On The Line

Key Selling Points In On the Line, a basketball star struggles to make sense of things when he learns his father is gay. Veteran children’s author Eric Walters has teamed up with rising star Paul Coccia to bring their expertise together into a single POV. This book explores the themes of family dynamics and divorce. Paul Coccia's book Cub was a Junior Library Guild Gold Standard Selection and was commended as a CCBC Best Books for Kids and Teens. Eric Walters has written more than 10 books featuring basketball, including Triple Threat, co-written with NBA fan-favorite Jerome Williams. Eric Walters founded the I Read Canadian Day movement and the day is now celebrated annually on February 17th.

Jackson doubts that he can be a great hockey player like the rest of his family, but his confidence soars when he organizes an equipment drive to collect hockey gear for his teammates so they can all participate in a local tournament

Factory you shall never have my soul I am here And I count for so much more than you And I count so much more because of you Thanks to you Unable to find work in his field, Joseph Ponthus enlists with a temp agency and starts to pick up casual shifts in the fish processing plants and abattoirs of Brittany. Day after day he records with infinite precision the nature of work on the production line: the noise, the weariness, the dreams stolen by the repetitive nature of exhausting rituals and physical suffering. But he finds solace in a life previously lived. Shelling prawns, he dreams of Alexandre Dumas. Pushing cattle carcasses, he recalls Apollinaire. And, in the grace of the blank spaces created by his insistent return to a new line of text – mirroring his continued return to the production line – we discover the woman he loves, the happiness of a Sunday, Pok Pok the dog, the smell of the sea. In this French bestseller, translated by Stephanie Smee, Ponthus captures the mundane, the beautiful and the strange, writing with an elegance and humour that sit in poignant contrast to the blood and sweat of the factory floor. On the Line (À la ligne) is a poet’s ode to manual labour, and to the human spirit that makes it bearable. Winner of: Grand Prix RTL-Lire, Prix Régine Deforges, Prix Jean Amila-Meckert, Prix du premier roman des lecteurs des bibliothèques de la Ville de Paris, Prix Eugène Dabit du roman populiste ‘From the uniformity and repetition of the production line Joseph Ponthus finds humour, grace and humanity. A unique and deeply affecting novel.’ —Ryan O’Neill

Told in two voices, Luli and Yun, raised in an orphanage to age sixteen, work together in a factory until Yun, pregnant, disappears and Luli must confront the dangers of the outside world to find her. Includes facts about China's One-Child Policy and its effects.

“How does one put into words the rage that workers feel when supervisors threaten to replace them with workers who will not go to the bathroom in the course of a fourteen-hour day of hard labor, even if it means wetting themselves on the line?”—From the Preface In this gutsy, eye-opening examination of the lives of workers in the New South, Vanesa Ribas, working alongside mostly Latino/a and native-born African American laborers for sixteen months, takes us inside the contemporary American slaughterhouse. Ribas, a native Spanish speaker, occupies an insider/outsider status there, enabling her to capture vividly the oppressive exploitation experienced by her fellow workers. She showcases the particular vulnerabilities faced by immigrant workers—a constant looming threat of deportation, reluctance to seek medical attention, and family separation—as she also illuminates how workers find connection and moments of pleasure during their grueling shifts. Bringing to the fore the words, ideas, and struggles of the workers themselves, On The Line underlines how deep racial tensions permeate the factory, as an overwhelmingly minority workforce is subject to white dominance. Compulsively readable, this extraordinary ethnography makes a powerful case for greater labor protection, especially for our nation’s most vulnerable workers.

The entrepreneur, angel investor, and bestselling author of Choose Yourself busts the 10,000-hour rule of achieving mastery, offering a new mindset and dozens of techniques that will inspire any professional—no matter their age or managerial level—to pursue their passions and quickly acquire the skills they need to succeed and achieve their dreams. We live in a hierarchical world where experience has traditionally been the key to promotion. But that period is over! Straight, clear-cut career trajectories no longer exist. Industries disappear, job descriptions change, and people’s interests and passions evolve. The key to riding this wave, entrepreneur James Altucher advises, is to constantly be curious about what’s next, to be comfortable with uncertainty so you can keep navigating the rough waters ahead, and most important, to pursue the things that interest you. In Skip the Line, he reveals how he went from struggling and depressed to making his personal, financial, and creative dreams come true, despite—and perhaps due to—his many failures along the way. Altucher combines his personal story with concrete—and unorthodox—insights that work. But Skip the Line isn’t about hacks and shortcuts—it’s about transforming the way you think, work, and live, letting your interests guide your learning, time, and resources. It’s about allowing yourself to do what comes naturally; the more you do what you love, the better you do it. While showing you how to approach change and crisis, Altucher gives you tools to help easily execute ideas, become an expert negotiator, attract the attention of those around you, scale promising ideas, and improve leadership—all of which will catapult you higher than you ever thought possible and at a speed that everyone will tell you is impossible.

One of the biggest stars in tennis, Serena Williams has captured every major title. Her 2009 Australia Open championship earned her the #1 world ranking for the third time in her illustrious career - and marked only the latest exclamation point on a life well and purposefully lived. As a young girl, Serena began training with an adult-sized racquet that was almost as big as her. Rather than dropping the racquet, Serena saw it as a challenge to overcome-and she has confronted every obstacle on her path to success with the same unflagging spirit. From growing up in the tough, hardscrabble neighborhood of Compton, California, to being trained by her father on public tennis courts littered with broken glass and drug paraphernalia, to becoming the top women's player in the world, Serena has proven to be an inspiration to her legions of fans both young and old. Her accomplishments have not been without struggle: being derailed by injury, devastated by the tragic shooting of her older sister, and criticized for her unorthodox approach to tennis. Yet somehow, Serena always manages to prevail. Both on the court and off, she's applied the strength and determination that helped her to become a champion to successful pursuits in philanthropy, fashion, television and film. In this compelling and poignant memoir, Serena takes an empowering look at her extraordinary life and what is still to come.

Witemeyer Returns with Her Trademark Blend of Adventure, Romance, and Humor Grace Mallory is tired of running, of hiding. But when an old friend sends an after-hours telegraph transmission warning Grace that the man who has hunted her for nearly a year has discovered her location, she fears she has no choice. She can't let the villain she believes responsible for her father's death release his wrath in Harper's Station, the town that has sheltered her and blessed her with the dearest friends she's ever known. Amos Bledsoe prefers bicycles to horses and private conversations over the telegraph wire to social gatherings with young ladies who see him as nothing more than an oddity. His telegraph companion, the mysterious Miss G, listens eagerly to his ramblings every night and delights him with tales all her own. For months, their friendship--dare he believe, courtship?--has fed his hope that he has finally found the woman God intended for him. Yet when he takes the next step to meet her in person, he discovers her life is in peril, and Amos must decide if he can shed the cocoon of his quiet nature to become the hero Grace requires.