General Books - Page 4

The Gift of Fear : Survival Signals That Protect Us from Violence

Gavin De Becker

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Subjects -> Health, Mind & Body -> Self-Help -> Abuse

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 305 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

A stranger in a deserted parking lot offers to help carry a woman's groceries. Is he a good Samaritan or is he after something else? A fired employee says "You'll be sorry." Will he return with a gun? After their first date, a man tells a woman it is their "destiny" to be married. What will he do when she won't see him again? A mother has an uneasy feeling about the nice babysitter she's just hired. Should she not go to work today?

These days, no one in America feels immune to violence. But now, in this extraordinary groundbreaking book, the nation's leading expert on predicting violent behavior unlocks the puzzle of human violence and shows that, like every creature on earth, we have within us the ability to predict the harm others might do us and get out of its way. Contrary to popular myth, human violence almost always has a discernible motive and is preceded by clear warning signs. Through dozens of compelling examples from his own career, Gavin de Becker teaches us how to read the signs, using our most basic but often most discounted survival skill - our intuition. The Gift of Fear is a remarkable, unique combination of practical guidance on leading a safer life and profound insight into human behavior.

Assassination Vacation

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Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> General AAS
Subjects -> Nonfiction -> Social Sciences -> Popular Culture

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 135 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Sarah Vowell exposes the glorious conundrums of American history and culture with wit, probity, and an irreverent sense of humor. With Assassination Vacation, she takes us on a road trip like no other--a journey to the pit stops of American political murder and through the myriad ways they have been used for fun and profit, for political and cultural advantage.

From Buffalo to Alaska, Washington to the Dry Tortugas, Vowell visits locations immortalized and influenced by the spilling of politically important blood, reporting as she goes with her trademark blend of wisecracking humor, remarkable honesty, and thought-provoking criticism. We learn about the jinx that was Robert Todd Lincoln (present at the assassinations of Presidents Lincoln, Garfield, and McKinley) and witness the politicking that went into the making of the Lincoln Memorial. The resulting narrative is much more than an entertaining and informative travelogue--it is the disturbing and fascinating story of how American death has been manipulated by popular culture, including literature, architecture, sculpture, and--the author's favorite--historical tourism.

Though the themes of loss and violence are explored and we make detours to see how the Republican Party became the Republican Party, there are lighter diversions into the lives of the three presidents and their assassins, including mummies, show tunes, mean-spirited totem poles, and a nineteenth-century biblical sex cult.

IN ORDER OF APPEARANCE:

Conan O'Brien Robert Todd Lincoln

Eric Bogosian John Wilkes Booth

Stephen King President Abraham Lincoln

Dave Eggers Mike Ryan

Catherine Keener Gretchen Worden

Jon Stewart President James A. Garfield

Tony Kushner John Humphrey Noyes

Brad Bird Charles Guiteau & Emma Goldman

Daniel Handler President William McKinley

Greg Giraldo President Theodore Roosevelt

David Rakoff Leon Czolgosz

The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and What Can Be Done About It

Paul Collier

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Subjects -> Business & Investing -> Economics -> Economic Policy & Development
Subjects -> Business & Investing -> Popular Economics -> Policy & Current Events

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 46 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

In the universally acclaimed and award-winning The Bottom Billion, Paul Collier reveals that fifty failed states--home to the poorest one billion people on Earth--pose the central challenge of the developing world in the twenty-first century. The book shines much-needed light on this group of small nations, largely unnoticed by the industrialized West, that are dropping further and further behind the majority of the world's people, often falling into an absolute decline in living standards. A struggle rages within each of these nations between reformers and corrupt leaders--and the corrupt are winning. Collier analyzes the causes of failure, pointing to a set of traps that ensnare these countries, including civil war, a dependence on the extraction and export of natural resources, and bad governance. Standard solutions do not work, he writes; aid is often ineffective, and globalization can actually make matters worse, driving development to more stable nations. What the bottom billion need, Collier argues, is a bold new plan supported by the Group of Eight industrialized nations. If failed states are ever to be helped, the G8 will have to adopt preferential trade policies, new laws against corruption, new international charters, and even conduct carefully calibrated military interventions. Collier has spent a lifetime working to end global poverty. In The Bottom Billion, he offers real hope for solving one of the great humanitarian crises facing the world today.
"Terrifically readable."
--Time.com
"Set to become a classic. Crammed with statistical nuggets and common sense, his book should be compulsory reading."
--The Economist
"If Sachs seems too saintly and Easterly too cynical, then Collier is the authentic old Africa hand: he knows the terrain and has a keen ear.... If you've ever found yourself on one side or the other of those arguments--and who hasn't?--then you simply must read this book."
--Niall Ferguson, The New York Times Book Review
"Rich in both analysis and recommendations.... Read this book. You will learn much you do not know. It will also change the way you look at the tragedy of persistent poverty in a world of plenty."
--Financial Times

The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down

Anne Fadiman

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Total reviews: 216 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for NonfictionWhen three-month-old Lia Lee Arrived at the county hospital emergency room in Merced, California, a chain of events was set in motion from which neither she nor her parents nor her doctors would ever recover. Lia's parents, Foua and Nao Kao, were part of a large Hmong community in Merced, refugees from the CIA-run "Quiet War" in Laos. The Hmong, traditionally a close-knit and fiercely people, have been less amenable to assimilation than most immigrants, adhering steadfastly to the rituals and beliefs of their ancestors. Lia's pediatricians, Neil Ernst and his wife, Peggy Philip, cleaved just as strongly to another tradition: that of Western medicine. When Lia Lee Entered the American medical system, diagnosed as an epileptic, her story became a tragic case history of cultural miscommunication.Parents and doctors both wanted the best for Lia, but their ideas about the causes of her illness and its treatment could hardly have been more different. The Hmong see illness aand healing as spiritual matters linked to virtually everything in the universe, while medical community marks a division between body and soul, and concerns itself almost exclusively with the former. Lia's doctors ascribed her seizures to the misfiring of her cerebral neurons; her parents called her illness, qaug dab peg--the spirit catches you and you fall down--and ascribed it to the wandering of her soul. The doctors prescribed anticonvulsants; her parents preferred animal sacrifices.

Loot: The Battle over the Stolen Treasures of the Ancient World

Sharon Waxman

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Total reviews: 2 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

A journey across four continents to the heart of the conflict over who should own the great works of ancient art

Why are the Elgin Marbles in London and not on the Acropolis? Why do there seem to be as many mummies in France as there are in Egypt? Why are so many Etruscan masterworks in America? For the past two centuries, the West has been plundering the treasures of the ancient world to fill its great museums, but in recent years, the countries where ancient civilizations originated have begun to push back, taking museums to court, prosecuting curators, and threatening to force the return of these priceless objects.

Where do these treasures rightly belong? Sharon Waxman, a former culture reporter for The New York Times and a longtime foreign correspondent, brings us inside this high-stakes conflict, examining the implications for the preservation of the objects themselves and for how we understand our shared cultural heritage. Her journey takes readers from the great cities of Europe and America to Egypt, Turkey, Greece, and Italy, as these countries face down the Louvre, the Metropolitan Museum, the British Museum, and the J. Paul Getty Museum. She also introduces a cast of determined and implacable characters whose battles may strip these museums of some of their most cherished treasures.

For readers who are fascinated by antiquity, who love to frequent museums, and who believe in the value of cultural exchange, Loot opens a new window on an enduring conflict.

The Numerati

Baker, Stephen

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 25 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

They Have Your Number 5 out of 5 stars.
2 of 2 people found this review helpful.

It may be that you have a "shopper's card" at your local grocery; you hand it to the teller as you check out, and the computer registers, besides what the total is and how the store's inventory will need to be restocked, just what the purchases were for you as a specific individual shopper. Maybe it will mail you some coupons on items it can tell you will be interested in, based on what you have already bought. Not too interesting, not too challenging for the computer, not too intrusive. But what will happen when you get a smart cart at the store? That's one that will welcome your insertion of your shopper's card, and then tell you what your shopping list usually looks like so you don't forget anything, where today's bargains are (in other words, what the store manager is trying to offload), and the fastest route through the aisles so you can get everything you need. If this sounds like it could be a useful tool for you, and also sounds a little creepy because of all the information the store (and the cart) knows about you, it's just the beginning. You may well want to see what else those who are mining your personal information are up to by reading _The Numerati_ (Houghton Mifflin) by Stephen Baker. Baker is a business journalist who wants to let us know about a new reach of mathematics into our lives. There are no equations here, just stories of the mathematicians and computer geeks that use them to find and exploit patterns of our day-to-day existence. Baker has cast some light onto many facets of an arcane realm of number crunchers, and has written a book that is entertaining and often disconcerting.

You can decide that you do not want to have a shopper's card. You can also decide that you do not want a cell phone, you never want to purchase anything on a credit card, or you do not wish to use an internet search engine. If you do volunteer for such activities, the Numerati have you. You cannot help but leave a digital trail. Most of Baker's chapters involve his looking into a particular realm of number crunching, interviewing the geeks and mathematicians who are involved, describing what has been done so far, and explaining the prospects for the not-too-distant future. Perhaps the brightest prospects for data mining are medical. Patients will do nothing extra to deliver information; it will just be monitored passively. Imagine a bed equipped with sensors that would tell how many hours we are actually spending in it, or how much tossing or turning we do, or how many times we get up for a bathroom break and how much fluid is lost on each such trip. Maybe there will be magic carpet on the floor of an elderly patient's house; it could register weight gain, or a new peculiarity in gait, or a fall, or even if the patient has stopped moving around the house during the day.

Privacy concerns are valid; it remains to be seen how much each of us will have to re-think what privacy actually means. There could also be moral questions involved; if you could make a mathematical model of a pedophile, and your church or school screens job applicants using such a model, and the screen says a candidate is an 85% fit, what is the right thing to do (and, an entirely separate question, what will be the thing to do to minimize legal liability)? And that percentage fit - it's going to be what any Numerati have to put up with, because any prediction or pattern can only indicate not reality, not truth, but mere probability. Several of the boffins interviewed here say that as complicated as are the mathematical algorithms to turn people into data, the math is the easy part; it's the humans that are hard to figure out. It is surprising, too, how simple tasks are actually monumental; terrorist watch lists of mere names present a nightmare, as any non-terrorist traveler who has a similar name will tell you. Internationalizing such data is a horrendous task; the Chinese alone, for instance, spell Osama Bin Laden eleven different ways. Baker's brightly-written and enthusiastic book presents pleasing pictures of how our numbers will come up in the future, and emphasizes those without neglecting to mention the darker issues of data misuse. He even did his own little experiment that verified something information techs have known since the most primitive of electronic computers. He and his wife filled out questionnaires at a dating site, and were dismayed that the computer did not point them in each other's direction as potential matches. It turns out that Baker had mistakenly excluded women of his wife's age. The verification: garbage in, garbage out.

Editorial Review:

Every day, we produce loads of data about ourselves just by living in the modern world. Now, a group of mathematicians is sifting through this data to profile us and manipulate our behavior without our even realizing it.

Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God (Bloom's Notes: Comprehensive Research & Study Guide)

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Total reviews: 407 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Their Eyes Were Watching God, an American classic, is a luminous and haunting novel about Janie Crawford, a Southern black woman in the 1930s whose journey from a free-spirited girl to a woman of independence and substance has inspired writers and readers for close to seventy years.

This poetic, graceful love story, rooted in black folk traditions and steeped in mythic realism, celebrates, boldly and brilliantly, African-American culture and heritage. And in a powerful, mesmerizing narrative, it pays quiet tribute to a black woman, who, though constricted by the times, still demanded to be heard.

Originally published in 1937, Their Eyes Were Watching God met significant commercial but divided critical acclaim. Somewhat forgotten after her death, Zora Neale Hurston was rediscovered by a number of black authors in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and reintroduced to a greater readership by Alice Walker in her 1972 essay "In Search of Zora Neale Hurston," written for Ms. magazine. Long out of print, the book was reissued after a petition was circulated at the Modern Language Association Convention in 1975, and nearly three decades later Their Eyes Were Watching God is considered a seminal novel of American fiction.

With a new foreword by the celebrated novelist Edwidge Danticat -- author of Eyes, Breath, Memory; The Farming of Bones; and Krik?Krak! -- this edition of Their Eyes Were Watching God commemorates the singular, inimitable voice in America's literary canon and highlights its unusual publication history.

The Wisdom of Crowds

James Surowiecki

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 161 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Hilarious! 1 out of 5 stars.
2 of 8 people found this review helpful.

Hee, hee, hee! This title and this book sure look funny right now (September 22nd, 2008). Do we follow the wisdom of the crowds on Wall Street (which, if left to its own devises will continue to drive financial titans into bankrupcy), or the machinations of the dubious experts (Paulson & Bernanke), who will put us on the hook for hundreds of billions for years to come?

Maybe it's time to dust off that 19th Century classic "The Madness of Crowds" instead of reading this smug balderdash.

Editorial Review:

In this fascinating book, New Yorker business columnist James Surowiecki explores a deceptively simple idea: Large groups of people are smarter than an elite few, no matter how brilliant–better at solving problems, fostering innovation, coming to wise decisions, even predicting the future.

With boundless erudition and in delightfully clear prose, Surowiecki ranges across fields as diverse as popular culture, psychology, ant biology, behavioral economics, artificial intelligence, military history, and politics to show how this simple idea offers important lessons for how we live our lives, select our leaders, run our companies, and think about our world.

Manifesto of the Communist Party

Karl Marx, Frederick Engels

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 254 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Good in theory 1 out of 5 stars.
7 of 32 people found this review helpful.

Kinda a pointless book now that communism has been proven ineffective. I guess if you still want to live in this type of society you can move to Russa, China, Cuba etc. Lucky for them they have the US to give them foreign aid. Communism would be dead within a few decades without a capitolistic nation to support it.

Editorial Review:

Originally published on the eve of the 1848 European revolutions, The Communist Manifesto is a condensed and incisive account of the worldview Marx and Engels developed during their hectic intellectual and political collaboration. Formulating the principles of dialectical materialism, they believed that labor creates wealth, hence capitalism is exploitive and antithetical to freedom.

This new edition includes an extensive introduction by Gareth Stedman Jones, Britain's leading expert on Marx and Marxism, providing a complete course for students of The Communist Manifesto, and demonstrating not only the historical importance of the text, but also its place in the world today.

The Complete Idiot's Guide to Amazing Sex, Third Edition

Sari Locker

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Subjects -> Health, Mind & Body -> Psychology & Counseling -> Sexuality -> Human

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 54 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Great guide 4 out of 5 stars.
2 of 3 people found this review helpful.

I have seen other books on this topic and found this one to contain better information. There is information in here that is good for beginners and those who have been going at it for years. I also recommend Sex and the Perfect Lover: Tao, Tantra, and the Kama Sutra

Editorial Review:

Most people know that there’s more to sex than the missionary position. But to make sex really hot, some people need a little guidance. That’s where acclaimed sex educator—and WCBS-TV relationship correspondent—Sari Locker steps in. The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Amazing Sex, Third Edition, has fresh advice on how readers can make smart sexual choices, cast aside inhibitions, and keep their sex life exciting well into their golden years. Readers get new and updated chapters on:

• Current sexual trends and attitudes
• Sex within marriage and long-term relationships
• Body image, obesity, and plastic surgery and their effect on sexuality
• Exciting techniques for reaching multiple orgasms for men and women
• Tips on specific sexual activities, including playful ideas on locations and toys
• Plus an 8-page full-color photographic insert of Sari’s eight original sexual positions