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By way of her adventures with seven birds--wild, tame, exotic, and common--the beloved author of "The Good Good Pig" weaves new scientific insights and narrative to reveal seven kernels of bird wisdom.

A celebrated author and filmmaker shares his firsthand experience of the convulsive changes in the landscape of Japanese society over the past 40 years.

What if digital communication felt as real as being touched?This question led Michael Chorost to explore profound new ideas triggered by lab research around the world, and the result is the book you now hold. Marvelous and momentous, World Wide Mind takes mind-to-mind communication out of the realm of science fiction and reveals how we are on the verge of a radical new understanding of human interaction. Chorost himself has computers in his head that enable him to hear: two cochlear implants. Drawing on that experience, he proposes that our Paleolithic bodies and our Pentium chips could be physically merged, and he explores the technologies that could do it. He visits engineers building wearable computers that allow people to be online every waking moment, and scientists working on implanted chips that would let paralysis victims communicate. Entirely new neural interfaces are being developed that let computers read and alter neural activity in unprecedented detail. But we all know how addictive the Internet is. Chorost explains the addiction: he details the biochemistry of what makes you hunger to touch your iPhone and check your email. He proposes how we could design a mind-to-mind technology that would let us reconnect with our bodies and enhance our relationships. With such technologies, we could achieve a collective consciousness—a World Wide Mind. And it would be humankind’s next evolutionary step. With daring and sensitivity, Chorost writes about how he learned how to enhance his own relationships by attending workshops teaching the power of touch. He learned how to bring technology and communication together to find true love, and his story shows how we can master technology to make ourselves more human rather than less. World Wide Mind offers a new understanding of how we communicate, what we need to connect fully with one another, and how our addiction to email and texting can be countered with technologies that put us—literally—in each other’s minds.

Originally published: New York: Free Press; London: Collier Macmillan, c1990.

Writing with a laser-sharp wit and a perceptive eye for revealing detail, Judy Bachrach traces the course of two careers and one romance—all driven by soaring ambition. With the right amount of energy, money, and desire, Tina Brown and Harry Evans knew how to handle virtually everything that came their way. Once they arrived from England, they felt destined to climb to the heights of the American media. The couple epitomized within elite corporate as well as social circles what might be called parvenu royalty, which covered both of them with the dazzling glaze of power, position, and fame. Underneath, of course, they were quite different: nature’s Americans, one might say, hungry, passionate, forever reinventing themselves. Tina put her stamp on Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, and Talk magazine. Harry ran Random House. Over the years, they artfully crafted and recrafted the faces they showed the world, confident they were a match for anybody…especially for each other. They were constantly in the public eye, throwing parties, accepting the adulation of their peers—all the time making sure that no one really knew anything about them. But what happens to the perfect married couple—wealthy, attractive, running twin empires, the darlings of the media, the envy of their bitter rivals—when their world starts to fall apart and the enchantment fades? This rich, fast-paced story of Tina Brown and Harry Evans is not only a brilliant account of two media stars, but also a tale of how this British couple molded and shaped every aspect of the American publishing world—until it inevitably turned on them. Originally published in 2001, Tina and Harry Come to America reads like a bestselling novel and is, at times, uncanny in its resemblance to William Thackeray’s Vanity Fair—a riveting, cautionary tale of power and the media.

From the coauthor of Bringing Up a Moral Child comes insight on how to encourage children to focus on intellectual achievement featuring practical techniques and real-life examples.The Passionate Mind shares research from the fields of human intelligence and creativity in an effort to enhance children’s learning and problem-solving skills. Focusing on intellectual achievement by sharing strategies that will boost curiosity, concentration, aesthetic sensitivity, imagination, and creativity, Michael Schulman gives readers information that encourages children to value learning and strengthen their abilities to do so.

There was once a familiar American left. Progressive unions, the civil rights movement, the women's movement, campaigns against poverty, war and other ills - all were recently a part of our national scene. Today all are faded or gone. Now, from Michael Tomasky, one of the most intelligent voices to emerge from the American left in years, comes a stirring challenge to our nation's progressive tradition. Left for Dead examines the troubling recent history and tenuous future of our nations' once-significant progressive movements, and makes an uncompromising study of how the left has been destroyed by its own contradictions and ills - and what must be done if there are any hopes for revival. With penetrating insight Tomasky uses revealing "case studies" to explore how today's left lost control of crucial issues such as welfare, immigration, affirmative action, and health care. It would be all too easy to blame the forces of the right for the left's slippage; but Tomasky explores how today's left has found its own way of "making enemies of everyone" - narrowly representing eccentrics, academic specialists and malcontents above the vast expanse of working-class Americans, whom it has come to regard with near-contempt. With each chapter a unique stepping stone in recent history, Tomasky traces the uneasy relationship between the left and the Democrats, the early institutionalization of identity politics in the McGovern campaign, the dead-end pursuit of welfare rights in the halls of academia, the confused and ultimately failed campaign for national health care and the ill-conceived politicking over immigration - all of which came to life with insight, freshness and candor in the pages of this book. It is from these ruinous times, however, that Tomasky finds the potential for a newly impassioned and American left, one that can understand all that is truly good and promising in America and can become reconnected with the hopes and the motivations of everyday people. But it is a potential that can be realized only with a dramatic break from recent years. If there is to be a recognizable American left in the next century, the thoughtful and urgent work can begin the discussion that will take it there.

As I attempted to digest stories of spiritual cannibalism, of curses that could cost a student her eyesight or ignite the pages of the books she read, I knew I was not alone in my skepticism. And yet, when I caught sight of the waving arms of an industrious scarecrow, the hair on the back of my neck would stand on end. It was most palpable at night, this creepy feeling, when the moon stayed low to the horizon and the dust kicked up in the breeze, reaching out and pulling back with ghostly fingers. There was something to this place that could be felt but not seen. With these words, Karen Palmer takes us inside one of West Africa’s witch camps, where hundreds of banished women struggle to survive under the watchful eye of a powerful wizard. Palmer arrived at the Gambaga witch camp with an outsider’s sense of outrage, believing it was little more than a dumping ground for difficult women. Soon, however, she encountered stories she could not explain: a woman who confessed she’d attacked a girl given to her as a sacrifice; another one desperately trying to rid herself of the witchcraft she believed helped her kill dozens of people. In Spellbound, Palmer brilliantly recounts the kaleidoscope of experiences that greeted her in the remote witch camps of northern Ghana, where more than 3,000 exiled women and men live in extreme poverty, many sentenced in a ceremony hinging on the death throes of a sacrificed chicken. As she ventured deeper into Ghana’s grasslands, Palmer found herself swinging between belief and disbelief. She was shown books that caught on fire for no reason and met diviners who accurately predicted the future. From the schoolteacher who believed Africa should use the power of its witches to gain wealth and prestige to the social worker who championed the rights of accused witches but also took his wife to a witch doctor, Palmer takes readers deep inside a shadowy layer of rural African society. As the sheen of the exotic wore off, Palmer saw the camp for what it was: a hidden colony of women forced to rely on food scraps from the weekly market. She witnessed the way witchcraft preyed on people’s fears and resentments. Witchcraft could be a comfort in times of distress, a way of explaining a crippling drought or the inexplicable loss of a child. It was a means of predicting the unpredictable and controlling the uncontrollable. But witchcraft was also a tool for social control. In this vivid, startling work of first-person reportage, Palmer sheds light on the plight of women in a rarely seen corner of the world.

Why do we work so hard at our jobs, day after day? Why is a job well done important to us? We know there is more to a career than money and prestige, but what exactly do we mean by "fulfillment"? These are old but important questions. They belong with some newly discovered ones: Why are people in business more religious than the population as a whole? What do people of business know, and what do they do, that anchors their faith? In this ground-breaking and inspiring book, Michael Novak ties together these crucial questions by explaining the meaning of work as a vocation. Work should be more than just a job -- it should be a calling. This book explains an important part of our lives in a new way, and readers will instantly recognize themselves in its pages. A larger proportion than ever before of the world's Christians, Jews, and other peoples of faith are spending their working lives in business. Business is a profession worthy of a person's highest ideals and aspirations, fraught with moral possibilities both of great good and of great evil. Novak takes on agonizing problems, such as downsizing, the tradeoffs that must sometimes be faced between profits and human rights, and the pitfalls of philanthropy. He also examines the daily questions of how an honest day's work contributes to the good of many people, both close at hand and far away. Our work connects us with one another. It also makes possible the universal advance out of poverty, and it is an essential prerequisite of democracy and the institutions of civil society. This book is a spiritual feast, for everyone who wants to examine how to make a life through making a living.

The suspenseful true story of the kidnapping of a four-year-old boy in 1912. Miraculously recovered several months later, the boy kept secret until his death the astounding reality behind his kidnapping and return. His granddaughter discovered the truth.

Lewis shows how tiny daily choices--and fast and easy shifts--create lasting life improvement. With a scientific basis in how actions change the brain, she provides ideas, strategies, and tools that can easily be implemented. What emerges is an accessible, clever, and highly actionable guide to tackling sometimes overwhelming challenges in manageable chunks, 272 pp.

Today, a company's capability to conceive and design quality prototypes and bring a variety of superior products to market quicker than its competitors is increasingly the focal point of competition, contend leading product development experts Steven Wheelwright and Kim Clark. Drawing on six years of in-depth, systematic, worldwide research, they present proven principles for developing the critical capabilities for speed, efficiency, and quality that have worked again and again in scores of successful Japanese, American, and European fast-cycle firms.The authors argue that to survive, let alone succeed, today's companies must construct a new "platform" -- with new methodologies -- on which they can compete. Using their model for development strategies, Wheelwright and Clark show that firms can create a solid architecture for the integration of marketing, manufacturing, and design functions for problem solving and fast action -- particularly during the critical design-build-test cycles of prototype creation.They demonstrate further how successful firms such as Honda in automobiles, Compaq in personal computers, Applied Materials in semi-conductors, Sony in audio equipment, The Limited in apparel, and Hill-Rom in hospital beds have employed recent methodologies to bring new products to market at break-neck speed. Such innovations include design for manufacturability, quality function deployment, computer-aided design, and computer-aided engineering.Finally, Wheelwright and Clark emphasize the importance of learning in the organization. Companies that consistently "design it right the first time" and follow a path of continuous improvement in product and process development have a formidable edge in the crucial race to market.