Awesome Decency Album and Music Offers

Inner-city black America is often stereotyped as a place of random violence; in fact, violence in the inner city is regulated through an informal but well-known code of the street. How you dress, talk, and behave can have life-or-death consequences, with young people particularly at risk. This incisive book examines the code as a response to the lack of jobs that pay a living wage, to the stigma of race, to rampant drug use, to alienation and lack of hope. An individual's safety and sense of worth are determined by the respect he commands in public--a deference frequently based on an implied threat of violence. Unfortunately, even those with higher aspirations can often become entangled in the code's self-destructive behaviors. Winner of the Komarovsky Book Award..
Price: $10.00 [Notify me when price goes down.]

For almost ten years, Samuel Mockbee, a recent MacArthur Grant recipient, and his architecture students at Auburn University have been designing and building striking houses and community buildings for impoverished residents of Alabama's Hale County. Using salvaged lumber and bricks, discarded tires, hay and waste cardboard bales, concrete rubble, colored bottles, and old license plates, they create inexpensive buildings that bear the trademark of Mockbee's work, which he describes as "contemporary modernism grounded in Southern culture."

In a time of unexampled prosperity, when architectural attention focuses on big, glossy urban projects, the Rural Studio provides an alternative of substance. In addition to being a social welfare venture, the Rural Studio--"Taliesin South" as Mockbee calls it--is also an educational experiment and a prod to the architectural profession to act on its best instincts. In giving students hands-on experience in designing and building something real, it extends their education beyond paper architecture. And in scavenging and reusing a variety of unusual materials, it is a model of sustainable architecture. The work of Rural Studio has struck such a chord-both architecturally and socially--that it has been featured on Oprah, Nightline, and CBS News, as well as in Time and People magazines.

The Studio has completed more than a dozen projects, including the Bryant "Hay Bale" House, Harris "Butterfly" House, Yancey Chapel, Akron Chapel, Children's Center, H.E.R.O. Playground, Lewis House, Super Sheds and Pods, Spencer House addition, Farmer's Market, Mason's Bend Community Center, Goat House, and Shannon-Dutley House. These buildings, along with the incredible story of the Rural Studio, the people who live there, and Mockbee and his student architects, are detailed in this colorful book, the first on the subject. "I tell my students, it's got to be warm, dry, and noble"--Samuel Mockbee.
Price: $12.94 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Beloved American storyteller Philip Gulley evokes a time when life revolved around the front porch, where friends gathered, stories were told, and small moments took on large meaning. In today's hurry-up world, Gulley's observations are frank and funny, reminding us of the world we once shared, and can again.

With poignancy and humor, Gulley writes about small-town life, things he thinks about while sitting in his Quaker meeting, and why Donald Trump should pay more taxes. Porch Talk is a tribute to common folk, including Charlie the hardware priest, the Bettys at the newspaper, and other paragons of decency not many people know, but should.

.
Price: $11.44 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Richard J. Mouw outlines how we can communicate effectively and graciously with people who disagree with us on the issues that matter most..
Price: $4.47 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Feminists, socialists, Afro-Puerto Rican activists, and elite politicians join laundresses, prostitutes, and dissatisfied wives in populating the pages of Imposing Decency. Through her analyses of Puerto Rican anti-prostitution campaigns, attempts at reforming marriage, and working-class ideas about free love, Eileen J. Suárez Findlay exposes the race-related double standards of sexual norms and practices in Puerto Rico between 1870 and 1920, the period that witnessed Puerto Rico’s shift from Spanish to U.S. colonialism.
In showing how political projects and alliances in Puerto Rico were affected by racially contingent definitions of “decency” and “disreputability,” Findlay argues that attempts at moral reform and the state’s repression of “sexually dangerous” women were weapons used in batttles between elite and popular, American and Puerto Rican, and black and white. Based on a thorough analysis of popular and elite discourses found in both literature and official archives, Findlay contends that racialized sexual norms and practices were consistently a central component in the construction of social and political orders. The campaigns she analyzes include an attempt at moral reform by elite male liberals and a movement designed to enhance the family and cleanse urban space that ultimately translated into repression against symbollically darkened prostitutes. Findlay also explores how U.S. officials strove to construct a new colonial order by legalizing divorce and how feminist, labor, and Afro-Puerto Rican political demands escalated after World War I, often focusing on the rehabilitation and defense of prostitutes.
Imposing Decency forces us to rethink previous interpretations of political chronologies as well as reigning conceptualizations of both liberalism and the early working-class in Puerto Rico. Her work will appeal to scholars with an interest in Puerto Rican or Latin American studies, sexuality and national identity, women in Latin America, and general women’s studies.
.
Price: $20.00 [Notify me when price goes down.]

There is a philosophy of doing business that goes beyond the transfer of goods and services It calls for a transfer of values known as of small decencies

. .

This book shows the way.

. .

Steve Harrison, longtime management and corporate culture innovator, knows one simple truth: The long term success of any company, small or large, local or global, depends largely on its culture. Change a company's internal culture for the better, and results skyrocket. But can a manager really adjust the culture of an entire work force, especially in a large corporation? Small decencies make it easy, and in this book Harrison describes dozens of such decencies, all field-tested by the best companies in the world. All represent small changes that produce big results.

. .

Addressing concerns at every level of corporate culture, from the entry level to the CEO's office, Harrison shows how decencies will enhance communication, build teamwork, boost productivity, and create a stronger dedication to a shared mission company-wide. The Manager's Book of Decencies provides real-life examples of small decencies that result in major business impact, and that you can put to use in your company.

. .

What is a Small Decency?

.

.
• Greet coworkers authentically and personally.
• Remember to say thank you-or better yet, write thank you notes.
• For meetings you convene, be the first to sit down and the last to get up.
• Welcome visitors by name. Better yet call them �guests�.
• Answer your own telephone.
• Give away recognition when things go well; hoard responsibility when they don't.
• Convey bad news in person.
• When you make a mistake, admit it and apologize.

. .

The Manager's Book of Decencies delivers a top-to-bottom approach to creating the kind of positive corporate culture, which has shown time and again to improve performance, attract and retain top talent, promote well-behaved organizations, and advance a vision of shared values. This is crucial reading for every manager.

..
Price: $9.91 [Notify me when price goes down.]

In February of 2004, Senator Zell Miller delivered the speech "A Deficit of Decency" on the Senate floor. The speech considered the very soul of America and generated an unexpectedly massive response from people across the nation.

Expanding on this theme in his new book by the same title, former U.S. Senator and Georgia Governor Zell Miller identifies a wide range of issues—from media and sports role models, to the judiciary, to the decline of traditional Christian values of the family, responsibility and sacrifice—where an absence of decency is threatening the heart of America.

"A Deficit of Decency" addresses specific issues where Miller sees a need to return to a basic sense of duty. Miller writes in the preface, "There have been ten generations of Americans since this nation was founded….Each left this nation in a little better condition than they had inherited it from their parents. This is the first generation at risk of doing the opposite. Why? I have come to believe that it is because we failed to acknowledge and discipline ourselves with the spiritual truths that have made us great for these two hundred years—faith, family, country, values. This book is about how one man thinks they may be restored and yet save this great civilization from itself."

In "A Deficit of Decency," Miller also speaks candidly about the values that led him to attack his own party and deliver a keynote speech at the 2004 Republican National Convention. These same values, he believes, are desperately needed at the heart of American culture. Miller explains, "There were two primary reasons I could not go where my lifelong political party wanted to take me. I seriously questioned its judgment on how to respond to the threat of terrorism, the most serious national security issue of the post Cold War era. But I also came to be repelled by the secularism that had engulfed its thinking and smothered its soul."

Miller writes from the unique perspective of his rise to and service as Governor and United States Senator, drawing upon public service in each of the past six decades. Miller has written six books, including "Corps Values" and the New York Times bestseller "A National Party No More"..
Price: $1.90 [Notify me when price goes down.]

The people of Denmark managed to save almost their country's entire Jewish population from extinction in a spontaneous act of humanity - one of the most compelling stories of moral courage in the history of World War II. Drawing on many personal accounts, Emmy Werner tells the story of the rescue of the Danish Jews from the vantagepoint of living eyewitnesses- the last survivors of an extraordinary conspiracy of decency that triumphed in the midst of the horrors of the Holocaust. A Conspiracy of Decency chronicles the acts of people of good will from several nationalities. Among them were the German Georg F. Duckwitz, who warned the Jews of their impending deportation, the Danes who hid them and ferried them across the Oresund, and the Swedes who gave them asylum. Regardless of their social class, education, and religious and political persuasion, the rescuers all shared one important characteristic: they defined their humanity by their ability to act with great compassion. These people never considered themselves heroes - they simply felt that they were doing the right thing..
Price: $7.12 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Ben Wilson's The Making of Victorian Values is the history of an era rather like our own-a time when dissenters and rebels were hemmed in by conformists and hardheaded authoritarians, a time when a nation on the eve of global domination fretted about its future. It was, however, a period when those who argued that a British empire would be a disaster for liberty were eventually squashed by imperialists, just as those who railed against mindless materialism were in the end rolled over by industrialists and the promoters of luxury goods. The Making of Victorian Values reveals an era when people were obsessed with the need to appear authentic, and yet forever had doubts about who was and who wasn't-concerns familiar to the "me" age we know so well.

Wilson begins with the libertine spirit inspired by Byron, Shelley, and the Romantics; he ends with the rise and eventual victory of stolid middle-class values. The result is a radical tour de force, a brilliant reworking of the pre-Victorian age. Once portrayed by Paul Johnson in his bestselling The Birth of the Modern as the years when virtue finally trumped corruption, Wilson reveals a far more compelling story-and a more engrossing and scandalous one, too. It is a story about hypochondriacs and cranks, killjoys and dandies, rakes and priests, advocates of free-speech and those against it-people who were made awe struck by Britain's emerging role as the economic and political powerhouse of the world, but who were also deeply anxious about the responsibilities a vast empire might require.

Wilson is heir to the great radical historians of the twentieth century, E. J. Hobsbawm and E. P. Thompson, among them. He brushes aside scholarly politesse and refuses to join in unnecessary academic point-settling, and his invigorating literary abilities will win many admirers who would otherwise know this history only through the works of nineteenth-century fiction..
Price: $1.39 [Notify me when price goes down.]

An evocative history of a World War II German POW camp in New Hampshire, where friendships among prisoners, guards, and villagers overcame the bitter divisions of war..
Price: $9.00 [Notify me when price goes down.]