In his acclaimed book―based on his legendary Harvard course―Sandel offers a rare education in thinking through the complicated issues and controversies we face in public life today. It has emerged as a most lucid and engaging guide for those who yearn for a more robust and thoughtful public discourse. "In terms we can all understand," wrote Jonathan Rauch in The New York Times, Justice "confronts us with the concepts that lurk . . . beneath our conflicts."Affirmative action, same-sex marriage, physician-assisted suicide, abortion, national service, the moral limits of markets―Sandel relates the big questions of political philosophy to the most vexing issues of the day, and shows how a surer grasp of philosophy can help us make sense of politics, morality, and our own convictions as well.Justice is lively, thought-provoking, and wise―an essential new addition to the small shelf of books that speak convincingly to the hard questions of our civic life.

    Getting Together takes you step-by-step through initiating, negotiating, and sustaining enduring relationships -- in business, in government, between friends, and in the family.

    One section focused on eight incredibly subtle—and devastatingly destructive—tactics for sabotaging the decision-making processes of organizations. While the manual was written decades ago, these sabotage tactics thrive undetected in organizations today:Insist on doing everything through channels. Make speeches. Talk as frequently as possible and at great length. Refer all matters to committees. Bring up irrelevant issues as frequently as possible. Haggle over precise wordings of communications. Refer back to matters already decided upon and attempt to question the advisability of that decision. Advocate caution and urge fellow-conferees to avoid haste that might result in embarrassments or difficulties later on. Be worried about the propriety of any decision.Everyone has been faced with someone who has used these tactics, even when they have meant well. Filled with proven strategies and techniques, this brief, clever book outlines the counter-sabotage measures to detect and reduce the impact of these eight classic sabotage tactics to improve productivity, spur creativity, and engender better collegial relationships.

    In this short and powerful book, renowned peace activist Michael Nagler challenges this assertion, demonstrating that nonviolence succeeds through aggressively strategic and sustained action. It demands greater courage and discipline than violence.Distilling the core theories of nonviolence and drawing deeply from the lives of leaders such as Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., this action-oriented handbook offers both guidance for nonviolent resistance and advice for building constructive movements capable of restructuring the very bedrock of society. Nagler also includes stories of successful nonviolent resistance that have been ignored by the mass media. The book features a list of resources that offer pathways to immediate action and engagement with the peace movement worldwide.

    With warmth and wit, she takes readers from her Minnesota childhood, where she became a violin prodigy, through college at Stanford and her in-the-trenches years as a cub reporter on local television stations before becoming a national news reporter. She describes her rise to anchor of The Real Story with Gretchen Carlson on FOX News channel as a testament to personal strength and perseverance. Carlson addresses the intense competitive effort of winning the Miss America Pageant, the challenges she’s faced as a woman in broadcast television, and how she manages to balance work and family as the wife of high-profile sports agent Casey Close and devoted mother to their two children. An unceasing advocate for respect and equality for women, Carlson writes openly about her own struggles with body image, pageant stereotypes, building her career, and having the courage to speak her mind. She encourages women to strive for their goals, never give up, and always believe in themselves. In Getting Real, Carlson emerges as a living example of a woman not afraid to chase her dreams and embrace life fully.

    Indeed, what began as an initial response of many institutions -- denial and delay -- has now grown into a crime against humanity. The fossil fuel industry is directing the Bush administration's energy and climate policies-payback for helping Bush get elected. But they're not the only ones to blame: the media and environmental activists are unwittingly worsening the crisis. In his new introduction, Gelbspan reveals that the outlook isn't getting better. The climate continues to change with increasing acceleration: hurricanes devastated Florida; rainfall patterns left two million people starving in Kenya; 2004 was the fourth hottest year on record. At the same time, the coal industry was planning to sabotage an effort in the Senate to begin to regulate carbon dioxide. Officials of Switzerland, France, and Canada said last year that, when the Kyoto Protocol takes effect, they intend to take the United States to court under the World Trade Organization, reasoning that the U.S.'s refusal to lower their carbon emissions amounts to an illegal subsidy-a "carbon subsidy"-on its exports. With the reelection of George W. Bush and a Republican-controlled congress, Boiling Point is more imperative than ever. Both a passionate call-to-arms and a thoughtful roadmap for change, Gelbspan reveals what's at stake for our fragile planet.

    From Plato to Christianity, from the Enlightenment to Nietzsche, the Western tradition has been based on arrogant and erroneous beliefs about human beings and their place in the world. Philosophies such as liberalism and Marxism think of humankind as a species whose destiny is to transcend natural limits and conquer the Earth. Even in the present day, despite Darwin's discoveries, nearly all schools of thought take as their starting point the belief that humans are radically different from other animals. John Gray argues that this humanist belief is an illusion. The aim of Straw Dogs is to explore how the world and human life look once humanism has been finally abandoned.Straw Dogs explores philosophical issues such as the nature of the self, free will, morality, progress and the value of truth. Drawing his inspiration from art, poetry, and the frontiers of science as well as philosophy itself, John Gray presents a post-humanist view of the world and of human life. Straw Dogs is an exhilarating, sometimes disturbing book that leads the reader to question their deepest beliefs.

    This book tackles such questions head-on.   The authors begin with the great economist John Maynard Keynes. In 1930 Keynes predicted that, within a century, per capita income would steadily rise, people’s basic needs would be met, and no one would have to work more than fifteen hours a week. Clearly, he was wrong: though income has increased as he envisioned, our wants have seemingly gone unsatisfied, and we continue to work long hours.   The Skidelskys explain why Keynes was mistaken. Then, arguing from the premise that economics is a moral science, they trace the concept of the good life from Aristotle to the present and show how our lives over the last half century have strayed from that ideal. Finally, they issue a call to think anew about what really matters in our lives and how to attain it.   How Much Is Enough? is that rarity, a work of deep intelligence and ethical commitment accessible to all readers. It will be lauded, debated, cited, and criticized. It will not be ignored.

    In her new book, SQ21: The Twenty-One Skills of Spiritual Intelligence, Cindy helps us understand how spiritual intelligence is analogous to such concepts as IQ and emotional intelligence (EQ). Using clear, practical language she defines the 21 skills that comprise spiritual intelligence and in doing so, teaches you the steps to begin developing your own spiritual intelligence. Cindy refers to her method as spiritual weightlifting-a process whereby we work to develop our muscles to shift away from thinking with our self-focused ego to behaving from our more loving and peaceful Higher Self. Her model is both faith-friendly and faith-neutral, and SQ21 offers a way for atheists, people of faith, and those who are spiritual but not religious to understand each other and discuss our universal concerns. These skills are especially crucial for those in positions of leadership, since they help us to make decisions on a higher level while in the midst of stress, complexity, and high rates of change. If you want more peace, wisdom and compassion in your life - SQ21 is the book for you.

    It’s become a product molded and shaped to suit the narrative. Facts that don’t fit are omitted. Off-narrative people and views are controversialized or neatly deposited down the memory hole. Partisan pundits, analysts and anonymous sources fill news space leaving little room for facts. The line between opinion and fact has disappeared.In Slanted, Sharyl Attkisson reveals with gripping detail the struggles inside newsrooms where journalism used to rule. For the first time, dozens of current and former top national news executives, producers and reporters give insider accounts, speaking with shocking candor about their industry’s devolution.Americans know their news diet is now filled with fast food concoctions created from talking point recipes devised by partisan and corporate interests. They see a record number of fact mistakes made by some of the world’s most formerly well-respected media outlets . . . often with no apologies. The media largely blames Donald Trump. But as this autopsy shows, the death of the news as we once knew it is self-inflicted. And the weapon was the narrative. Sharyl Attkisson also finds reason for hope and argues that courageous, counternarrative news reporting can revive journalism.

    Most forms of private vice and public evil are kindled and sustained by lies. Acts of adultery and other personal betrayals, financial fraud, government corruption—even murder and genocide—generally require an additional moral defect: a willingness to lie.

    Labor unions hurt their members. Government regulation destroys jobs. These are just a few of the biggest lies in the web of misinformation spun by conservatives and the Chamber of Commerce. Holland's book dissects each malicious fiction to show how the Right is just plain wrong on the economy—wrong on jobs, wrong on the deficit, wrong on taxes, wrong on trade.Takes down old and new conservative myths about the economy, including healthcare, stimulus, progressive taxes, Wall Street regulation, and moreFilled with recent quotes from conservative politicians and pundits, from the misleading to the laughable to the totally outrageousTackles specific aspects of the Republicans' economic agenda, including their 2010 alternatives to Obama's budgetDeftly written and rigorously documented by Alternet senior writer/editor Joshua HollandWith the economy set to be the driving issue before and after the 2010 midterm elections, The Fifteen Biggest Lies about the Economy sets the record straight on every part of the conservatives' economic agenda.

    Their daily experiences at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue taught them valuable lessons about how to work productively with people from different walks of life and points of view. These Washington insiders share what they’ve learned through first person examples of their own glamorous (and sometimes harrowing) moments with celebrities, foreign leaders and that most unpredictable of animals—the American politician.This book is for you if you feel unsure of yourself in social settings, if you’d like to get along more easily with others, or if you want to break through to a new level of cooperation with your boss and coworkers. They give specific advice for how to exude confidence even when you don’t feel it, ways to establish your reputation as an individual whom people like, trust, and want to help, and lay out the specific social skills still essential to success - despite our increasingly digitized world. Jeremy and Lea prove that social skills are learned behavior that anyone can acquire, and tell the stories of their own unlikely paths to becoming the social arbiters of the White House, while providing tantalizing insights into the character of the first ladies and presidents they served.This is not a book about old school etiquette; they explain the things we all want to know, like how to walk into a roomful of strangers and make friends, what to do about a difficult colleague who makes you dread coming to work each day, and how to navigate the sometimes-treacherous waters of social media in a special chapter on “Virtual Manners.” For lovers of White House history, this is a treasure of never-before-published anecdotes from the authors and their fellow former social secretaries as they describe pearl-clutching moments with presidents and first ladies dating back to the Johnson administration.The authors make a case for the importance of a return to treating people well in American political life, maintaining that democracy cannot be sustained without public civility.Foreword by Laura Bush