Showing results for "greg downs"

Money problems aren't math problems.They're human problems.After losing nearly everything to alcohol-his freedom, career, savings, and sense of self-Greg Downs walked into a recovery meeting and started working the Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous. What he discovered changed his life: The same principles that help people recover from addiction can also transform their relationship with money.Greg spent 14 years as a financial ad...

With a reporter's eye for the inside story and a historian's grasp of the ironies in our collective past, Greg Downs affectionately observes some of the last survivors of what Greil Marcus has called the old, weird America. Living off the map and out of sight, folks like Embee, Rudy, Peg, and Branch define themselves by where they are, not by what they eat, drink, or wear.The man who is soon to abandon his family in "Ain't I a King, Too?" is mistaken for the populist autocrat of Lo...

The First Matildas is the story of the women who played for Australia in the Asian Cup Ladies Football Tournament held in Hong Kong in 1975. Australia took part along with teams from Hong Kong, Malaysia, New Zealand, Singapore, and Thailand. The tournament, which was the forerunner to what is known today as the Asian Football Confederation's Women's Asian Cup, was won by New Zealand with Australia placed third.It was a turning point for women's football in Australia.

The Matildas are now one of the most beloved national teams in Australia. But who were the women and men who helped build and develop the women's game locally?Greg Downes profiles 18 people - some well-known in the football fraternity, others not so well-known - who have made contributions, big and small, to help make the women's game what it is today. 'Dedicated Lives' is a living history to be treasured.Based on his PhD dissertation, Greg has talked with, and interviewed,...

This collection of eleven original essays interrogates the concept of freedom and recenters our understanding of the process of emancipation. Who defined freedom, and what did freedom mean to nineteenth-century African Americans, both during and after slavery? Did freedom just mean the absence of constraint and a widening of personal choice, or did it extend to the ballot box, to education, to equality of opportunity? In examining such questions, rather than defining every aspect of postem...

In his Gettysburg Address, Abraham Lincoln promised that the nation’s sacrifices during the Civil War would lead to a “new birth of freedom.” Lincoln’s Unfinished Work analyzes how the United States has attempted to realize—or subvert—that promise over the past century and a half. The volume is not solely about Lincoln, or the immediate unfinished work of Reconstruction, or the broader unfinished work of America coming to terms with its tangled history of race; it investigates all...

These stories are enveloped by change and the changes that shift the trajectories of our lives: change that shatters us, change that opens the world, and change from which we can never come back. These fourteen stories tell us about extensive and inevitable changes and how we realign ourselves and our lives, if we can.

On May 1, 1866, a minor exchange between white Memphis city police and a group of black Union soldiers quickly escalated into murder and mayhem. Changes wrought by the Civil War and African American emancipation sent long-standing racial, economic, cultural, class, and gender tensions rocketing to new heights. For three days, a mob of white men roamed through South Memphis, leaving a trail of blood, rubble, and terror in their wake. By May 3, at least forty-six African American men, women,...

Aunt Blythe's house gives Drew the creeps—it's full of dark rooms, creaky noises, and the sound of a woman sobbing somewhere in the shadows. Then, in the middle of the night, Drew awakens to find a boy standing in his room . . . a boy who is Drew's exact double, except he looks as if he's come from the grave. He wants Drew to help him by traveling to a place where he will meet the spirits of long-dead ancestors . . . a place from which Drew may never return.

When sixteen-year-old Cynda goes to stay with her father and his second wife, Susan, at their remote bed-and-breakfast inn in Maine, everything starts off well despite legends about ghosts and a murder at the inn. But Cynda feels like a visitor in Dad's new life, an outsider. Then intense, handsome stranger Vincent Morthanos arrives at the inn and seems to return Cynda's interest. At first, she is blind to the subtle, insistent signs that Vincent is not what he seems-that he is, in fact, a...

Against the ominous backdrop of the influenza epidemic of 1918, Elsie, the class tattletale, liar, and thief, claims the new girl at school, Annie, as her best friend. But Annie soon makes other friends as well and finds herself joining them in teasing and tormenting Elsie, who later succumbs to the epidemic and dies. Elsie is not absent from school long though. She soon returns there as a ghost, ready to reclaim Annie's friendship and to punish all the girls who bullied her.

Ashley Cummings is happy to leave Baltimore and the sad memories it holds for her and her widowed mom. But there's something strange about their new place. Sometimes, in the middle of the night, Ashley is sure she hears a child crying out in the darkness. When she and her friend, Kristi, find a doll in the garden, Ashley wants to keep it for herself. But an eerie encounter makes it clear that the doll's rightful owner wants it back...even though she died seven years ago.