Best Selling Books by Geraldine M

Butcher Bird, Geraldine North''s collection of 26 short stories, captures universal aspects of the human experience within the peculiar ethos of rural Australia. The author reaches back to her experiences as an isolated, yet carefree and inquisitive child growing up on the family farm during the 1940s and ''50s. While they evoke the often-desolate ambiance of this remote region, her fictional representations attain a timeless quality defined by complex characters and well-wrought plots driven by familiar human impulses. Compelling, keenly written, sharply detailed, brightened by wit and sometimes brooding, these tales bring distinct slices of humanity into sharp focus.

Mickey has a hard time understanding the concept of honor until he has a talk with his grandmother about how honor operates in everyday life.

Rebeca tells how her uncle Conrad, who was a frail, sickly baby, was saved by his mother''s loving instincts.

Conrad refuses to do his chores until a dream offers him a lesson in responsibility.

Research suggests college students with high incidence disabilities experience more distress than their peers without disabilities as they adapt to college. The expressive writing paradigm developed by Pennebaker and Beall (1986) effectively reduced distress in college students and other nonclinical samples when participants wrote about emotions they experienced surrounding an upsetting event. Previous research on expressive writing has not addressed the effectiveness of the paradigm with students with disabilities. A randomized control trial study examined changes in distress and daily hassles for participants with disabilities who engaged in expressive writing compared to a control condition in which participants wrote about non-emotional topics. Emotional competencies and coping were also explored as possible proximal outcomes, while distress at baseline and social support were explored as possible moderators of expressive writing outcomes. Fifty seven students, 51% male and mostly European-American (83.6%), from a large, public university and a local community college both in the Southeastern United States, wrote for 15 minutes on three consecutive days on their own personal computers, with assessment at pre-test, post-test and 30-day follow-up. Expressive writing did not significantly decrease stress or daily hassles, nor did treatment condition differ from the control condition on any of the factors examined. Discussion of participant factors explored possible ceiling effects due to low baseline distress scores and possible limitations related to employing a sample of students with disabilities who are currently receiving college-level support services. Other methodological and procedural issues were also discussed as they relate to best expressive writing practices as well as meeting the needs of students with disabilities. For example, although use of the computer for writing was deemed important for this group of participants, longer writing sessions that may be necessary to impact psychological outcomes could be difficult for students with disabilities. Future directions include qualitative analysis of writing samples in order to develop areas of concern for this population, beginning and ending expressive writing to align with the college academic calendar, as well as use of a control group without disabilities in order to control for baseline levels of distress.

The purpose of this thesis is to investigate the idea that acting collectively, in associations, ordinary people can play a useful peacebuilding role. In both El Salvador and Colombia, accords signed as a result of elite-led negotiations for peace have had limited effect in reducing levels of violence. This thesis considers that rather than focusing predominantly on what can be achieved through negotiations, a more useful approach would be to examine the kind of peacebuilding activities which ordinary people are able to engage in, given the surrounding constraints. Chapter one explores the historical contexts of conflict in El Salvador and Colombia. Chapter two establishes the conceptual framework for the thesis. It reviews several different bodies of literature and explains the main ideas to be explored through empirical analysis in the case study chapters. Chapters three and four explore the limitations of elite-led negotiations for peace in El Salvador and Colombia respectively. Chapter five empirically explores six grassroots peacebuilding initiatives which provides the basis for a typology of peacebuilding strategies from ''below''. Chapter six explores how to create an infrastructure for peace which can help protect and validate spaces for grassroots peacebuilding. The conclusion argues that the international community and intermediary organisations have a dual role to play in acting as facilitators between different levels of peacebuilding activity, and in trying to prise open and maintain spaces for grassroots peacebuilding.

West, a Londoner by birth, settled in Birmingham in 1854, at a time when surgery was being transformed. Anaesthesia enabled surgeons to operate without subjecting patients to the agonising ordeals of the past and was adopted by West and his colleagues. James West kept a journal. The diary provides an insight into West''s character.