Bryn Mawr Authors

Project Performance Review focuses on evaluating projects efficiently and in context, identifying important improvement opportunities and leading project and organizational management practices. It advises how these can be put in place to give stakeholders confidence in the control and delivery of their projects without waste.

The authors explain not just the mechanism and objective of project performance reviews but also the ideal environment in which they are intended to be implemented. The shaping of this environment, by the stakeholders and technical team, is key to achieving your intended outcomes. Without the professional cooperation of all interested and informed parties, the effectiveness of any review may be compromised. Topics addressed include: introducing the project review method, engaging project stakeholders, ensuring project governance, conducting project risk assessments, improving accountability, providing project assurance, organizing and managing projects, optimizing review scope and approach, avoiding review pitfalls, meeting existing audit standards, and proposing alternate approaches to project evaluation.

"A travelogue of purgatory. Brutal, but minutely rendered--a chronicle of small betrayals and vicissitudes in a ruthless world. Losers, hustlers and delusional artists, all trapped in their pretense and hollow lives; making deals with the devil at the crossroads of Tinseltown." --Guillermo del Toro

Tim Blake Nelson's debut novel is an epic group portrait of four men grappling for control of a script in a radically changing Hollywood, or the City of Blows.

It's early 2020, and legendary producer Jacob Rosenthal is eager to make his next film, Coal, adapted from the bestselling novel by the celebrated writer Rex Patterson. The project--which takes on the controversial topic of race in America--is Jacob's envisioned magnum opus, and likely his swan song. He selects David Levit to direct, a major opportunity for the classically trained actor/director whose own films, while garnering critical acclaim, have not resulted in box office success.

But the announcement of David's hiring doesn't sit well with a producer from David's past, Brad Shlansky, who channels the last remaining vestiges of his creativity into a revenge plot that could very well scupper the making of Coal, and ruin the lives of its producer and director in the process.

A sprawling, character-driven depiction of the modern film industry, City of Blows reaches back decades to the formative experiences of each of the novel's central figures to explore what first motivated them to become involved in the quixotic and often venal world of movie-making. Driven by their diverse backgrounds, each must navigate the same huckstering circus that puts films on screen.

From the start, Tim Blake Nelson's sharp and unsparing voice holds a mirror up to America itself, using Hollywood to investigate the cultural and economic fault lines that have come to dominate and confound us all. You will find yourself unable to turn away from the ruthlessness and despair, the hubris and sheer evil, as City of Blows accelerates to its unimaginable yet inevitable crescendo.

Divorce lawyer Leigh Huyett knows all too well that most second marriages are doomed to fail. Yet five years in, she and Pete Conley couldn't be happier with their blended family.

But one rainy Friday night, on the way back from celebrating their anniversary, Peter and Leigh receive horrific news. Peter's son Kip, a high school senior, has crashed his truck and been arrested for drunk driving. And Leigh's fourteen-year-old daughter, Chrissy, was with him.

Twelve hours later, Chrissy is dead and Kip is charged with manslaughter.

Reeling with grief, Leigh nonetheless does her best to rally behind Peter and Kip. That is, until Kip changes his story and claims that he wasn't driving after all--Chrissy was, and he swears there is a witness.

As they hurtle toward Kip's trial date, husband and wife are torn between loyalty to their children and to each other, while the mystery of what really happened that night looms large.

A richly illustrated history of textiles in the Mughal Empire

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a vast array of textiles circulated throughout the Mughal Empire. Made from rare fibers and crafted using virtuosic techniques, these exquisite objects animated early modern experience, from the intimate, sensory pleasure of garments to the monumentality of imperial tents. The Art of Cloth in Mughal India tells the story of textiles crafted and collected across South Asia and beyond, illuminating how cloth participated in political negotiations, social conversations, and the shared seasonal rhythms of the year.

Drawing on small-scale paintings, popular poetry, chronicle histories, and royal inventory records, Sylvia Houghteling charts the travels of textiles from the Mughal imperial court to the kingdoms of Rajasthan, the Deccan sultanates, and the British Isles. She shows how the "art of cloth" encompassed both the making of textiles as well as their creative uses. Houghteling asks what cloth made its wearers feel, how it acted in space, and what images and memories it conjured in the mind. She reveals how woven objects began to evoke the natural environment, convey political and personal meaning, and span the distance between faraway people and places.

Beautifully illustrated, The Art of Cloth in Mughal India offers an incomparable account of the aesthetics and techniques of cloth and cloth making and the ways that textiles shaped the social, political, religious, and aesthetic life of early modern South Asia.