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It’s time to showcase your best work of the year with one of NASW’s two award programs.
Featured news
Jeff Hecht, Lasers, Death Rays, Quest for Ultimate Weapon
From Zeus’ thunderbolts to sci-fi fiction, films, and comics, death rays rouse public interest. The Pentagon has explored the potential of the laser, invented in the late 1950s, to shoot down ballistic missiles and achieve other military aims. That involved many alluring but ultimately false starts, Jeff Hecht reports in Lasers, Death Rays, and the Long, Strange Quest for the Ultimate Weapon.
Patricia Barnes-Svarney and Thomas E. Svarney, Forensic Science Answer Book
What comprises evidence at a crime scene? What do forensic entomologists do? Forensic scientists face a profusion of daunting tasks, some as rare as determining the effects of a poison dart filled with ricin or tea containing active radionucleotide polonium-210. In The Handy Forensic Science Answer Book, Patricia Barnes-Svarney and Thomas Svarney reveal the field’s mysteries.
Carma Spence, Public Speaking Super Powers
“It usually takes me more than three weeks to prepare a good impromptu speech,” Mark Twain asserted. In Public Speaking Super Powers, Carma Spence tells how to structure a speech for coherence and flexibility, develop the right stories for your message, and overcome fears of speaking in public. With practice, Spence maintains, everyone can become a better public speaker.
Partnership brings National Writers Union benefits to NASW members
Thanks to the work of the freelance committee, NASW members now qualify for discount membership to the National Writers Union (NWU). This cooperative agreement allows NASW members to receive the advice, power, and backing of NWU in resolving payment disputes with publishers. NWU, a fellow member of the Authors Coalition, is the only labor union that represents freelance writers working in all genres, formats, and mediums.
In 1940, as German U-boats blocked ships attempting Atlantic crossings, a 15-alarm blaze at Baltimore’s Crown Cork and Seal factory consumed nine acres of baled cork, a sealant crucial to the defense industry. Was the fire caused by Nazi sabotage? In Cork Wars: Intrigue and Industry in World War II, David Taylor describes this event and its impact on the lives of three men and their families.
