Go Where There Is No Path

For all who dare to go off the beaten track, this is the inspirational, power-packed playbook for transforming your life and your world—from a young, Black social entrepreneur whose dorm-room tech startup has helped millions pay for college and access unprecedented opportunity. Gray, the son of a single working mother who had him at age fourteen, grew up in deep poverty in Birmingham, Alabama. An academic star, he had every qualification for attending a top college—except for the financial means. Desperate, Gray headed off the beaten path, searching online to apply for every scholarship he could find. His hustle resulted in awards of 1.3 million dollars and became his call to action to help other students win their own “schollys.” It inspired him to start up Scholly, an app that matches college applicants with millions of dollars in outside scholarships that often go unclaimed. When he was a senior at Drexel University, he appeared on Shark Tank as CEO of Scholly. In the most heated fight in the show’s history, the sharks challenged Gray as to whether his app was a charity or a profitable business. Both, he insisted, proposing a new paradigm for social entrepreneurship and netting deals from Lori Grenier and Daymond John. At the time Scholly’s subscriber base was 90,000 users. Today the app has 4 million subscribers who have won scholarships totaling more than $100 million. Meanwhile, Gray—without help from the mostly all-white boy’s club of Silicon Valley—has emerged as a tech startup superhero now tackling the crisis of student debt with innovative, unrivaled strategies. Gray’s premise is that when you lead with the good—confronting issues such as poverty and racism—the money will follow. His story is proof that when you develop a mindset for success, you turn disadvantages into gold. And when you create opportunities for others, you enrich the marketplace for yourself too. Gray shows us, we can carve out new paths to better days and leave trails for others.

Traveler, there is no road; you make your path as you walk.

“An intense snapshot of the chain reaction caused by pulling a trigger.” —Booklist (starred review) “Astonishing.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review) “A tour de force.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review) A Newbery Honor Book A Coretta Scott King Honor Book A Printz Honor Book A Time Best YA Book of All Time (2021) A Los Angeles Times Book Prize Winner for Young Adult Literature Longlisted for the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature Winner of the Walter Dean Myers Award An Edgar Award Winner for Best Young Adult Fiction Parents’ Choice Gold Award Winner An Entertainment Weekly Best YA Book of 2017 A Vulture Best YA Book of 2017 A Buzzfeed Best YA Book of 2017 An ode to Put the Damn Guns Down, this is New York Times bestselling author Jason Reynolds’s electrifying novel that takes place in sixty potent seconds—the time it takes a kid to decide whether or not he’s going to murder the guy who killed his brother. A cannon. A strap. A piece. A biscuit. A burner. A heater. A chopper. A gat. A hammer A tool for RULE Or, you can call it a gun. That’s what fifteen-year-old Will has shoved in the back waistband of his jeans. See, his brother Shawn was just murdered. And Will knows the rules. No crying. No snitching. Revenge. That’s where Will’s now heading, with that gun shoved in the back waistband of his jeans, the gun that was his brother’s gun. He gets on the elevator, seventh floor, stoked. He knows who he’s after. Or does he? As the elevator stops on the sixth floor, on comes Buck. Buck, Will finds out, is who gave Shawn the gun before Will took the gun. Buck tells Will to check that the gun is even loaded. And that’s when Will sees that one bullet is missing. And the only one who could have fired Shawn’s gun was Shawn. Huh. Will didn’t know that Shawn had ever actually USED his gun. Bigger huh. BUCK IS DEAD. But Buck’s in the elevator? Just as Will’s trying to think this through, the door to the next floor opens. A teenage girl gets on, waves away the smoke from Dead Buck’s cigarette. Will doesn’t know her, but she knew him. Knew. When they were eight. And stray bullets had cut through the playground, and Will had tried to cover her, but she was hit anyway, and so what she wants to know, on that fifth floor elevator stop, is, what if Will, Will with the gun shoved in the back waistband of his jeans, MISSES. And so it goes, the whole long way down, as the elevator stops on each floor, and at each stop someone connected to his brother gets on to give Will a piece to a bigger story than the one he thinks he knows. A story that might never know an END…if Will gets off that elevator. Told in short, fierce staccato narrative verse, Long Way Down is a fast and furious, dazzlingly brilliant look at teenage gun violence, as could only be told by Jason Reynolds.

Small cities face intricate challenges. No Straight Lines provides the basis for a refined model of community-engaged leadership and research designed to realize equality of quality of life. With particular attention to the small city of Kamloops, BC, this book explores the impact of extended, short-term, and unique leadership collaborations and local responses to homelessness, sustainability and food security, aging populations, and the recovery of local history. It offers exciting insights into the role of the university in the small city, from generating local learning opportunities to the integration of undergraduates and faculty in achieving positive change. Based on active engagement, No Straight Lines reveals the barriers present in addressing local needs, and the transformations that can be achieved through effective collaboration. It offers rich accounts and valuable insights into flexible practices that respond to the needs of community organizations while recognizing the challenges associated with resource constraints and limitations in capacity. This unique collection provides new insights into the twists and turns of leadership and learning in the small city.

For a few years in the early 1990s - when the embers of a violent agitation for Gorkhaland were slowly dying down - Parimal Bhattacharya taught at the Government College in Darjeeling. No Path in Darjeeling Is Straight is a memoir of his time in the iconic town, and one of the finest works of Indian non-fiction in recent years. As Parimal tramped its roads and winding footpaths, Darjeeling slowly grew on him. He sought out its history: a land of incomparable beauty originally inhabited by the Lepchas and other tribes; the British who took it for themselves in the mid-1800s so they could remember home; the Darjeeling Himalayan Railway - once a vital artery, now a quaint toy train; and the vast tea gardens with which the British replaced verdant forests to produce the fabled Orange Pekoe. And in the enmeshed lives of the small town's inhabitants, Parimal discovered a richly cosmopolitan society which endured even under threat from cynical politics and haphazard urbanization. Written with empathy, and in shimmering prose, No Path in Darjeeling Is Straight effortlessly merges travel, history, literature, memory, politics, and the pleasures of ennui into an unforgettable portrait of a place and its people.

"In 2009, while thru-hiking the Appalachian Trail, Robert Moor began to wonder about the paths that lie beneath our feet: How do they form? Why do some improve over time while others fade? What makes us follow or strike off on our own? Over the course of the next seven years, Moor traveled the globe, exploring trails of all kinds, from the miniscule to the massive. He learned the tricks of master trail-builders, hunted down long-lost Cherokee trails, and traced the origins of our road networks and the Internet. In each chapter, Moor interweaves his adventures with findings from science, history, philosophy, and nature writing--combining the nomadic joys of Peter Matthiessen with the eclectic wisdom of Lewis Hyde's The Gift. Throughout, Moor reveals how this single topic--the oft-overlooked trail--sheds new light on a wealth of age-old questions: How does order emerge out of chaos? How did animals first crawl forth from the seas and spread across continents? How has humanity's relationship with nature and technology shaped the world around us? And, ultimately, how does each of us pick a path through life? With a breathtaking arc that spans from the dawn of animal life to the digital era, On Trails is a book that makes us see our world, our history, our species, and our ways of life anew"--Book jacket flap.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Nobel Peace Prize winner, Chair of The Elders, and Chair of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, along with his daughter, the Reverend Mpho Tutu, offer a manual on the art of forgiveness—helping us to realize that we are all capable of healing and transformation. Tutu's role as the Chair of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission taught him much about forgiveness. If you asked anyone what they thought was going to happen to South Africa after apartheid, almost universally it was predicted that the country would be devastated by a comprehensive bloodbath. Yet, instead of revenge and retribution, this new nation chose to tread the difficult path of confession, forgiveness, and reconciliation. Each of us has a deep need to forgive and to be forgiven. After much reflection on the process of forgiveness, Tutu has seen that there are four important steps to healing: Admitting the wrong and acknowledging the harm; Telling one's story and witnessing the anguish; Asking for forgiveness and granting forgiveness; and renewing or releasing the relationship. Forgiveness is hard work. Sometimes it even feels like an impossible task. But it is only through walking this fourfold path that Tutu says we can free ourselves of the endless and unyielding cycle of pain and retribution. The Book of Forgiving is both a touchstone and a tool, offering Tutu's wise advice and showing the way to experience forgiveness. Ultimately, forgiving is the only means we have to heal ourselves and our aching world.