**ONE OF THE BEST COOKBOOKS OF THE YEAR: Los Angeles Times, Serious EatsGroundbreaking recipes for real desserts—sweetened entirely by fruit and other natural, unexpectedly sweet ingredients—from a pastry cook who’s worked at acclaimed restaurants in New York and France.**Brian Levy spent years making pastries the traditional way, with loads of refined sugar and white flour, at distinguished restaurants, inns, and private homes in the United States and Europe. But ...

In Chasin' the Sound: Learning Jazz Improvisation through Historical Models, authors Brian Levy and Keith Waters use solos by famous jazz musicians to outline a melodic and rhythmic vocabulary of jazz improvisation. In contrast to mainstream approaches based on rote memorization and generic chord/scale pedagogies, Chasin' the Sound encourages hands-on learning with activities that highlight the intangible yet key aesthetics of sound, groove, and feel. By studying jazz fun...

The development discourse has long been dominated by best practices prescriptions for reform, but these are not a useful way of responding to the governance ambiguities of the early 21st century. Working with the Grain draws on both innovative scholarship and Brian Levy's quarter century of experience at the World Bank to lay out an alternative-a practical, analytically grounded, "with-the-grain" approach to reducing poverty and addressing weaknesses in governance. Best practice p...

Few concepts have captured the imagination of the conflict and development community in recent years as powerfully as the idea of a 'political settlement'. At its most ambitious, 'political settlements analysis' (PSA) promises to explain why conflicts occur and states collapse, the conditions for their successful rehabilitation, different developmental pathways from peace, and how to better fit development policy to country context. Yet not all is well in the world of PSA. Rival definition...

Fulfilling the Export Potential of Small and Medium Firms addresses the question, `How can economic policy contribute to a strong export performance by small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in developing countries?' In today's increasingly integrated world economy, such a performance can make a significant difference to the growth, employment creation and income distribution of many developing countries. The study uses information from specifically designed surveys of SME exporters ...

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. All over the world, economic inclusion has risen to the top of the development discourse. A well-performing education system is central to achieving inclusive development - but the challenge of improving educational outcomes has proven to be unexpectedly difficult. A...

Problem-driven political economy analysis holds considerable promise for development practitioners seeking to identify policies and strategies that are most likely to deliver solutions for difficult development challenges. This volume takes stock of the World Bank's experiences applying this approach. The eight good practice cases presented in this volume illustrate recent Bank achievements. Problem-Driven Political Economy Analysis: The World Bank's Experience shows how political economy ...

The Hugging Tree captures a moment in time when we realize that together we can be stronger than apart and how embracing that idea can remove any limits from our lives.

Island life can be deadly.For Ollie Arias, owning an island in Micronesia is beyond his wildest dreams. Moving his best friends from college to share his dream…priceless. A little urban exploration of the abandoned military lab unearths strange, dark secrets. And awakens a slumbering beast that has gone decades without food. Ollie and his pals have unwittingly unleashed a deadly infection above, and a prehistoric killing machine below. The storm of the century is h...

Elphy Grey is the story of an eight-year-old boy, Paul, who has moved into a new home and is spending a very lonely and boring summer. One day, as he is exploring in the basement, he finds something that changes his life. Paul uses imagination and magic to overcome loneliness. Elphy Grey is a story that will help children understand how important their imaginations are in overcoming family and personal problems.

Is it possible to hold on to faith in an age of unbelief?Intellectual certainty has long been a cornerstone of the Christian faith. But in an age of secularism, skepticism, and cynicism, our worldviews have been shaken. Various solutions exist—some double down on certainty, while others deconstruct their faith until there is nothing left at all. But Brian Zahnd offers a third way: what is needed is not a demolition but instead a renovation of fait...

Hollywood is indelibly printed in our minds as the ‘go-to’ place for entertainment and has been for decades. When there really did seem to be more stars in Hollywood than in Heaven Hollywood Stage had them performing films as radio plays – on the sponsors dime of course. Classic films now become audiobooks with many featuring the original stars from way back when. Here's Jezebel starring Loretta Young & Brian Donlevy.