This book examines the iconic presence of second chances in everyday life. David Newman explores its various iterations in popular culture, commercial marketplaces, religion, intimate relationships, education, criminal justice, and human bodies. He analyzes how this concept—as a cultural aspiration, driver of policy, and lived personal experience—has become part and parcel of our individual sense of self and our collective national identity. While the rhetoric of redemption is familiar and ubiquitous, Newman uncovers the costs and constraints of second chances, paying particular attention to the factors that affect judgments of deservedness. Informed by an array of data sources including personal interviews, mission statements of nonprofit recovery agencies, images in popular culture, stories from the news, plot summaries of novels, and scriptural texts, Newman frames the second chance experience as the quintessential cultural paradox: a concept that simultaneously represents the pinnacle of our shared hopes for renewal and our deepest suspicions about the intransigence of human nature.

In Second Chances, Chuck Gallagher comes clean about his past, his mistakes, and what they taught him as he rebuilt his life. Although Gallagher enjoyed a good life and a steady job, greed got the better of him, and little by little, he began to steal from his clients. It was only a matter of time before his choices caught up to him. After his stunning and public fall from the graces of his community, Gallagher describes his life in prison, the things he missed out on, and the steps he took to make things right. His inspiring story focuses on how anyone can take their worst moments of life and transform them into a better opportunity.

The Comfort of Little Things is a thought-provoking book that empowers educators to give themselves and the people in their lives second chances in order for themselves and the children they teach to learn and thrive. This book includes stories from the author and contributors to the author's blog posts. Holly Elissa Bruno is an author, attorney, acclaimed keynote speaker, and host of an online radio program. Her other Redleaf Press books are Managing Legal Risks in Early Childhood Programs (co-published with Teachers College Press) and Learning from the Bumps in the Road.

With 31 years of ministry in Japan and 20 in the United States, Pastor Hanabusa knows each county well and why both cultures desperately need Gods healing love. He opens a unique window on Jesus forgiving love and its universal call for redeeming second chances. (Christian)

Renowned conservationist Aldo Leopold once wrote, "A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it does otherwise." Few have taken Leopold's vision more to heart than Steven I. Apfelbaum, who has, over the last thirty years, transformed his eighty-acre Stone Prairie Farm in Wisconsin into a biologically diverse ecosystem of prairie, wetland, spring-fed brook, and savanna. In healing his land, Apfelbaum demonstrates how humans might play a starring role in healing the planet.

Having met at Ithaca University as graduate students, the millennial year of 2000 soon approaching, Sydney Steinberg and Corinna Kipnis consider each other their exclusive significant other. While after graduation, Corinna takes up a position as reference librarian in her hometown library of Thompsonville, Syd hastens to finish his graduate degree in engineering. But after some irrepressible soul-searching, he decides on a radical change of course—he will, instead, attempt that more challenging career in the New York financial world he has always aspired to, which, in his estimate, will not only demand his highest level of intellectual mastery but, simultaneously, will also position him at the very cutting edge of significant decision making. This choice and the lifestyle it engenders set Corinna and Syd on deeply discordant life tracks and toward life goals that prove incompatible. In the meantime, Viktor, Corinna’s father and now professor emeritus, has been summoned to California for a hospital visit with his cousin and boyhood hero, Mitchell Kipnis. Despite Mitchell’s palatial Malibu home, Viktor perceives Mitchell’s loneliness as a widower and retiree and convinces him that a prolonged vacation in his old hometown—Thompsonville—is just what the doctor would have ordered. Additionally, Viktor reminds Mitchell, that his son Paul, has just taken a position at Ely College in Thompsonville and would be an added companion. Mitchell consents to this transition and eventually becomes a thoroughly vibrant part of the whole Thompsonville scene. Inevitably, Corinna and Syd separate; and through this painful process, Corinna actually begins to fall in love with another person—having herself attained a depth and confidence she had never before realized. In this generational and career mix of interesting, well-realized characters, there are more than enough opportunities for dynamic clashes of values and priorities—small-town community or big-city glitz? Wealth and power or a dedication to personal development? Parents and their children retaining familial ties between generations or opting to go it alone? Plenty of opportunity for second thoughts. And hopefully discovering second chances along the way, the reader might be drawn into some thoughtful reevaluation of his own basic assumptions. And that is, of course, the best of all outcomes.