In The Triumph of Principles: A Story of American Spirituality in Twelve Steps, Ben Riggs walks readers through America's storied intellectual past to arrive at the Twelve Steps. Why the Steps? We've all heard of them, but do we really know what they are or why they are important?The Library of Congress named the book that launched the Twelve Steps one of the eighty-eight books that shaped America?Riggs explains how and why the path blazed by this exceptional group of recovering alcoholics embodies the quintessential American spirituality. He explores the influence of democracy, pluralism, egalitarianism, Transcendentalism, and American Pragmatics on the Twelve Steps, revealing a practical approach to spirituality that benefits everyone. Riggs also provides in-depth commentary on the practice of each Step, inviting the reader to experience their simplicity and effectiveness firsthand.The Triumph of Principles is a must-read for students of American philosophy, practical spirituality, and of course, practitioners of the Twelve Steps.

Triumph of Principles: A Story of American Spirituality in Twelve Steps

Health, Fitness & Dieting

Riggs, Benjamin

Riggs, Ben

Addiction & Recovery

Benjamin Riggs

About the Author\nBEN RIGGS is a writer, teacher, and podcaster. He traveled the world teaching in his 20s. During his journeys, he tutored a princess, saw both the Sahara and Mt. Fuji at dawn, and discovered his wife and fellow traveler, Tara. He has settled down in his hometown of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where he teaches English and history, and he and Tara have a son, Simon. Ben’s RPG podcast, Plot Points, has been running for the last decade, and his work has appeared on NPR and Geek & Sundry. Slaying the Dragon is his first book.\nRole-playing game historian Ben Riggs unveils the secret history of TSR― the company that unleashed imaginations with Dungeons & Dragons, was driven into ruin by disastrous management decisions, and then saved by their bitterest rival.\nCo-created by wargame enthusiasts Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson, the original Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game released by TSR (Tactical Studies Rules) in 1974 created a radical new medium: the role-playing game. For the next two decades, TSR rocketed to success, producing multiple editions of D&D, numerous settings for the game, magazines, video games, New York Times bestselling novels by Margaret Weis, Tracy Hickman, and R. A. Salvatore, and even a TV show! But by 1997, a series of ruinous choices and failed projects brought TSR to the edge of doom―only to be saved by their fiercest competitor, Wizards of the Coast, the company behind the collectible card game Magic: The Gathering.\nUnearthed from Ben Riggs’s own adventurous campaign of in-depth research, interviews with major players, and acquisitions of secret documents, Slaying the Dragon reveals the true story of the rise and fall of TSR. Go behind the scenes of their Lake Geneva headquarters where innovative artists and writers redefined the sword and sorcery genre, managers and executives sabotaged their own success by alienating their top talent, ignoring their customer fanbase, accruing a mountain of debt, and agreeing to deals which, by the end, made them into a publishing company unable to publish so much as a postcard.\nAs epic and fantastic as the adventures TSR published, Slaying the Dragon is the legendary tale of the rise and fall of the company that created the role-playing game world.

Slaying the Dragon: A Secret History of Dungeons & Dragons

Business & Money

Biography & History

St.Martin's Press

St. Martin's: Griffin

What does storytelling-narrative-have to do with reporting-nonfiction? Everything.In 1965, Capote published In Cold Blood, an account of a series of ghastly murders in the late '50s. His book became a bestseller, marked by factual accuracy shared through the transporting power of fictional prose. He called it a "nonfiction novel," and some have called it a literary experiment that "opened the way for a new kind of literature." See it as a writer's version of crosspollination, maybe even a certain literary alchemy.Before In Cold Blood, America's interest in nonfiction and journalism had already begun to grow. The breakneck speed of reporting captured readers' attention. With it came a writing technique that treated the reader more like a receptacle for information and headlines rather than someone to compel and entice with words and sentences from the first word to the final period. The Inverted Pyramid, the journalist's map for writing, ensured that a report's first paragraphs contained all the information readers would need, like a shirt in an overstuffed suitcase. This guaranteed readers' access to anything useful if the bottom paragraph had to be cut.Storytelling offers great resources for accomplishing most of the goals of nonfiction writing. In fact, most of the marketing, selling, persuading, and entertaining goals attached to today's writing finds its lineage in the bloodline of storytelling; namely, what prompts readers' curiosity, compels them to continue reading, and satisfies their needs as readers. If you're writing leadership articles or recipe blogs or online-marketing copy, how can you use storytelling to your advantage? In Tell Them a Story: Using the Best Lessons from Narrative Nonfiction in Your Everyday Writing, Ben Riggs breaks down the differences between a report and a story, asks the reader to examine the different purposes of "efferent" writing and "aesthetic" writing, and to consider the benefits of joining the two to meet the needs of an audience. In an examination of the importance of theme, Riggs teaches that by situating your piece of writing on the back of a theme you can inject deeper meaning into even the most prosaic and pragmatic of nonfiction pieces. Writers still need to know how to distill real life accurately into words. Nonfiction. To accomplish all of these strategies, writers still need to write to entice, entertain, and compel readers. Narrative. Even for genres that don't seem inherently "story-friendly," you can make many writing decisions that bring any reader to think, "What happens next?" Ideally, writing this way doesn't occur at the expense of the clarity and factual nature of nonfiction writing and its many forms. This booklet contains tools and strategies to help you write nonfiction in a way that helps your readers - whoever they are - ask those three words, even if they don't know they're asking them. If you make certain writing decisions, they will find themselves traveling from sentence to sentence, paragraph to paragraph, having forgotten where they were before they started reading because they've been transported elsewhere.

Tell Them a Story: Using Narrative Nonfiction in Your Everyday Writing

Reference

Writing, Research & Publishing Guides

Editorial Freelancers Association Publications

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