The first woman president of an advertising agency and the first woman CEO of a company on the New York Stock Exchange tells her "riveting story: How... she shattered every glass ceiling and became a Madison Avenue legend."* From her role as fledgling copywriter at Doyle Dane Bernbach -- the agency that made big-car-obsessed America fall in love with the funny little Volkswagen -- to her brilliant campaign for Braniff Airways that had the flying public scrambling for seats on wild-colored planes to founding the fastest-growing ad agency in history, Mary Wells Lawrence's life in advertising couldn't be any bigger. As The New York Observer put it, her agency, Wells Rich Greene, created ads that "etched indelible phrases into the public imaginations: 'Flick your Bic' and 'I Love New York!' and 'Plop plop, fizz fizz, oh what a relief it is.'" For those thinking about a life in advertising for themselves and for anyone who enjoys being transported by a great storyteller's art, Mary Wells Lawrence is the most energetic, passionate guide to the world of American advertising in all its brilliance, excitement, fun and crazines

Ability Profiling and School Failure: One Child's Struggle to Be Seen as Competent explores the social and contextual forces that shape the appearance... of academic ability and disability and how these forces influence the perception of academic underachievement of minority students. It is a powerful case study of a competent fifth grader, an African American boy growing up in a predominantly white, rural community, who was excluded from participating in science and literacy discourses within his classroom community. The case study form allows for the integration of the story of the student's struggle to be seen as competent in school, a context where his teacher perceives him as learning disabled, with Collins' own perspective as a researcher and teacher-educator engaged in a professional development effort with the teacher. The contribution of this book is to make visible the situated and socially constructed nature of ability, identity, and achievement, and to illustrate the role of educational and social exclusion in positioning students within particular identities. Highly relevant across the field of education, this book will particularly interest researchers, graduate students, and professionals in literacy and science education, curriculum and instruction, sociocultural theories of learning, discourse analysis of classrooms, research on teaching and learning, special education, social foundations, and teacher education.

A bold manifesto by two business leaders, A Billion Bootstraps shows why microcredit is the world's most powerful poverty-fighting movement-and an... unbeatable investment for your charitable donations. A Billion Bootstraps unearths the roots of the microcredit revolution, revealing how the pioneering work of people such as Dr. Muhammad Yunus-winner of the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize-is giving hope to billions. Philanthropist and self-made millionaire Phil Smith and microcredit expert and consultant Eric Thurman provide a riveting narrative that explores how these small loans, arranged by “barefoot bankers,” enable impoverished people to start small businesses, support their families, and improve local economies. By paying back their loans instead of simply accepting handouts, men and women around the world are continually giving others the same opportunity to change their futures. Smith and Thurman also examine why traditional charity programs, while providing short-term relief, often perpetuate the problems they are trying to alleviate, and how applying investment principles to philanthropy is the key to reversing poverty permanently. A Billion Bootstraps explains how ordinary people can accelerate the microcredit movement by investing charitable donations in specific programs and then leveraging those contributions so the net cost to lift one person out of poverty is remarkably low. You'll discover how to get more for your money by donating with the mind-set of an investor and calculating measurable returns-returns that will change lives and societies forever.

Two maverick neuroscientists use the world's largest psychology experiment-the Internet-to study the private activities of millions of men and women... around the world, unveiling a revolutionary and shocking new vision of human desire that overturns conventional thinking. For his groundbreaking sexual research, Alfred Kinsey and his team interviewed 18,000 people, relying on them to honestly report their most intimate experiences. Using the Internet, the neuroscientists Ogas and Gaddam quietly observed the raw sexual behaviors of half a billion people. By combining their observations with neuroscience and animal research, these two young neuroscientists finally answer the long-disputed question: what do people really like? Ogas and Gaddam's findings are transforming the way scientists and therapists think about sexual desire. In their startling book, Ogas and Gaddam analyze a "billion wicked thoughts" on the Internet: a billion Web searches, a million individual search histories, a million erotic stories, a half-million erotic videos, a million Web sites, millions of online personal ads, and many other enormous sources of sexual data in order to understand the true differences between male and female desires, including: ?Men and women have hardwired sexual cues analogous to our hardwired tastes-there are sexual versions of sweet, sour, salty, savory, and bitter. But men and women are wired with different sets of cues. ?The male sexual brain resembles a reckless hunter, while the female sexual brain resembles a cautious detective agency. ?Men form their sexual interests during adolescence and rarely change. Women's sexual interests are plastic and change frequently. ?The male sexual brain is an "or gate": A single stimulus can arouse it. The female sexual brain is an "and gate": It requires many simultaneous stimuli to arouse it. ?When it comes to sexual arousal, men prefer overweight women to underweight women, and a significant number of men seek out erotic images of women in their 40s, 50s, and 60s. ?Women enjoy writing and sharing erotic stories with other women. The fastest growing genre of erotic stories for women are stories about two heterosexual men having sex. ?Though the male sexual brain is much more different from the female sexual brain than is commonly believed, the sexual brain of gay men is virtually identical to that of straight men. Featuring cutting-edge, jaw-dropping science, this wildly entertaining and controversial book helps readers understand their partner's sexual desires with a depth of knowledge unavailable from any other source. Its fascinating and occasionally disturbing findings will rock our modern understanding of sexuality, just as Kinsey's reports did sixty years ago.

Abina and the Important Men is a compelling and powerfully illustrated "graphic history" based on an 1876 court transcript of a West African woman named... Abina, who was wrongfully enslaved and took her case to court. The book is a microhistory that does much more than simply depict an event in the past; it uses the power of illustration to convey important themes in world history and to reveal the processes by which history is made.The story of Abina Mansah--a woman "without history" who was wrongfully enslaved, escaped to British-controlled territory, and then took her former master to court--takes place in the complex world of the Gold Coast at the onset of late nineteenth-century colonialism. Slavery becomes a contested ground, as cultural practices collide with an emerging wage economy and British officials turn a blind eye to the presence of underpaid domestic workers in the households of African merchants. The main scenes of the story take place in the courtroom, where Abina strives to convince a series of "important men"--a British judge, two Euro-African attorneys, a wealthy African country "gentleman," and a jury of local leaders--that her rights matter. "Am I free?" Abina inquires. Throughout both the court case and the flashbacks that dramatically depict her life in servitude, these men strive to "silence" Abina and to impose their own understandings and meanings upon her. The story seems to conclude with the short-term success of the "important men," as Abina loses her case. But it doesn't end there: Abina is eventually redeemed. Her testimony is uncovered in the dusty archives by Trevor Getz and, through Liz Clarke's illustrations, becomes a graphic history read by people around the world. In this way, the reader takes an active part in the story along with the illustrator, the author, and Abina herself.Following the graphic history in Part I, Parts II-V provide detailed historical context for the story, a reading guide that reconstructs and deconstructs the methods used to interpret the story, and strategies for using Abina in various classroom settings. Click the following links to see sample pages from the book:Sample page 1 Sample page 2

Accepting the widespread view that 1 Thessalonians is the earliest surviving Pauline letter, Furnish commends reading it as fully as possible on its own... terms, without presupposing or imposing themes or positions that are explicit only in letters of a later date. While he agrees with commentators who note this letter's pastoral aims and character, he is more convinced than some that it also exhibits a rich and coherent theological point of view. Furnish interprets 2 Thessalonians as the work of an anonymous Paulinist writing several decades after the apostle's death. He regards this letter, too, as historically and theologically valuable, although less for what it discloses about Paul's ministry and thought than for what it shows about the reception and interpretation of Paul in the late first-century church.

In a striking departure from customary readings of the Acts of the Apostles as the story of the growth of the church, Gaventa argues that Luke's second... volume has to do with nothing less than the activity of God. From the beginning of the story at Jesus' Ascension and extending until well past the final report of Paul's activity in Rome, Luke narrates a relentlessly theological story, in which matters of institutional history or biography play only an incidental role. Gaventa pays careful attention to Luke's story of God, as well as to the numerous characters who set themselves in opposition to God's plan.

This informative and engaging commentary invites modern readers to "overhear" Paul's letter as if they were present in one of the Galatian... house-churches where it was being read for the first time.  By setting aside the theological baggage of the centuries that burdens many other interpretations of Galatians, Williams allows the Apostle's own provocative thought to be encountered freshly and appreciated anew in its own terms.

In this lucid exposition, an acclaimed interpreter shows that the book of Revelation is to be read as a unified work of religious poetry aimed at... extricating Christians from Roman society, in which they were living quietly and peacefully. Thompson considers connections between John’s negative view of society and his social location as a wandering prophet, compares his visionary experience with that of other prophets and seers, especially in Judaism, notes similarities between the depictions of Christ and Satan in Revelation and portraits of heroes and demons in other writings of the time, and emphasizes that John’s vision of heaven and the future were intended to infuse everyday Christian life with confidence in the goodness and ultimate triumph of God. “Thompson’s commentary on Revelation is written in an engaging literary style and, by presenting perceptive comparisons and contrasts with both Greco-Roman and Jewish literature—canonical and non-canonical—he highlights the distinctive features of this book. He deals effectively with the rhetorical and even the epistemological dimensions, while offering an illuminating and convincing proposal for the structure and thematic development of Revelation. In short, it is a most revealing and insightful analysis of this challenging early Christian writing, as it shows how this book addresses perennial human questions about divine purpose and human destiny.” –-Howard Clark Kee

"Like widely differing siblings raised by the same parents, each letter produced by Paul has its own distinguishing character. For the historically... minded critic, each letter’s unique traits provide important clues for detecting the circumstances in which Paul wrote it as well as what he hoped to achieve with it. Scholars assume that by examining the content of the letter (the “answer”), they can infer the readers’ situation that Paul is addressing (the “question”)--a method sometimes called “mirror reading.” In the case of Romans, however, both the particular traits and the overall content are so unusual that scholars continue to debate why Paul wrote precisely this letter and what he hoped to achieve by it in Rome."  So begins Leander Keck's seminal work on the New Testament book of Romans. Keck asserts that because Romans is part of the New Testament, we can compare it with the other letters ascribed to Paul, as well as with what Acts reports about his message and mission. But the first readers of Romans had only this letter; they could compare it only with what they may have heard about him. While this commentary does from time to time compare Romans with what Paul had said before, it concentrates on Romans itself; what Paul says in this text should not be conflated with--nor inflated into--what he thought comprehensively, though it is essential to understand that as well. "We do not really need another major commentary [on Romans] that loses us in the minutiae of word studies, literary parallels, sociological and rhetorical hypotheses; we have such in plenty. The Abingdon series, however, by its limited size, forces the contributor to focus on the primary task of the commentator: to clarify the meaning (intended or potential) of the words of the text and to provide some basic reflection on its/their continuing significance. And that is where Keck excels."   James D. G. Dunn, Review of Biblical Literature 04/2006.

The Abingdon Old Testament Commentaries series offers compact, critical commentaries on all the books of the Old Testament. In addition to providing... fundamental information on and insights into Old Testament writings, these commentaries exemplify the tasks and procedures of careful, critical exegesis so as to assist students of the Old Testament in coming to an informed engagement of the biblical texts themselves. These commentaries are written with special attention to the needs and interests of theology students, but they will also be useful for students in upper-level college or university settings, as well as for pastors and other church leaders. Each volume consists of four parts: -- an introduction that addresses the key issues raised by the writing; the literary genre, structure, and character of the writing; the occasional and situational context of the writing, including its wider social and historical context; and the theological and ethical significance of the writing within these several contexts-- a commentary on the text, organized by literary units, covering literary analysis, exegetical analysis, and theological and ethical analysis-- an annotated bibliography-- a brief subject index In this volume on Deuteronomy, Brueggemann shows the significance of the Book of Deuteronomy to the shape and substance of Israel's faith in the Old Testament.  Deuteronomy gave classic articulation to the main themes characteristic of Judaism, and, derivatively, of Christianity.  Brueggemann emphasizes that Deuteronomy is an expression of covenant theology, whereby YHWH and Israel are pledged to exclusive loyalty and fidelity to each other; YHWH is to assure the well-being of Israel, and Israel is to live in trust and obedience to YHWH.  In examining the relationship of Israel to God, Brueggemann makes suggestions on how such covenant fidelity might be lived out by believers today. "Brueggemann's commentary on the Book of Deuteronomy provides an accessible exegetical and theological understanding of a crucial biblical text. The introduction presents Deuteronomy as an expression of the radical Yahwistic alternative to the political rhetoric and ideology of the Israelite monarchy in the eighth and seventh centuries. Each section consists of an introduction, exegesis, and theological and ethical analysis of the essential elements that form the core of Deuteronomy's message to the Israelite community. The choice between 'covenant' and 'idol' that forms the crux of the text's message is further interpreted in light of the concern for covenant faithfulness as expressed in the rest of the OT and in the proclamation of the NT. Brueggemann explores how this same choice is reflected in the political and ideological voices that address the community of faith today. This commentary introduces the Book of Deuteronomy to theological students, pastors and teachers and points to the relevance of its message for those who seek to bring the alternative biblical message into the current cultural conversation."--Beverly White Cushman, Calvin College, in Religious Studies Review, Volume 29 Number 3, July 2003.

For more than eighty years the Jewish Daily Forward's legendary advice column, "A Bintel Brief" ("a bundle of letters") dispensed shrewd, practical, and... fair-minded advice to its readers. Created in 1906 to help bewildered Eastern European immigrants learn about their new country, the column also gave them a forum for seeking advice and support in the face of problems ranging from wrenching spiritual dilemmas to petty family squabbles to the sometimes hilarious predicaments that result when Old World meets New Isaac Metzker's beloved selection of these letters and responses has become for today's readers a remarkable oral record not only of the varied problems of Jewish immigrant life in America but also of the catastrophic events of the first half of our century.

A Biographical History of African Americans is the most comprehensive, pocket sized, scholarly volume on African American biography published in the... last three decades. The book gives an introductory overview to African American history, followed by a selection of notable African American subjects, arranged in four topical and chronological periods. It is diverse as to gender, geography and vocations. The work has been particularly concerned with profiling notable subjects who have not appeared in other dictionaries, directories or encyclopedias. While it can be used as a text or supplementary reader as well as a general reference work, its readable style will also appeal to a popular audience.