Success Habits - second hand

In the entertaining collection Laughing At Life: Tall Tales & Other Short Stories, author Mike Benn shares many of his amusing life experiences as he delves into "tough" questions, such as:

• Have you ever caught a duck-while fishing?
• When your children say jump, do you just ask how high?
• What happens when the doctor becomes the patient?
• How significant is that red flashing light on your car's instrument panel? Join Benn in his search for "the perfect stool", and experience his frustration after purchasing the latest state-of-the-art home cinema equipment to the envy of all his friends-and after six months, still not being able to get it to work. Laughing at Life takes you on a trip-sometimes more like a stumble-down memory lane, from Benn's childhood in Perth, Australia, to his present-day life in Israel. Encompassing subjects ranging from living in a household of females to the adventures of traveling, and from coping with modern technology to personal health issues, Laughing at Life draws you into the Benn's world, allowing you to view the humorous side of life's challenges that daily affect each and every one of us.

A source of endless fascination and speculation, the subject of countless biographies, novels, and films, Elizabeth I is now considered from a thrilling new angle by the brilliant young historian Tracy Borman.

So often viewed in her relationships with men, the Virgin Queen is portrayed here as the product of women: the mother she lost so tragically, the female subjects who worshiped her, and the peers and intimates who loved, raised, challenged, and sometimes opposed her.

In vivid detail, Borman presents Elizabeth’s bewitching mother, Anne Boleyn, eager to nurture her new child, only to see her taken away and her own life destroyed by damning allegations--which taught Elizabeth never to mix politics and love. Kat Astley, the governess who attended and taught Elizabeth for almost thirty years, invited disaster by encouraging her charge into a dangerous liaison after Henry VIII’s death. Mary Tudor (“Bloody Mary”) envied her younger sister’s popularity and threatened to destroy her altogether. And animosity drove Elizabeth and her cousin Mary Queen of Scots into an intense thirty-year rivalry that could end only in death.

Elizabeth’s Women contains more than an indelible cast of characters. It is an unprecedented account of how the public posture of femininity figured into the English court, the meaning of costume and display, the power of fecundity and flirtation, and how Elizabeth herself, long viewed as the embodiment of feminism, shared popular views of female inferiority and scorned and schemed against her underlings’ marriages and pregnancies.

Brilliantly researched and elegantly written, Elizabeth’s Women is a unique take on history’s most captivating queen and the dazzling court that surrounded her.