Curtis Books

Having retired from a forty year teaching career, Dorris Curtis began painting at the age of 65. Her work has been exhibited in Chicago and Washington, DC, and she has been a guest on the acclaimed PBS series "American Art Forum". Recently, Dorris donated her entire art collection to the University of Central Arkansas. For those unfamiliar with her work, there is now published Come Walk With Me: The Art Of Dorris Curtis which is enhanced with an informed and informative introduction by Robert Cochran and showcases an extraordinary talent comparable to the legendary Grandma Moses -- whose example provided Dorris with the inspiration to first put color to canvas in 1973. Come Walk With Me will prove to be a welcome and much appreciated contribution to any personal, school art department, and community library American Art History collections.

I love it. I'm doing a beginner drawing course and the book answers all my questions concerning drawing and painting. Every illustration is relevant and useful, the text is informative, simple, entertaining and practical at the same time. The layout and the quality of the book itself is very good. It was the perfect choice for me.

First off - it is a Reader's Digest product which means it is top quality- a beautiful set, comes with some pencils, eraser and 2 books one on techique and the other on exersises. All in one package which closes by having magnets in the binding that locks and closes the bundle. The books are easy to understand with plenty of examples from the skech to the finished art work. A perfect first set for someone just intrested or someone more advanced, has information and exersises for both. A perfect item to get as a gift!

African-American business leader Curtis J. Crawford, Ph.D. (founder and CEO of consulting firm XCEO Inc.) presents Compliance & Conviction: The Evolution of Enlightened Corporate Governance, an insider's look at corporate failures of the twenty-first century - particularly the disasters precipitated by illegal business practices, though only a small number of business leaders have been convicted of such. Compliance & Conviction also examines the repercussions of those failures, such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, that renewed focus on corporate governance and what needs to be done to regain stakeholders' respect and confidence. Written in straightforward language for business leaders of all backgrounds, chapters discuss correlations between corporate governance and share value, executive compensation, director independence, evaluating board director performance, the impact of investor activism, and much more. A solid and insightful look at repercussions of headline-grabbing business scandals in modern-day business governance.

This is a comprehensive guide for anyone wanting to learn how to compose technical documents in an organized, professional manner. I found the text very easy to follow and it made the whole process seem so simple, while still going into great detail. I thoroughly recommend!

I was unsure of how to use the talent God had given to me due to fear and failure. Through this book I have learned how to have perfect peace while doing the work that God has for me. I can do it with assurance. If I never understood purpose and my mission before, I knew it before finished the 5th chapter (I read it 2 times), I was secure. Not only is this book great but the Author has a beautiful spirit and it flows through her writing. I gave my book to someone, and I had to get another copy. I have given several copies to other women who have been motivated. This is a real keepsake.

An easy to read book with a tremendous amount of detail not only about Daniel Pratt and his business but about the town of Prattville that was named for him and the inhabitants of that town during the time period from 1835 until the 1870s. Exhaustively researched, footnoted and indexed this book is a treasure for all who want to see a view of the South contrary to the popular agarian stereotype. Historians as well as genealogists will find this a wonderful resource.

"A Consuming Faith" is an important study of the ideology of the Social Gospel movement present among American Christians during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Susan Curtis argues that the Social Gospel provided a necessary linkage between the Protestant-Victorian construct of society of the nineteenth century and the more secular consumer culture that emerged following World War I. Most Social Gospel reformers of the 1890s shared middle-class origins and a concern for the underside of America civilization. They have been portrayed, usually accurately, as a generation of Christian reformers who gave up their middle-class comforts to enter a world of squalor and hopelessness to help others. They ministered in ways that were fundamental to an urban underclass.

Curtis confesses in her preface that she was skeptical of the "do-gooder" image of those involved in the Social Gospel movement. Not surprisingly, therefore, she found good reason for skepticism. "For these American Protestants, responsible for acts of courage and kindness in the name of social justice," she wrote, "were also men and women bedeviled by private anxieties that impelled them into the arena of reform" (p. xi).

Carrying farther the well-established theories of status anxiety developed for progressive reformers of the same era by George D. Mowry and Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., Curtis argued that they not only honestly wanted to accomplish good in the world but also desired to find meaning in a world undergoing rapid and sustained change in response to forces collectively identified as modernity. According to Curtis a range of motivations propelled the Social Gospelers and their activities; some overt and others subconscious, some lofty and others more base.

The Social Gospel, Curtis suggested, emerged in response to the dislocations of the industrial revolution in the late nineteenth century, including large-scale immigration and rapid and sustained urbanization. In its early expression the Social Gospel brought to the fore a sustained critique of industrial capitalist society and helped to displace the traditional American Christian concern for afterlife and eternity with an emphasis on the welfare of humanity in the here and now.

For Social Gospelers the Kingdom of God was very much of this world and not the next. It was something of a utopian vision that represented a spiritual condition where righteousness and justness are partners with goodwill and charity. The result would be what Washington Gladden, one of the reformers profiled here, defined as "social salvation." To accomplish it Social Gospel advocates organized cooperative ventures, undertook political activism, and engaged in a variety of reform efforts with specific goals. The heart of Curtis' interesting and convincing thesis is that some of the elements of the Social Gospel's ideology, as well as its members' desires, sought a place not in opposition to industrialism and modern society but in concert with it. Bound up in a dramatic cultural transformation as the older Protestant- informed Victorian order gave way to a modern, secular American society after World War I, the Social Gospel moved more in parallel rather than in apposition with these trends. By the 1920s, Curtis concluded, the adherents to the Social Gospel's ideas and actions made it easier for Protestant Americans to embrace a secular culture in which Protestantism was not prominently featured. They contributed to an American culture that validated abundance, consumption, and self-realization. Social Gospelers, reformers though they were, created not a critique of modern capitalism, but rather a consuming faith in the material abundance it promised (p. 278).

The Social Gospelers, therefore, not only accomplished positive social ends on a broad front but also established an intellectual rationalization for modernity that allowed contentment with the world. Curtis demonstrates this thesis through a series of biographical portraits of fifteen Americans involved in a variety of Social Gospel activities. In subtle ways these individuals came to embrace modernity and the secular social system that emerged in the 1920s.

There is much to praise and little to criticize in "A Consuming Faith." Susan Curtis argues her case well, and offers a convincing thesis explaining certain aspects of the paradigm shift that took place in American society between the 1890s and the 1920s. The most important caution I would offer, of course, relates to how far the intellectual leaders of any group reflected the opinions of the rank and file. Howard Zinn's warning is appropriate in this instance: "There is an underside to every Age about which history does not often speak, because history is written from records left by the privileged. We learn...about the thinking of an age from its intellectual elite" (Howard Zinn, "The Politics of History" (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1970), p. 102). Can a series of fifteen elites accurately define the ideological origins and development of such an amorphous movement as the Social Gospel? That question may be unanswerable, certainly it would require some very detailed and imaginative historical research to arrive at a satisfactory answer. Having raised this question, I should add that this is not a major flaw of A Consuminq Faith. I would suggest, however, that readers bear the question in mind when considering the book.

"A Consuming Faith" is an important discussion of a significant reform effort that helped shape modern American society. It is one of several refreshing books to appear recently on the development of American religion. It should be of use to anyone interested in the development of American religion and culture at the beginning of the twentieth century. As a sophisticated analysis of several historical trends focused through the lens of the Social Gospel, it is at once religious, social, and intellectual history and probably some other types of history yet unnamed. Those seeking staid history with emphasis on the minutiae of organizations and denominations will be disappointed. Those readers pondering broader vistas, however, will be rewarded by considering Curtis' work.

I used to eat at some of the restaurants Curtis Grace owned and these are the same recipes he serves. Don't miss the 9th Street House Chicken Salad or the tea. They are great.

Annie Raye is back in Vegas. She left Vegas to go straight, leaving her card counting father and the life she hated behind. She was a bright child, and at the age of twelve began card counting - for a living. When she beat one of the most successful casino owners of all time, she began refusing to play blackjack because she watched her father almost beaten to death over the game.

Annie is back to find a life for herself and her daughter, Maddy. She has come home to Vegas to take a job at Slotto, but a private investigator, Sam Knight has rejected her for the position over her background check. Annie wants to know why, and sets out to prove herself to him. When Sam finds out she is THE card counter from years ago, he is intrigued, but still has illegal players to find before the casinos are run broke by card counters.

Sam and Annie are exact opposites and play upon each others weaknesses to create chaos and situations that left this reader laughing out loud at times. They also come together with a bang, and when their attraction blows up, they are both torn between wanting each other, and knowing what might happen. Sam passing out every time Maddy comes into his vision makes for a unique twist that made this reader sigh with frustration and to hope he can overcome his past to make a future with this family.

This reader loved numbers growing up and made counting objects a big game. As Maddy counts things, and plays, she makes a great secondary character and gives a great dimension to this tale. Her antics and the love that surrounds her turn this tale into a family tale to treasure.

In this reviewers opinion this one of the best Super Romance novels publishes so far this year, and this author will be put on auto-buy for future books to come!

Review Courtesy of LoveRomancesandmore