MSI Press Blog

    Today's book excerpt comes from Bob McGee's award-winning book,   A View through the Fog : FIRST DAYS         The late afternoon Bay Area breeze knows no season. My once white coveralls, now stained with red-oxide primer, helped take the bite away from the piercing April air, allowing me to become lost in the remarkable view of the Carquinez Straits as I looked out from the catwalk below the Benicia Bridge.      The sound of soft-soled work boots approaching me on the catwalk interrupted my reflective moment of solitude. Taking up the same pose as me, arms crossed, leaning across the top guard-rail of the catwalk, my paint foreman Don shared the view for a moment before whispering, “The Gate is hiring painters.”      My concentration broke, and I immediately turned my gaze on Don. Still facing out toward the straits, he said, “There’s three openings, but you’ve only got two days to get the paperwork in.” Then, he added, “Just something to think about.”      The timi

  This month's featured author is Bertha Cooper. Her book, Women, We're Only Old Once , won the Phoenix award for best new voice in health and fitness,  She also contributed a book to our pandemic series, Old and On Hold . Bravo, Bertha!  Want to know more about Bertha? Check out her biography: Bertha Cooper earned a BSN degree in nursing (University of WA) and entered the profession the same year as Medicare, a coincidence destined to define her career in non-traditional ways. She began her career in public health and moved into a management position early in her career–the beginning of a long career in management and administration in an expanding array of health care delivery innovations. She worked in public health, home health, long-term care, hospice and acute care. Every one of those positions involved quality, safety, and effective health care for the elderly. She became a reasonable voice and passionate advocate for patient-centered services across the continuum of car

  Excerpt from  Think Yourself into Becoming a Language Learning Super Star Cognitive Styles A few cognitive styles have bee referred to and defined earlier (or footnoted). There are many kinds and systems of understanding cognition that have been proposed over the past 3-4 decades. The one I use in this book is the E&L Cognitive Style Construct (Ehrman & Leaver, 2002; Leaver, 2019). I have chosen it principally because it encompasses many other systems—the reason it was designed: to simplify the proliferating models floating around academic programs. [1] For this book, it provides an easy overview of styles because the E&L subordinates ten subscales [2] to two overarching categories, which make it easier and simpler to use as a first-step instrument. Cognition refers to the way people process information. After perceiving new information (through one or another sensory preference), a learner must process it, encoding it for memory. The effectiveness of how that is done