The Improv Handbook is the most comprehensive, smart, helpful and inspiring guide to improv available today. Applicable to comedians, actors, public speakers and anyone who needs to think on their toes, it features a range of games, interviews, descriptions and exercises that illuminate and illustrate the exciting world of improvised performance. First published in 2008, this second edition features a new foreword by comedian Mike McShane, as well as new exercises on endings, managing blind offers and master-servant games, plus new and expanded interviews with Keith Johnstone, Neil Mullarkey, Jeffrey Sweet and Paul Rogan. The Improv Handbook is a one-stop guide to the exciting world of improvisation. Whether you're a beginner, an expert, or would just love to try it if you weren't too scared, The Improv Handbook will guide you every step of the way.

As public education declined and many Americans despaired of their children's future, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Jonathan Freedman volunteered as a writing mentor in some of California's toughest innercity schools. He discovered a program called AVID that gave him hope. In this work of creative non-fiction, Mr. Freedman interweaves the lives of AVID's founder, Mary Catherine Swanson, and six of her original AVID students over a 20-year period, from 1980 to 2000. With powerful personalities, explosive conflicts, and compelling action, Wall of Fame portrays the dramatic story of how one teacher in one classroom created a pragmatic program that has propelled thousands of students to college. This story of determination, courage, and hope inspires a new generation of teachers, students, and parents to fight for change from the bottom up.

Beloved, best-selling science writer Mary Roach’s “acutely entertaining, morbidly fascinating” (Susan Adams, Forbes) classic, now with a new epilogue. For two thousand years, cadavers – some willingly, some unwittingly – have been involved in science’s boldest strides and weirdest undertakings. They’ve tested France’s first guillotines, ridden the NASA Space Shuttle, been crucified in a Parisian laboratory to test the authenticity of the Shroud of Turin, and helped solve the mystery of TWA Flight 800. For every new surgical procedure, from heart transplants to gender confirmation surgery, cadavers have helped make history in their quiet way. “Delightful—though never disrespectful” (Les Simpson, Time Out New York), Stiff investigates the strange lives of our bodies postmortem and answers the question: What should we do after we die? “This quirky, funny read offers perspective and insight about life, death and the medical profession. . . . You can close this book with an appreciation of the miracle that the human body really is.” —Tara Parker-Pope, Wall Street Journal “Gross, educational, and unexpectedly sidesplitting.” —Entertainment Weekly

Far off the coast of California looms a harsh rock known as the island of San Nicholas. Dolphins flash in the blue waters around it, sea otter play in the vast kep beds, and sea elephants loll on the stony beaches. Here, in the early 1800s, according to history, an Indian girl spent eighteen years alone, and this beautifully written novel is her story. It is a romantic adventure filled with drama and heartache, for not only was mere subsistence on so desolate a spot a near miracle, but Karana had to contend with the ferocious pack of wild dogs that had killed her younger brother, constantly guard against the Aleutian sea otter hunters, and maintain a precarious food supply. More than this, it is an adventure of the spirit that will haunt the reader long after the book has been put down. Karana's quiet courage, her Indian self-reliance and acceptance of fate, transform what to many would have been a devastating ordeal into an uplifting experience. From loneliness and terror come strength and serenity in this Newbery Medal-winning classic.

In a bold rethinking of the Hollywood blacklist and McCarthyite America, Joseph Litvak reveals a political regime that did not end with the 1950s or even with the Cold War: a regime of compulsory sycophancy, in which the good citizen is an informer, ready to denounce anyone who will not play the part of the earnest, patriotic American. While many scholars have noted the anti-Semitism underlying the House Un-American Activities Committee’s (HUAC’s) anti-Communism, Litvak draws on the work of Theodor W. Adorno, Hannah Arendt, Alain Badiou, and Max Horkheimer to show how the committee conflated Jewishness with what he calls “comic cosmopolitanism,” an intolerably seductive happiness, centered in Hollywood and New York, in show business and intellectual circles. He maintains that HUAC took the comic irreverence of the “uncooperative” witnesses as a crime against an American identity based on self-repudiation and the willingness to “name names.” Litvak proposes that sycophancy was (and continues to be) the price exacted for assimilation into mainstream American culture, not just for Jews, but also for homosexuals, immigrants, and other groups deemed threatening to American rectitude. Litvak traces the outlines of comic cosmopolitanism in a series of performances in film and theater and before HUAC, performances by Jewish artists and intellectuals such as Zero Mostel, Judy Holliday, and Abraham Polonsky. At the same time, through an uncompromising analysis of work by informers including Jerome Robbins, Elia Kazan, and Budd Schulberg, he explains the triumph of a stoolpigeon culture that still thrives in the America of the early twenty-first century.

A comprehensive study guide divided into four distinct sections, each representing a section of the official GMAT.

The Hunger Games trilogy is a popular culture success. Embraced by adults as well as adolescents, Suzanne Collins’s bestselling books have inspired an equally popular film franchise. But what, if anything, can reading the Hunger Games tell us about what it means to be human in the world today? What complex social and political issues does the trilogy invite readers to explore? Does it merely entertain, or does it also instruct? Bringing together scholars in literacy education and the humanities, The Politics of Panem: Challenging Genres examines how the Hunger Games books and films, when approached from the standpoint of theory, can challenge readers and viewers intellectually. At the same time, by subjecting Collins’s trilogy to literary criticism, this collection of essays challenges its complexity as an example of dystopian literature for adolescents. How can applying philosophic frameworks such as those attributable to Socrates and Foucault to the Hunger Games trilogy deepen our appreciation for the issues it raises? What, if anything, can we learn from considering fan responses to the Hunger Games? How might adapting the trilogy for film complicate its ability to engage in sharp-edged social criticism? By exploring these and other questions, The Politics of Panem: Challenging Genres invites teachers, students, and fans of the Hunger Games to consider how Collins’s trilogy, as a representative of young adult dystopian fiction, functions as a complex narrative. In doing so, it highlights questions and issues that lend themselves to critical exploration in secondary and college classrooms.