The 1990s saw a shock wave of dynamic new directing talent that took the Hollywood studio system by storm. At the forefront of that movement were six innovative and daring directors whose films pushed the boundaries of moviemaking and announced to the world that something exciting was happening in Hollywood. Sharon Waxman, editor and chief of The Wrap.com and for Hollywood reporter for the New York Times spent the decade covering these young filmmakers, and in Rebels on the Backlot she weaves together the lives and careers of Quentin Tarantino, Pulp Fiction; Steven Soderbergh, Traffic; David Fincher, Fight Club; Paul Thomas Anderson, Boogie Nights; David O. Russell, Three Kings; and Spike Jonze, Being John Malkovich.

They defied death by being such good girls keeping secrets, staying out of sight, and suffering in frightened silence.Sophie pictured on the cover survived the Holocaust without even knowing she was Jewish, while her terrified, widowed mother worked for the Nazis in Poland under the guise of a Christian bookkeeper.Flora, orphaned by Final Solution, was shuttled through southern France, from convents to the homes of one Christian family after another, unsure of who she really was.Carla and her family took shelter in the apartment of a Dutch barber, while, one floor below, the man who protected them would cut German soldiers' hair.Sophie Turner-Zaretsky, Flora Hogman, and Carla Lessing (and her husband, Ed) survived not only the Holocaust among the mere 10 percent of European Jewish children who did but their own survival. Each of them ended up in New York, where they slowly emerged from the traumas of their childhoods, devoted their careers to helping others, and played important roles in the groundbreaking 1991 event that, for the first time, brought together the hidden child survivors scattered around the world.A chance meeting with Sophie sent author R. D. Rosen, a privileged Jewish American child of the suburbs, on a journey to grasp the scope of Nazi extermination of Europe's Jews and to honor hidden children, the very last generation of survivors to have witnessed the Holocaust firsthand.

In this unique biography of Thomas Jefferson, leading journalist and social critic Christopher Hitchens offers a startlingly new and provocative interpretation of our Founding Father. Situating Jefferson within the context of America's evolution and tracing his legacy over the past two hundred years, Hitchens brings the character of Jefferson to life as a man of his time and also as a symbolic figure beyond it.Conflicted by power, Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence and acted as Minister to France yet yearned for a quieter career in the Virginia legislature. Predicting that slavery would shape the future of America's development, this professed proponent of emancipation elided the issue in the Declaration and continued to own human property. An eloquent writer, he was an awkward public speaker; a reluctant candidate, he left an indelible presidential legacy.Jefferson's statesmanship enabled him to negotiate the Louisiana Purchase with France, doubling the size of the nation, and he authorized the Lewis and Clark expedition, opening up the American frontier for exploration and settlement. Hitchens also analyzes Jefferson's handling of the Barbary War, a lesser-known chapter of his political career, when his attempt to end the kidnapping and bribery of Americans by the Barbary states, and the subsequent war with Tripoli, led to the building of the U.S. navy and the fortification of America's reputation regarding national defense.In the background of this sophisticated analysis is a large historical drama: the fledgling nation's struggle for independence, formed in the crucible of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, and, in its shadow, the deformation of that struggle in the excesses of the French Revolution. This artful portrait of a formative figure and a turbulent era poses a challenge to anyone interested in American history -- or in the ambiguities of human nature.

Garden & Gun magazine's aptly named Good Dog column—which features true stories of canines and the humans who love them—is one of the publication's most popular features. Now editor in chief David DiBenedetto and the editors of Garden & Gun have gathered their favorite essays as well as original pieces to create this must-read collection of dog ownership, companionship, and kinship. By turns humorous, inspirational, and poignant, Good Dog offers beautifully crafted essays from such notable writers as P. J. O'Rourke, Jon Meacham, Julia Reed, and Roy BlountJr. From the troublemakers who can't be fenced in to the lifelong companions who never leave our sides, this one-of-a-kind anthology showcases man's best friend through all of his most endearing (and maddening) attributes.

Finding Life in RuinsJump into a battered Indiana Jones style Jeep with the intrepid Marilyn Johnson and head down bone-rattling roads in search of those who dig up the past. Johnson, the author of two acclaimed books about quirky subcultures The Dead Beat (about obituary writers) and This Book Is Overdue! (about librarians) brings her irrepressible wit and curiosity to bear on yet another strange world, that of archaeologists. Who chooses to work in ruinsWhat's the allure of sifting through layers of dirt under a hot sunWhy do archaeologists care so passionately about what's dead and buried and why should we?Johnson tracks archaeologists around the globe from the Caribbean to the Mediterranean, from Newport, Rhode Island to Machu Picchu. She digs alongside experts on an eighteenth-century sugar plantation and in a first-century temple to Apollo. She hunts for bodies with forensics archaeologists in the vast and creepy Pine Barrens of New Jersey, drinks beer with an archaeologist of ancient beverages, and makes stone tools like a caveman. By turns amusing and profound, Lives in Ruins and its wild cast of characters find new ways to consider what is worth salvaging from our past.Archaeologists are driven by the love of history and the race to secure its evidence ahead of floods and bombs, looters and thieves, and before the bulldozers move in. Why spend your life in ruinsTo uncover our hidden stories before they disappear.

It was a cold late autumn day when I brought my children to live in rural West Virginia. The farmhouse was one hundred years old, there was already snow on the ground, and the heat was sparse as was the insulation. The floors weren't even, either. My then-twelve-year-old son walked in the door and said, 'You've brought us to this slanted little house to die.'Thus begins former romance writer Suzanne McMinn's wild ride into self-sustainable living halfway up a hill on one of the most remote dirt roads in West Virginia, with a cast including her children, an enigmatic partner, the rural neighborhood of quirky characters, and a whole slew of ridiculous and uncooperative farm animals. An unlikely adventurer, the suburban-born-and-bred author tackles one daunting challenge after another on her new forty-acre farm, from hatching chickens and milking a cow to herding sheep and making her own cheese. Whether she's trying to convince a goat to accept its baby or just get her ornery neighbor to move over and let her pass on the road, every page of her adventure is fraught with laughter, passion, drama, and the risk of losing it all before she figures out why she's doing it in the first place. And when she does lose it all, she discovers a triumph she never expected along with the truth for which she'd been searching all along.

In 2008, Aspen Matis left behind her quaint Massachusetts town for a school two thousand miles away. Eager to escape her childhood as the sheltered baby girl of her family, Aspen wanted to reinvent herself at college. She hoped that far from home she'd meet friends who hadn't known her high school meekness; she would explore thrilling newfound freedom, blossom, and become a confident adult. But on her second night on campus, all those hopes were obliterated when Aspen was raped by a fellow student.The academic year commenced; Aspen felt alone now, devastated. She stumbled through her first college semester. Her otherwise loving and supportive parents discouraged her from speaking of the attack; her university's "conflict mediation" process for handling sexual assaults was callous then ineffectual. Aspen was confused, ashamed, and uncertain about how to deal with a problem that has disturbingly become common at institutions of higher learning throughout the country. Her desperation growing, she made a bold decision: she fled. She dropped out and sought healing in the freedom of the wild, on the 2,650-mile Pacific Crest Trail leading from Mexico to Canada.In this important and inspiring memoir, Aspen chronicles an ambitious five-month trek that was as dangerous as it was transformative. Forced to survive on her own for the first time, squarely facing her trauma and childhood, she came to realize that the rape was not the only shameful burden she carried with her as she walked. She found herself on a new expedition: to confront and overcome the confines that had bound her since long before her second night at college.A nineteen-year-old girl alone and adrift, Aspen conquered desolate mountain passes and met rattlesnakes, bears, and fellow desert pilgrims. Among the snowcaps and the forests of America's West, she found the confidence that had eluded her all her life. After a thousand miles of solitude, she met a man who helped her learn to love, trust, and heal. Then from the endless woods she blazed a new path to the future she wanted and reclaimed it.What emerges is an unflinching portrait of a girl in the aftermath of rape. Told with elegance and suspense, Girl in the Woods is a beautifully rendered story of emotional and physical boundaries eroding to reveal the truths that lie beyond the edges of the map.

Are you a narcissistWhat is narcissismis one of the fastest-rising searches on Google, and articles on the topic routinely go viral. Yet the word narcissism seems to mean something different each time it's uttered. In fact, the more it's slung about, the more elusive its true meaning becomes. The only certainty, it would seem, is that it's bad to be a narcissist really bad. That's terrible news for millennials, who've been branded the most narcissistic generation ever. In Rethinking Narcissism, Dr. Craig Malkin a Harvard Medical School Instructor and clinical psychologist with more than two decades of clinical experience offers a radically new model for understanding this often misused term. Narcissism, argues Dr. Malkin, is essentially a spectrum of self-importance and everyone falls somewhere on the scale between utter selflessness and total arrogance. When we casually invoke the term narcissist most of us are referring to the outer edge of the spectrum, which can shade into dangerous psychopathy. But there are also those who live at the lower end of the spectrum dubbed echoists by Dr. Malkin. These, too, are people we know; people so fearful of attention or acknowledgment that they often seem to have no voice at all. Drawing on his own research as well as on the latest findings in psychology, Dr. Malkin uses vivid stories of people from all walks of life to teach concrete strategies for spotting and coping with excessive narcissism. At the same time, he explains why embracing some degree of narcissism the drive to feel special is essential to maintaining a healthy sense of self-worth. Using his new tool , the Narcissism Test, he not only guides readers through the process of measuring their narcissism, but also offers step-by-step advice to prevent unhealthy narcissism and to nurture healthy narcissism in ourselves as well as in our partners, our colleagues, and our children.As practical as it is wise, Rethinking Narcissism doesn't just help people avoid the temptations and dangers of extreme narcissism and narcissists in both the real world and cyberspace; it helps everyone, including people who don't feel special enough, to find their voices and live a more passionate, fulfilling life.

A decade ago Philip Connors left work as an editor at the Wall Street Journal and talked his way into a job far from the streets of lower Manhattan: working as one of the last fire lookouts in America. Spending nearly half the year in a 7' x 7' tower, 10,000 feet above sea level in remote New Mexico, his tasks were simple: keep watch over one of the most fire-prone forests in the country and sound the alarm at the first sign of smoke.Fire Season is Connors's remarkable reflection on work, our place in the wild, and the charms of solitude. The landscape over which he keeps watch is rugged and roadless it was the first region in the world to be officially placed off limits to industrial machines and it typically gets hit by lightning more than 30,000 times per year. Connors recounts his days and nights in this forbidding land, untethered from the comforts of modern life: the eerie pleasure of being alone in his glass-walled perch with only his dog Alice for company; occasional visits from smokejumpers and long-distance hikers; the strange dance of communion and wariness with bears, elk, and other wild creatures; trips to visit the hidden graves of buffalo soldiers slain during the Apache wars of the nineteenth century; and always the majesty and might of lightning storms and untamed fire. Written with narrative verve and startling beauty, and filled with reflections on his literary forebears who also served as lookouts among them Edward Abbey, Jack Kerouac, Norman Maclean, and Gary Snyder Fire Season is a book to stand the test of time.

Malachy McCourt, bestselling author of A Monk Swimming, shares the extraordinary story of how he went from living the headlong and heedless life of a world-class drunk to becoming a sober, loving father and grandfather, still happily married after thirty-five years.Bawdy and funny, naked and moving, told in the same inimitable voice that left readers all over the world wondering what happened next in A Monk Swimming, Singing My Him Song is "told with the frankness and honesty for which McCourt has become renowned" (New York Daily News).

Khaliah Ali, daughter of Muhammad Ali, shares her success at overcoming obesity through banding surgery—a minimally invasive, reversible, and extremely effective choice for drastically overweight peopleWhen Muhammad Ali's daughter Khaliah hit 325 pounds, she didn't need to be told again that she was morbidly obese. A lifetime of dieting, of starving, had not helped. Miserable, depressed, and unable to walk up a flight of stairs without losing her breath, she did not know which way to turn—until a friend pointed her toward a new type of surgery called gastric banding. It is just as effective as gastric bypass but with a fraction of potential complications. With the band placed around her stomach and completely taking away her hunger, Khaliah slimmed down to half her former size. Khaliah wraps her story of weight loss in this memoir of what it was like to grow up the daughter of one of the world's most famous men, and teams up with her surgeons at the New York University Medical Center to detail the lifetime of misery suffered by an obese girl; the ins and outs of the banding operation; and the joy, serenity, and health resulting from a solution that until now had eluded her.

Meet Tom Ripple, a man with an uncommon outlook on his common life. Through the vividness of his voice and his growing sense of the sorrow and absurdity of the world, Tom Ripple becomes an unusually appealing antihero, aware of his ordinariness and the limits of his intelligence, with a ribald sense of humor, and a clumsiness in his attempts at emotional connection with others. He is a bewildered everyman navigating his way through modern times. By turns poignant, funny, heartbreaking, and profound, It's All Right Now is a towering achievement and a singular work of the imagination.

Over 140 practical recipes to help you make sense of your data with ease and build production-ready data apps About This Book Analyze Big Data sets, create attractive visualizations, and manipulate and process various data types Packed with rich recipes to help you learn and explore amazing algorithms for statistics and machine learning Authored by Ivan Idris, expert in python programming and proud author of eight highly reviewed books Who This Book Is For This book teaches Python data analysis at an intermediate level with the goal of transforming you from journeyman to master. Basic Python and data analysis skills and affinity are assumed. What You Will Learn Set up reproducible data analysis Clean and transform data Apply advanced statistical analysis Create attractive data visualizations Web scrape and work with databases, Hadoop, and Spark Analyze images and time series data Mine text and analyze social networks Use machine learning and evaluate the results Take advantage of parallelism and concurrency In Detail Data analysis is a rapidly evolving field and Python is a multi-paradigm programming language suitable for object-oriented application development and functional design patterns. As Python offers a range of tools and libraries for all purposes, it has slowly evolved as the primary language for data science, including topics on: data analysis, visualization, and machine learning. Python Data Analysis Cookbook focuses on reproducibility and creating production-ready systems. You will start with recipes that set the foundation for data analysis with libraries such as matplotlib, NumPy, and pandas. You will learn to create visualizations by choosing color maps and palettes then dive into statistical data analysis using distribution algorithms and correlations. You’ll then help you find your way around different data and numerical problems, get to grips with Spark and HDFS, and then set up migration *s for web mining. In this book, you will dive deeper into recipes on spectral analysis, smoothing, and bootstrapping methods. Moving on, you will learn to rank stocks and check market efficiency, then work with metrics and clusters. You will achieve parallelism to improve system performance by using multiple threads and speeding up your code. By the end of the book, you will be capable of handling various data analysis techniques in Python and devising solutions for problem scenarios. Style and Approach The book is written in “cookbook” style striving for high realism in data analysis. Through the recipe-based format, you can read each recipe separately as required and immediately apply the knowledge gained.

This book is intended for software developers who want to use parallel programming techniques to write powerful and efficient code. After reading this book, you will be able to master the basics and the advanced features of parallel computing. The Python programming language is easy to use and allows nonexperts to deal with and easily understand the topics exposed in this book.

If you are a Java developer or administrator with a technical background and want to install and configure Liferay Portal as an enterprise intranet, this is the book for you. In short, reusable recipes help you realize business goals as working features in Liferay. This book will also give you useful hints on how to easily improve the default functionality of the system and its performance.

This book is aimed at anyone interested in creating impressive data visualization tools using modern graphics hardware. Whether you are a developer, engineer, or scientist, if you are interested in exploring the power of OpenGL for data visualization, this book is for you. While familiarity with C/C++ is recommended, no previous experience with OpenGL is assumed.

This is an excellent handbook for system administrators, support professionals, or for anyone intending to give themselves a headstart in learning how to install, configure, and manage a vSphere environment. It is also a good task-oriented reference guide for consultants or infrastructure architects who design and deploy vSphere environments.

This book is intended for all Camel users who want to get the best out of Camel, and who want to implement the most efficient integration logic using best practices.

If you work with Lync on a daily basis or if you have to use a specific feature of Lync for a project, this is the book for you. For solutions architects, technical consultants, and administrators, if you have a Lync deployment and you want to upgrade, integrate, secure, or extend it to the cloud, you can get valuable information from the recipes in this book.

If you are a forensic analyst or an information security professional wanting to develop your knowledge of Android forensics, then this is the book for you. Some basic knowledge of the Android mobile platform is expected.

If you are a Big Data enthusiast and wish to use Hadoop v2 to solve your problems, then this book is for you. This book is for Java programmers with little to moderate knowledge of Hadoop MapReduce. This is also a one-stop reference for developers and system admins who want to quickly get up to speed with using Hadoop v2. It would be helpful to have a basic knowledge of software development using Java and a basic working knowledge of Linux.