The Anatomy of Peace: Resolving the Heart of Conflict
Arbinger Institute
What if conflicts at home, conflicts at work, and conflicts in the world stem from the same root cause? And what if individually and collectively we systematically misunderstand that cause, and unwittingly perpetuate the very problems we think we are trying to solve?
Through an intriguing story of parents struggling with their troubled children and with their own personal problems, "The Anatomy of Peace" shows how to get past the preconceived ideas and self-justifying reactions that keep us from seeing the world clearly and dealing with it effectively. Yusuf al-Falah, an Arab, and Avi Rozen, a Jew, each lost his father at the hands of the other's ethnic cousins. As the story unfolds, we discover how they came together, how they help warring parents and children to come together, and how we too can find our way out of the struggles that weigh us down. The choice between peace and war lies within us. As one of the characters says, "A solution to the inner war solves the outer war as well." This book offers more than hope — it shows how we can prevent the conflicts that cause so much pain in our lives and in the world.
Look Me in the Eye: My Life with Asperger's
John Elder Robison
New York Times Bestseller
“As sweet and funny and sad and true and heartfelt a memoir as one could find.”
—from the foreword by Augusten Burroughs
Ever since he was young, John Robison longed to connect with other people, but by the time he was a teenager, his odd habits—an inclination to blurt out non sequiturs, avoid eye contact, dismantle radios, and dig five-foot holes (and stick his younger brother, Augusten Burroughs, in them)—had earned him the label “social deviant.” It was not until he was forty that he was diagnosed with a form of autism called Asperger’s syndrome. That understanding transformed the way he saw himself—and the world. A born storyteller, Robison has written a moving, darkly funny memoir about a life that has taken him from developing exploding guitars for KISS to building a family of his own. It’s a strange, sly, indelible account—sometimes alien yet always deeply human.
Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard
Chip Heath, Dan Heath
Why is it so hard to make lasting changes in our companies, in our communities, and in our own lives?
The primary obstacle is a conflict that’s built into our brains, say Chip and Dan Heath, authors of the critically acclaimed bestseller Made to Stick. Psychologists have discovered that our minds are ruled by two different systems—the rational mind and the emotional mind—that compete for control. The rational mind wants a great beach body; the emotional mind wants that Oreo cookie. The rational mind wants to change something at work; the emotional mind loves the comfort of the existing routine. This tension can doom a change effort—but if it is overcome, change can come quickly.
In Switch, the Heaths show how everyday people—employees and managers, parents and nurses—have united both minds and, as a result, achieved dramatic results:
● The lowly medical interns who managed to defeat an entrenched, decades-old medical practice that was endangering patients.
● The home-organizing guru who developed a simple technique for overcoming the dread of housekeeping.
● The manager who transformed a lackadaisical customer-support team into service zealots by removing a standard tool of customer service
In a compelling, story-driven narrative, the Heaths bring together decades of counterintuitive research in psychology, sociology, and other fields to shed new light on how we can effect transformative change. Switch shows that successful changes follow a pattern, a pattern you can use to make the changes that matter to you, whether your interest is in changing the world or changing your waistline.
Understanding Institutional Diversity
Elinor Ostrom
The analysis of how institutions are formed, how they operate and change, and how they influence behavior in society has become a major subject of inquiry in politics, sociology, and economics. A leader in applying game theory to the understanding of institutional analysis, Elinor Ostrom provides in this book a coherent method for undertaking the analysis of diverse economic, political, and social institutions.
Understanding Institutional Diversity explains the Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) framework, which enables a scholar to choose the most relevant level of interaction for a particular question. This framework examines the arena within which interactions occur, the rules employed by participants to order relationships, the attributes of a biophysical world that structures and is structured by interactions, and the attributes of a community in which a particular arena is placed.
The book explains and illustrates how to use the IAD in the context of both field and experimental studies. Concentrating primarily on the rules aspect of the IAD framework, it provides empirical evidence about the diversity of rules, the calculation process used by participants in changing rules, and the design principles that characterize robust, self-organized resource governance institutions.
Going Inside: A Tour Round a Single Moment of Consciousness
John McCrone
What happens in our brain just before we act or speak? A look at a revolution in science.
The mysteries of human consciousness — the most unyielding of the enigmas of the human brain — are at last beginning to reveal their secrets. What happens in that split second before we become aware and the brain prompts us to speak or act? In Going Inside, John McCrone takes us inside a single instant of consciousness — that moment before a tennis player hits the ball without seeing it. What are the dynamics occurring inside the brain on a subconscious level before each moment of awareness? With great clarity and detail, McCrone tells us about the new ideas and research tools — such as brain scanning, which snaps pictures of thoughts or images in a person's head. He explains why the model of the mind as a giant computer is being abandoned. In its place has emerged a view of a dynamic, evolving, chaotic system — seeing the brain as an organ that literally "grows" awareness. These new ideas have wrought a revolution in cognitive neuroscience, now enjoying the kind of glory days that particle physics saw in the 1960s and genetics in the 1980s.
How To Win Friends and Influence People
Dale Carnegie
How to Win Friends and Influence People is the first, and still the finest, book of its kind. One of the best-known motivational books in history, Dale Carnegie's groundbreaking work has sold millions of copies, has been translated into almost every known written language, and has helped countless people succeed in both their business and personal lives.
First published in 1937, Carnegie's advice has remained relevant for generations because he addresses timeless questions about the fine art of getting along with people: How can you make people like you instantly? How can you persuade people to agree with you? How can you speak frankly to people without giving offense? The ability to read others and successfully navigate any social situation is critically important to those who want to get a job, keep a job, or simply expand their social network.
The core principles of this book, originally written as a practical, working handbook on human relations, are proven effective. Carnegie explains the fundamentals of handling people with a positive approach; how to make people like you and want to help you; how to win people to your way of thinking without conflict; and how to be the kind of leader who inspires quality work, increased productivity, and high morale.
As Carnegie explains, the majority of our success in life depends on our ability to communicate and manage personal relationships effectively, whether at home or at work. How to Win Friends and Influence People will help you discover and develop the people skills you need to live well and prosper.
Counterclockwise: Mindful Health and the Power of Possibility
Ellen J. Langer
If we could turn back the clock psychologically, could we also turn it back physically? For more than thirty years, award-winning social psychologist Ellen Langer has studied this provocative question, and now, in Counterclockwise, she presents the answer: Opening our minds to what’s possible, instead of presuming impossibility, can lead to better health–at any age.
Drawing on landmark work in the field and her own body of colorful and highly original experiments–including the first detailed discussion of her “counterclockwise” study, in which elderly men lived for a week as though it was 1959 and showed dramatic improvements in their hearing, memory, dexterity, appetite, and general well-being–Langer shows that the magic of rejuvenation and ongoing good health lies in being aware of the ways we mindlessly react to social and cultural cues. Examining the hidden decisions and vocabulary that shape the medical world (“chronic” versus “acute,” “cure” versus “remission”), the powerful physical effects of placebos, and the intricate but often defeatist ways we define our physical health, Langer challenges the idea that the limits we assume and impose on ourselves are real. With only subtle shifts in our thinking, in our language, and in our expectations, she tells us, we can begin to change the ingrained behaviors that sap health, optimism, and vitality from our lives. Improved vision, younger appearance, weight loss, and increased longevity are just four of the results that Langer has demonstrated.
Immensely readable and riveting, Counterclockwise offers a transformative and bold new paradigm: the psychology of possibility. A hopeful and groundbreaking book by an author who has changed how people all over the world think and feel, Counterclockwise is sure to join Mindfulness as a standard source on new-century science and healing.
Love in 90 Days: The Essential Guide to Finding Your Own True Love
Diana Kirschner
Finding true love is possible in just 90 days. Renowned clinical psychologist, Dr. Diana Kirschner, uses the latest research, clinical and personal experience to show you how. Dr. Diana knows the questions single women everywhere face: "Why am I attracted to the wrong kind of guys?""Why is he just not that into me?""Why can't I seem to find the One?" She also knows the unconscious mistakes that women make over and over again in love-regardless of age, work success, or the type of men they are dating.
Over the years Dr. Diana has received countless inquiries from single women about writing a how-to guide on her work. Love in 90 Days: The Essential Guide to Finding Your Own True Love is that book.
Love in 90 Days is fun, savvy and based on the latest research on singles, online dating and healthy relationships. Loaded with step-by-step instructions, checklists, and weekly homework assignments, this revolutionary love book is also an intensely personal journey for each reader. Love in 90 Days guides you along your own path towards self discovery with proven and effective dating advice and tough love. Dr. Diana dispels common misconceptions about love relationships and dating, and share personal stories from women who have successfully completed the Love in 90 Days Program. There's also a chapter devoted to the special issues faced by African-American women, single mothers, and women forty-five and older.
Reviews of Love in 90 Days
"Are you just thinking about getting back into dating? Or is your current dating strategy getting you nowhere? Maybe you're with a guy now and wondering if he's "The One?" Or are you in a relationship now that you know deep inside is failing? No matter what is happening in your love life, Love in 90 Days is for you. Grab this book now. It truly rocks!"~Steve Nakamoto, Writers Digest award-winning author of Men are Like Fish; What Every Women Needs to Know about Catching a Man
"A wonderful addition to any single woman's library...I was thrilled with how many times Dr. Diana exceeded my expectations...Chapter Two (the Deadly Dating Patterns is mandatory reading." ~Bonny Albo, Dating Guide at About.com
"The best-selling, how to book, flew off the shelves of bookstores and a copy seems to be on the coffee tables and reference material for many of my friends..."Love in 90 Days" is replete with pages of heart-filled ideas and exercises. Like the song: summertime and the reading is easy. Go for it."
~Page Larkin, Examiner.com
Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality
Christopher Ryan, Cacilda Jethá
Since Darwin's day, we've been told that sexual monogamy comes naturally to our species. Mainstream science—as well as religious and cultural institutions—has maintained that men and women evolved in families in which a man's possessions and protection were exchanged for a woman's fertility and fidelity. But this narrative is collapsing. Fewer and fewer couples are getting married, and divorce rates keep climbing as adultery and flagging libido drag down even seemingly solid marriages.
How can reality be reconciled with the accepted narrative? It can't be, according to renegade thinkers Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá. While debunking almost everything we "know" about sex, they offer a bold alternative explanation in this provocative and brilliant book.
Ryan and Jethá's central contention is that human beings evolved in egalitarian groups that shared food, child care, and, often, sexual partners. Weaving together convergent, frequently overlooked evidence from anthropology, archaeology, primatology, anatomy, and psychosexuality, the authors show how far from human nature monogamy really is. Human beings everywhere and in every era have confronted the same familiar, intimate situations in surprisingly different ways. The authors expose the ancient roots of human sexuality while pointing toward a more optimistic future illuminated by our innate capacities for love, cooperation, and generosity.
With intelligence, humor, and wonder, Ryan and Jethá show how our promiscuous past haunts our struggles over monogamy, sexual orientation, and family dynamics. They explore why long-term fidelity can be so difficult for so many; why sexual passion tends to fade even as love deepens; why many middle-aged men risk everything for transient affairs with younger women; why homosexuality persists in the face of standard evolutionary logic; and what the human body reveals about the prehistoric origins of modern sexuality.
In the tradition of the best historical and scientific writing, Sex at Dawn unapologetically upends unwarranted assumptions and unfounded conclusions while offering a revolutionary understanding of why we live and love as we do.
The Science of Orgasm
Barry R. Komisaruk, Carlos Beyer-Flores, Beverly Whipple
This fascinating and comprehensive book is the first to explore the complex biological process leading to orgasm. Here, sexuality researcher and nurse Beverly Whipple, coauthor of the international best-selling book The G Spot and Other Discoveries about Human Sexuality, joins neuroscientist Barry R. Komisaruk and endocrinologist Carlos Beyer-Flores to view orgasm through the lenses of behavioral neuroscience along with cognitive and physiological sciences.
The authors explain how and why orgasms happen, why they fail to happen, and what brain and body events are put into play at the moment of orgasm. No topic is left unexplored, as the book describes the genital-brain connection, how the brain produces orgasms, how aging affects orgasm, and the effects of prescription medication, street drugs, hormones, disorders, and diseases.
Covering every type of sexual peak experience in women and men?from intense to phantom — this informative and entertaining work illuminates the hows, whats, and wherefores of orgasm.
Not Your Mother's Cookbook: Unusual Recipes for the Adventurous Cook
John Bear Ph.D., Marina Bear
Tired of the same chicken-pasta-fish routine? Then leaf through these pages of kitchen-tested recipes for inspiration. Using recipes culled from newspaper food editors, invented in a recipe game, and adapted from published cookbooks and Internet sites, the authors offer out-of-the-ordinary dishes that are accessible to an average cook in an ordinary kitchen — dishes that actually work. Though the ingredients may be surprising, as in Green Chile Maple Brittle, or the preparation procedures unorthodox, as in Eggs Cooked for 12 Hours in Turkish Coffee, these dishes can be served — and enjoyed — with pride. Accompanied by illustrations throughout, these surprising recipes inspire cooks to push the boundaries of traditional cuisine.
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