One heroic schoolteacher has saved hundreds of lives with unconditional love and zero tolerance for rule-breakers. His students are the worst of the worst—drug addicts, gang members, and violent criminal offenders. They have flunked out or been thrown out of every other school they’ve attended. They may be the children of addicts, of abusers, or even of good parents, but they have one thing in common: they have been rejected by everyone except Paul White. With ten simple rules, he has helped hundreds of kids turn their lives around. “I can’t remember when I’ve been this happy. Since I came here I’m getting right with my family and friends, I’m off the drugs and staying out of trouble. I’m doing really well in school and I’ve got a job.” —Kathy, fifteen, West Valley student, former crystal meth user “He never gives up on you.” —Roger, seventeen Among students, they’re the worst of the worst: chronic truants, drunks, drug addicts, even violent criminals. Some haven’t been to school for months, even years. Some have spent a year or more locked up for gang-related offenses and felony assaults. All of them, it seems, are on the short list of life’s early losers. Enter Paul White, the teacher whose combination of unconditional love and unbreakable rules has changed, and sometimes saved, the lives of the most troubled students in Detroit, the San Francisco Bay Area, and Los Angeles. When they walk through the door of his one-room high school, the West Valley Leadership Academy in Canoga Park, California, White treats them like his own children: loving them, protecting them, and requiring them to become men and women of moral courage, integrity, and high achievement. Sometimes it only takes one person to turn the tide. During his twenty-five-year career as a teacher, Paul White has saved hundreds of students from falling through the cracks. Veritable miracles have taken place in his classroom: ?The reading skills of a fourteen-year-old recovering crystal meth addict climbed from a seventh- to a tenth-grade level in six months. She finished high school at age sixteen and went on to complete a nursing program. A fifteen-year-old girl was flunking out of school—and so violent that the safety of the people around her couldn’t be guaranteed. After joining Paul’s class, she not only brought her grades up enough to graduate from high school at sixteen, but has gone on to finish several semesters at a local community college. A seventeen-year-old boy who had been a neo-Nazi asked a Holocaust survivor to forgive him for his disrespectful behavior. White’s Rules is a lesson to parents and educators who can’t control their kids or their classrooms. For Americans who truly want to stop the violence, end the apathy, and improve academic performance, White poses a challenge: Try his rules. The ten-rule list that he developed covers everything from character values to schoolwork, from getting off drugs to learning personal finance skills. By enforcing these rules, parents and educators can attack both the causes and the effects of the crisis in our schools. This is the moving story of how the program evolved and what we can all do to save our youth, one kid at a time.

Once sixteen-year-old Sameera Righton's father is elected president of the United States, the adopted Pakistani-American girl moves into the White House and makes some decisions about how she is going to live her life in the spotlight.

Email marketing's power is matched only by how incredibly misunderstood it is. Email Marketing Rules demystifies this vital channel, taking you step by step through 150 best practices, providing extensive tactical checklists, and giving you strategic frameworks for long-term success. Updated and greatly expanded, the 3rd Edition of Email Marketing Rules will help you... Set the right program goals by understanding "deep metrics" and properly interpreting campaign, channel, and subscriber metrics Build high-performance lists by identifying valuable subscriber acquisition sources, using appropriate permission practices, and managing inactives wisely Ensure your emails are delivered by understanding the factors that cause inbox providers to block senders Craft relevant messaging with effective subject lines, savvy designs, and smart targeting Automate your messaging so you address moments that matter and create highly engaging subscriber journeys Develop solid workflows that avoid errors and speed up production

If you care about social change but hate feel-good platitudes, Do It Anyway is the book for you. Courtney Martin’s rich profiles of the new generation of activists dig deep, to ask the questions that really matter: How do you create a meaningful life? Can one person even begin to make a difference in our hugely complex, globalized world?

Mobutu Sese Seko, who ruled Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo) from 1965 until 1997, was fond of saying “happy are those who sing and dance,” and his regime energetically promoted the notion of culture as a national resource. During this period Zairian popular dance music (often referred to as la rumba zaïroise) became a sort of musica franca in many parts of sub-Saharan Africa. But how did this privileged form of cultural expression, one primarily known for a sound of sweetness and joy, flourish under one of the continent’s most brutal authoritarian regimes? In Rumba Rules, the first ethnography of popular music in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Bob W. White examines not only the economic and political conditions that brought this powerful music industry to its knees, but also the ways that popular musicians sought to remain socially relevant in a time of increasing insecurity. Drawing partly on his experiences as a member of a local dance band in the country’s capital city Kinshasa, White offers extraordinarily vivid accounts of the live music scene, including the relatively recent phenomenon of libanga, which involves shouting the names of wealthy or powerful people during performances in exchange for financial support or protection. With dynamic descriptions of how bands practiced, performed, and splintered, White highlights how the ways that power was sought and understood in Kinshasa’s popular music scene mirrored the charismatic authoritarianism of Mobutu’s rule. In Rumba Rules, Congolese speak candidly about political leadership, social mobility, and what it meant to be a bon chef (good leader) in Mobutu’s Zaire.