Publisher: Forbes Books
Western leaders face significant challenges when conducting business in Iraq, from navigating cultural differences to overcoming ingrained misconceptions. In Leadership Beyond Borders, Midhat Zwayen delivers a powerful guide to overcoming these obstacles with culturally attuned leadership practices.
This audiobook is narrated by an AI Voice. You go to work. You answer emails. You keep the house running and show up where people expect you to. From the outside, nothing looks wrong. But inside, something has gone quiet. You've been feeling frozen inside and going through the motions for weeks, maybe months, doing what needs to be done while the things that actually matter to you sit untouched. The project. The conversation. The decision. You think about them constantly. You just can't make yourself move toward them. If you've been asking yourself why can't I do anything when I'm not even sad, you are not lazy, ungrateful, or unmotivated. You are stuck in a nervous system state that most self-help books never address. It is called functional freeze, and it happens when your body activates a protective shutdown response while keeping just enough energy online to maintain daily functioning. You can perform. You can cope. But you cannot move forward. And no amount of goal-setting, discipline, or motivational advice will fix it, because the problem was never motivation. The problem is that your nervous system has classified forward action as unsafe.Show book
A Vita Nuova (pronounced [la ˈviːta ˈnwɔːva]; Italian for "The New Life") is a text by Dante Alighieri published in 1294. It is an expression of the medieval genre of courtly love in a prosimetrum style, a combination of both prose and verse.Show book
Accidental injury is the leading cause of death for Americans under the age of forty-five. From fatal traffic accidents to firearms injuries to casualties of war to a deadly virus passed to an elderly loved one, accidental harm dates back almost as far as our human stories go. When these accidents occur, they pose profound and agonizing questions: What do we do when a death falls somewhere between a murder and an insurance claim? What if we are responsible for such harm? Is healing even possible? Rooted in research on moral injury, religious rituals of confession and cleansing, and psychology—as well as the hard-won wisdom of someone who has been there—Accidental explores the complicated reality of accidental death and injury and offers companionship to those affected by these tragedies. Author, military veteran, and Episcopal priest David W. Peters walks with us through his own lonely journey after he unintentionally killed someone in a traffic accident and the journey of his family, as his brother was killed by a bus. Peters investigates the cars, guns, and systems that put some people and communities at more risk than others, and then draws wisdom from ancient cities of refuge, where accidental killers could find asylum. Accidental helps listeners accept responsibility, see themselves in the stories of others, and find absolution and community.Show book
China has always fascinated outsiders, much in the same way that distant light fascinates someone looking down a dark road. It is both familiar and mysterious, ancient and new, and fully understanding it seems to always remain just out of reach. From the Great Wall to the ancient teachings of Confucius, China’s natural and man-made wonders have been topics of interest among Westerners since the Middle Ages and the pursuit of trade routes both by land and sea, amazing Marco Polo and 19th century British expeditions in similar ways despite the passage of several centuries between them. The Great Wall of China is perhaps the wonder of the world that has most captured the human imagination, and as the quotes about it indicate, the wall has acquired special significance even outside of China. The places and ways in which it has taken hold vary greatly, but one thing is certain: the Great Wall of China is as amazing as it is mysterious, and it’s as mundane as it is magical. Naturally, the Wall has become the most recognizable symbol of China, used for both aggrandizement and criticism. Nationalists see it as a symbol of China's peaceful nature, engineering capability, and historic longevity, while detractors see the Wall as the embodiment of China's backwardness, closed-mindedness, and hubris. Though the wall can symbolize all of these things about China, it is important to remember that the many long walls. upon some of which the current landmark was constructed, were put up by specific people for specific purposes. People across the world were excited when it was revealed in 1974 that archaeologists had uncovered a new and amazing find: an underground army consisting of thousands of clay soldiers, still standing at their posts despite being over 2,000 years old. In addition to the remarkable feats of craftsmanship and the size and scale of the Terracotta Army, modern people could not quite wrap their minds around.Show book
What does it mean to obsess about clothes and appearances? For some of us, deciding what to wear can involve tension and torment as well as delight. What do we mean by 'looking classy' or 'power dressing'? What are the connections – or contradictions – between dress and desire, glamour and feminism? Do our choices reflect or challenge social values and constraints in women's lives? Appearances is both memoir and cultural history. It considers attitudes to personal appearance through four generations of women in the author's family, weaving memory through a wide-ranging exploration of fashion, femininity and feminism in the recent past.Show book
The power of Colette's work comes from its modernist storytelling. Colette was a pioneering, groundbreaking modernist writer, but has not always had her originality and worth recognized in Britain. Her work provocatively uses unstable narratives, gaps, silences, fairytale, mythical tropes, and sensual evocations of childhood, sex, and landscapes. In this book, Michèle Roberts examines how Colette invents new forms to express her unsettling content on desire, perversion, aging, and different forms of love. Delving into four key texts, Roberts explores Colette's willingness to break open taboos about older woman and desire, as well as hidden and forbidden aspects of human longings and pleasures. Through these re-readings, Roberts discovers that Colette's work is even more entrancing, more disturbing, and more original than she first thought.Show book
