“Known Unto God”It was the war to end all wars and became one of the bloodiest and cruellest conflicts in history.Into the hands of author Mark Scott came a poignant survivor of those nightmare years – a notebook carried through the trenches by his great grandfather, Jimmy Scott, nestled in the pocket of his uniform. In it was a list of names, written with the tiny pencil still attached to the fragile cover....

Lance Corporal George Hackney of the 36th Ulster Division was an ordinary Belfast soldier who, contrary to military law at the time, took his camera away to war in 1915. The images he took have become an exceptional and rare collection that documents The Great War first hand.George's images of soldiers training, travelling to France, and relaxing with friends and comrades contrast with his later images from the first day of the Battle of the Somme, life in the trenches and poignant...

Stop. Listen. Step outside the echo chamber.How do we step outside our own echo chamber to understand others? What are we losing when we share fewer and fewer national moments?The new media is enabling despots and disempowering democracy. So when every opinion seems to matter equally, ON US invites us to switch our devices off and to read uninterrupted. It contemplates why more information often means less insight.

Poetic revelations that take you on a journey with the author as he vacillates over a command from God imploring him to leave a six-figure management position at the height of his career. After obeying the command and allowing his employment contract to expire, his vociferous discourse with God escalates as he faces the mounting pressures that arise in the wake of unemployment. Each poetic revelation, short story, and parable spills onto the pages with an urgency to express the authors con...

Rural Places and Planning provides a compact analysis for students and early-career practitioners of the critical connections between place capitals and the broader ideas and practices of planning, seeded within rural communities. It looks across twelve international cases, examining the values that guide the pursuit of the ‘good countryside’.The book presents rural planning – rooted in imagination and reflecting key values – as being embedded in the life of particular places, deal...

Maclay School's Journal of Creative WritingOn our title: We take the title of this journal from a novella of the same name by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. The novella is an existential piece, written before Dostoyevsky's greatest works and before Existentialism had really taken root in literature. The unnamed narrator is frequently named an anti-hero and is described by the note on the back of the Dover edition as a "profoundly alienated individual in whose brooding self-an...

In 2003, eight Ulstermen – some of the last surviving veterans of the 1944 D-Day invasion of France – were interviewed for the film documentary We Fought on D-Day by DoubleBand Films in Belfast. The author has been given access to previously-unseen interview material not aired in the original film. Delving into the veterans' testimonies, he reveals previously-untold stories of courage, triumph and tragedy that were endured by a group of ordinary men who each played their part in t...

Ireland is now an urban society, and both parts of the island have experienced rapid urban-generated growth and new patterns of development in recent years. This inter-disciplinary book adopts an all-Ireland perspective to investigate the tension that exists between sustainable urban development values and rhetoric - such as increased densities, brown field development, the compact city and social inclusion - and the emerging geography of urban Ireland, influenced by consumer and lifestyle...

In this, the first book of a trilogy, reporter Bruce Martin stumbles upon a most subtle but lethal terrorist attack. He discovers that for months a confederacy of America's enemies have been smuggling high grade cocaine laced with the deadly Spanish Influenza virus. The secretive nature of the drug culture has allowed the virus to explode across the country without anybody realizing what has actually happened. Martin attempts to sound the alarm but a corrupt and paranoid government moves t...

Warren Buffett famously invoked the metaphor of a tapeworm when describing what healthcare is to the American economy. The United States spends approximately 20% of its gross national product on healthcare, but it is unclear where the money goes or who is minding the store. This healthcare crisis is mostly about money--not lack of money, but rather misspending of money.From the perspective of a healthcare auditor and provider, this work describes the problems of American healthcare...

This book is more than the story of a small, rural Oregon hospital’s successful attempt to profoundly change for the better the way patients, their families and friends, staff and employees experience healthcare. It is the account of an extraordinary effort that led to a remarkable transformation of an entire organization, the man who directed it and, gradually, is changing the industry as a whole.During the 1990s Mid-Columbia Medical Center became the first hospital to implement t...

How do we step outside our own echo chamber to understand others? What are we losing when we share fewer and fewer national moments? The new media is enabling despots and disempowering democracy. So when every opinion seems to matter equally, On Us offers a few more on choice in a concentrated media world and asks why more information often means less insight.