With captivating case histories and anecdotes about such famous people as George Burns, Howard Hughes, and C. S. Lewis, McGinnis shares the secret of how to love and be loved. The first edition of The Friendship Factor, published in 1979, has sold more than 350,000 copies.

    Nearly every entry in thatrenowned work has been revised and updated and scores of completely new entries have been added to produce an indispensable guide to the political language being used and abused in America today.Safire's definitions--discursive, historically aware, and often anecdotal--bring a savvy perspective to our colorful political lingo. Indeed, a Safire definition often reads like a mini-essay in political history, and readers will come away not only with a fuller understanding of particular wordsbut also a richer knowledge of how politics works, and fails to work, in America. From Axis of Evil, Blame Game, Bridge to Nowhere, Triangulation, and Compassionate Conservatism to Islamofascism, Netroots, Earmark, Wingnuts and Moonbats, Slam Dunk, Doughnut Hole, and many others, this languagemaven explains the origin of each term, how and by whom and for what purposes it has been used or twisted, as well as its perceived and real significance.For anyone who wants to cut through the verbal haze that surrounds so much of American political discourse, Safire's Political Dictionary offers a work of scholarship, wit, insiderhood and resolute bipartisanship.

    Once an alleged fact has been well established, no matter how erroneous it is. all the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. Nowhere in this fact so well illustrated as in the history of the efforts to break down the stubborn resistance of science to the idea that the human organism, like the organisms of the lower animals, can safely abstain from food for prolonged periods. Long after thousands of men and women had fasted for periods ranging from a few days to several weeks and were benefitted by the experience, science persisted in repeating, as though it were a fully demonstrated fact, its stupid notion that man cannot fast for more than a few days without dying. Indeed, after some of these long fasts had received much world-wide publicity and some of them had been studied by men of science, the devotees of the modern infallible god. science, continued to repeat the old fallacy that if a man should abstain from food for six days his heart would collapse and he would die.