Stories have the power to captivate listeners and to ignite their imaginations. Our brains crave stories - it's how history was recorded before people learned how to write - but what makes a great story? How can you create and deliver stories which keep your listeners transfixed? Based on Intensive Research on Brain Science, Storytelling, Screenwriting and Public Speaking I spent the last four years studying and evaluating thousands of speakers - some great ones, and others who (to put it mildly) needed a lot of help. I read over two hundred books on the art of public speaking, storytelling and screenwriting, attended countless seminars on the subject and devoured every piece of information I could get on the art of presenting. This book is the result of my intensive research. In it, you will find powerful storytelling and speaking techniques that are used by some of the world’s best speakers to help win audiences over to their way of thinking. If you want to master the art of public speaking, you must master the art of storytelling. In this book, you will discover the public speaking and storytelling techniques used by some of the best public speakers in the world. More specifically, you will learn how to: •Create an opening that instantly hooks your audience into your speech •Keep your audience on the edge of their seats with a spellbinding story •Use the suspended story to keep your audience intrigued •Bring your characters to life •Turn your stories into mental movies for your audience •Create and deliver a speech your audience will remember and talk about for years •Keep ratcheting up the suspense by increasing the intensity of your conflicts •Customize your speech (and your story) for your audience •Add organic humor to your speeches and stories without resorting to jokes •Use anchors to make your points memorable •Use tough-watch logic to inspire your audience •Create smooth transitions to ensure your speech flows logically •Create analogies and metaphors to make your message memorable •Give your audience dialogue to build rapport with them •Add a you-focused check-in to relate with your audience •Use vocal variety to spice up your speech •Create a memorable and repeatable catch-phrase using “the rule of opposites” •Add credibility to your speeches and stories •Take an element out of your story and put it into your audience’s lives •Creatively summarize your main points •Tell a story and deliver a speech that your audience will remember and talk about for years What Makes This Book Different? This book is unlike most books on the subjects of public speaking and storytelling.

    But until now, without compelling evidence, it has been impossible to say for sure that such a connection really exists and especially how it works.Now, that evidence has been discovered.A thrilling scientific detective story, The Balance Within tells how researchers finally uncovered the elusive mind-body connection and what it means for our health. In this beautifully written book, Dr. Esther Sternberg, whose discoveries were pivotal in helping to solve this mystery, provides first hand accounts of the breakthrough experiments that revealed the physical mechanisms - the nerves, cells, and hormones - used by the brain and immune system to communicate with each other. She describes just how stress can make us more susceptible to all types of illnesses, and how the immune system can alter our moods. Finally, she explains how our understanding of these connections in scientific terms is helping to answer such crucial questions as "Does stress make you sick?" "Is a positive outlook the key to better health?" and "How do our personal relationships, work, and other aspects of our lives affect our health?"A fascinating, elegantly written portrait of this rapidly emerging field with enormous potential for finding new ways to treat disease and cope with stress, The Balance Within is essential reading for anyone interested in making their body and mind whole again.

    Although these images are sanitized and romanticized in American popular culture, they represent the untold stories of enslaved men and women who had a significant impact on the nation's culinary and hospitality traditions even as they were forced to prepare food for their oppressors.Kelley Fanto Deetz draws upon archaeological evidence, cookbooks, plantation records, and folklore to present a nuanced study of the lives of enslaved plantation cooks from colonial times through emancipation and beyond. She reveals how these men and women were literally -bound to the fire- as they lived and worked in the sweltering and often fetid conditions of plantation house kitchens. These highly skilled cooks drew upon skills and ingredients brought with them from their African homelands to create complex, labor-intensive dishes such as oyster stew, gumbo, and fried fish. However, their white owners overwhelmingly received the credit for their creations.Focusing on enslaved cooks at Virginia plantations including Thomas Jefferson's Monticello and George Washington's Mount Vernon, Deetz restores these forgotten figures to their rightful place in American and Southern history. Bound to the Fire not only uncovers their rich and complex stories and illuminates their role in plantation culture, but it celebrates their living legacy with the recipes that they created and passed down to future generations.

    He has been a hospital surgeon, a ship's physician, an air-ambulance doctor, and a trauma surgeon. He has worked in locations as diverse as England, Burma, Eritrea, the Amazon, Mozambique, and the United States. In this story of unforgettable adventure and tragedy, Dr. Kaplan explores the great challenge of his career -- to maintain his humanity even when that option does not seem possible. The Dressing Station is a haunting and elucidating look into the nature of human violence, the shattering contradictions of war, and the complicated role of medicine in this modern world. "A unique mix of biography and reportage, both personal and clinical," it is "a rare insight into the mind of a surgeon." -- Sue Cullinan, Time "Eloquent ... Beautifully written ... Provides a startling glimpse of battlefield surgery in those conflicts that CNN does not cover." -- Abraham Verghese, The New York Times Book Review "Kaplan ... has a keen sense of the smaller moments that leaven the agonies of daily life." -- Julian B. Orenstein, The Washington Post

    a longing to find meaning to life ... a yearning to discover a sanctuary of serenity and peace ... a hunger to have your heart and soul touched by that Divine love that brings comfort to life ... a passionate desire to have a closer relationship with your creator, then the Tao Te Ching is for you. The Tao Te Ching provides an intuitive insight into the art of living an authentic life, and introduces you to the laws of nature on how to live in this world in peace and joy. With a knowing of the Tao Te Ching, you will see resistance and opposition fade away. Conflict and stress will become distant memories. The issues of life become irrelevant or will simply disappear once you start living your authentic self with the Tao. The Tao shows how to transcend all those insurmountable obstacles that the ego has created. The Tao contains the power to liberate you from the ego-imposed prison of the dualistic world. Living in the Tao can bring a deep inner peace and a reconnection to the divine source. The wisdom of the Tao is in a practical sense, a way to live life with the clarity of knowing the universal truth. The Tao is an ancient philosophy of living in the natural world. It shows the way of how to get back to being your Authentic Self, your Spiritual Self. The Tao has the power to help you reclaim your life from the temporal ego identity that is imprisoning you. With the Tao you can discover your Authentic Identity. You can get back to the being-ness and oneness of living in the Divine Consciousness by learning the truths of the Tao Te Ching. Through discovering these truths you can become the creators of your own universe instead of being the passive observer that you have been. You can learn to live a fuller life in the infinity of the moment verses living in the clutches of the Ego. The Tao can show you how to grow detached from the ego identity by becoming in direct contact with your true intent and motives that was meant for you. When you do, you begin to see yourself as you truly are. It is being authentic that you become reconnected to the divine source.The Tao Te Ching will show you how to develop a more rewarding spiritual experience and obtain a higher sense of awareness through connecting with the Divine Source, and help you realize that the Power is within you to achieve this. It makes no difference what your religious background or beliefs are, the teachings of the Tao Te Ching are universal and available to everyone. Following the way of the Tao Te Ching is a spiritual path to finding true joy and ecstasy.For those who wish to learn more, may I suggest my book, "The Way of the Tao, Living an Authentic Life" This book has several essays on the deeper meaning of the Tao including modern day examples to demostrate the timelessness of the Tao.

    Famously home to artists and activists, and known as the birthplace of the Beats, the Black Panthers, and the LGBTQ movement, the Bay Area has been reshaped by Silicon Valley. The richer the region gets, the more unequal and less diverse it becomes, and cracks in the city’s facade—rapid gentrification, an epidemic of evictions, rising crime, atrophied public institutions—are growing wider. Inspired by Studs Terkel’s classic works of oral history, Cary McClelland spent years interviewing people at the epicenter of recent change, from venture capitalists and coders to politicians and protesters, capturing San Francisco as never before.

    Jacobs' other books, it offers a concrete approach to an abstract and elusive subject. That, all by itself, makes for an intoxicating experience."—New York Times

    They come in many shapes: loving a man or a woman who will not commit to us, being heartbroken when we're abandoned by a lover, engaging in Sisyphean internet searches, coming back lonely from bars, parties, or blind dates, feeling bored in a relationship that is so much less than we had envisaged - these are only some of the ways in which the search for love is a difficult and often painful experience.Despite the widespread and almost collective character of these experiences, our culture insists they are the result of faulty or insufficiently mature psyches. For many, the Freudian idea that the family designs the pattern of an individual's erotic career has been the main explanation for why and how we fail to find or sustain love. Psychoanalysis and popular psychology have succeeded spectacularly in convincing us that individuals bear responsibility for the misery of their romantic and erotic lives. The purpose of this book is to change our way of thinking about what is wrong in modern relationships. The problem is not dysfunctional childhoods or insufficiently self-aware psyches, but rather the institutional forces shaping how we love.The argument of this book is that the modern romantic experience is shaped by a fundamental transformation in the ecology and architecture of romantic choice. The samples from which men and women choose a partner, the modes of evaluating prospective partners, the very importance of choice and autonomy and what people imagine to be the spectrum of their choices: all these aspects of choice have transformed the very core of the will, how we want a partner, the sense of worth bestowed by relationships, and the organization of desire.This book does to love what Marx did to commodities: it shows that it is shaped by social relations and institutions and that it circulates in a marketplace of unequal actors.

    At the core of these books is the idea that people should design for themselves their own houses, streets, and communities. This idea may be radical (it implies a radical transformation fo the architectural profession) but it comes simply from the observation that most of the wonderful places of the world were not made by architects but by the people. This book is the master plan for the University of Oregon, and is now being implemented at that university; but it shows at the same time how any community the size of a university or small town might go about designing its own future environment-with all members of the community participating personally. It is a concrete example at the Center's theories in practice, showing in simple detail, with numerous illustrations, how to implement six guiding principles: organic order, participation, piecemeal growth, patterns, diagnosis, and coordination.

    How is it, then, that today the former British colonial trading post is a thriving Asian metropolis with not only the world's number one airline, best airport, and busiest port of trade, but also the world's fourth–highest per capita real income?The story of that transformation is told here by Singapore's charismatic, controversial founding father, Lee Kuan Yew. Rising from a legacy of divisive colonialism, the devastation of the Second World War, and general poverty and disorder following the withdrawal of foreign forces, Singapore now is hailed as a city of the future. This miraculous history is dramatically recounted by the man who not only lived through it all but who fearlessly forged ahead and brought about most of these changes.Delving deep into his own meticulous notes, as well as previously unpublished government papers and official records, Lee details the extraordinary efforts it took for an island city–state in Southeast Asia to survive at that time.Lee explains how he and his cabinet colleagues finished off the communist threat to the fledgling state's security and began the arduous process of nation building: forging basic infrastructural roads through a land that still consisted primarily of swamps, creating an army from a hitherto racially and ideologically divided population, stamping out the last vestiges of colonial–era corruption, providing mass public housing, and establishing a national airline and airport.In this illuminating account, Lee writes frankly about his trenchant approach to political opponents and his often unorthodox views on human rights, democracy, and inherited intelligence, aiming always "to be correct, not politically correct." Nothing in Singapore escaped his watchful eye: whether choosing shrubs for the greening of the country, restoring the romance of the historic Raffles Hotel, or openly, unabashedly persuading young men to marry women as well educated as themselves. Today's safe, tidy Singapore bears Lee's unmistakable stamp, for which he is unapologetic: "If this is a nanny state, I am proud to have fostered one."Though Lee's domestic canvas in Singapore was small, his vigor and talent assured him a larger place in world affairs. With inimitable style, he brings history to life with cogent analyses of some of the greatest strategic issues of recent times and reveals how, over the years, he navigated the shifting tides of relations among America, China, and Taiwan, acting as confidant, sounding board, and messenger for them. He also includes candid, sometimes acerbic pen portraits of his political peers, including the indomitable Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, the poetry–spouting Jiang Zemin, and ideologues George Bush and Deng Xiaoping.Lee also lifts the veil on his family life and writes tenderly of his wife and stalwart partner, Kwa Geok Choo, and of their pride in their three children –– particularly the eldest son, Hsien Loong, who is now Singapore's deputy prime minister.For more than three decades, Lee Kuan Yew has been praised and vilified in equal measure, and he has established himself as a force impossible to ignore in Asian and international politics. From Third World to First offers readers a compelling glimpse into this visionary's heart, soul, and mind.

    In this classic book, originally published in 1980, acclaimed media critic Todd Gitlin first scrutinizes major news coverage in the early days of the antiwar movement. Drawing on his own experiences (he was president of the Students for a Democratic Society in 1963-64) and on interviews with key activists and news reporters, he shows in detail how the media first ignore new political developments, then select and emphasize aspects of the story that treat movements as oddities. He then demonstrates how the media glare made leaders into celebrities and estranged them from their movement base; how it inflated the importance of revolutionary rhetoric, destabilizing the movement, then promoted "moderate" alternatives--all the while spreading the antiwar message. Finally, Gitlin draws together a theory of news coverage as a form of anti-democratic social management--which he sees at work also in media treatment of the anti-nuclear and other later movements.Updated for 2003 with a new preface, The Whole World Is Watching is a subtle and sensitive book, true to the passions and ironic reversals of its subject, and filled with provocative insights that apply to the media's relationship with all activist movements.

    From the logistics revolution to the unprecedented concentration of business and wealth in the hands a shrinking few, Moody examines the impact of this new economic terrain on potential working class resistance movements.

    Uses observations of pedestrians to describe and analyze the city, and assesses the influence of architecture and urban planning.

    This offers the first broad treatment of the city in both its historic and its contemporary aspects.

    Where rising populism on the right and the left exploits the grievances of those left behind in the global economy, new localism has developed as a mechanism to address them head on.New localism is not a replacement for the vital roles federal governments play; it is the ideal complement to an effective federal government, and, currently, an urgently needed remedy for national dysfunction.In The New Localism, Katz and Nowak tell the stories of the cities that are on the vanguard of problem solving. Pittsburgh is catalyzing inclusive growth by inventing and deploying new industries and technologies. Indianapolis is governing its city and metropolis through a network of public, private and civic leaders. Copenhagen is using publicly owned assets like their waterfront to spur large scale redevelopment and finance infrastructure from land sales.Out of these stories emerge new norms of growth, governance, and finance and a path toward a more prosperous, sustainable, and inclusive society. Katz and Nowak imagine a world in which urban institutions finance the future through smart investments in innovation, infrastructure and children and urban intermediaries take solutions created in one city and adapt and tailor them to other cities with speed and precision.As Katz and Nowak show us in The New Localism, "Power now belongs to the problem solvers."