Soft Hearts and Hard Times is the true story of a little boy who's age of awareness coincided with beginning of the Great Depression. It tells the story of how he and his family endured; and how the dismal events of the day affected them. It demonstrates how, even in the worst of times, there is still time for a boyish pleasure or two.

The Crisis: People who are in rebellion are not the only ones with hard hearts. The dictionary defines hard when it applies to matters of the heart as being "cold; insensitive; callous; unfeeling; unyielding." This malady has stricken every Christian in some area of their life. This is what keeps us from hearing the voice of the Lord and being led by Him in our everyday lives. The Cause: The condition of our heart is determined by what we focus our attention on. It doesn't matter what we know, it's what we think on that controls whether our hearts is hard or soft (Proverbs 23:7). Once this is understood, this same law that will sensitize us towards God can be used to harden us towards the devil. The Cure: The Cure for a hardened heart is a total commitment to keep our minds stayed on the Lord. This teaching will give you one of the clearest understandings of the relationship between faith and unbelief that you have ever had.

Despite the title, Dickens’s portrayal of early industrial society here is less relentlessly grim than that in novels by contemporaries such as Elizabeth Gaskell or Charles Kingsley. Hard Times weaves the tale of Thomas Gradgrind, a hard-headed politician who raises his children Louisa and Tom without love, of Sissy the circus girl with love to spare who is deserted and adopted into their family, and of the honest mill worker Stephen Blackpool and the bombastic mill owner Josiah Bounderby. The key contrasts created are finally less those between wealth and poverty, or capitalists and workers, than those between the head and the heart, between “Fact”—the cold, rationalistic approach to life that Dickens associates with utilitarianism—and “Fancy”—a warmth of the imagination and of the feelings, which values individuals above ideas. Concentrated and compressed in its narrative form, Hard Times is at once a fable, a novel of ideas, and a social novel that seeks to engage directly and analytically with political issues. The central conflicts raised in the text, between government’s duty not to intervene to guarantee the liberty of the subject, and between quantitative and qualitative assessments of progress, remain unresolved today in the late or post industrial stages of liberal democracies.

No area of the United States was untouched by the Great Depression, but the severity in which people experienced those significant years depended in large part on where in the nation they lived. While dust choked the life out of Americans in the plains, apples grew in abundance in the Northwest. Unemployment-driven poverty robbed urban dwellers of hearth and home, while Upper-plains farm women traded eggs and chickens like money. This bibliography describes the youth literature and relevant resources written about the Great Depression, all categorized by geographical location. Students, educators, historians, and writers can use this book to find literature specific to their state or region, gaining a greater understanding of what the Great Depression was like in their locale. The Great Depression was a pivotal period in our nation's history. This annotated bibliography guides readers to biographies; oral histories, memoirs, and recollections; photograph collections; fiction and nonfiction books; picture books; international resources; and other reference sources. The Works Progress Administration (WPA) state guides are included, as well as literature about the federal theater, arts, and music projects. A comprehensive listing of museums and state historical societies complement this reference. For readers interested in learning about the Great Depression, this is a must-have resource.

Readers of Alan Blinder's regular Business Week column appreciate his concise, thought-provoking opinions and his eloquent prose. In Hard Heads, Soft Hearts he brings to life the inner workings of America's economy and in so doing explains what's wrong and how to fix it.

“An excellent collection of critical and social commentary that will help to make Dickens’ image of Victorian England meaningful to all students.” —John Howard Wilson, Dakota Wesleyan University This Norton Critical Edition includes: - Sylvere Monod’s superbly edited text, based on the 1854 edition and accompanied by Fred Kaplan’s expanded annotations. - Fourteen illustrations from 1854 to circa 1890. - Contextual pieces by social critics and theorists of Dickens’ time that give readers outstanding examples of views on industrialism, education, and utilitarianism in the nineteenth century. - Eight new critical essays by Paulette Kidder, David M. Levy, Christopher Barnes, Theodore Dalrymple, Christina Lupton, Efraim Sicher, Nils Clausson, and Kent Greenfield and John E. Nilsson. - A Chronology and a Selected Bibliography.

Soft Skills for Hard Times is a hand book for the over achiever. It is written for people who understand that when competence is present, it is only the ticket to the game; it does not make one a player. It is a book for those who would invest resources in getting good and no time in getting chosen. It is a book for the potential high performer who constantly wonders why since they are so smartwhy is it that the seemingly average performer keeps getting ahead. These are hard timeswe need skills to navigate the course.