"A ruthless dissection of American life in the late 1960s, Play It as It Lays captures the mood of an entire generation, the ennui of contemporary society reflected in spare prose that blisters and haunts the reader. Set in a place beyond good and evil-literally in Hollywood, Las Vegas, and the barren wastes of the Mojave Desert, but figuratively in the landscape of an arid soul-it remains more than three decades after its original publication a profoundly...

"New York City in 2012, the sweltering summer before Hurricane Sandy hits. Kate, a young woman newly arrived from England, is staying in a Manhattan apartment while she tries to figure out her future. She has two unfortunate responsibilities during her time in America: to make regular Skype calls to her miserable boyfriend back home, and to cat-sit an indifferent feline named Joni Mitchell. The city has other plans for her. In New York's parks and...

Ever since his astonishing victory in the 1991 PGA Championship, John Daly, known affectionately on the PGA Tour as "Big 'Un," has enthralled fans with his big drives, bigger personality, and "Grip It and Rip It" approach to golf -- and to life. Long John, usually seen with a Marlboro Light dangling from his lip, is the unchained, unpredictable, unapologetic bad boy of professional golf. "The only rules I follow," JD likes to say, "are the Rules...

Physical play is the first type of play to emerge but also the least researched and most neglected by educators. However this is rapidly changing as educators realize just how vital it is from many points of view. Inbuilt psychological drives mean that children want to be able to do things for themselves and physical play leads to children becoming adept at using their bodies. Being motivated to succeed at tasks is an important factor in effective...

"It's Union Time, people!" — the rallying cry of workers at the Smithfield Foods pork processing plant in Tar Heel, North Carolina. Since its opening in 1993, employees of the plant have endured various abuses such as intimidation tactics, low pay, and dangerous working conditions which resulted in bodily injury and, on one occasion, death. Often treated as expendable, the workers came together and engaged in a 16-year-long struggle for the right...

This documentary tells the story of the incredible and enduring friendship between Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs, and how they gave birth to the literary movement of the Beat Generation. It begins in New York, at the end of the Second World War, travels through San Francisco, Mexico City, Tangier, Paris and ends fifteen years later with the publication of Howl (Ginsberg), of On the Road (Kerouac) and Naked Lunch (Burroughs). Each...

Learning about literacy is a social act. Young children develop the necessary skills they will need to be competent and confident readers and writers from the people around them and their environment. Children need to know about their language(s) and the sounds and all about print and its uses. They need to develop a love of books and storytelling and have the confidence to express themselves, use their imagination and be creative. It is young children's...

What would it take to transform industrial-era schools into modern organizations capable of supporting deep learning for all? Jal Mehta and Sarah Fine's quest to answer this question took them inside some of America's most innovative schools and classrooms--places where educators are rethinking both what and how students should learn. The story they tell is alternately discouraging and hopeful. Drawing on hundreds of hours of observations and interviews...

Shakespearean Drama of the Highest Quality Performed at an authentic recreation of The Globe. With performances by world famous award winning Shakespearean actors this series has recaptured the Elizabethan flavor of Shakespeare's own Globe productions by staging them just as they were seen in the 16th century. The renowned story of mistaken love, familial deceit and murder. Lear, the aging King of Britain, has chosen to lay aside the care of the...

Soon after her twenty-fifth birthday, Libby Jones returns home from work to find the letter she's been waiting for her entire life. She rips it open with one driving thought: I am finally going to know who I am. She soon learns not only the identity of her birth parents, but also that she is the sole inheritor of their abandoned mansion on the banks of the Thames in London's fashionable Chelsea neighborhood, worth millions. Everything in Libby's life...