fast-as being the show's new star attraction embroils her in what threatens to become a serial murder mystery with the potential to ruin everything. In the midst of all this, Juniper encounters the dark and brooding Cassius whose torment pushes her to the end of herself. And there she discovers her undeniable love for the circus-and despite his efforts to be her worst enemy-her equally undeniable attraction for Cassius.

One day, a mysterious stranger arrives at a boardinghouse of the widow Gateau- a sad-faced stranger, who keeps to himself. When the widow's daughter, Mirette, discovers him crossing the courtyard on air, she begs him to teach her how he does it. But Mirette doesn't know that the stranger was once the Great Bellini- master wire-walker. Or that Bellini has been stopped by a terrible fear. And it is she who must teach him courage once again. Emily Arnold McCully's sweeping watercolor paintings carry the reader over the rooftops of nineteenth-century Paris and into an elegant, beautiful world of acrobats, jugglers, mimes, actors, and one gallant, resourceful little girl.

The story of a daring tightrope walk between skyscrapers, as seen in Robert Zemeckis's The Walk, starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt. In 1974, French aerialist Philippe Petit threw a tightrope between the two towers of the World Trade Center and spent an hour walking, dancing, and performing high-wire tricks a quarter mile in the sky. This picture book captures the poetry and magic of the event with a poetry of its own: lyrical words and lovely paintings that present the detail, daring, and--in two dramatic foldout spreads-- the vertiginous drama of Petit's feat. The Man Who Walked Between the Towers is the winner of the 2004 Caldecott Medal, the winner of the 2004 Boston Globe - Horn Book Award for Picture Books, and the winner of the 2006 Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Children's Video.

Hermine Demoriane is a singer, playwright, actress and performance artist. In this account of her life as a funambulist and her career in the 1970s, she also evokes the spirit of earlier tightrope walkers who pioneered the art - the legendary Blondin, Madame Saqui and others.

The most successful public sector leaders today are ones that have the capacity to lead internally and externally. They are able to see and understand the inherent contradictions in their multiple roles. For instance, appeasing the community with a more humanistic approach to policing, while getting tough on crime; giving the community a greater role in police affairs, but maintaining the autonomy to make unilateral decisions; supporting tough actions against bad cops to appease the community while steadfastly defending the rank and file. These are scenarios that are difficult for police chiefs to reconcile. This book examines how chiefs of the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) have attempted to reconcile contradictory objectives. It explores the history of leadership in this famed police department, analyzing the leadership styles of its contemporary chiefs. This book explores the leader's capacity to walk the public leadership tightrope. This exercise is the most important task of any public sector leader. As one of the most highly profiled public agencies in the U.S., the LAPD has embraced many contradictions. The department has been a model of professionalism and misconduct. The LAPD has been at the center of many of the nation's most racially explosive experiences: the 1965 Watts riots, the Rodney King beating and subsequent 1992 riots, and the O.J. Simpson case. Additionally, the Rampart Scandal was one of the biggest police corruption scandals in the nation. Because of its proximity to Hollywood, the contradictory culture of the LAPD has been exposed in television and film. Indeed, America has become familiar with the LAPD through its periodic scandals and by its media and popular culture profile. Specifically written for students of criminal justice and public administration, this book examines the ways in which the LAPD's leaders have attempted to navigate crisis after crisis. The author uses interviews with thirty LAPD officers of various rankings and several Los Angeles residents to tell the LAPD story.

An engaging and challenging introduction to Jean Genet, this concise biography of the French writer and his work cuts directly to the intersection of thought and life that was essential to Genet's creativity. Arguing that Genet's life was an extraordinary spectacle in which the themes of his most revolutionary works were played out, Stephen Barber gives both the work and its singular inspiration in Genet's life their full due. Abandoned, arrested, and repeatedly incarcerated, Genet, who died in 1986, led a life that could best be described as a tour of the underworld of the twentieth century. Similarly, Genet's work is recognized by its nearly obsessive and often savage treatment of certain recurring themes. Sex, desire, death, oppression, domination-these ideas, central to Genet's artistic project, can be seen as preoccupations that arose directly from the artist's travels, imprisonments, sexual and emotional relationships, and political engagements and protests. This trenchant volume focuses directly on the moments in Genet's life in which those preoccupations are vividly projected in his novels, theater works, and film projects. Genet's works have been hugely influential for a vast array of writers, filmmakers, choreographers, and directors, especially at moments of social crisis; thus Genet's life is not only at the root of his own work but also that of many important artists of the twentieth century. With its frank and illuminating introduction by Edmund White, Jean Genet gives readers access to this brilliant and brutal mind.