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      • Optima Communications

        Lisa Bjerke is the owner and director of Optima Communications. Optima Communications provides customized assessments, coaching, training, and workshops to meet the unique communication needs of each individual, group or organization. Training is facilitated onsite in the workplace or virtually. Lisa has a Master’s degree in Speech-Language Pathology. She is a corporate communication coach working with clients to enhance communication skills. These skills include: active listening, clear verbal expression, emotional intelligence, cultural diversity and communication, and managing difficult conversations.  Lisa is a communication and professionalism coach with the University of Calgary’s Cumming School of Medicine and Post Graduate Medical Education Program. Lisa is a recognized expert in accent assessment and training. She is the author of Accent on Canadian English: a pronunciation program for speakers of English as a second language™, Accent on Canadian English™ e-book, Accent on Clear English™ International e-book and the Accent on Canadian English Pronunciation Assessment Kit™. She is also the creator of the Accent on Clear English™ eCourse  https://acetraining.online

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      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        March 2017

        Air empire

        British imperial civil aviation, 1919–39

        by Gordon Pirie, Andrew Thompson, John M. MacKenzie

        Air empire is a fresh study of civil aviation as a tool of late British imperialism. The first pioneering flights across the British empire in 1919-20 were flag-waving adventures that recreated an era of plucky British maritime exploration and conquest. Britain's development of international air routes and services was approved, organised and celebrated largely in London; there was some resistance in and beyond the subordinate colonies and dominions. Negotiating the financing and geopolitics of regular commercial air service delayed its inception until the 1930s. Technological, managerial and logistical problems also meant that Britain was slow into the air and slow in the air. Propaganda concealed underperformance and criticism. The study uses archival sources, biographies, industry magazines and newspapers to chronicle the disputed progress toward air empire. The rhetoric behind imperial air service offers a glimpse of late imperial hopes, fears, attitudes and style. Empire air service had emotional appeal and symbolic value, but disappointed in practice.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        February 2017

        Cultures and caricatures of British imperial aviation

        Passengers, pilots, publicity

        by Gordon Pirie, Andrew Thompson, John M. MacKenzie

        The new activity of trans-continental civil flying in the 1930s is a useful vantage point for viewing the extension of British imperial attitudes and practices. Cultures and caricatures of British imperial aviation examines the experiences of those (mostly men) who flew solo or with a companion (racing or for leisure), who were airline passengers (doing colonial administration, business or research), or who flew as civilian air and ground crews. For airborne elites, flying was a modern and often enviable way of managing, using and experiencing empire. On the ground, aviation was a device for asserting old empire: adventure and modernity were accompanied by supremacism. At the time, however, British civil imperial flying was presented romantically in books, magazines and exhibitions. Eighty years on, imperial flying is still remembered, reproduced and re-enacted in caricature.

      • Trusted Partner
        Children's & YA
        January 2011

        The Boy Who Saw the Color of Air

        by Abdo Wazen

        In his first YA novel, cultural journalist and author Abdo Wazen writes about a blind teenager in Lebanon who finds strength and friendship among an unlikely group.   Growing up in a small Lebanese village, Bassim’s blindness limits his engagement with the materials taught in his schools. Despite his family’s love and support, his opportunities seem limited.   So at thirteen years old, Bassim leaves his village to join the Institute for the Blind in a Beirut suburb. There, he comes alive. He learns Braille and discovers talents he didn’t know he had. Bassim is empowered by his newfound abilities to read and write.   Thanks to his newly developed self-confidence, Bassim decides to take a risk and submit a short story to a competition sponsored by the Ministry of Education. After winning the competition, he is hired to work at the Institute for the Blind.   At the Institute, Bassim, a Sunni Muslim, forms a strong friendship with George, a Christian. Cooperation and collective support are central to the success of each student at the Institute, a principle that overcomes religious differences. In the book, the Institute comes to symbolize the positive changes that tolerance can bring to the country and society at large.   The Boy Who Saw the Color of Air is also a book about Lebanon and its treatment of people with disabilities. It offers insight into the vital role of strong family support in individual success, the internal functioning of institutions like the Institute, as well as the unique religious and cultural environment of Beirut.   Wazen’s lucid language and the linear structure he employs result in a coherent and easy-to-read narrative. The Boy Who Saw the Color of Air is an important contribution to a literature in which people with disabilities are underrepresented. In addition to offering a story of empowerment and friendship, this book also aims to educate readers about people with disabilities and shed light on the indispensable roles played by institutions like the Institute.

      • Trusted Partner

        To Win the Battles

        by The Editorial Board of Nangjing Military Command

        This book selects events from 40 different conflicts. It vividly explains the heroic spirit of the People’s Army, and shows the tenacity of the blood and courage of these soldiers. This entire book is groundbreaking and cutting-edge. It’s an ingenious conception, with in-depth commentary, lively language, and boasts both graphics and text – it is well suited to the tastes of young readers. This book is worthy of the troops, extendable to the youth, acts as an assistance to middle-school children who are beginning their Patriotism studies, pays homage to Revolutionary heroes, and even acts as an educational reader to the battles of the past.

      • Trusted Partner

        To Win the Battles(Intensive version)

        by The Editorial Board of Nangjing Military Command

        This book selects events from 40 different conflicts. It vividly explains the heroic spirit of the People’s Army, and shows the tenacity of the blood and courage of these soldiers. This entire book is groundbreaking and cutting-edge. It’s an ingenious conception, with in-depth commentary, lively language, and boasts both graphics and text – it is well suited to the tastes of young readers. This book is worthy of the troops, extendable to the youth, acts as an assistance to middle-school children who are beginning their Patriotism studies, pays homage to Revolutionary heroes, and even acts as an educational reader to the battles of the past.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        April 2010

        On the far Western front

        Britain's First World War in South America

        by Phillip A. Dehne

        This book uncovers a forgotten campaign of the First World War, the fight to dominate South America. Propelled by the fear of British businessmen, Britain created a complex economic war against local Germans, with the aim of permanently overturning German dominance in lucrative avenues of international trade. By utilizing archives in Britain and South America, Dehne produces a lively account of the way the campaign was conducted on both sides of the Atlantic. This book will persuade anyone interested in the First World War that the conflict must be examined beyond the battlefields of Europe. It comprises a significant contribution to the new field of the history of globalization, and it will appeal to anyone interested in the economic, diplomatic, and imperial history of the twentieth century. Suggesting new reasons for the emergence of anti-foreign populism in South American states, it will also be of interest to Latin American history students. ;

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        March 2017

        Imperialism and the natural world

        by John M. MacKenzie

        Imperial power, both formal and informal, and research in the natural sciences were closely dependent in the nineteenth century. This book examines a portion of the mass-produced juvenile literature, focusing on the cluster of ideas connected with Britain's role in the maintenance of order and the spread of civilization. It discusses the political economy of Western ecological systems, and the consequences of their extension to the colonial periphery, particularly in forms of forest conservation. Progress and consumerism were major constituents of the consensus that helped stabilise the late Victorian society, but consumerism only works if it can deliver the goods. From 1842 onwards, almost all major episodes of coordinated popular resistance to colonial rule in India were preceded by phases of vigorous resistance to colonial forest control. By the late 1840s, a limited number of professional positions were available for geologists in British imperial service, but imperial geology had a longer pedigree. Modern imperialism or 'municipal imperialism' offers a broader framework for understanding the origins, long duration and persistent support for overseas expansion which transcended the rise and fall of cabinets or international realignments in the 1800s. Although medical scientists began to discern and control the microbiological causes of tropical ills after the mid-nineteenth century, the claims for climatic causation did not undergo a corresponding decline. Arthur Pearson's Pearson's Magazine was patriotic, militaristic and devoted to royalty. The book explores how science emerged as an important feature of the development policies of the Colonial Office (CO) of the colonial empire.

      • Trusted Partner
        Fiction
        September 2017

        A Vision of Battlements

        by Anthony Burgess

        by Andrew Biswell, Paul Wake

        A Vision of Battlements is the first novel by the writer and composer Anthony Burgess, who was born in Manchester in 1917. Set in Gibraltar during the Second World War, the book follows the fortunes of Richard Ennis, an army sergeant and incipient composer who dreams of composing great music and building a new cultural world after the end of the war. Following the example of his literary hero, James Joyce, Burgess takes the structure of his book from Virgil's Aeneid. The result is, like Joyce's Ulysses, a comic rewriting of a classical epic, whose critique of the Army and the postwar settlement is sharp and assured. The Irwell Edition is the first publication of Burgess's forgotten masterpiece since 1965. This new edition includes an introduction and notes by Andrew Biswell, author of a prize-winning biography of Anthony Burgess.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        September 2024

        Law across imperial borders

        British consuls and colonial connections on China’s western frontiers, 1880-1943

        by Emily Whewell

        Law across imperial borders offers new perspectives on the complex legal connections between Britain's presence in Western China in the western frontier regions of Yunnan and Xinjiang, and the British colonies of Burma and India. Bringing together a transnational methodology with a social-legal focus, it demonstrates how inter-Asian mobility across frontiers shaped British authority in contested frontier regions of China. It examines the role of a range of actors who helped create, constitute and contest legal practice on the frontier-including consuls, indigenous elites and cultural mediators. The book will be of interest to historians of China, the British Empire in Asia and legal history.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        March 2017

        From Jack Tar to Union Jack

        Representing naval manhood in the British Empire, 1870–1918

        by Mary A. Conley

        Jack Tar to Union Jack examines the intersection between empire, navy, and manhood in British society from 1870 to 1918. Through analysis of sources that include courts-martial cases, sailors' own writings, and the HMS Pinafore, Conley charts new depictions of naval manhood during the Age of Empire, a period which witnessed the radical transformation of the navy, the intensification of imperial competition, the democratisation of British society, and the advent of mass culture. Jack Tar to Union Jack argues that popular representations of naval men increasingly reflected and informed imperial masculine ideals in Victorian and Edwardian Britain. Conley shows how the British Bluejacket as both patriotic defender and dutiful husband and father stood in sharp contrast to the stereotypic image of the brave but bawdy tar of the Georgian navy. This book will be essential reading for students of British imperial history, naval and military history, and gender studies.

      • Trusted Partner
        Children's & YA
        February 2014

        Red Line

        by Samar Mahfouz BarrajIllustrated By: Mona Yakzan and Mira El-Myr

        Mazen, a young boy, is one day surprised by their neighbor Bassam shouting with anger in the street “My parking spot is a red line!” Does this mean he plans to paint the street red, asks Mazen to his mother? The mother explains to Mazen that what Bassam means is simply that no one is to park in his place. The notion is still vague to Mazen: Why red? Does it have anything to do with red traffic lights? The mother tries again “When something is a red line, it means that it is off limits to others”. In this illustrated album, Samar Barraj boldly addresses the delicate issue of child sexual abuse. Acknowledging the complexity of the boundary it tackles, the book determines it through examples the mother and child raise in their conversation. Mazen’s spontaneous remarks and comments point out the difficulty of defining this red line, and make of the book a realistic example of such a conversation. The illustrations develop the notion further, by representing situations in which the red line might be crossed – one may be on his bicycle, at his computer, or approached by a respectable-looking old man in the street. The body parts are not named, but are represented in a naïve drawing Mazen made, though the text insists on the importance of preserving the body as a whole. The colorful images and constant presence of the mother and parents make of the book a reassuring experience despite the gravity of the topic.

      • Trusted Partner
        2008

        Hero Qin Qiong of Tang Dynasty

        by Mutiple Authors

        Hero Qin Qiong of Tang Dynasty This book has narrated the stories of Qin Qiong, a hero of early Tang dynasty, in the form of comic strips.

      • Trusted Partner
        Biography & True Stories

        Suffering Hero Ren Zhengfei

        Basic Law of Huawei

        by Wang Yukun

        This is a book about a man, a father and an enterprise. It tells the story of the suffering experience in the the growth stage of Ren Zhengfei, the boss of Huawei, as well as the influence of the parents on him; analyzes the twists and turns from his resignation from a state-owned enterprise to starting his own business step by step, as well as the bitterness, hardship, tribulation, despair and persistence he has experienced; based on his life experience, summarizes Ren Zhengfei's theory of "Gray Philosophy" and underlying management thinking system in Huawei. From the parallel clues of Ren Zhengfei and Huawei, the author presents the ideological history of Huawei over the past 30 years to the readers, and let readers understand the reasons why Huawei employees have unified thoughts, strong cohesion and Why Huawei step by step goes global.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        June 2024

        At home with the poor

        Consumer behaviour and material culture in England, c. 1650-1850

        by Joseph Harley

        This book opens the doors to the homes of the forgotten poor and traces the goods they owned before, during and after the industrial revolution (c. 1650-1850). Using a vast and diverse range of sources, it gets to the very heart of what it meant to be 'poor' by examining the homes of the impoverished and mapping how numerous household goods became more widespread. As the book argues, poverty did not necessarily equate to owning very little and living in squalor. In fact, its novel findings show that most of the poor strove to improve their domestic spheres and that their demand for goods was so great that it was a driving force of the industrial revolution.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        March 2017

        Migrant races

        Empire,Identity and K.S. Ranjitsinhji

        by Andrew Thompson, John M. MacKenzie, Satadru Sen

        This book is a study of mobility, image and identity in colonial India and imperial Britain in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It is a model for studies of migrant figures like K.S. Ranjitsinhji who emerged during the imperial period. Ranjitsinhji is an important figure in the history of modern India and the British empire because he was recognized as a great athlete and described as such. The book focuses on four aspects of Ranjitsinhji's life as a colonial subject: race, money, loyalty and gender. It touches upon Ranjitsinhji's career as a cricketer in the race section. The issue of money gave Indian critics of Ranjitsinhji's regime the language they needed to condemn his personal and administrative priorities, and to portray him as self-indulgent. Ranjitsinhji lived his life as a player of multiple gender roles: sometimes serially, and on occasion simultaneously. His status as a "prince" - while not entirely fake - was fragile enough to be unreliable, and he worked hard to reinforce it even as he constructed his Englishness. Any Indian attempt to transcend race, culture, climate and political place by imitating an English institution and its product must be an unnatural act of insurgency. The disdain for colonial politics that was manifest in the "small rebellions" at the end of the world war converged with the colonized/Indian identity that was evident at the League of Nations. Between the war and his death, it is clear, Ranjitsinhji moved to maximize his autonomy in Nawanagar.

      • Trusted Partner
        Biography & True Stories
        June 2019

        The Half Quilt

        by Zeng San

        Rucheng, Hunan, is the first large-scale centralized land recuperation after the Red Army's Long March. A story of "half-quilt" embodies the deep feelings of the military and civilians in the village of Shazhou in Rucheng. The revolutionaries Mao Zedong and Zhu De launched revolutionary activities in Rucheng, which has consolidated the mass foundation on this land.The book takes the "Half Quilt" story as the entrance, integrates the Long March story and revolution story of Rucheng, and the story of Shazhou Village's poverty eradication in the new era.

      • Trusted Partner
        April 2021

        Unswerving and Brave Divisional Commander Chen Shuxiang

        by Zhi Zaifei, originally named Jiang Zhifei, is a writer, playwright, lyricist, and party history worker. He has published or released nearly 4 million words of various types of writings.

        Based on the spirit of Xi Jinping's speech at the 2014 Political Work Conference of the People's Liberation Army, the author, in the pursuit of the ideal, meticulously collected historical materials on Chen Shuxiang, the commander of the 34th Divisionof the Central Red Army's Rear Guard, and spent several years crafting this historical novel.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        June 2012

        Cultures and caricatures of British imperial aviation

        Passengers, pilots, publicity

        by Gordon Pirie, Andrew Thompson, John Mackenzie

        The new activity of trans-continental civil flying in the 1930s is a useful vantage point for viewing the extension of British imperial attitudes and practices. Cultures and caricatures of British imperial aviation examines the experiences of those (mostly men) who flew solo or with a companion (racing or for leisure), who were airline passengers (doing colonial administration, business or research), or who flew as civilian air and ground crews. For airborne elites, flying was a modern and often enviable way of managing, using and experiencing empire. On the ground, aviation was a device for asserting old empire: adventure and modernity were accompanied by supremacism. At the time, however, British civil imperial flying was presented romantically in books, magazines and exhibitions. Eighty years on, imperial flying is still remembered, reproduced and re-enacted in caricature. ;

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