Pocket Notebook

A funny, colorful, fascinating tour through the work and life of one of today’s most influential graphic designers. Esquire. Ford Motors. Burton Snowboards. The Obama Administration. While all of these brands are vastly different, they share at least one thing in com­mon: a teeny little bit of Aaron James Draplin. Draplin is one of the new school of influential graphic designers who combine the power of design, social media, entrepreneurship, and DIY aesthetic to create a successful business and way of life. Pretty Much Everything is a mid-career survey of work, case studies, inspiration, road stories, lists, maps, how-tos, and advice. It includes examples of his work—posters, record covers, logos—and presents the process behind his design with projects like Field Notes and the “Things We Love” State Posters. Draplin also offers valuable advice and hilarious commentary that illustrates how much more goes into design than just what appears on the page. With Draplin’s humor and pointed observations on the contemporary design scene, Pretty Much Everything is the complete package.

Meet Jacob Smith, your good-old British policeman. But Jacob's no ordinary beat bobby. He's a tactical firearms officer; a handsome, popular, financially secure specialist. He's a connoisseur of fine cinema, who also enjoys his expansive collection of do-it-yourself 'art' DVD's (the latest of which was 'borrowed' during a drugs warrant). And he likes to keep himself in shape, hence the large steroid habit - and the even larger amount of money he owes his dealer. And did we mention he's partial to women'sfeet? The girlfriend who's desperately trying to shrug him off? Or what about his parents' dark past? And now his family and friends are starting to worry... and his police superiors are increasingly taking notice of the way he conducts himself. Jake's a very busy boy. And life is about to get even more complicated... Pocket Notebook is the brilliant debut novel from serving police officer Mike Thomas. An angry black comedy, it follows Jacob's very public fall from grace, all of which he meticulously records in his police notebook.

An African American folk saying declares, "Our God can make a way out of no way.... He can do anything but fail." When Dianne Swann-Wright set out to capture and relate the history of her ancestors--African Americans in central Virginia after the Civil War--she had to find that way, just as her people had done in creating a new life after emancipation. In order to tell their story, she could not rely solely on documents from the plantation where her forebears had lived. Unlike the register of babies born, marriages made, or lives lost that white families' Bibles contained, ledgers recorded Swann-Wright's ancestors, as commodities. Thus Swann-Wright took another route, setting out to gather spoken words--stories, anecdotes, and sayings. What results is a strikingly rich and textured history of a slave community. Looking at relations between plantation owners and their slaves and the succeeding generations of both, A Way out of No Way explores what it meant for the master-slave relation to change to one of employer and employee and how patronage, work relationships, and land acquisition evolved as the people of Piedmont Virginia entered the twentieth century. Swann-Wright illustrates how two white landowners, one of whom had headed a plantation before the Civil War, learned to compensate freed persons for their labor. All the more fascinating is her study of how the emancipated learned to be free--of how they found their way out of no way.

Vols. 8, 11-12 accompanied by separate "Emendations and departures from the manuscript," by the editors.

For those looking to become great business writers, this practical guide supplies clear instruction and examples of how to organize thoughts into written form, impart information with pinpoint accuracy, persuade, and hold the reader's interest: in short, to use language to get what you want. In today's business world, writers need to be prepared and comfortable with various forms of writing: reports, blogs, social media, white papers. Written by an established expert on writing and communication, journalism professor Carl D. Hausman, Write Like a Pro: Ten Techniques for Getting Your Point Across at Work (and in Life) can make you a better writer, regardless of your experience and current skill level; and will teach you how to vastly improve your written communication through a straightforward, easy-to-follow method. This book doesn't just cover the essential "mechanics" of good writing; it focuses on developing the more subtle skills of infusing your writing with eloquence, power, accuracy, and persuasiveness—and it shows readers how to achieve those qualities with no-nonsense advice. The information is highly accessible, sometimes amusing, and replete with memorable examples that demonstrate what works and teaches a strategy for solving any writing problem. It is essential reading for anyone who wants to write effectively, in any form, from emails to complaint letters to social media.

Watergate, our “great national nightmare” in the words of President Gerald Ford, was the most impactful scandal in American—and perhaps world—history. Yet even those who believe they have studied Watergate fully could never understand the purpose of this puzzling burglary of DNC headquarters, with no meaningful information to gain, and Nixon far ahead in the polls. In easily accessible vignettes, The Mysteries of Watergate will unpack factual narratives and solid inferences that will astound the reader. John O’Connor’s rendition will add to prior research into heretofore-unknown occurrences, putting all “revisionist” knowledge into one coherent, understandable whole. Even more explosively, he has, for the first time by any observer in fifty years, deeply examined the three thousand Post Watergate articles and its subsequent publications to show how deeply false and flawed this journalism was. He also will offer the first comprehensive understanding of Deep Throat’s true motives. Since this reporting won a Pulitzer Prize and is the template for all subsequent investigative reporting, this book profoundly shakes the foundation of the modern mainstream media project. The Mysteries of Watergate is a must-read for anyone interested in the way modern society shapes its historical narratives.