Dorren calculates that to speak fluently with half of the world's 7.4 billion people in their mother tongues, you would need to know no fewer than twenty languages. He sets out to explore these top twenty world languages, which range from the familiar (French, Spanish) to the surprising (Malay, Javanese, Bengali). Babel whisks the reader on a delightful journey to every continent of the world, tracing how these world languages rose to greatness while others fell away and showing how speakers today handle the foibles of their mother tongues. Whether showcasing tongue-tying phonetics or elegant but complicated writing scripts, and mind-bending quirks of grammar, Babel vividly illustrates that mother tongues are like nations: each has its own customs and beliefs that seem as self-evident to those born into it as they are surprising to the outside world. Among many other things, Babel will teach you why modern Turks can't read books that are a mere 75 years old, what it means in practice for Russian and English to be relatives, and how Japanese developed separate "dialects" for men and women. Dorren lets you in on his personal trials and triumphs while studying Vietnamese in Hanoi, debunks ten widespread myths about Chinese characters, and discovers that Swahili became the lingua franca in a part of the world where people routinely speak three or more languages. Witty, fascinating and utterly compelling, Babel will change the way you look at and listen to the world and how it speaks.

    The Weather Channel, now America's most watched programming, has in recent years shown us a relentless series of hurricanes, tsunamis, earthquakes, and eruptions killing thousands, turning millions into refugees, and leaving whole cities in shocked, shattered ruins.Of nature's weapons, tornadoes are among the most unforgiving, and here's an unforgettable portrait of these storms and one extraordinary man who challenged them—and produced the first-ever photographs snatched from a rampaging twister's black heart. Tornado chaser Tim Samaras, working with master storyteller Stefan Bechtel, author of Roar of the Heavens, has created a page-turner with narrative force and scientific substance.In the first of five you-are-there accounts, Tornado Hunter opens with a moment-by-moment description of the 2003 catastrophe that engulfed Manchester, South Dakota. The authors evoke the doomed town and its people; the dark menacing funnel; and Samaras's fearless advance into the whirlwind’s core to deploy the ingenious equipment he devised. They interweave the tornado chaser's passion, the fascinating science of the storms themselves, and six decades of progress in predicting and recording their onslaught—an art beholden to Samaras's own groundbreaking inventions.Tim Samaras's 2004 article in National Geographic became one of the most widely read in the magazine’s history. This powerful book is destined to blast its way onto bestseller lists everywhere.

    Waldman summons Tarot's Force Arcana, the Bible's Miriam, the passion of the suffragettes, and various messengers and heroines of historical, hermetic, and heretical stance. Melpomene, the muse of tragic poetry, is highlighted as an inspiration for dirge, prophecy, and imagination in action. Mythopoetics, shape shifting, quantum entanglement, chance operation, magic, and divination play inside the field of these poems. Tricksters turn many ways, as does poetry, and in Waldman's rendering, a female trickster's manipulation may be apocalyptic.

    College Writing Skills With Reading features John Langan's clear writing style and his wide range of writing assignments and activities that effectively reinforce the four essentials of good writing: unity, support, coherence, and sentence skills. This alternate version provides 25 entertaining and informative essays by professional writers.

    Some people will do anything for money.  Take Brian Zembic, recipient of the world's most notorious boob job.  After a fellow gambler bet $100,000 that Brian wouldn't subject himself to the breast implants he so admired in women, Brian found himself going under the knife to become a 38C--and $100,000 richer.Anchored by this incredible tale, gambling expert Michael Konik introduces readers to the quirky subculture of high rollers and hustlers in dozens of other outrageous true stories profiling gamblers who make wagering a way of life.You'll meet the man who turned $10,000 into $17 million with a pair of dice, the man responsible for determining the point spread of the Super Bowl, and the world's most notorious golf hustler.  In addition to the bizarre and hilarious escapades of hard-core gamblers, Konik shares insider tips for how to score more in comps than you lose at the tables, how to identify casino games that should be avoided, and how to gain a legal advantage over the house.In this rollicking collection of stories, Konik celebrates the glamour, glitz, and excitement of gambling culture in Vegas and beyond, giving readers a behind-the-tables look at one of the nation's most lucrative entertainment industries.

    Research has shown that positive language has the power to change the way our brains think--and thereby influence positive behavior. Following on the heels of the wildly popularInstant Happy, this colorful little gift book presents happiness expert Karen Salmansohn's next infusion of mood-boosting sayings. Filled with fascinating nuggets from popular science, this peptalk-in-a-book provides lists of "things to think" to build mental resilience, positivity, gratitude, and happiness.

    Marshall Boswell examines the four major works of fiction David Foster Wallace has produced thus far: the novels The Broom of the System and Infinite Jest and the story collections Girl with Curious Hair and Brief Interviews with Hideous Men.

    It is not about what happens when we get knocked down but more about what happens when we get up again. It is a book about what resilience is and how we grow and maintain it. The first step in understanding resilience is accepting what you can and cannot change. You can't change the weather but you can certainly change the way you interact with it; using an umbrella, a jacket or sunscreen. Just as you can't change your history, family, race, or past hurts and events but with the right direction and understanding you can certainly change how you look and feel about them moving forward. Life doesn't always turn out as we'd expected. It can be complex, harsh, joyful, mean, hilarious and utterly perplexing. The sooner we understand this, the sooner we will be able to cope with whatever life throws our way. For the majority of life's adversities, there is no magic pill or silver bullet - to get over anything we generally have to go through it - but if we're prepared to learn from that experience, good can certainly come from bad. We can grow to be wiser, more empathetic and understanding and from that we can create greater purpose in our lives.

    Nearly 18 million Americans are problem shoppers, unable to break the buying habits that lead them into debt, damaged relationships, and depression. If this describes you, or someone you care about, the help you need is here. Drawing on recent research and on decades of working with overshoppers, Dr. April Benson brings together key insights with practical strategies in a powerful program to help you stop overshopping. As you progress through this book, you’ll take back control of your shopping and spending and create a richer, more meaningful and satisfying life. To learn more about the author, visit her website: www.stoppingovershopping.com

    And there is no better guide to the dictionary's many wonderments than the former chief editor of the OED, John Simpson. Simpson spent almost four decades of his life immersed in the intricacies of our language, and guides us through its history with charmingly laconic wit. In The Word Detective, an intensely personal memoir and a joyful celebration of English, he weaves a story of how words come into being (and sometimes disappear), how culture shapes the language we use, and how technology has transformed not only the way we speak and write but also how words are made. Throughout, he enlivens his narrative with lively excavations and investigations of individual words -- from deadline to online and back to 101 (yes, it's a word) -- all the while reminding us that the seemingly mundane words (can you name the four different meanings of ma?) are often the most interesting ones. But Simpson also reminds us of the limitations of language: spending his days in the OED's house of words, his family at home is forced to confront the challenges of wordlessness. A brilliant and deeply humane expedition through the world of words, The Word Detective will delight and inspire any lover of language.

    In July of 1991, he launched Cartoon Books in Columbus, Ohio, to publish his black-and-white comic strip Bone. A tale of three marshmallowy creatures named Bone, adrift in a world of humans, monsters and fantasy creatures, Bone has since been translated into 15 languages and won Smith countless awards. Bone and Beyond is the first volume to offer an overview of Smith's work. Published in conjunction with the Wexner Center and Cartoon Research Library's 2008 exhibition, this catalogue presents work featured in the show, including examples of Smith's original drawings for Bone, plus the more recent Shazam and Rasl, a forthcoming time travel story. Also featured are selected works by cartoonists who have influenced Smith, such as George Herriman, Charles Schulz and Walt Kelly, and essays by comic book and fantasy author Neil Gaiman, comic book artist and scholar Scott McCloud and Wexner Center film/video curator David Filipi, the exhibition's co-curator. Cartoon Research Library curator Lucy Shelton Caswell, the exhibition's other co-curator, provides an introduction.

    A meditation on life, a philosophical enquiry into human nature and a profoundly funny dissection of urban madness.Christopher Ross, philosopher and traveller, decided to cease his journeyings and go underground, working for a year as a station assistant on Platform 6 (northbound Victoria Line) at Oxford Circus. After training school, where he is taught how not to electrocute himself and always to look a member of the public in the eye as they are assaulting you, he faces up to his new duties with a mixture of curiosity and foreboding.‘Tunnel Visions’ is a delightful mixture of lived experience in the sureal world of London’s Underground and the more elevated ideas, thoughts and imaginings that experience provokes. Oxford Circus station, complete with its weeping wall, its streakers, buskers, onanists and cupboard containing one employee whose ideal working day was to sleep soundly 100 feet below ground, is a Plato’s Cave of reflection and human comedy. Christopher Ross, a still point in the whirling stream of the bizarre and otherworldly life below ground, has written a profoundly funny book.

    If the conscious mind—the part you consider you—accounts for only a tiny fraction of the brain’s function, what is all the rest doing? This is the question that David Eagleman—renowned neuroscientist and acclaimed author of Sum—answers in a book as accessible and entertaining as it is deeply informed by startling, up-to-the-minute research.

    Yet we know little about the conversational engine that drives our everyday lives. We are pushed and pulled around by language far more than we realize, yet are seduced by stereotypes and myths about communication.This book will change the way you think about talk. It will explain the big pay-offs to understanding conversation scientifically. Elizabeth Stokoe, a social psychologist, has spent over twenty years collecting and analysing real conversations across settings as varied as first dates, crisis negotiation, sales encounters and medical communication. This book describes some of the findings of her own research, and that of other conversation analysts around the world. Through numerous examples from real interactions between friends, partners, colleagues, police officers, mediators, doctors and many others, you will learn that some of what you think you know about talk is wrong. But you will also uncover fresh insights about how to have better conversations - using the evidence from fifty years of research about the science of talk.

    His brilliant musicianship inspired his fans in London to scrawl graffiti in the underground train proclaiming, "Clapton is God." Nearly forty years later, this multi-million selling, Grammy award-winning virtuoso guitarist is still winning adulation from a whole new generation of fans.Crossroads, the definitive portrait of the man and his music, reveals with compassion and insight both the depths of Clapton's pain and the roots of his musical power. Michael Schumacher traces his career from the early years of the Yardbirds and John Mayall to the legendary supergroups Cream and Derek and the Dominoes to the solo career that has lasted a quarter of a century. Crossroads also explores the tumultuous life -- his heroin addiction, the excruciating relationship with Patti Boyd (George Harrison's wife and the woman who inspired the classic "Layla"), the year of 1990 when he lost four close friends, and the devastating death of his four-year-old son Connor the following year. Both revealing and sympathetic, this is the ultimate look at the enduring legend who transformed personal suffering into lasting artistic triumph.-- Revised and updated to include details on Clapton's new marriage and his recent recordings and tour-- Complete with a comprehensive discography and tour history