The House Is Burning

It’s the 1950s and mounting political unrest consumes Rwanda. With fading monarchy, intensifying colonial rule and whispers of rebellion, countless native families find age-old traditions under attack.

For Abel A. Nkunda’s family, the shifting climate grows increasingly hostile. As powers vie for control around them, they face a painful choice: take flight to save all they cherish or stay to watch it burn.

Venturing into remote wilds in search of refuge, grandparents lead young Abel towards an uncertain future. With each step into the unknown, doubts arise. Can a foreign haven truly preserve their sacred cattle herding heritage from extinction?

Follow the Nkundas’ quest across a changing landscape where long-held customs blink at the brink. Will new mountains shelter this household from escalating threats? Or will the life they knew go up in smoke? Immerse yourself in one family’s struggle to find safe harbour for endangered livelihoods and identity before the house left behind is reduced to ashes.

The Value

Every step in life presents an opportunity to reflect on the past journey. Having worked on diverse issues over many years, I now cherish the progress made towards envisioned goals.

Admission into an institution aligned with one’s core purpose and vision is a proud milestone. As I look back, I am reminded that the seeds we once planted with history as our guide now blossom as illuminating milestones.

A Leadership Shift

Rooted in over 40 years of seasoned experience and rigorous scholarly research, A Leadership Shift beckons leaders towards a courageous transformation in organizational ethos. This pioneering narrative seamlessly translates intricate scholarly theories into a practical, proven implementation methodology, illuminated through a real-world case study. It’s the first of its kind, melding profound subjects like organizational oneness, quantum field linkage to leadership, the human biofield’s potency, and the ripple effects of thoughts and spiritual emotions in the workplace, into a comprehensible step-by-step methodology for leaders.

The discourse extends into gender diversity and the ramifications of women empowerment programs, converging multiple facets into a singular vista. While various scholars have shed light on the subjects broached in this book, its distinctiveness emanates from melding science with practical experience and morphing it into a tangible methodology to tackle genuine organizational challenges.

A Leadership Shift not only unveils the science of evolving a culture to attain organizational oneness but invites readers to perceive the human dynamo from a fresh lens and foster a leadership metamorphosis to unlock workplace potential. It demystifies the science and the method, making it accessible for leaders to adopt and apply sans complexity.

Offering a structured methodology to aid leaders in overhauling organizational culture and ingraining change capabilities within the system, this book elucidates the methodology, provides a meticulous depiction of its implementation, and the ensuing outcomes. Bolstered by over 160 scholarly citations, four decades of global know-how, and academic action research, A Leadership Shift demonstrates the profound impact of this methodology on organizational performance, fuelled by an enhanced sense of belonging within the organization.

Me

Ron Pearson was born in Bramley, Leeds on August 12, 1924. He began writing this book on August 12, 2021, his 97th birthday. After a childhood beset by illness, he left school at 14, and took a job packing parcels in a multiple tailoring factory, not for him. He moved on to packing parcels general muggins at an advertising agency at 50 pence a week, which he loved. His career in advertising was interrupted by a four-and-a-half-year spell in the army on ‘Special Operations’. Returning to civvy street, his career culminated in being appointed Managing Director and then Chairman of one of Yorkshire’s most respected advertising agencies. He was a local actor for almost 50 years including the renowned Bradford Alhambra and Playhouse.There are some sad moments outnumbered by many hilarious ones. Ron’s beloved wife, Pat, died in 2017 after 66 years of happy marriage.The list of ‘celebrities’ he has met is impressive, including Princess Margaret, Prince Charles, Hollywood’s Marlene Dietrich, George Raft, Sir Ralph Richardson, George Best, Jackie Charlton, Harry Worth, Alan Bennett etc.

Reality Sucks

Douglas, living a humdrum life in Spokane, Washington, yearning to escape working as an accountant, borderline suicidal, leaves his life behind to pursue his dream of working in entertainment. Hollywood, full of sin, seduces Douglas, distracting him in many ways. The men in the town are quite intoxicating and he exposes some pretty explicit parts of his life while making the transition to Hollywood. Douglas finds his way to cope living with the craziness of Hollywood, but finds himself overcorrecting his life as it was in Spokane.

Hollywood’s Women of Action

The ‘action heroine’ has never been more popular than she is today, with the likes of The Hunger Games (2012), Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) and Wonder Woman (2017) granting her a newfound prominence in Hollywood filmmaking. When most knowledgeable action fans think of the action heroine historically, however, they tend to do so through the prism of her most iconic characters: Emma Peel in the 1960s; Lynda Carter’s Wonder Woman in the 1970s; Ripley and Sarah Connor in the 1980s; Xena Warrior Princess and Buffy the Vampire Slayer in the 1990s; and, of course, the likes of Hermione Granger, Katniss Everdeen, Imperator Furiosa and Princess Diana in modern times.Yet, the action heroine’s epic journey goes back much further than this. Indeed, it has its origins in the earliest days of cinema, amongst the serial-queens of the early silent-era, and the fleeting cowgirls, swordswomen, and jungle-girls of Hollywood’s ‘Golden Age’ in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s. This book is about that epic journey. It traces the action heroine’s century-long struggle for legitimacy and respect, beginning with the silent-era serial, The Perils of Pauline (1914), and ending with the big-budget action-blockbusters of today.This book asks why the action heroine’s path towards acceptability on mainstream film and television has proven such a long and tortuous one, why she is so hated by a vocal minority of male action fans, and how she has overcome the conservativism of the Hollywood system to at last forge a reputation for herself as a genuinely viable protagonist on both the big and small screens?

Lady Bean and Family

Lady Bean and Family, the follow-up to Gerald and Usanna Stribling’s Mr Cabbage and Family, is an in-depth exploration of the world of leguminous plants, presenting a blend of historical, botanical, and culinary perspectives. This book details the development of beans throughout history, examining their botanical structure, emphasizing their nutritional importance and even discussing their sometimes surprising cultural role. The authors share expert knowledge on various aspects of bean cultivation and storage, highlighting different methods of preservation and discussing the health benefits and diverse uses of beans.The narrative takes readers on a global journey, culminating in an extensive collection of recipes that showcase beans in various forms. From savoury snacks popular in the Americas to traditional soybean-based dishes from China and Japan, and even classic French culinary delights, the book provides a wide array of options for cooking enthusiasts and food lovers.Ideal for readers with an interest in food history, botany, and gastronomy, Lady Bean and Family is an informative resource that offers a comprehensive look at one of the world’s most versatile and nutritious plant families.

Social Theory of Displacement: Adventures in the Everyday

What is happening when we mistake one thing for another? Disorientations and double takes are a key part of the lived experience of modern capitalism. But the corollary of this is an existential anxiety which motivates a perpetual search for reassurances of our individual and collective identities.How do we escape self-estrangement and alienation on any level of existence? The experiential gaps in formal bureaucratic and marketised ‘life’ present us with absolute boundaries or difference, and hence binary forms of identity. The search for identity is then accompanied by an inability to deal with the hybridity and cognitive dissonance of everyday life.The fragmentations of institutional life nevertheless produce something that passes for a world of reciprocal recognition (we are all colleagues, part of a ‘team’ and so on). In fact, at the same time this pulls the rug out from beneath a sense of mutuality with fellow incumbents of such formal, contractualised settings. The dominance of formal institutions in modern life promotes the idea that we can ‘find ourselves’ within these settings and it does so by insinuating within itself the experiential world that it lacks.Here, informal social worlds appear in chimerical and caricature form. Modern capitalism feeds off and mimics the spontaneity, contingency, and collegiality of the lived world in order to present itself as the genuine article. Social Theory of Displacement: Adventures in the Everyday attempts to unravel the conundrums posed by living in these parallel worlds of reciprocity and contractualism.

Mountain People

“You have to love the mountains to live here.” Nevertheless, at seventeen Salva left, returning many years later with Àngels to the family farm. Now it’s a holiday centre.“I was sleeping in the tent. The bear was eating a sheep fifty metres away,” says Mustà, a shepherd who moved to the Pyrenees from Morocco.“Born here… without doctors, without anything.” Josep has never left his mountain village. Once a secretary in Barcelona, his wife María is now the farmer in the family.Five in-depth life stories from the fifteen in Mountain People. Stories of hope in the face of adversity, reflecting our common humanity. Stories that, like the surrounding mountains, will ignite your imagination.

The Tale of a Dream

In The Tale of a Dream, an octogenarian author embarks on a reflective expedition through the archives of her mind. With a quest to understand how events, people, and experiences have moulded her life, she aims to unearth universal truths and a sense of purpose. What begins as a straightforward analytical endeavour transforms into a fascinating odyssey where patterns and connections manifest with surprising ease, as if the puzzle pieces of her life were falling into place on their own.Seemingly without effort, her fragmented thoughts coalesce into a coherent philosophy that she terms ‘Taoist-Existentialism.’ This innovative approach harmonizes natural wisdom with intellectual insights, and fuses the primal elements of nature with the complex algorithms of technology, illuminating the untapped potential within evolving humanity.Guided solely by the currents of her thoughts and absent any preconceived notions, the author delves into life’s multifaceted questions. While many queries find answers, the eternal ‘why?’ remains intriguingly elusive, as it has for philosophers and thinkers throughout history.The Tale of a Dream invites you to explore the landscape of human experience, asking you to reconsider what you thought you knew while urging you to ponder what you have yet to discover.

Poochtraveller

Poochtraveller is the bible of dog travel guides – an insightful and down-to-earth book, and an invaluable support system for all dog owners looking to travel abroad.Claire Templeton distils what she has learned over years of trial and error, traveling throughout Europe with her dog Snowy.You will come away from this book feeling confident and excited about your travels, with some personal recommendations to get you started. 

Pictures of Women: A Practical Essay on Pictures and Education

Our environment is packed with pictures, often of poor quality, especially when it comes to pictures that depict women. These pictures are everywhere in our daily life, they highly standardized the way we see women today: they focus exclusively on women’s sex appeal, and in doing so, they omit to show women as complex, rich, and deep internally human beings. Pictures of Women is an essay about pictures and education: it aims both to point out the problems and give solutions to the reader. It is a call to create more sustainable pictures and bring fair and inspiring pictures home. Along keys to understand the pictures of women, the book provides a list of fair and inspiring pictures to uplift your life and the society.