Beating the Odds is the improbable, inspiring autobiography of financial guru Eddie C. Brown, one of the nation's top stock pickers and money managers. It details how Brown skillfully kept Brown Capital Management afloat through the dot-com bust, 9/11 and the Great Recession. Born to a 13-year-old unwed mother in the rural South, this African-American investment whiz created a Baltimore-based financial firm that amassed more than $6 Billion under management. Brown delves into the profound heartbreak and disorientation upon the death of his beloved grandmother – who was his surrogate mother -- and recounts how Brown's moonshine-running Uncle Jake subsequently became the dominant adult figure in Brown's life. His unflinchingly honest, easy-to-read memoir details how intellectual curiosity, abiding self-belief, hard work and divine providence helped Brown earn an electrical engineering degree, become an Army officer, and later a civilian IBM engineer. Readers will learn of the strife that ensued when Brown quit IBM to earn an MBA, leading to investment jobs that prepared him to start his own money management company in 1983.

The amazing true story of one of the world s greatest sports...

Brad Carter is down on his luck. He loses his job, catches his woman in bed with another man, and he’s days away from being booted out of his home. Wanting to get away from his problems, Brad and his boys go to a nightclub, where they meet a wealthy stranger who offers them each $50,000 to go to Rio de Janeiro and traffic cocaine back to the U.S. They jump at the opportunity and have the time of their lives in Rio, but when it’s time to return to the U.S. with the drugs, all hell breaks loose. Brad and his friends are caught, and being in jail is not anything they could have imagined. With the help of a fellow prisoner with powerful connections, they plan an escape. Brad is determined to find his way back to the U.S., but not without Diamond, the beautiful woman he met before things went awry in Rio. Can he rescue her from the clutches of Armand, the sick crime boss who’s been holding her captive for years? He soon discovers that the web of criminal connections between Armand, his wife, and his associates are deep and dangerous. With the obstacles he faces, Brad’s journey to freedom may be impossible.

Beating the Odds tells the story of how teachers, students, and leaders in three schools transcend obstacles to beat the odds of failure and achieve impressive success. The schools' a suburban vocational/technical school, an urban school for immigrant, new-English-language learners, and an urban second-chance school for students who have failed elsewhere, all operate as communities of commitment. With accessible language, multiple examples, and rich anecdotes, Ancess describes how these schools are organized, how they use adult-student relationships to leverage high levels of student performance, how they enact teaching and learning for making meaning, and how they confront the obstacles they encounter. Ancess also discusses the systemic conditions for sustaining and scaling up schools such as these three. The high schools described in this volume - Urban Academy, International High School, and Hodgson Vocational-Technical, have come to represent models of successful reform despite their challenging student populations. In addition to telling their story, this book provides samples of school documents that illustrate the day-to-day operation of the schools and can be adapted by practitioners to fit their own circumstances.

Aiming to inspire and empower, Beating the Odds highlights real-life success stories of technical women who made it. This book explores critical turning points that make or break careers and provides tools for putting insight into action — both for women and organizations supporting them.