Katherine Ellison

“An absorbing, sharply observed memoir.” —Kirkus Reviews A hilarious and heartrending account of one mother’s journey to understand and reconnect with her high-spirited preteen son—a true story sure to beguile parents grappling with a child’s bewildering behavior. Popular literature is filled with the stories of self-sacrificing mothers bravely tending to their challenging children. Katherine Ellison offers a different kind of tale. Shortly after Ellison, an award-winning investigative reporter, and her twelve-year-old son, Buzz, were both diagnosed with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder, she found herself making such a hash of parenting that the two of them faced three alternatives: he’d go to boarding school; she’d go AWOL; or they’d make it their full-time job to work out their problems together. They decided to search for a solution while Ellison investigated what genuine relief, if any, might be found in the confusing array of goods sold by the modern mental health industry. The number of diagnoses for childhood attention and behavior issues is exploding, leaving parents and educators on a confusing chase to find the best kind of help for each child. Buzz, a page-turner of a memoir, brings much relief. It is immensely engaging, laugh-out-loud funny, and honest—and packed with helpful insights.

A Year of Paying Attention

Buzz

Ronnie Cohen

Girl CEO

“[Weaves] together her own story and a stranger-than-fiction true-crime tale…gripping prose that by turns is tragic and hilarious.”—Stephen Hinshaw, author of Another Kind of Madness This remarkable memoir by a Pulitzer Prize- and Polk Award-winning journalist takes readers on a wild, tragicomic ride from the criminal courtrooms of California’s Silicon Valley to the Himalayan mountains of Pakistan to the deserts of Ethiopia. In delightful, insightful prose, Katherine Ellison reflects on her mistakes and her triumphs as she reveals the stories of how her career almost ended before it began, how she nearly missed marrying the love of her life, and how she unwittingly got drawn into a bizarre murder case. Rich in drama and self-reflection, replete with unique characters—including two bumbling hitmen, a rodeo-riding prosecutor, a flamboyant Beverly Hills defense attorney, and a charismatic stay-at-home mother-of-three who is keeping outrageous secrets—Mothers & Murderers is like a mashup of Fargo and Eat, Pray, Love—a memoir to make you laugh, cry, and think. “In what she’s authentically dubbed a ‘true-crime memoir, Katherine Ellison brings to bear the demons of her own past, her considerable chops as a reporter, and her willingness to plunge into the psychological depths. What she created is a dark jewel. The reader cannot look away.”—Jacquelyn Mitchard, New YorkTimes-bestselling author of The Deep End of the Ocean “Mothers and Murderers is like nothing else I’ve ever read, and I mean that in the best possible way…Katherine Ellison captivatingly describes a young woman's path from blind impulse to wisdom…she makes an ultra-strong case for the examined life, shedding light on the lies we tell ourselves and others—and the hard work involved in taking responsibility for yourself.”—Stephen Hinshaw, author of Another Kind of Madness

A True Story of Love, Lies, Obsession . . . And Second Chances

Mothers & Murderers

Ayelet Waldman

Tom Little

A noted educator and a Pulitzer Prize-winning author team up to introduce readers to progressive education, which has been forging creative thinkers in the United States for more than 100 years, and explain how this practice—which emphasizes critical thinking, problem solving, communication and collaboration—can turn students into lifelong learners.

How Progressive Education Can Save America's Schools

Loving Learning

During and after the English civil wars, between 1640 and 1690, an unprecedented number of manuals teaching cryptography were published, almost all for the general public. While there are many surveys of cryptography, none pay any attention to the volume of manuals that appeared during the seventeenth century, or provide any cultural context for the appearance, design, or significance of the genre during the period. On the contrary, when the period’s cryptography writings are mentioned, they are dismissed as esoteric, impractical, and useless. Yet, as this book demonstrates, seventeenth-century cryptography manuals show us one clear beginning of the capitalization of information. In their pages, intelligence—as private message and as mental ability—becomes a central commodity in the emergence of England’s capitalist media state. Publications boasting the disclosure of secrets had long been popular, particularly for English readers with interests in the occult, but it was during these particular decades of the seventeenth century that cryptography emerged as a permanent bureaucratic function for the English government, a fashionable activity for the stylish English reader, and a respected discipline worthy of its own genre. These manuals established cryptography as a primer for intelligence, a craft able to identify and test particular mental abilities deemed "smart" and useful for England’s financial future. Through close readings of five specific primary texts that have been ignored not only in cryptography scholarship but also in early modern literary, scientific, and historical studies, this book allows us to see one origin of disciplinary division in the popular imagination and in the university, when particular broad fields—the sciences, the mechanical arts, and the liberal arts—came to be viewed as more or less profitable.

A Cultural History of Early Modern English Cryptography Manuals

Susan Kim

The first cultural history of early modern cryptography, this collection brings together scholars in history, literature, music, the arts, mathematics, and computer science who study ciphering and deciphering from new materialist, media studies, cognitive studies, disability studies, and other theoretical perspectives. Essays analyze the material forms of ciphering as windows into the cultures of orality, manuscript, print, and publishing, revealing that early modern ciphering, and the complex history that preceded it in the medieval period, not only influenced political and military history but also played a central role in the emergence of the capitalist media state in the West, in religious reformation, and in the scientific revolution. Ciphered communication, whether in etched stone and bone, in musical notae, runic symbols, polyalphabetic substitution, algebraic equations, graphic typographies, or literary metaphors, took place in contested social spaces and offered a means of expression during times of political, economic, and personal upheaval. Ciphering shaped the early history of linguistics as a discipline, and it bridged theological and scientific rhetoric before and during the Reformation. Ciphering was an occult art, a mathematic language, and an aesthetic that influenced music, sculpture, painting, drama, poetry, and the early novel. This collection addresses gaps in cryptographic history, but more significantly, through cultural analyses of the rhetorical situations of ciphering and actual solved and unsolved medieval and early modern ciphers, it traces the influences of cryptographic writing and reading on literacy broadly defined as well as the cultures that generate, resist, and require that literacy. This volume offers a significant contribution to the history of the book, highlighting the broader cultural significance of textual materialities.

Cryptography and the History of Literacy

A Material History of Medieval and Early Modern Ciphers

This edited collection of essays brings together scholars across disciplines who consider the collaborative work of John Matthews Manly and Edith Rickert, philologists, medievalists and early modernists, cryptologists, and education reformers. These pioneers crafted an extensive interdisciplinary network of intellectual partnerships that made possible groundbreaking projects, from the eight-volume Text of the Canterbury Tales (1940) to the deciphering of the Waberski Cipher. Yet, except for their Chaucer work, their many other accomplishments have received little attention. Collaborative Humanities Research and Pedagogy not only surveys the rich range of their work but also emphasizes the transformative intellectual and pedagogical benefits of collaboration. Katherine Ellison is Professor of English at Illinois State University, USA. She is author of A Cultural History of Early Modern English Cryptography Manuals (2017) and Fatal News: Reading and Information Overload in Early Eighteenth- Century Literature (2014), and co-editor of A Material History of Medieval and Early Modern Ciphers (2020) and Topographies of the Imagination: New Approaches to Defoe (2017). Susan M. Kim is Professor of English at Illinois State University, USA. She is co-editor of A Material History of Medieval and Early Modern Ciphers (2020) and co-author of This Language, A River: A History of English (2017) and Inconceivable Beasts: The Wonders of the East in the Beowulf Manuscript (2013), winner of the International Society of Anglo-Saxonists biennial Best Book award (2015).

The Networks of John Matthews Manly and Edith Rickert

Collaborative Humanities Research and Pedagogy

In delightful, insightful prose, Katherine Ellison reflects on her mistakes and her triumphs as she weaves together the stories of how her Pulitzer Prize-winning career almost ended before it began, how she nearly missed marrying the love of her life, and how she unwittingly got drawn into a stranger-than-fiction murder case.

A True Story Of Love, Lies, Obsession ... and Second Chances

Mothers And Murderers

Noted educator Tom Little and Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Katherine Ellison reveal the home-grown solution to turning American students into life-long learners. The longtime head of Park Day School, Tom Little embarked on a tour of 43 progressive schools across the country. In this book, his life’s work, he interweaves his teaching experience, the knowledge he gleaned from his trip, and the history of Progressive Education. As Little and Katherine Ellison reveal, these educators and schools invigorate learning and promote inquisitiveness by allowing the curriculum to grow organically out of children's questions—whether they lead to studying the senses, working on a farm, or re-creating a desert ecosystem in the classroom. We see curious students draw on information across disciplines to think in imaginative yet practical ways, like in a "Mini-Maker Faire" or designing and building a chair from scratch. Becoming good citizens was another of Little's goals. He believed in the need for students to learn how to become advocates for themselves, from setting rules on the playground to engaging in issues of social justice in the wider community. Using the philosophy of Progressive Education, schools can prepare students to shape a vibrant future in the arts and sciences for themselves and the nation.

Loving Learning: How Progressive Education Can Save America's Schools

Stephen P. Hinshaw

Rates of diagnosis of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) are skyrocketing, throughout America and the rest of the world. U.S. rates of youth diagnosis have increased 40% from just a decade ago. Adults with ADHD are now the fastest-growing segment of the population receiving diagnosis and medication. The disorder is painful and sometimes disabling for individuals and tremendously costly for society; yet, widespread misinformation, skepticism, and unanswered questions have jeopardized effective diagnosis and treatment. Researched and written by Stephen Hinshaw, an international expert on ADHD, and Katherine Ellison, a Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist and author, ADHD: What Everyone Needs to Know® is the go-to book for authoritative, current, accurate, and compelling information about the global ADHD epidemic. This book addresses questions such as: · Is ADHD a genuine medical condition or a means of pathologizing active and exploratory behavior? · Do medications for ADHD serve as needed treatments, or are they attempts at social control, designed to bolster profits of pharmaceutical firms? · Has the ADHD label become a ruse by which parents can game the educational system for accommodations? · How do symptoms and impairments related to ADHD differ between girls and women and boys and men? · Why are ADHD medications often used as performance enhancers by college and high-school students? ADHD: What Everyone Needs to Know® clears the air of the most polarizing and misleading information that abounds, providing straight talk and sound guidelines for educators, policymakers, health professionals, parents, and the general public. It shows the reality of ADHD but does not ignore the forces that have pushed up rates of diagnosis to alarmingly high levels.

Katherine Ellison

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