Before and After: How to Design Cool Stuff


John McWade - 2008
    Truly an icon of the graphic design community, his insistence on approaching design not as mere decoration but as an essential form of communication is vividly apparent in this cohesive primer on page design and layout. And you could not hope for a better, more qualified teacher. McWade shows readers how to arrange and present information using today's powerful graphics tools. Readers will learn how to design single-page and multi-page documents, brochures, and ads; why one typeface works better than another; and much more. Best of all, they'll discover how to think visually transforming the images in their heads into something that communicates effectively on the page.

Oil on the Brain: Adventures from the Pump to the Pipeline


Lisa Margonelli - 2007
    Where does all this gas come from? Lisa Margonelli’s desire to learn took her on a one-hundred thousand mile journey from her local gas station to oil fields half a world away. In search of the truth behind the myths, she wriggled her way into some of the most off-limits places on earth: the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, the New York Mercantile Exchange’s crude oil market, oil fields from Venezuela, to Texas, to Chad, and even an Iranian oil platform where the United States fought a forgotten one-day battle. In a story by turns surreal and alarming, Margonelli meets lonely workers on a Texas drilling rig, an oil analyst who almost gave birth on the NYMEX trading floor, Chadian villagers who are said to wander the oil fields in the guise of lions, a Nigerian warlord who changed the world price of oil with a single cell phone call, and Shanghai bureaucrats who dream of creating a new Detroit. Deftly piecing together the mammoth economy of oil, Margonelli finds a series of stark warning signs for American drivers.

Signal


Cynthia C. DeFelice - 2009
    Her name is Campion, after the wildflower that is an alien species in the area--"alien "meaning "from someplace else"--and Campion claims to come from someplace else entirely, a planet called Home. She plans to signal her parents to come pick her up in their spaceship. Owen agrees to help, and as he does, he feels happier than he has in a long time: his mother died a year and a half ago, and now he and his workaholic father live together like two planets on separate orbits, in a new house far from his friends. What will he do when Campion asks him to come with her into outer space, away from his lonely life on Earth?In this moving novel, two friendless kids search the night sky for something to believe in--but discover that they've found what they need right here on Earth.

Dragonfly


Lana Sky - 2015
    What better way to assert her newfound independence than by moving to San Francisco? However, when she meets a tall, blood-drenched stranger she gets more than she bargained for. Jackie is everything she should never want. Violence, lies, and even murder taint this strange man, but she finds herself irresistibly drawn to him…like a moth to flame.When their relationship strains her loyalty and his livelihood, it isn't long before violence consumes her independence and Amy’s quest for freedom turns into just another story of a good girl caught on the wrong side of the tracks, too far gone to turn back.

The Mindfulness Revolution: Leading Psychologists, Scientists, Artists, and Meditatiion Teachers on the Power of Mindfulness in Daily Life


Barry Boyce - 2011
    Countless people who have tried it say it's improved their quality of life. Simply put, mindfulness is the practice of paying steady and full attention, without judgment or criticism, to our moment-to-moment experience. Here is a collection of the best writing on what mindfulness is, why we should practice it, and how to apply it in daily life, from leading figures in the field. Selections include:    • Leading thinking Jon Kabat-Zinn on the essence of mindfulness, stress reduction, and positive change    • Zen teacher Thich Nhat Hanh on the transformative power of mindful breathing    • Professor of psychiatry Daniel Siegel, MD, on how mindfulness benefits the brain    • Physician and meditation teacher Jan Chozen Bays, MD, on how and why to practice mindful eating    • Pioneering psychologist Ellen Langer on how mindfulness can change the understanding and treatment of disease    • Leadership coach Michael Carroll on practicing mindfulness at work    • Psychologist Daniel Goleman on a mindful approach to shopping and consuming    • Pianist Madeline Bruser on how mindfulness can help us overcome performance anxiety    • and much more The Mindfulness Revolution also includes an in-depth discussion by writer-editor Barry Boyce about how mindfulness is being applied in a variety of professional fields—from health care to education, from performing arts to business—to improve effectiveness and enhance well-being. Learn more at www.mindful.org.

The Stress of Life


Hans Selye - 1956
    Annotated references are also included.

A Married Man


Piers Paul Read - 1979
    Staying with his parents-in-law at their house in Norfolk, he reads Leo Tolstoy’s novella, The Death of Ivan Illych, and this precipitates a mid-life crisis. What has happened to his youthful ideals to do good in the world? What has happened that has made his marriage go stale? It is the period of strikes, political crisis and the `three-day week’: Strickland determines to stand as a Labour MP. His ambition is mocked by his wife and, blaming her for his life’s stagnation, he starts an affair with another woman.

Boss with Benefits


Ruthie Luhnow - 2020
    But between the champagne and the ski runs and the king-sized bed we're sharing, it's getting harder and harder to remind myself my billionaire playboy boss could never really fall for someone like me.Fletcher: Who needs love when you have work? For years, my job has been my sole focus, and my work has paid off. But when I ask my assistant to pretend to be my fake boyfriend for a family trip, I soon realize that his quick wit and level head might be exactly what I've been looking for. It doesn't hurt that he's cute as hell, either. Has the one I've been waiting for been working beside me all along? And will a few days in the snow be enough for me to convince him that this is the real deal?Boss With Benefits is a light, flirty m/m novella with plenty of heat!

Networking with the Affluent


Thomas J. Stanley - 1993
    From the New York Times bestselling author of The Millionaire Next Door, the classic guide on how to network with the affluent client.

Williwaw


Gore Vidal - 1946
    Battling the sea and struggling against each other as the dreaded williwaw approaches, strikes, and subsides, the men reveal the storms within their souls, stark, fierce, and compelling. And pervading all is the grim atmosphere, set down with a mastery of description, of the desolate Arctic and the harsh destructive storm.

Ambient Findability: What We Find Changes Who We Become


Peter Morville - 2005
    Written by Peter Morville, author of the groundbreaking Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, the book defines our current age as a state of unlimited findability. In other words, anyone can find anything at any time. Complete navigability.Morville discusses the Internet, GIS, and other network technologies that are coming together to make unlimited findability possible. He explores how the melding of these innovations impacts society, since Web access is now a standard requirement for successful people and businesses. But before he does that, Morville looks back at the history of wayfinding and human evolution, suggesting that our fear of being lost has driven us to create maps, charts, and now, the mobile Internet.The book's central thesis is that information literacy, information architecture, and usability are all critical components of this new world order. Hand in hand with that is the contention that only by planning and designing the best possible software, devices, and Internet, will we be able to maintain this connectivity in the future. Morville's book is highlighted with full color illustrations and rich examples that bring his prose to life.Ambient Findability doesn't preach or pretend to know all the answers. Instead, it presents research, stories, and examples in support of its novel ideas. Are we truly at a critical point in our evolution where the quality of our digital networks will dictate how we behave as a species? Is findability indeed the primary key to a successful global marketplace in the 21st century and beyond. Peter Morville takes you on a thought-provoking tour of these memes and more -- ideas that will not only fascinate but will stir your creativity in practical ways that you can apply to your work immediately.

Raids On The Unspeakable


Thomas Merton - 1966
    Though he sees dark horizons, his ultimate answer is one of Christian hope.

Is Paris Burning?


Larry Collins - 1965
    An extraordinary series of events, fastidiously researched here, saved the city from what Hitler wanted to leave to the Allies "nothing but a field of ruins."

Payback


Gert Ledig - 1956
    First published in 1956, and now available in English for the first time, Payback paints a savage and unflinching picture of the realities of warfare for ordinary men and women.

Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming


Anthony Dunne - 2013
    In Speculative Everything, Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby propose a kind of design that is used as a tool to create not only things but ideas. For them, design is a means of speculating about how things could be--to imagine possible futures. This is not the usual sort of predicting or forecasting, spotting trends and extrapolating; these kinds of predictions have been proven wrong, again and again. Instead, Dunne and Raby pose "what if" questions that are intended to open debate and discussion about the kind of future people want (and do not want).Speculative Everything offers a tour through an emerging cultural landscape of design ideas, ideals, and approaches. Dunne and Raby cite examples from their own design and teaching and from other projects from fine art, design, architecture, cinema, and photography. They also draw on futurology, political theory, the philosophy of technology, and literary fiction. They show us, for example, ideas for a solar kitchen restaurant; a flypaper robotic clock; a menstruation machine; a cloud-seeding truck; a phantom-limb sensation recorder; and devices for food foraging that use the tools of synthetic biology. Dunne and Raby contend that if we speculate more--about everything--reality will become more malleable. The ideas freed by speculative design increase the odds of achieving desirable futures.