Best Books of 2013: Reader's Guide


Amazon Books - 2013
    This free Kindle book features interviews, essays, excerpts, and other fun extras about the year’s top 20 titles: Donna Tartt talks about her eating habits while writing The Goldfinch; Khaled Hosseini’s publicist discusses what it’s like to be on a national tour with him; David Finkel discusses the emotional impact following the 2-16 infantry battalion in Thank You for Your Service; and much more.

Heroic Living: Discover Your Purpose and Change the World


Chris Lowney - 2009
    Each of us has a special purpose in life—do you know what yours is? In Heroic Living, best-selling author and former investment banker Chris Lowney combines the proven practices of Ignatian spirituality with his business expertise to help each of us discover our mighty purpose in life and develop a personal life strategy to achieve it.By merging Ignatian Spirituality with astute business knowledge, Lowney provides the tools and strategies needed to make practical, long-term life changes that move us away from our fractured, compartmentalized lives and toward the satisfaction and wholeness that each of us desires so deeply.

Social Constructionism


Vivien Burr - 2003
    Using a variety of examples from everyday experience and from existing research in areas such as personality, sexuality and health, the basic theoretical assumptions of social constructionism are clearly explained. Key debates, such as the nature and status of knowledge, truth, reality and the self are given in-depth analysis in an accessible style. The theoretical and practical issues relevant to social constructionist research are illustrated with examples from real empirical studies, and the different approaches to social constructionist research are clearly defined. While the text is broadly sympathetic to social constructionism, the weaknesses of the approach are also addressed through a critical approach to the material, and in the final chapter the theory is subjected to a more extensive critique. Social Constructionism, Second Edition, extends and updates the material covered in the first edition and will be a useful and informative resource for undergraduate and postgraduate students of psychology, as well as students from related areas such as health, social work and education.

Democracy and Tradition


Jeffrey L. Stout - 2003
    He discusses the fate of virtue, the legacy of racism, the moral issues implicated in the war on terrorism, and the objectivity of ethical norms. Against those who see no place for religious reasoning in the democratic arena, Stout champions a space for religious voices. But against increasingly vocal antiliberal thinkers, he argues that modern democracy can provide a moral vision and has made possible such moral achievements as civil rights precisely because it allows a multitude of claims to be heard.Stout's distinctive pragmatism reconfigures the disputed area where religious thought, political theory, and philosophy meet. Charting a path beyond the current impasse between secular liberalism and the new traditionalism, Democracy and Tradition asks whether we have the moral strength to continue as a democratic people as it invigorates us to retrieve our democratic virtues from very real threats to their practice.

POTS - Together We Stand: Riding the Waves of Dysautonomia


Jodi Epstein Rhum - 2011
    Initially conceptualized as a survival guide for children, teens, young adults and parents; it quickly transcended into this unprecedented, critical volume. This encompassing work responds to the many desperate and heartbreaking pleas of those affected by dysautonomia; included are clear explanations of medical information, evidenced-based research, best practices for clinical diagnoses and treatment options, alternative/complimentary medicine approaches, non-medical strategies, coping techniques, helpful tips, patient rights and options, and inspiring narrative accounts of people living with the syndrome around the globe. The book contributors and its readers join hand in hand to represent the POTS dysautonomia community's shared struggles and hopes, concerns and endeavors, unequivocally serving as a living testament that "Together We Stand." This is the 3rd Edition!

Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling


John Taylor Gatto - 1991
    This Special Collector's Edition celebrates 100,000 copies or the book in print, and the book's on-going importance and popularity.

Forensic Science: An Introduction to Scientific and Investigative Techniques


Stuart H. James - 2005
    Packed with full-color illustrations and case studies, this new edition offers a cutting-edge presentation of criminalistics and related laboratory subjects, including new chapters on forensic nursing and forensic entomology/botany. Written by highly respected experts, the book covers the very latest theories and practices in areas such as DNA testing, crime reconstruction, toxicology, chemistry of explosives and arson, and vehicle reconstruction. Also included are an instructor's manual and laboratory exercise manual.

Ways with Words: Language, Life and Work in Communities and Classrooms


Shirley Brice Heath - 1983
    'Roadville' is a white working-class community of families steeped for generations in the life of textile mills; 'Trackton' is an African-American working-class community whose older generations grew up farming the land, but whose existent members work in the mills. In tracing the children's language development the author shows the deep cultural differences between the two communities, whose ways with words differ as strikingly from each other as either does from the pattern of the townspeople, the 'mainstream' blacks and whites who hold power in the schools and workplaces of the region. Employing the combined skills of ethnographer, social historian, and teacher, the author raises fundamental questions about the nature of language development, the effects of literacy on oral language habits, and the sources of communication problems in schools and workplaces.

The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature


Steven Pinker - 2007
    His previous books, including the Pulitzer Prize finalist The Blank Slate, have catapulted him into the limelight as one of today's most important and popular science writers. Now, in The Stuff of Thought, Pinker marries two of the subjects he knows best: language and human nature. The result is a fascinating look at how our words explain our nature. What does swearing reveal about our emotions? Why does innuendo disclose something about relationships? Pinker reveals how our use of prepositions and tenses taps into peculiarly human concepts of space and time, and how our nouns and verbs speak to our notions of matter. Even the names we give our babies have important things to say about our relations to our children and to society. With his signature wit and style, Pinker takes on scientific questions like whether language affects thought, as well as forays into everyday life: why is bulk e-mail called spam and how do romantic comedies get such mileage out of the ambiguities of dating? The Stuff of Thought is a brilliantly crafted and highly readable work that will appeal to fans of readers of everything from The Selfish Gene and Blink to Eats, Shoots & Leaves.

The Globalization Reader


Frank J. Lechner - 1999
    This new edition has been thoroughly revised and updated, with thirty new essays and a new section on anti-globalization movements. The editors have replaced several abstract articles from the first edition with livelier, more accessible essays that reflect the current scholarship. With new case studies, and a more international focus, this second edition is an even better introduction to globalization studies.Fully revised and updated - includes 30 new essays and a new section on anti-globalization movements.Wide-ranging - across economic, political, cultural, and experiential dimensions of social change.Inclusive - covering a wide variety of perspectives on globalization and capturing some of the fault lines in current debates.Stimulating - not only by including well-written, provocative, and contemporary works but also by structuring sections around arguments that serve as connecting themes.

The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception


Michel Foucault - 1963
    For the first time, medical knowledge took on a precision that had formerly belonged only to mathematics. The body became something that could be mapped. Disease became subject to new rules of classification. And doctors begin to describe phenomena that for centuries had remained below the threshold of the visible and expressible.In The Birth of the Clinic the philosopher and intellectual historian who may be the true heir to Nietzsche charts this dramatic transformation of medical knowledge. As in his classic Madness and Civilization, Michel Foucault shows how much what we think of as pure science owes to social and cultural attitudes — in this case, to the climate of the French Revolution. Brilliant, provocative, and omnivorously learned, his book sheds new light on the origins of our current notions of health and sickness, life and death.

Blue Jean Chef: Comfortable Under Pressure


Meredith Laurence - 2013
    By sharing tips, tricks and techniques with the QVC customers while equipping their kitchens with QVC’s professional Technique® and Blue Jean Chef® cookware, Meredith has helped people become comfortable in their kitchens. Now, in this cookbook, Meredith gives you a wide variety of delicious recipes for the pressure cooker, so you can get meals on the table in one third of the time it would normally take. Her recipes, tips, and techniques will help make any cook more Comfortable Under Pressure. With 125 recipes and over 100 tips and explanations, Blue Jean Chef: Comfortable Under Pressure will help you create delicious meals while becoming more versatile and at ease with your pressure cooker. Don’t let the pressure get to you! Get Comfortable Under Pressure!

How Professors Think: Inside the Curious World of Academic Judgment


Michèle Lamont - 2009
    Illuminating the confidential process of academic evaluation, this text reveals the inner workings of this secretive, powerful and peculiar world.

Sister Revolutions: French Lightning, American Light


Susan Dunn - 1999
    Although both professed similar Enlightenment ideals of freedom, equality, and justice and set similar political agendas, there were also fundamental differences. The French sought a complete break with a thousand years of history; the Americans were content to preserve many aspects of their English heritage. Why did the two revolutions follow such different trajectories? And what lessons do they offer us about democracy today? In lucid narrative style, Dunn captures the personalities and lives of the great figures of both revolutions, and shows how their stories added up to make two very different events.

Twentieth-Century American Art


Erika Doss - 2002
    From the 1893 Chicago World's Fair to the 2000 Whitney Biennial, a rapid succession of art movements and different styles reflected theextreme changes in American culture and society, as well as America's position within the international art world.This exciting new look at twentieth century American art explores the relationships between American art, museums, and audiences in the century that came to be called the American century. Extending beyond New York, it covers the emergence of Feminist art in Los Angeles in the 1970s; the Blackart movement; the expansion of galleries and art schools; and the highly political public controversies surrounding arts funding. All the key movements are fully discussed, including early American Modernism, the New Negro movement, Regionalism, Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, andNeo-Expressionism.