What do you get if you blend a downtrodden head teacher, a hostile school inspector, an incompetent reality TV film crew, an ice cream factory and a load of unruly pigs? A hilarious novel from the pen of Steve Baker, a brilliant writer and school behaviour specialist.Outstanding tells the story of a school inspection set against the backdrop of a struggling school in a semi-rural setting. Educating Norfolk have been invited in to film the cash strapped school and just happ...

A hilarious novel about surviving a chaotic school inspection with a side of pig-related pandemonium!In a struggling semi-rural school, a downtrodden head teacher faces the dreaded school inspection. To make matters worse, a reality TV crew arrives to film the chaos, just as a war erupts between the local ice cream factory and a pig farmer. Can anyone survive this perfect storm of madness?Steve Baker, an award-winning education author, brings his insider kn...

Brain-talk Meets God-talk is a story that begins in Egypt's Eastern Desert.In Part 1, it's the year AD 356, and a wise old Christian fights his last spiritual battle in the darkness of the desert. Then time-leap forward to this decade in the United States and observe a Christian in Iowa fighting clinical depression.Discover the connection between the men. Get ready for the hope found in a gift that links them, though they are 1,600 years apart in t...

In The Postmodern Animal, Steve Baker explores how animal imagery has been used in modern and contemporary art and performance, and in postmodern philosophy and literature, to suggest and shape ideas about identity and creativity. Baker cogently analyses the work of such European and American artists as Olly and Suzi, Mark Dion, Paula Rego and Sue Coe, at the same time looking critically at the constructions, performances and installations of Robert Rauschenberg, Louise Bourgeois,...

Knowing How Long the Game Will Last Can Radically Change How You Play.Few people feel they control their own lives. They operate on autopilot, enslaved by anxiety, debt, and desperation. They tolerate unrewarding jobs and unfulfilling relationships. They don't do what they want to do, but rather what they feel they have to do. Stop sacrificing your best just to make a living - and start designing the life you deserve!Quality Time Remaining™ is the most approachable framewor...

Slabscape: Dammit is the second novel in the Slabscape series by S.Spencer Baker.Somebody’s slung a stop sign over a solar system and Slab is heading straight for it.Stopping is not an option. Slab is over a thousand kilometres long, travelling at near-lightspeed and the thirty-two million humans, NAHs and avatars who inhabit the Slabscape are on a mission; they’re going Home and wouldn’t stop even if they could."The 'Slabscape' saga is a compulsive read for all those ...

Slabscape: Reset is the first novel in the Slabscape series by S.Spencer Baker.Take the most sophisticated A.I. designed mind that has ever existed, encase it in over fifty million cubic kilometres of diamond nano-rods and send it off on a twenty-thousand-year odyssey towards the centre of the galaxy. Then screw it all up by allowing thirty-two million humans to go along for the ride.“Slabscape soon began to feel like a curious fusion of Douglas Adams and Iain M Banks, Hitchi...

Slab is three hundred and fifty years into its voyage home when the lights—and everything else—go out. With zero chance of rescue and no possibility that an alternative power source can be invented and deployed in time, most of the thirty-two million SlabCitizens choose to enter cryo suspension in the fragile hope that if and when they are defrosted, there will still be a slab worth living in. To make matters worse, Council have no option but to elevate self-proclaimed business gurulla Lou...

Lucien and Olivia by André Narbonne, author of Twelve Miles to Midnight, is a comic statement on the beautiful waywardness of life. Built on scenes of discovery and error, the novel satirizes the transactional view of human relations that has elbowed its way into our lives by way of contemporary political discourse. The novel is set in the 1980s before cell phones, personal computers, and Facebook “likes.” Lucien is a marine engineer on a Canadian tanker. While on one-mon...

Once a forbidding area of swamps and forests, Berkley was uninhabited until the early 19th century. In 1924, the Detroit News disparaged the "frontier community" and wrote that it "resembles a settlement in the oil waste of Wyoming." Still, forward-thinking residents thought Berkley had a bright future. Two factions with competing ideas raced with paperwork to the Oakland County Courthouse in Pontiac; the triumphant group, desiring a small town, camped out overnight to be the first in line...

How Americans think about work changed profoundly over the course of the twentieth century. Successful workers were increasingly expected to show initiative and enthusiasm for change. Our culture of work today is more demanding than ever, even though workers haven't seen commensurate rewards.Make Your Own Job explains how this entrepreneurial work ethic took hold, from its origins in late nineteenth-century success literature to the gig economy of today, sweeping in strang...

A Leader's Guide to Executing Change and Delivering Results.Governor Charlie Baker, one of the most popular governors in the United States, with a reputation for getting things done, wants to put the service back into public service: "Wedge issues may be great for making headlines," he writes, "but they do not move us forward. Success is measured by what we accomplish together. Our obligation to the people we serve is too important to place politics and partisanshi...