Survival guide for anyone who needs tips, insight and humor in order to survive the college application process.

Mix religion, personal preferences, countless guests, and raging hormones, and you have the makings for chaos. Secrets of a Bar Mitzvah Mom is a humorous review and self-help resource for Jewish and non-Jewish family and friends that provides a real-life glimpse into the bar mitzvah experience. Author Nancy Berk pairs her humor and psychological training to address the common social and parenting dilemmas related to bar and bat mitzvah preparation and party planning. From religious school carpools to the just-in-the-nick-of-time home renovation, this book will take you down the winding road of the bar mitzvah parent and provide you with tips and tactics for strategizing, organizing, and streamlining your overloaded life. Secrets of a Bar Mitzvah Mom will make you smile about adolescent indecision, party meal planning, tablecloth obsession, and the occasional need for airbrush photography. A concise and practical reference, it also illustrates that the bar mitzvah experiences of parents are often amazingly similar. (And for that we can enjoy a sigh of relief.)

From the winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award, a debut novel featuring Harry Houdini and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. It is April 1922. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle arrives in New York on a spiritualist crusade. To packed houses at Carnegie Hall, he displays photographs of ghosts and spirits; of female mediums bound and gagged, ectoplasmic goo emerging from their bodies. In the newspapers, he defends the powers of the mysterious Margery, one of the most famous mediums of the day. His good friend Harry Houdini is a skeptic, and when Doyle claims Margery's powers are superior to Houdini's, the magician goes on the attack. Into this mix of spirit-chasing celebrities enters Molly Goodman, a young reporter whose job is to cover the heated debate. As she wanders into this world of spooks and spirits, murder and criminal frauds, Molly discovers herself: her true love, her place in the world; even her relationship to her beloved dead brother, Carl.

A breakdown of the impact of the feminist movement on American culture from a conservative political analyst and commentator. Fifty years after Betty Friedan unveiled The Feminine Mystique, relations between men and women in America have never been more dysfunctional. If women are more liberated than ever before, why aren't they happier? In this shocking, funny, and bluntly honest tour of today’s gender discontents, Andrea Tantaros, one of Fox News’ most popular and outspoken stars, exposes how the rightful feminist pursuit of equality went too far, and how the unintended pitfalls of that power trade have made women (and men!) miserable. In a covetous quest to attain the power that men had, women were advised to work like men, talk like men, party like men, and have sex like men. There’s just one problem: women aren’t men. Instead of feeling happy with their newfound freedoms, females today are tied up in knots, trying to strike a balance between their natural, feminine and traditional desires and what modern society dictates—and demands—through the commandments of feminism. Revealing the mass confusion this has caused among both sexes, Tantaros argues that decades of social and economic progress haven’t brought women the peace and contentedness they were told they’d gain from their new opportunities. The pressure both to have it all and to put forth the perfectly post-worthy, filtered life for social media and society at large has left women feeling twisted. Meanwhile, in their rightful quest for equality, women have promoted themselves at the expense of their male counterparts, leaving both genders frayed and frustrated. In this candid and humorous romp through the American cultural landscape, Tantaros reveals how gaining respect in the office—where women earned it—made them stop demanding it where they really wanted it: in their love lives. The impact of this power trade has been felt in every way, from sex to salaries, to dating and marriage, to fertility and female friendships, to the personal details they share with each other. As a result, we’ve lost the traditional virtues and values that we all want, regardless of our politics: intimacy, authenticity, kindness, respect, discretion, and above all commitment. With scathing wit—and insights born of personal experience—Tantaros explores how women have taken guys off the hook in dating (much to their own detriment) and exposes how we’ve become a nation averse to intimacy and preoccupied with porn, one that has traded kindness for control, intimacy for sexting, and monogamy for polygamy. Sorry romance. Sorry decency and manners. Long talks over the telephone have been supplanted by the “belfie.” All this indicates a culture that's devolving, not evolving. And it’s only getting worse. Tied Up in Knots is a no-holds-barred gut check for the sexes and a wake-up call for a society that has decayed—faster than anyone thought possible. It’s time to remember what we all really want out of work, love and life. Only then can we finally begin untying those knots.

This is one of the first books to thoroughly critique the rise of Trumpism and its potential impact, nationally and globally. One of the world’s leading social critics, Giroux offers new critiques of Trump and his early Cabinet choices in the context of longer term trends, including the rise of right-wing populism, the threat of planetary peril, anti-intellectual fervor, the war on youth, a narrowing political discourse, deepening inequality and disposability, authoritarianism, the crisis of civic culture, the rise of the mass incarceration state, and more. Giroux dissects the diverse forces that led to Trump’s rise and points to pathways for resisting his authoritarian instincts. Offering a new language of hope and possibility, Giroux’s optimism is rooted especially in the resurgence of progressive politics among youth. Giroux reclaims the centrality of education to politics and boldly articulates a vision in which the radical imagination merges with civic courage as part of a broad-based struggle for a radical democracy. Deep inquiries into fast-changing and pressing issues of our time makes this book 'the essential Giroux' that citizens and students must read, debate, and act upon.

In this extraordinary book, Kevin Starr–widely acknowledged as the premier historian of California, the scope of whose scholarship the Atlantic Monthly has called “breathtaking”–probes the possible collapse of the California dream in the years 1990—2003. In a series of compelling chapters, Coast of Dreams moves through a variety of topics that show the California of the last decade, when the state was sometimes stumbling, sometimes humbled, but, more often, flourishing with its usual panache. From gang violence in Los Angeles to the spectacular rise–and equally spectacular fall–of Silicon Valley, from the Northridge earthquake to the recall of Governor Gray Davis, Starr ranges over myriad facts, anecdotes, news stories, personal impressions, and analyses to explore a time of unprecedented upheaval in California. Coast of Dreams describes an exceptional diversity of people, cultures, and values; an economy that mirrors the economic state of the nation; a battlefield where industry and the necessities of infrastructure collide with the inherent demands of a unique and stunning natural environment. It explores California politics (including Arnold Schwarzenegger’s election in the 2003 recall), the multifaceted business landscape, and controversial icons such as O. J. Simpson. “Historians of the future,” Starr writes, “will be able to see with more certainty whether or not the period 1990-2003 was not only the end of one California but the beginning of another”; in the meantime, he gives a picture of the place and time in a book at once sweeping and riveting in its details, deeply informed, engagingly personal, and altogether fascinating.