In the world of rugby, the All Blacks have an unsurpassed legacy of success. We are the best of the best. Legends in Black comprises frank, no-holds-barred interviews with New Zealand rugby greats, each sharing their thoughts on every aspect of what it means to be an All Black: first selection, the haka, international and provincial rugby, professionalism, team culture, camaraderie, technical advances, coaching and leadership. A one-of-a-kind account of New Zealan...

Most machine learning books teach algorithms in order and abandon you the moment your model leaves the notebook. This one works the other way. You build 3 complete systems, from raw messy data to deployed APIs, learning each concept exactly when you need it. You will build a churn prediction service with Scikit-Learn, a plant disease classifier with Keras, and a support ticket classifier with PyTorch using transformer models from HuggingFace. You finish with 3 working projects and the judg...

There were tens of thousands of different local law-courts in late-medieval England, providing the most common forums for the working out of disputes and the making of decisions about local governance. While historians have long studied these institutions, there have been very few attempts to understand this complex institutional form of 'legal pluralism'. Law in Common provides a way of understanding this complexity by drawing out broader patterns of legal engagement. Tom Johnson...

"What audacity!" exclaimed actor Robert Wagner when he heard about the authors' adolescent exploits in nabbing interviews with Hollywood celebrities. In 1978, Fantle and Johnson, St. Paul teenagers, boarded a plane to meet with Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly. They had written the stars requesting interviews--and to their amazement, both agreed.Over the years, more than 250 other stars also agreed--Lucille Ball, Bob Hope, James Cagney, Mickey Rooney, Debbie Reynolds, George Burns, Rod ...

In their third and final screen teaming, Judy Garland and Gene Kelly starred together in the MGM musical Summer Stock. In C'mon, Get Happy, authors David Fantle and Tom Johnson present a comprehensive study of this 1950 motion picture. The production coincided at a critical point in the careers of Kelly and an emotionally spent Garland. Kelly, who starred in An American in Paris just one year later, was at the peak of his abilities. On the other hand, Summer ...

In this new, revised edition, three experts in seven-card stud, who have earned millions of dollars in major tournaments and cash games, eight World Series of Poker bracelets and hundreds of other titles in competition against the best players in the world show readers how to play and win at all three types of stud poker. In addition to cash-game advice, the authors reveal the winning strategies for stud poker tournaments. Insightful give-and-take conversations between the authors provide mul...

It's humans versus monsters when an apocalypse turns a simple cross-country trek into the road trip from hell in this breakneck LitRPG thrill ride.All that stands between rowdy long-haul trucker Jill MacLeod (aka Junkmouth) and her family back in Boston is two thousand miles of asphalt. Well, that and the monstrous game the System has had her playing ever since it descended on Earth. The reward: mana. Jill's goal: kill, score, drive—and stay alive. Behind the wheel...

Charting the path forward for our churches and ministries in providing care—not a cure— for our non-straight sisters and brothers who are living lives of costly obedience to Jesus.At the start of the gay rights movement in 1969, evangelicalism's leading voices cast a vision for gay people who turn to Jesus. It was C.S. Lewis, Billy Graham, Francis Schaeffer and John Stott who were among the most respected leaders within theologically orthodox Protestantism...

The term “blowback,” invented by the CIA, refers to the unintended consequences of American actions abroad. In this incisive and controversial book, Chalmers Johnson lays out in vivid detail the dangers faced by our overextended empire, which insists on projecting its military power to every corner of the earth and using American capital and markets to force global economic integration on its own terms.From a case of rape by US servicemen in Okinawa to our role in Asia’s financial ...

When Americans turn on their laptops, play video games, go to church, vote, eat TexMex, shop for groceries, listen to music, grill steaks, or watch football, they are, knowingly or not, paying tribute to Texas. Tracing the profound and surprising story of the Lone Star State, Benjamin Heber Johnson shines new light on why Texas has had such a powerful influence on United States history.Texas is known to outsiders for mob violence, swaggering self-conception, and conservative politi...

This conservative parody of Primary Colors'Äîthe roman a clef about a presidential scandal'Äîno longer sounds so outrageous given America'Äôs current political absurdities. Harry Beltway, the idealistic grandson of a famous evangelist, has just come back from a missionary tour when he is persuaded to join the campaign staff of Tim Duncannon, an arch-conservative television commentator. Duncannon has set his sights on the presidency, so that he can build a barbed wire fence around the Unite...

If you have fashion in writing and you want to learn How to Write a Novel, then get a copy of this guide.The writing process is a little bit different from one person to the next, but fundamentally, it's very similar. When someone sits down to write, there tends to be an awkward "uninspired" moment in the beginning, when you begin to get over the doubt and the thoughts of not knowing what to say and then jump into it anyway. Usually once you've gotten a few sentences out -...