Beating Goliath

Beating Goliath is a memoir about overcoming loss and keeping faith by the innovative former head coach of the top ranked Baylor Bears college football team. Growing up in Rule, Texas, Art Briles learned at a young age the importance of hard work and faith from his parents. Soon that faith would be tested. On their way to see him play in a college football game, Briles' parents and aunt died in a car crash. This event shaped Briles into the man he is today. His father, Dennis, left him with a series of lessons. He taught his son that the world doesn't just hand you things, you have to earn them. And he taught him the influence that faith could have in his life. Briles put these lessons to work as a football coach, where he established his reputation for turning struggling teams into winners, from high school to the staff at Texas Tech to head coach at the University of Houston. Hired to coach Baylor in 2007, he was faced with a familiar task. Within three years, Briles led the Bears to their first bowl game in 15 years. Today, he instills those same lessons into his young players, helping them find a reason to excel. There are plenty of excuses for failure but Briles surrounds himself with people who are fearless when it comes to chasing success. That is one of the many lessons he imparts to his readers, with chapters that include: * God and the Teaching of Dennis Briles * Finding Your Passion * You Can Change Attitude, Not Talent * Passing in the Land of Earl Campbell * Everybody is a Captain Filled with dramatic football stories and lessons learned, this book will inspire and entertain.

Beating Goliath examines the phenomenon of victories by the weak over the strong--more specifically, insurgencies that succeeded against great powers. Jeffrey Record reviews eleven insurgent wars from 1775 to the present and determines why the seemingly weaker side won. He concludes that external assistance correlates more consistently with insurgent success than any other explanation. He does not disparage the critical importance of will, strategy, and strong-side regime type or suggest that external assistance guarantees success. Indeed, in all cases, some combination of these factors is usually present. But Record finds few if any cases of unassisted insurgent victories except against the most decrepit regimes. Having identified the ingredients of insurgent success, Record examines the present insurgency in Iraq and whether the United States can win. In so doing, Record employs a comparative analysis of the Vietnam War and the Iraq War. He also identifies and assesses the influence of distinctive features of the American way of war on the U.S. forces' performance against the Iraqi insurgency. Make no mistake: insurgent victories are the exception, not the rule. But when David does beat Goliath, the consequences can be earth shattering and change the course of history. Jeffrey Record's persuasive logic and clear writing make this timely book a must read for scholars, policymakers, military strategists, and anyone interested in the Iraq War's outcome.

Destiny. Deliverance. Happiness. Love. Purpose. Success. God intends for you to achieve every desire, dream, or vision. He wants you to attain everything He placed in your heart or mind to pursue. The question then is, "How can I advance in my life when overwhelmed by so many obstacles or 'giants'?" Defeating Goliath exposes divine principles on how to slay the giants standing between you and your destiny. Drawing from David's astounding victory over Goliath, the book awakens the unstoppable and resilient power resting within you. If you're seeking to acquire the life God has for you, Defeating Goliath is your blueprint. The time-tested strategies inside will ensure your victory over each financial, physical, emotional or spiritual challenge that's facing you. Moreover, Defeating Goliath will help you achieve the destiny you've been waiting for.

In the Hebrew Bible and stories loyal to it, Goliath is the stereotypical giant of folklore: big, brash, violent, and dimwitted. Goliath as Gentle Giant sets out to rehabilitate the giant’s image by exploring the origins of the biblical behemoth, the limitations of the “underdog” metaphor, and the few sympathetic treatments of Goliath in popular media. What insights emerge when we imagine things from Goliath’s point of view? How might this affect our reading of the biblical account or its many retellings and interpretations? What sort of man was Goliath really? The nuanced portraits analyzed in this book serve as a catalyst to challenge readers to question stereotypes, reexamine old assumptions, and humanize the “other.”

This book explores the use of deadly force by private security companies during the Iraq War. The work focuses on and compares the activities of the US companies Blackwater and Dyncorp. Despite sharing several important characteristics, such as working for the same client (the US State Department) during the same time period, the employees of Blackwater fired their weapons far more often, and killed and seriously injured far more people in Iraq than their counterparts in DynCorp. In order to explain this disparity, the book undertakes the most comprehensive analysis ever attempted on the use of violence by the employees of these firms. Based on extensive empirical research, it offers a credible explanation for this difference: Blackwater maintained a relatively bellicose military culture that placed strong emphasis on norms encouraging its personnel to exercise personal initiative, proactive use of force, and an exclusive approach to security, which, together, motivated its personnel to use violence quite freely against anyone they suspected of posing a threat. Specifically, Blackwater’s military culture motivated its personnel to fire upon suspected threats more quickly, at greater distances, and with a greater quantity of bullets, and to more readily abandon the people they shot at when compared to DynCorp’s personnel, who maintained a military culture that encouraged far less violent behaviour. Utilizing the Private Security Company Violent Incident Dataset (PSCVID), created by the author in 2012, the book draws upon data on hundreds of violent incidents involving private security personnel in Iraq to identify trends in the behaviour exhibited by the employees of different firms. Based on this rich and original empirical data, the book provides the definitive study of contemporary private security personnel in the Iraq War. This book will be of much interest to students of the Iraq War, Private Security Companies, Military Studies, War and Conflict Studies and IR in general.

Feelings of the heart comes from the feelings you have, happy days you have, sad days you have, exhilarating days, and you have awesome days, you have sad days. The poems inside this book speak to all of those feelings.

Uglier than Hugo’s Hunchback; more terrifying then Shelly’s Frankenstein and yet more affable then Steinbeck’s Lenny Small is Goliath: the Giant of Palestine. Not the renowned Old Testament villain but a child unwittingly manipulated into the rogue Goliath. While stopping short of suggesting another slinger on a grassy knoll is an intriguing skeptical dissecting of I Samuel’s telling of history’s most famous one-on-one battle. How and why the ancestors of present day Palestinians and Israelis came to struggle for the same land sheds new light on the argument of “Just whose land is it anyway?” Goliath, a seven-year-old boy trapped in the body of a fierce giant, endures many fantastic adventures at the hands of history’s greatest mariners, the Phoenician and ushered throughout the Mediterranean as pirate and circus attraction. The storyline returns to his homeland where his people continually clash with the Tribes of Israel. Initial terrorism, conspiracy, assassination and all-out war of this first Middle East conflict are accurately depicted and fueled by current headlines. Presented also is a tender love story of the granddaughter of the eminent biblical Ruth and a displaced Philistine. After all the necessary covenants are fulfilled a marriage takes place. Ten years of research based on historical evidence, biblical events and well-worn theories depicts the cultural, religious and technological differences of the two peoples.