Bøger udgivet af W. W. Norton & Company

Amber Kivinen is moving to Mars. Or at least, she will be if she wins a chance to join MarsNow. She and twenty-three reality TV contestants from around the world-including attractive Israeli soldier Adam, endearing fellow Canadian Pichu, and an assortment of science nerds and wannabe influencers-are competing for two seats on the first human-led mission to Mars, sponsored by billionaire Geoff Task.Meanwhile Kevin, Amber's boyfriend of fourteen years, was content going nowhere until Amber left him-and their hydroponic weed business-behind. As he tends to (and smokes) the plants growing in their absurdly overpriced Vancouver basement apartment, Kevin tunes in to find out why the love of his life is so determined to leave the planet with somebody else. On screen, Amber competes in globe-trotting, Survivor-meets-Star Trek challenges and seems like she might be falling for Adam. But is that real, or is it just a tactic to keep from being voted off? And since the technology to come home doesn't exist yet, would Amber really leave everything behind to be a billionaire's Martian guinea pig? Sure, the rainforest is burning, Geoff Task has bought New Zealand, and Kevin might be a little depressed, but isn't there some hope left for life on Earth?An audacious debut from "a dazzlingly smart and strikingly original writer" (Molly Antopol), Girlfriend on Mars is at once a satirical indictment of our pursuit of fame and wealth amidst environmental crisis, and an exploration of humanity's deepest longing, greatest quest, and most enduring cliché: love.

In 1958, Manchester United was flying high: the best-known soccer team in the world, the reigning English champions, led by a bright young group of star players nicknamed the "Busby Babes" after their charismatic manager Matt Busby. But that February, a plane carrying the team back from a European Cup match crashed on takeoff in Munich, killing 23 people-including eight Manchester United players and three team officials. The accident destroyed the team, traumatized fans all over the world, and devastated the tight-knit community in Manchester. In the trademark style critics have hailed as "hallucinatory" (New York Times) and "incantatory" (Los Angeles Times), renowned novelist David Peace reimagines the crash and its aftermath, dramatizing the deep scars left on British society, and the struggles of a nation and a city to recover and rise again.

Some of humanity's mightiest engineering achievements are small in scale-and, without them, the complex machinery on which our modern world runs would not exist. In Nuts and Bolts, structural engineer Roma Agrawal examines seven of these extraordinary elements: the nail, the wheel, the spring, the magnet, the lens, the string, and the pump.Tracing the evolution from Egyptian nails to modern skyscrapers, and Neanderthal string to musical instruments, Agrawal shows us how even our most sophisticated items are built on the foundations of these ancient and fundamental breakthroughs. She explores an array of intricate technologies-dishwashers, spacesuits, microscopes, suspension bridges, breast pumps-making surprising connections, explaining how they work, and using her own hand-drawn illustrations to bring complex principles to life.Alongside deeply personal experiences, she recounts the stories of remarkable-and often uncredited-scientists, engineers, and innovators from all over the world, and explores the indelible impact these creators and their creations had on society. In preindustrial Britain, nails were so precious that their export to the colonies was banned-and women were among the most industrious nail makers. The washing machine displayed at an industrial fair in Chicago in 1898 was the only machine featured that was designed by a woman. The history of the wheel, meanwhile, starts with pottery, and takes us to India's independence movement, where making clothes using a spinning wheel was an act of civil disobedience.Eye-opening and engaging, Nuts and Bolts reveals the hidden building blocks of our modern world, and shows how engineering has fundamentally changed the way we live.

In the tradition of narrativa de lo inusual (narrative of the unusual), The Only Sound Is the Wind combines the fantastic with the everyday, weaving elements of magical realism and surrealist twists to sharpen our view of human (and animal) connection. In the title story, the arrival of a mail-order clone complicates a burgeoning romance; a lonely librarian longing for her homeland strikes up an unusual relationship in the award-winning "The Moth"; when humans start giving birth to puppies and kittens in "This New Turn", a realignment of the natural order ensues; and the narrator of "Chicory" harnesses the power of invisibility to spy on her beautiful neighbour.With a playful tenderness and satirical bent, The Only Sound Is the Wind, is a lyrical exploration of solitude and communion, opening strange new worlds where characters try to make their way towards love.

In this magisterial book, historian Sunil Amrith twins the stories of environment and Empire, of genocide and eco-cide, of an extraordinary expansion of human freedom and its planetary costs. Drawing on an extraordinarily rich diversity of primary sources, he reckons with the ruins of Portuguese silver mining in Peru, British gold mining in South Africa, and oil extraction in Central Asia. He explores the railroads and highways that brought humans to new terrains of battle against each other and against stubborn nature. Amrith's account of the ways in which the First and Second World Wars involved the massive mobilization not only of men, but of other natural resources from around the globe, provides an essential new way of understanding war as an irreversible reshaping of the planet. So too does this book reveal the reality of migration as consequence of environmental harm.The imperial, globe-spanning pursuit of profit, joined with new forms of energy and new possibilities of freedom from hunger and discomfort, freedom to move and explore, has brought change to every inch of the Earth. Amrith relates in gorgeous prose, and on the largest canvas, a mind-altering epic-vibrant with stories, characters, and vivid images-in which humanity might find the collective wisdom to save itself.

In this exhilarating work, Amber Massie-Blomfield brings together stories of remarkable acts of creativity that have shifted history on its axis, from writer Ken Saro Wiwa combatting oil pollution in Nigeria and British environmentalists taking inspiration from a novel by Edward Abbey to Susan Sontag's production of Waiting for Godot in besieged Sarajevo and Billie Holiday's Strange Fruit capturing the spirit that drove the civil rights movement. Massie-Blomfield considers the work of artists, writers, musicians, and filmmakers-such as Pablo Picasso, Gran Fury, the Velvet Underground, Alexis Wright, Claude Cahun, and Rabindranath Tagore-alongside collectives, communities, and amateurs who have used protest sites as their canvas and spearheaded movements that have transformed history. Deeply inspiring, it is a powerful testament to the idea that art is not only a salve in the bleakest of times but also can change the world.

Four lives are drawn together in a sweeping, panoramic new novel from Richard Powers, showcasing the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Overstory at the height of his skills. Twelve-year-old Evie Beaulieu sinks to the bottom of a swimming pool in Montreal strapped to one of the world's first aqualungs. Ina Aroita grows up on naval bases across the Pacific with art as her only home. Two polar opposites at an elite Chicago high school bond over a three-thousand-year-old board game; Rafi Young will get lost in literature, while Todd Keane's work will lead to a startling AI breakthrough.They meet on the history-scarred island of Makatea in French Polynesia, whose deposits of phosphorus once helped to feed the world. Now the tiny atoll has been chosen for humanity's next adventure: a plan to send floating, autonomous cities out onto the open sea. But first, the island's residents must vote to greenlight the project or turn the seasteaders away.Set in the world's largest ocean, this awe-filled book explores that last wild place we have yet to colonize in a still-unfolding oceanic game, and interweaves beautiful writing, rich characterization, profound themes of technology and the environment, and a deep exploration of our shared humanity in a way only Richard Powers can.

Music is one of humanity's oldest medicines. From the Far East to the Ottoman Empire, Europe to Africa and the pre-colonial Americas, many cultures have developed their own rich traditions for using sound and rhythm to ease suffering, promote healing, and calm the mind.In his latest work, neuroscientist and New York Times best-selling author Daniel J. Levitin (This Is Your Brain on Music) explores the curative powers of music, showing us how and why it is one of the most potent therapies today. He brings together, for the first time, the results of numerous studies on music and the brain, demonstrating how music can contribute to the treatment of a host of ailments, from neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson's and Alzheimer's, to cognitive injury, depression, and pain.Levitin is not your typical scientist-he is also an award-winning musician and composer, and through lively interviews with some of today's most celebrated musicians, from Sting to Kent Nagano and Mari Kodama, he shares their observations as to why music might be an effective therapy, in addition to plumbing scientific case studies, music theory, and music history. The result is a work of dazzling ideas, cutting-edge research, and jubilant celebration. I Heard There Was a Secret Chord highlights the critical role music has played in human biology, illuminating the neuroscience of music and its profound benefits for those both young and old.

This engrossing deep dive exposes how the shadowy global system of offshore finance fuels economic crises and austerity while also undermining democracy and the rule of law. Sociologist Brooke Harrington trained as an offshore wealth manager then spent years immersed in tax havens around the world, observing and interviewing the experts who keep the secrets and protect the fortunes of the global ultra-rich. She shows what offshore finance costs all of us and how it has colonised the world-not on behalf of any one country, but to benefit a largely invisible empire of a few thousand billionaires who help themselves to the best society has to offer while sticking us with the bill. As politicians struggle to address the deepening economic and political inequality destabilising the world, Harrington's exposé of the offshore system is a vital resource for understanding the most pressing crises of our time.

To be American is to hoard, to collect. But what if that wasn't a bad thing? Emily Mester's American Bulk asks readers to see our national consumer obsession as more than a modern scourge-to consider consumption a complex character in a larger story of capitalism, imperialism and technology. In sharply witty prose, Mester details how a seasonal stint at Ulta Beauty reveals the insidious performance of retail sales, how Yelp reviews highlight the lengths Americans go to curate their personal ephemera, and why they can't help but find joy at Costco. In a stark reexamination of diet culture and fatness, Mester recounts her teenage summer at fat camp and the liberatory body neutrality that surrounded her. And in Storm Lake, Iowa, Mester excavates her grandmother's abandoned hoard, among other discoveries about her own family's history. American Bulk asks us to regard consumption not with guilt but with grace and empathy.

When Kyle Shanahan became the NFL's youngest offensive coordinator in 2008, he had one prevailing rule: Tell me the why. If a colleague couldn't justify his position by providing the unassailable reasoning behind it, he was told to get the hell out of Shanahan's office. Shanahan and the members of his coaching tree-including Sean McVay, Mike McDaniel, Raheem Morris, and Matt LaFleur-came up in a sport where innovation was the exception, not the rule. There had been brilliant football minds before, from Paul Brown to Bill Walsh to Bill Belichick. But for the most part, coaches learned a particular system and stuck to it no matter what-no matter the players on their team, no matter what the opponent might do.This group of young coaches would change all that. The Why Is Everything is the story of old dogmas falling before astonishingly creative new strategies and game plans. Drawing on unmatched access across the league, longtime NFL reporter Mike Silver takes us into the key moments in this still-unfolding revolution, from the education of Mike Shanahan, Kyle's father and a two-time Super Bowl champion, in the 1980s; to the Washington Redskins' football laboratory in the early 2010s, where the coaches first worked together, shocking the league with their cutting-edge scheme for rookie quarterback Robert Griffin III; to McVay's Super Bowl victory in 2022 and Kyle Shanahan's Super Bowl agony in 2019 and 2024.Less than a decade after their emergence, these men are the stars of their profession and have helped propel the NFL to new heights of viewership and drama. With The Why is Everything, Silver reveals how it all happened, and in the process gives us a timeless account of friendship, rivalry, and the never-ending pursuit of perfection.

From the summer of 1870 to the spring of 1871, famously dubbed the "Terrible Year" by Victor Hugo, Paris and its people were besieged, starved, and forced into surrender by Germans-then imperiled again as radical republicans established a breakaway Commune, ultimately crushed by the French Army after bloody street battles and the burning of central Paris. As renowned art critic Sebastian Smee shows, it was against the backdrop of these tumultuous times that the Impressionist movement was born-in response to violence, civil war, and political intrigue.In stirring and exceptionally vivid prose, Smee tells the story of those dramatic days through the eyes of great figures of Impressionism. Édouard Manet, Berthe Morisot, and Edgar Degas were trapped in Paris during the siege and deeply enmeshed in its politics. Others, including Pierre-August Renoir and Frédéric Bazille, joined regiments outside of the capital, while Claude Monet and Camille Pissarro fled the country just in time. In the aftermath, these artists developed a newfound sense of the fragility of life. That feeling for transience-reflected in Impressionism's emphasis on fugitive light, shifting seasons, glimpsed street scenes, and the impermanence of all things-became the movement's great contribution to the history of art.At the heart of it all is a love story; that of Manet, by all accounts the father of Impressionism, and Morisot, the only woman to play a central role in the movement from the start. Smee poignantly depicts their complex relationship, their tangled effect on each other, and their great legacy, while bringing overdue attention to the woman at the heart of Impressionism.Incisive and absorbing, Paris in Ruins captures the shifting passions and politics of the art world, revealing how the pressures of the siege and the chaos of the Commune had a profound impact on modern art, and how artistic genius can emerge from darkness and catastrophe.

Born Deaf into an ASL-speaking family and blind by adolescence, John Lee Clark learned to embrace the possibilities of his tactile world. He is on the frontlines of the Protactile movement, which gave birth to an unprecedented language and way of life based on physical connection.In a series of paradigm-shifting essays, Clark reports on seismic developments within the DeafBlind community and challenges the limitations of sighted and hearing norms. In "Against Access", he interrogates the prevailing advocacy for "accessibility" that re-creates a shadow of a hearing-sighted experience, and in "Tactile Art", he describes his relationship to visual art and breathtaking encounters with tactile sculpture. He offers a brief history of the term "DeafBlind", distills societal discrimination against DeafBlind people into "Distantism", sheds light on the riches of online community and advocates for "Co-Navigation", a new way of exploring the world together without a traditional guide.Touch the Future brims with passion, energy, humour and imagination as Clark takes us by the hand and welcomes us into the exciting landscape of Protactile communication. A distinct language of taps, signs and reciprocal contact, Protactile emerged from the inadequacies of ASL-a visual language even when pressed into someone's hand-with the power to upend centuries of DeafBlind isolation.As warm and witty as he is radical and inspiring, Clark encourages us-disabled and non-disabled alike-to reject stigma and discover the ways we are connected. Touch the Future is a dynamic appeal to rethink the meanings of disability, access, language and inclusivity, and to reach for a future we can create together.

In stories that beckon and haunt, Fruiting Bodies ranges confidently from the fantastical to the gothic to the uncanny as it follows characters-mostly queer, mostly women-on the precipice of change. Echoes of timeless myth and folklore reverberate through urgent narratives of discovery, appetite, and coming-of-age in a time of crisis.In "The Changeling," two young cousins wait in dread for a new family member to arrive, convinced that he may be a dangerous supernatural creature. In "Endangered Animals," Jane prepares to say goodbye to her almost-love while they road-trip across a country irrevocably altered by climate change. In "Take Only What Belongs to You," a queer woman struggles with the personal history of an author she idolized, while in "Fiddler, Fool, Pair," an anthropologist is drawn into a magical-and dangerous-gamble. In the title story, partners Agnes and Geb feast peacefully on the mushrooms that sprout from Agnes's body-until an unwanted male guest disturbs their cloistered home.Audacious, striking, and wholly original, Fruiting Bodies offers stories about knowledge in a world on the verge of collapse, knowledge that alternately empowers or devastates. Pulling beautifully, brazenly, from a variety of literary traditions, Kathryn Harlan firmly establishes herself as a thrilling new voice in fiction.

What kind of mother abandons her child? It's a question that conjures the worst kind of moral judgment. Yet during the pandemic, trapped at home with young children and struggling to find creative space to write, journalist Begoña Gómez Urzaiz became fixated on artistic women who were able to overcome both society's condemnation and their own maternal instincts to leave their children-at will or due to economic or other circumstances. More than anything, she was fascinated by her own prejudice toward these women, so clearly tied up in a much wider cultural bias.The Abandoners is sharp, at times slyly humorous, and always deeply empathetic. Using famous examples such as Ingrid Bergman, Muriel Spark, Doris Lessing, and Maria Montessori as well as fictional ones like Anna Karenina and the many roles of Meryl Streep, and interrogating modern trends like "momfluencers," Gómez Urzaiz reveals what our judgement of these women tells us about our judgement of all women.

Everything in Edith's life is approaching disaster. Her writing career is stagnant. Her love life is a mess. Her ex, Tessa, is marrying a man. Her teeth are rotting in her skull. And her best friend, Val, is dead.Still Life volleys between the present and recent past, chronicling the lives of three women-one cis, two trans, all forever entwined. Edith was a bumbling "boy" pre-transition, in love with Tessa, enamored by Val, and drowning in Boston. She and Tessa called each other Joni and Joan, an homage to the musical backdrop of their fledgling adulthood. When Edith decides to leave behind the East Coast for graduate school, she begins a yearslong journey away from the person she loves most and toward a hazy new understanding of who she will become.In the present, Edith visits Boston feeling like a failure of a writer, a failure of a girl, and wracked with guilt over Val's death. Val, the intrepid wanderer, had drifted in and out of Edith's life, arriving in Texas with estrogen pills and wisdom from a life on the road. A sometimes lover, sometimes trans mentor, Val was everything Tessa wasn't and everything Edith needed. Home alone in Texas, she is left loveless and exhausted as the state slowly chips away at trans rights. Was Val's fatal car crash Edith's fault? Would she have stayed put if Edith had loved her better?Katherine Packert Burke's debut novel unfolds like a rusty pocketknife, jagged and lacerating. Infused with pop culture, cigarettes, and Sondheim, Still Life traces the lives of three friends, authentic and evolving, loving and cruel, here and gone, to craft a tableau of modern womanhood.

Set in locations from dive bars to Montparnasse Cemetery, from an ancient Greek temple to a tourist shop in Assisi, Exit Opera explores the ever-vexing issues of time, mortality, love, and loss, and considers the roles of art and human connection. Whatever their nominal subject-jazz, zombies, Buddhism, Siberian tigers-these poems make for a compelling mix of humor and pain, difficulty and solace. In a nod to Keats, one of the many fellow travelers in these poems, Addonizio invites us to "[inscribe] a few verses on whatever water / you can find" and assures readers that they are not alone in navigating the challenges and changes of mortal life. As she writes in "My Opera":The staging is difficult. Exploding starsare involved, high-redshift galaxies, interior chambers,a little country blues, a little jazz guitar, a jam jar containinga tiny ocean & a tinier rowboat rocking gently in the swellsthat I am steering toward you in the dark.

First came the secretaries from Brooklyn and Queens-the "smart cookies" who learned on the job despite the obstacles. Then came the first Harvard Business School grads, who, despite their hard-earned diplomas, often settled for less. Eventually came the yuppies of the 1980s in power suits and commuter sneakers. In She-Wolves, award-winning historian Paulina Bren tells the story of the first generations of women who fought their way into the bad-boy culture and lavish opulence of the finance world. If the wolves of Wall Street made a show of their ferocity, the she-wolves did so with tough-as-nails persistence. Starting at a time when "No Ladies" signs hung across the doors of Wall Street's clubs and unapologetic sexism and racism were the norm at top firms, Bren chronicles the remarkable women who demanded a seat at the table. She-Wolves is an engaging and enraging look at the collision of women, finance, and New York from the go-go years to ground zero.

Moving from Paris to Beirut and back, Calligraphies is a tribute to exiles and refugees, the known and unknown, dead and living, from the American poet Marie Ponsot to the Syrian pasionaria Fadwa Suleiman. Award-winning poet Marilyn Hacker finds resistance, wit, potential, and gleaming connection in everyday moments-a lunch of "standing near the fridge with / labneh, two verbs, and a spoon"-as a counterweight to the precarity of existence.With signature passion and agility, Hacker draws from French, Arabic, and English to probe the role of language in identity and revolution. Amid conversations in smoky cafes, personal mourning, and political turmoil, she traces the lines between exiles and expats, immigrants and refugees. A series of "Montpeyroux Sonnets" bookends the volume, cataloguing months in 2021 and 2022 in which the poet observes a village "in pandemic mode" and reflects on her own aging.In a variety of tones and formal registers, from vivid crowns of sonnets to insistent ghazals to elegiac pantoums and riffs on the renga, Calligraphies explores a world opened up by language.

This celebratory anthology explores human connection through forty poems curated by Pádraig Ó Tuama, host of the On Being Project's Poetry Unbound podcast. Along with each poem, Ó Tuama shares an enriching meditation, revealing the ways we relate to each other, the world around us, and ourselves. Among the selections, Ó Tuama examines the profundity of friendship through Langston Hughes' "I Miss My Friend," the strength of familial bonds in Rita Dove's "Eurydice Turning," the power of self-love depicted in Lucille Clifton's "Won't You Celebrate with Me," and the vitality of our connection to nature in Joy Harjo's "Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings." Blending humor with insight, tension with tenderness, and complication with care, 44 Poems on Being with Each Other clearly articulates what is at stake in reading poetry: it illuminates aspects of the human condition, particularly our connections with each other, and provides material for grounded and intelligent self-reflection.

Since its improvised creation at Microsoft in the mid-1990s, Comic Sans has become one of the most used and talked-about typefaces of the digital age. The subject of April Fools pranks and endless internet discourse, it has spawned a movement to ban it, inspired revivals and spinoffs, and continues to be widely promoted by educators. In this delightful history, best-selling author Simon Garfield tells the story of how Comic Sans emerged from speech bubbles on educational software to become one of the most recognized-and reviled-typefaces on earth. He considers how the computer transformed type into something that anyone could use and have an opinion on, explores how new fonts emerge with changing times and technology, and meets die-hard Comic Sans adherents and haters. He concludes the book by asking the unimaginable: Could Comic Sans now be the coolest typeface ever made?

Acid rainstorms have transformed New York City into a toxic wasteland, cutting its remaining citizens off from one another. In one apartment building, an unlikely family of humans and ghosts survives. Mira reels from a devastating breakup with her partner, Mal, whose whereabouts are unknown, while her mother is plagued by furious dreams and her grandfather, Grandpa Why, stakes his claims as a rambunctious ghost. Across the hall, the cockroach Shin, also a ghost. As the world around them worsens, each character must learn to redefine what it means to live, die, and love at the end of the world.

In After Eden, prominent Latin American historian John Charles Chasteen provided a concise history of the world, in which he explores the origins and persistence of the timeless phenomena of humanity's inhumanity to itself. Where did it come from? Why has it been so prevalent throughout our history? And, most importantly, can we overcome it? Chasteen argues that to do so, we must understand our shared past. While much of that past is violent, we can look for inspiration from major periods when we strived to live more cooperatively, such as our early foraging periods, to the creation of universal religions and ethical systems, the birth of the ideas of individual liberty and freedom, the rise of socialism in response to the massive excesses of global capitalism, the civil rights and decolonisation movements of the twentieth century, to the environmental and social justice movements of today.Once we understand who and what we are as a species and a people, we will be in the best position to figure out how to work together to tackle the greatest challenges we face today-mass global inequality and the destruction of our environment. Fully informed by the latest scholarship, After Eden presents a down-to earth, fast-paced narrative of world history, animated by stories of people from all walks of life and enriched by insightful analysis and the author's extensive world travel.

Personality and Wholeness in Psychotherapy applies the perspective of interpersonal neurobiology to a traditional wisdom framework widely known as the Enneagram of Personality. This framework describes a lifespan developmental personality model of nine distinct, key strategies that people use to make sense of and cope with their experiences and interactions with the world. These strategies can be understood as nine Patterns of Developmental Pathways, or PDPs.This book provides mental health practitioners with both a theoretical understanding of PDPs and practical tools for implementing the framework in clinical settings. Readers will find detailed descriptions of the nine core patterns of personality as well as integrative practices specific to each of these patterns that can help people work towards states of well-being and wholeness. This innovative book has the potential to unlock deep and lasting change in problematic and perplexing patterns of thinking, feeling and behaving, transforming personality from a prison to a playground for readers and clients alike.

In the 1960s and 1970s, an insurgent attack on traditional liberalism took shape in America. It was built on new ideals of citizen advocacy and the public interest. Environmentalists, social critics, and consumer advocates like Rachel Carson, Jane Jacobs, and Ralph Nader crusaded against what they saw as a misguided and often corrupt government. Drawing energy from civil rights protests and opposition to the Vietnam War, the new citizens' movement drew legions of followers and scored major victories. Citizen advocates disrupted government plans for urban highways and new hydroelectric dams and got Congress to pass tough legislation to protect clean air and clean water. They helped lead a revolution in safety that forced companies and governments to better protect consumers and workers from dangerous products and hazardous work conditions.And yet, in the process, citizen advocates also helped to undermine big government liberalism-the powerful alliance between government, business, and labor that dominated the United States politically in the decades following the New Deal and World War II. Public interest advocates exposed that alliance's secret bargains and unintended consequences. They showed how government power often was used to advance private interests rather than restrain them. In the process of attacking government for its failings and its dangers, the public interest movement struggled to replace traditional liberalism with a new approach to governing. The citizen critique of government power instead helped clear the way for their antagonists: Reagan-era conservatives seeking to slash regulations and enrich corporations.Public Citizens traces the history of the public interest movement and explores its tangled legacy, showing the ways in which American liberalism has been at war with itself. The book forces us to reckon with the challenges of regaining our faith in government's ability to advance the common good.

Benjamin Franklin, Leonardo da Vinci, Aristotle, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. These individuals share the venerable title of polymath-or, more colloquially, "Renaissance man." Compared to his peers, though, Leibniz has all but disappeared from collective memory. In The Best of All Possible Worlds, historian Michael Kempe embarks on a journey through the life, accomplishments, and inventions of one of the most important thinkers in history. Structured around seven crucial days from Leibniz's life, Kempe's masterwork allows us to observe the philosopher and courtier in the act of thinking and creating, giving us a deeper understanding of his philosophy, mathematics, and broad-reaching scientific endeavors, which all saw Leibniz strive to connect far-flung fields of knowledge. Simultaneously, a person who bears a resemblance to the isolated individuals of the present day comes into view, constantly communicating and yet withdrawn into themselves. The Best of All Possible Worlds draws us into the awe-inspiring mind of an often-overlooked genius, showing how Leibniz helped make our world.

By presenting the autism diagnosis through the lens of a disordered nervous system-that is, by applying Polyvagal Theory-this book opens new avenues for intervention and treatment, while challenging age-old assumptions of what autism means and how it presents itself.Here, Sean Inderbitzen-a therapist as well as someone living with autism-encourages clinicians to conceptualise their autistic clients' difficulties with social interactions and cognitive flexibility through a polyvagal lens. Inderbitzen argues that individuals with autism can be thought of as having deficits in accessing their ventral vagal nervous system-the system which promotes flexibility and connection to others. The book explores strategies to address these challenges through familiar tools such as motivational interviewing, clinical social work pedagogy, sensorimotor psychotherapy, mindfulness, biofeedback, and cultivating a sense of safety. Autism in Polyvagal Terms is an essential new text for anyone who works with individuals on the autism spectrum.