And yet attaining happiness has become, it appears, anything but simple. Having stuff - The Latest, The Newest, The Best Yet - is all too often peddled as the sure fire route to happiness. So why then, in our consumer-driven society, is depression, stress and anxiety ever more common, affecting every strata of society and every age, even, worryingly, the very young? Why is it, when we have so much, that many of us still feel we are missing something and the rush of pleasure when we buy something new turns so quickly into a feeling of emptiness, or purposelessness, or guilt?So what is the route to real, deep, long lasting happiness? Could it be that our lives have just become overly crowded, that we've lost sight of the things - the simple things - that give a sense of achievement, a feeling of joy or excitement? That make us happy. Do we need to take a step back, reprioritise? Do we need to make our lives more simple?Kate Humble's fresh and frank exploration of a stripped-back approach to life is uplifting, engaging and inspiring - and will help us all find balance and happiness every day.

    Phileas Fogg of London and his newly employed French valet Passepartout attempt to circumnavigate the world in 80 days on a £20,000 wager set by his friends at the Reform Club.

    Terran greed spirals around native innocence & wisdom, overturning the ancient society. Humans have learned interstellar travel from the Hainish (the origin-planet of all humanoid races, including Athsheans). Various planets have been expanding independently, but during the novel it's learned that the League of All Worlds has been formed. News arrives via an ansible, a new discovery. Previously they had been cut off, 27 light years from home.The story occurs after The Dispossessed, where both the ansible & the League of Worlds are unrealised. Also well before Planet of Exile, where human settlers have learned to coexist. The 24th century has been suggested. Terran colonists take over the planet locals call Athshe, meaning "forest," rather than "dirt," like their home planet Terra. They follow the 19th century model of colonization: felling trees, planting farms, digging mines & enslaving indigenous peoples. The natives are unequipped to comprehend this. They're a subsistence race who rely on the forests & have no cultural precedent for tyranny, slavery or war. The invaders take their land without resistance until one fatal act sets rebellion in motion & changes the people of both worlds forever.

    This guide introduces and sets in context, the range of critical arguments that have been generated by this work.

    The jubilant Kauravas insult the Pandavas in their helpless state and even try to disrobe Draupadi in front of the entire court, but her honour is saved by Krishna who miraculously creates lengths of cloth to replace the ones being removed.

    In this lively collection, learn how an ordinary young man, Mahesh Das, became the beloved Raja Birbal we all know today, and how he uses his famous wit, time and again, to build a ‘celestial palace’ for Emperor Akbar, order a census of crows, trap a thief using a magic bamboo, and much more.Replete with wisdom and wit, and brought to life by Tapas Guha’s beautiful illustrations, this clever collection of stories also offers valuable life lessons hidden beneath its humour.

     Marcus Aurelius wrote the 12 books of the Meditations as a source for his own guidance and self-improvement. These books have been carefully adapted into a contemporary form to allow for easy reading.

    We shall continue to have Wars; and some day the world is going to have a war to which the present Will serve only as a try-out. When that war comes our country will prob ably have to bear the burden for the western hemisphere. In that war our navy will be our first line of defense; and what we do for our navy now will have much to do with what our navy will be able to do for us then.

    But Chief Inspector Pointer has his doubts. Why, for instance, would the dead man choose to expire in the rather inconvenient confines of a piece of furniture? And who was the dead man, anyway? Soon these and other questions lead Pointer onto the trail of a completely different crime. Written by an author whose identity is as great a mystery as his/her novels. The Eames-Erskine Case is the first of nearly two dozen mysteries from the 1920’s and 1930’s to feature Chief Inspector Pointer.

    To a smaller yet no less passionate audience, Fowles is also known for having written The Tree, one of his few works of nonfiction. First published a generation ago, it is a provocative meditation on the connection between the natural world and human creativity, and a powerful argument against taming the wild. In it, Fowles recounts his own childhood in England and describes how he rebelled against his Edwardian father’s obsession with the “quantifiable yield” of well-pruned fruit trees and came to prize instead the messy, purposeless beauty of nature left to its wildest. The Tree is an inspiring, even life-changing book, like Lewis Hyde’s The Gift, one that reaffirms our connection to nature and reminds us of the pleasure of getting lost, the merits of having no plan, and the wisdom of following one’s nose wherever it may lead—in life as much as in art.

    He answers an ad in a local newspaper from a teacher looking for serious pupils, only to find himself alone in an abandoned office with a full-grown gorilla who is nibbling delicately on a slender branch. "You are the teacher?" he asks incredulously. "I am the teacher," the gorilla replies. Ishmael is a creature of immense wisdom and he has a story to tell, one that no other human being has ever heard. It is a story that extends backward and forward over the lifespan of the earth from the birth of time to a future there is still time save. Like all great teachers, Ishmael refuses to make the lesson easy; he demands the final illumination to come from within ourselves. Is it man's destiny to rule the world? Or is it a higher destiny possible for him-- one more wonderful than he has ever imagined?

    All for the chance to get back at a handful of people. It isn’t as if they didn’t deserve it either. They had driven him from his home. Chased him physically from the very guild house itself. All the way to the gates of the city. Simply because he wasn’t as strong as they expected him to be. As strong as he’d expected himself to be. He’d returned to the city the next day and left with his means for revenge. Something he’d hidden away and told no one about when he found it in one of his few Dungeon Dives. An inactive Dungeon Core. A crystal the size of a fist with a soul inside. One that could create anything from mana it wanted to. From monsters and complex cave systems to gold coins. Years spent in planning, and unfortunately farming, as he waited. Now it felt like his moment was finally here. The Dungeon Core had been acting strange lately. As if it were finally… coming to life. Watching over the crystal like a hawk for this very event, Ryker impatiently waits. Any day now, it'd start. And he could set about taking his vengeance. Starting with ripping the soul of the Dungeon out. Warning and minor spoiler: This novel contains graphic violence, undefined relationships/harem, unconventional opinions/beliefs, forced political marriage (and consummation), and a hero who is as tactful as a dog at a cat show. Read at your own risk. (Product Page for Book 1: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07... Page for Book 2: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07... Page for Book 3: https://www.amazon.com/Dungeon-Depose...)

    He translates the philosophy of the Maine farmer into terms as applicable in Manhattan as on the Kennebec. Northern Farm is among the great classics of American nature writing

    Each casebook reprints documents relating to a work's historical context and reception, presents the best critical studies, and, when possible, features an interview with the author. Accessible and informative to scholars, students, and nonspecialist readers alike, the books in this series provide a wide range of critical and informative commentaries on major texts. Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude is arguably the most important novel in twentieth-century Latin American literature. This Casebook features ten critical articles on Garcia Marquez's great work. Carefully selected from the most important work on the novel over the past three decades, they include pieces by Carlos Fuentes, Iris Zavala, James Higgins, Jean Franco, Michael Wood, and Gene H. Bell-Villada. Among the intriguing aspects of the work discussed are its mythic dimension, its "magical" side, its representations of women, its relationship with past chronicles of exploration and discovery, its portrayals of Western power and imperialism, its astounding diffusion throughout the globe and the media, and its simple truth-telling, its fidelity to the tangled history of Latin America. The book incorporates several theoretical approaches--historical, feminist, postcolonial; the first English translation of Fuentes's renowned, oft-cited, eight page meditation on the work; a general introduction; and a 1982 interview with Garcia Marquez.

    It was to last five years and transform him from an amiable and somewhat aimless young man into a scientific celebrity. Even more vitally, it was to set in motion the intellectual currents that culminated in the arrival of The Origin of Species in Victorian drawing-rooms in 1859. His journal, reprinted here in a shortened version, is vivid and immediate, showing us a naturalist making patient observations, above all in geology. As well as a profusion of natural history detail, it records many other things that caught Darwin’s eye, from civil war in Argentina to the new colonial settlements of Australia. The editors have provided an excellent introduction and notes for this Penguin Classics edition, which also contains maps and appendices, including an essay on scientific geology and the Bible by Robert FitzRoy, Darwin’s friend and captain of the Beagle.