Light Touch

An outline of Curtis's approach to painting landscapes. He stresses the need to work "plein air", with little studio work, and discusses techniques and materials suitable for this approach. The book includes step-by-step demonstrations where the artist puts into practice the advice he has given

Here are six one-act dramas and comedies, ranging in length from 10 to 65 minutes, plus a full-length musical based on the collaboration between W. S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan in their mostly happy but sometimes argumentative creation of the D’Oyly Carte Savoy Operettas. Choosing Home—the play that opens the book—won four awards following its first performance in 2005. It was then commissioned to be serialized as a five–part radio play. Here, the original cast are making the recording under the direction of BBC producer Jenny Kendall-Tobias. It has since become one of Blicq’s most-produced plays.

While the use of Feng Shui, the Chinese art of placement, has become popular in the home and office, classroom application has been virtually overlooked. The book is an easy to use, spiral-bound guide which educates teachers about Feng Shui principles such as furniture placement and use of color, while providing specific instructions for classroom application. Interspersed throughout are personal experiences from the authors, photos of their classrooms, diagrams and original illustrations along with case studies and testimonials from teachers who have applied these techniques to their own classrooms.

A growing literature in economics has analyzed the effects of psychological interventions designed to boost individual aspirations as a strategy to increase investments with long-term returns and thus reduce poverty. This paper reports on a randomized controlled trial evaluating a short video-based intervention designed to increase aspirations of adults in poor rural Ethiopian households, all of whom are beneficiaries of the Productive Safety Net Program, the main government safety net program in Ethiopia. Evidence from a sample of 5258 adults from 3220 households is consistent with the hypothesis that there is no evidence that the aspirations treatment had any significant effects on self-reported aspirations for the household, educational investment in children, or savings nine months post-treatment, suggesting that the effect of light-touch aspirations treatments for extremely poor adults may be limited in this context.

Humor is a powerful management tool, although few business people how how to use it. Malcolm Kushner, a prominent consultant to corporations on the use of humor, presents his easy-to-apply formulas that help command respect and attention, build morale, and create a more productive work environment.

Sharon Giammatteo teaches readers a self-healing method that can return life to areas deadened by shock or trauma. The technique is based on the Neurofascial Process, a calculated laying on of hands and subsequent release of emotional and physical pain. The author widens her scope to include any pain, strain, or fracture, and extensive illustrations make the process simple and rewarding.

"It's my bible for teaching young children" and "It reads like a novel," said veteran and preservice teachers alike.

*NOW A NETFLIX LIMITED SERIES—from producer and director Shawn Levy (Stranger Things) starring Mark Ruffalo, Hugh Laurie, and newcomer Aria Mia Loberti* Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist, the beloved instant New York Times bestseller and New York Times Book Review Top 10 Book about a blind French girl and a German boy whose paths collide in occupied France as both try to survive the devastation of World War II. Marie-Laure lives with her father in Paris near the Museum of Natural History where he works as the master of its thousands of locks. When she is six, Marie-Laure goes blind and her father builds a perfect miniature of their neighborhood so she can memorize it by touch and navigate her way home. When she is twelve, the Nazis occupy Paris, and father and daughter flee to the walled citadel of Saint-Malo, where Marie-Laure’s reclusive great uncle lives in a tall house by the sea. With them they carry what might be the museum’s most valuable and dangerous jewel. In a mining town in Germany, the orphan Werner grows up with his younger sister, enchanted by a crude radio they find. Werner becomes an expert at building and fixing these crucial new instruments, a talent that wins him a place at a brutal academy for Hitler Youth, then a special assignment to track the Resistance. More and more aware of the human cost of his intelligence, Werner travels through the heart of the war and, finally, into Saint-Malo, where his story and Marie-Laure’s converge. Doerr’s “stunning sense of physical detail and gorgeous metaphors” (San Francisco Chronicle) are dazzling. Deftly interweaving the lives of Marie-Laure and Werner, he illuminates the ways, against all odds, people try to be good to one another. Ten years in the writing, All the Light We Cannot See is a magnificent, deeply moving novel from a writer “whose sentences never fail to thrill” (Los Angeles Times).