Cut Loose

Stack, slice, switch, and sew your way to crooked versions of traditional quilt blocks! Jan’s easy techniques dispense with perfection and show you how easy it is to follow your own crooked path. 18 fun, colorful projects--with no points to match, you’ll want to make every one of them! Easy enough for beginners, while experienced quilters will love the challenge of modifying favorite blocks. Learn Jan’s “ish” factor for super-simple cutting and piecing. Designs are based on traditional quilt block patterns.

Drawing on slave narratives found in forty-one volumes of interviews and one hundred autobiographies by former slaves, these contributors explore how enslaved African Americans received the often oppressive faith of their masters but transformed it into a gospel of liberation. This classic work demonstrates how an authentic black theology of liberation today must listen to the divine spirit that once fed and continues to feed the black religious experience. This second edition includes three additional provocative essays.

With more than thirty-five years of experience in psychotherapy, Dr. Halpern enables the adult child to understand his or her parent and foster a positive, healthy adult relationship. In all respects, you appear to be well-adjusted, reasonably successful adult, but in the presence of your parents, you feel vulnerable, dependent, guilty, insecure—childlike. They manipulate you, smother you, demand your attention or elicit your resentment. In clear, nonclinical terms, renowned psychotherapist Dr. Howard Halpern shows you how to break these familiar family routines so that you can build healthy, rewarding parent-child relationships. He teaches you, for example, how to handle martyred mothers, despotic fathers, and moralistic, unloving, or seductive parents. He also addresses the sensitive topics of how to deal with aging, divorced, or dying parents. Resolving conflicts with your parents will enable you, finally, to cut loose—to start being yourself rather than your parent's child. Without guilt, revenge, or fear as your motives, you will be able to make the choices in love, work, and values that do justice to who you are. With more than thirty-five years of experience in psychotherapy, Dr. Halpern enables the adult child to understand his or her parent and foster a positive, healthy adult relationship.

"Years after the Great Recession, the economy is still weak, and an unprecedented number of workers have sunk into long spells of unemployment, increasingly unlikely to get another good job in their lifetimes. Based on a careful crossnational comparison, "Cut Loose" describes the experiences of American and Canadian unemployed workers and the impact of the different social policies meant to help them. It focuses on a historically important group: autoworkers. Their well-paid factory jobs built a strong middle class in the decades after World War II. But today, they find themselves lost and beleaguered in a changed economy of greater inequality and risk, one that favors the well-educated--or well-connected. Their declining fortunes tell us something about what the white-collar workforce should expect in the years ahead, as job-killing technologies and the shipping of work overseas take away even more good jobs. Their frustrating experiences with retraining question whether education is really the cure-all it is made out to be. And their grim prospects in the job market reveal today's frenzied competition and harsh culture of judgment that has trickled down to a group long known for its strong belief in equality. "Cut Loose" provides a poignant look at how the long-term unemployed struggle in today's unfair economy to support their families, rebuild their lives, and cope with shame and self-blame. Yet it is also a call to action--a blueprint for a new kind of politics, one that offers a measure of grace in a society of ruthless advancement."--Provided by publisher.

Two executions behind the forbidding walls of Oakalla prison near Vancouver in 1955. The first a routine hanging, the second a gruesome spectacle. The first is witnessed by an 18-year-old reporter, Peter. The second, some weeks later, turns into a grisly struggle on the trapdoor as Canada’s hangman, Camille Blanchard, battles to subdue and finally dispatch the condemned man. The awful scene is watched by a second, older reporter who quickly descends into a swirl of irrational behavior, self-loathing and alcohol. He explodes in a violent assault on his 23-year-old wife, Jenny, whom Peter has been silently coveting for weeks. The attack throws Jenny into Peter’s arms where she finds fulfilment for the first time. But their fierce lovemaking triggers a scandal that compels Peter to leave Vancouver for London, cutting his ties to Jenny and to his past in Canada.

Meet three women who are as different as could be—at least that's what they think—and the men who've turned their lives upside down as their paths collide in sizzling, sexy Miami. . . . Ranya is a modern-day princess—brought up behind the gilded walls of Saudi Arabian high society and winner of the dream husband sweepstakes . . . until said husband turns out to be more interested in Paolo, the interior-decorator-cum-underwear-model, than in his virginal new wife. Smart, independent, but painfully shy, Zahra has managed to escape her impoverished Palestinian roots to carve out a life of comfort. But she can't reveal her secrets to the man she adores or shake off the fear that she doesn't deserve any of it. She also can't shake the fear that if she holds on to anything—or anyone—too dearly, they will be taken away in the blink of a kohl-lined eye. Rio has risen above the slums of her native Honduras—not to mention the jeers of her none too supportive family—to become editor in chief of Suéltate magazine, the hottest Latina-targeted glossy in town, and this in spite of Georges Mallouk, her hunky-yet-clueless boss, and in spite of Rio's totally wrong but oh-so-sinfully-right affair with the boss's delicious but despicable younger brother, Joe. In this city of fast cars, sleek clubs, and unapologetic superficiality, Ranya, Zahra, and Rio wrestle with the ties that bind them to their difficult pasts, and it just might be time for them to cut loose. . . . At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Cutting Loose in Paradise is a mystery novel set in a remote island full of quirky people off the northeast coast of Florida. The story involves the death of a middle-aged woman who supposedly committed suicide by shooting herself in the chest. But local hair stylist and single mom LaRue Panther has her doubts. When part-Seminole LaRue is cutting the dead womans hair in the casket, she realizes the womans neck has been slashed and that there is no wound in the chest. LaRue and her local friends, a bartender and a journalist, are on the case to find out what really happened.

She's the unsuspecting beauty with something everybody wants. He's the secret agent in so deep nobody can find him. Until now... CIA operative Zachary Prade made his name taking out world threats. But now he’s tracking a very different kind of danger and her name is Lily Robbins. Lily holds the key to a valuable encoded file that’s about to fall into the wrong hands. All Zach has to do is retrieve the key and forget the rain-soaked beauty who came to his Central American plantation seeking shelter from more than the weather. Lily knows him as Alejandro Campos, the seductive drug lord who saved her life. They met when she traveled to El Salvador to film a documentary…and got caught in the middle of a nasty drug-and-guerrilla war. Now, back in the U.S., hunted by spooks and assassins, Lily has to trust Campos again. Except his name isn’t Campos, and he’s arousing a passion so hot it’s criminal. That is, if they can survive long enough to enjoy it… From the Paperback edition.