What It Is: Race, Family, and One Thinking Black Man's Blues


Clifford Thompson - 2019
    Thompson was raised to believe in treating every person of every color as an individual, and he decided as a young man that America, despite its history of racial oppression, was his home as much as anyone else's. As a middle-aged, happily married father of biracial children, Thompson finds himself questioning his most deeply held convictions when the race-baiting Donald Trump ascends to the presidency--elected by whites, whom Thompson had refused to judge as a group, and who make up the majority in this country Thompson had called his own.In the grip of contradictory emotions, Thompson turns for guidance to the wisdom of writers he admires while knowing that the answers to his questions about America ultimately lie in America itself. Through interviews with a small but varied group of Americans he hears sharply divergent opinions about what is happening in the country while trying to find his own answers--conclusions based not on conventional wisdom or on what he would like to believe, but on what he sees.

Spiral Dynamics Integral: Learn to Master the Memetic Codes of Human Behavior


Don Edward Beck - 2006
    Don Beck has taught people at all levels how to stop clashing and start communicating. His method is called Spiral Dynamics Integral, a revolutionary new way of perceiving human nature that lets us understand, predict, and resolve even the most difficult conflicts. In his effort to map the genome of the mind, Dr. Beck has created a tool he calls the Spiral, which charts the underlying reasons for virtually everything that human beings think, believe, and do. Breaking down the "complexity codes" that lie at the heart of a problem, he explains, is the first step toward coming up with a real, lasting solution.

Nature and the Human Soul: Cultivating Wholeness and Community in a Fragmented World


Bill Plotkin - 2006
    Depth psychologist and wilderness guide Bill Plotkin presents a model for a human life span rooted in the cycles and qualities of the natural world, a blueprint for individual development that ultimately yields a strategy for cultural transformation.With evocative language and personal stories, including those of elders Thomas Berry and Joanna Macy, this book defines eight stages of human life - Innocent, Explorer, Thespian, Wanderer, Soul Apprentice, Artisan, Master, and Sage - and describes the challenges and benefits of each. Plotkin offers a way of progressing from our current egocentric, aggressively competitive, consumer society to an ecocentric, soul-based one that is sustainable, cooperative, and compassionate. At once a primer on human development and a manifesto for change, Nature and the Human Soul fashions a template for a more mature, fulfilling, and purposeful life - and a better world.

What Really Matters: Searching for Wisdom in America


Tony Schwartz - 1995
    At the height of his career as a journalist, Tony Schwartz hit an unexpected wall.  Why did success suddenly feel so empty?  How could he add richer meaning to his everyday life?  What guides could he trust on the road to wisdom?During the next five years his search for answers took him from a meditation retreat in the mountains of Utah to a biofeedback laboratory in Kansas, from a peak-performance workshop at a tennis academy in Florida to a right-brain drawing course in Boston.  Blending the hunger of a seeker with a journalist's hard-headed inquiry, he discovered the best teachers and techniques for inner development--and identified the potential pitfalls and false gurus he met along the way.  What he found dramatically changed his life.  It may change yours as well.

How Successful People Think Smart: 7 Ways you Can Develop Their Mind Power


Jill Ammon-Wexler - 2013
    Included are insights and exercises to help YOU trigger these parts of your brain to change your thinking. This will help you create the life you want and deserve. By personal development expert Dr. Jill Ammon-Wexler, doctor of psychology and pioneer brain/mind researcher. Includes a link to a free MP3 stress-busting Alpha brainwave audio. Previously published as: ”7 Ways to Crack the Winner’s Brain Code.”Show more Show less

The Meaning Of Sports


Michael Mandelbaum - 2004
    In keeping with his reputation for writing about big ideas in an illuminating and graceful way, he shows how sports respond to deep human needs; describes the ways in which baseball, football and basketball became national institutions and how they reached their present forms; and covers the evolution of rules, the rise and fall of the most successful teams, and the historical significance of the most famous and influential figures such as Babe Ruth, Vince Lombardi, and Michael Jordan. Whether he is writing about baseball as the agrarian game, football as similar to warfare, basketball as the embodiment of post-industrial society, or the moral havoc created by baseball's designated hitter rule, Mandelbaum applies the full force of his learning and wit to subjects about which so many Americans care passionately: the games they played in their youth and continue to follow as adults. By offering a fresh and unconventional perspective on these games, The Meaning of Sports makes for fascinating and rewarding reading both for fans and newcomers.

Being Dad: Father as a Picture of God's Grace


Scott Keith - 2015
    Dr. Keith brings his experience with family, students, great mentors, and friends to bear on a subject that is crying out for attention. Equally, he brings his Christian faith, a scholarly eye for detail, and an ear for story along on the journey and works with the reader to navigate a path to a better country where the Father blesses His children and is honored.

The Evolving Self: Problem and Process in Human Development


Robert Kegan - 1982
    According to Robert Kegan, meaning-making is a lifelong activity that begins in earliest infancy and continues to evolve through a series of stages encompassing childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. The Evolving Self describes this process of evolution in rich and human detail, concentrating especially on the internal experience of growth and transition, its costs and disruptions as well as its triumphs.At the heart of our meaning-making activity, the book suggests, is the drawing and redrawing of the distinction between self and other. Using Piagetian theory in a creative new way to make sense of how we make sense of ourselves, Kegan shows that each meaning-making stage is a new solution to the lifelong tension between the universal human yearning to be connected, attached, and included, on the one hand, and to be distinct, independent, and autonomous on the other. The Evolving Self is the story of our continuing negotiation of this tension. It is a book that is theoretically daring enough to propose a reinterpretation of the Oedipus complex and clinically concerned enough to suggest a variety of fresh new ways to treat those psychological complaints that commonly arise in the course of development.Kegan is an irrepressible storyteller, an impassioned opponent of the health-and-illness approach to psychological distress, and a sturdy builder of psychological theory. His is an original and distinctive new voice in the growing discussion of human development across the life span.

The Turning Point: Science, Society, and the Rising Culture


Fritjof Capra - 1982
    Our biologists had taken a mechanistic view of life. From a biology textbook quoted by Capra, "One of the acid tests of understanding an object is the ability to put it together from its component parts. " (Capra p. 102) An approach that ironically is quite opposed to the study of life. We've now realized that the mapping of the human genome has yielded many beautiful computer models but little else. The biomedical model which concentrates on the mechanisms of smaller and smaller fragments of the body has yielded an approach that views disease as, "the malfunctioning of biological organisms which are studied from the point of view of cellular and molecular biology; the doctor's role is to intervene, either physically or chemically, to correct the malfunctioning of a specific mechanism." (p.123) The ingestion of many chemicals and execution of complicated surgeries has resulted in ever rising health care costs, and while saving many lives has primarily served as an excuse for lifestyles that run counter to human nature. "We prefer to talk about our children's hyperactivity or learning disability rather than examine the inadequacy of our schools; we prefer to be told that we suffer from hypertension rather than change our over-competitive business world; we accept ever increasing rates of cancer rather than investigate how the chemical industry poisons our food to increase its profits." (p.163)

The Mental Equivalent


Emmet Fox - 2006
    How do you do it? You build in the mental equivalents by thinking quietly, constantly, and persistently of the kind of thing you want, and by thinking that has two qualities: clearness or definiteness, and interest. If you want to build anything into your life-if you want to bring health, right activity, your true place, inspiration; if you want to bring right companionship, and above all if you want understanding of God-form a mental equivalent of the thing which you want by thinking about it a great deal, by thinking clearly and with interest. Remember clarity and interest; those are the two poles. Wilder Publications is a green publisher. All of our books are printed to order. This reduces waste and helps us keep prices low while greatly reducing our impact on the environment.

Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging


Sebastian Junger - 2016
    These are the very same behaviors that typify good soldiering and foster a sense of belonging among troops, whether they’re fighting on the front lines or engaged in non-combat activities away from the action. Drawing from history, psychology, and anthropology, bestselling author Sebastian Junger shows us just how at odds the structure of modern society is with our tribal instincts, arguing that the difficulties many veterans face upon returning home from war do not stem entirely from the trauma they’ve suffered, but also from the individualist societies they must reintegrate into.A 2011 study by the Canadian Forces and Statistics Canada reveals that 78 percent of military suicides from 1972 to the end of 2006 involved veterans. Though these numbers present an implicit call to action, the government is only just taking steps now to address the problems veterans face when they return home. But can the government ever truly eliminate the challenges faced by returning veterans? Or is the problem deeper, woven into the very fabric of our modern existence? Perhaps our circumstances are not so bleak, and simply understanding that beneath our modern guises we all belong to one tribe or another would help us face not just the problems of our nation but of our individual lives as well.Well-researched and compellingly written, this timely look at how veterans react to coming home will reconceive our approach to veteran’s affairs and help us to repair our current social dynamic.

The Nature of Happiness


Desmond Morris - 2004
    He shows that there are many ways of achieving happiness; for example, there is the inherent happiness that comes with the love of a child; the competitive happiness of triumphing over your opponents; the sensual happiness of the hedonist. Rather than preaching a particular behavior or way of life, Morris provides knowledge that we can use, if we wish, to make ourselves happier.

Notorious C.O.P.: The Inside Story of the Tupac, Biggie, and Jam Master Jay Investigations from NYPD's First "Hip-Hop Cop"


Derrick Parker - 2000
     Always straddling the fence between "po-po" and NYPD outsider, Derrick threatened police tradition to try to get the cases solved. He was the first detective to interview an informant offering a detailed account of Biggie Smalls's murder. He protected one of the only surviving eyewitnesses to the Jam Master Jay murder and knows the identity of the killers as well as the motivation behind the shooting. "Notorious C.O.P. "reveals hip-hop crimes that never made the paper--like the robbing of Foxy Brown and the first Hot 97 shooting--and answers some lingering questions about murders that have remained unsolved. The book that both the NYPD and the hip-hop community don't want you to read, "Notorious C.O.P. "is the first insider look at the real links between crime and hip-hop and the inefficiencies that have left some of the most widely publicized murders in entertainment history unsolved.

The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience


Francisco J. Varela - 1991
    The authors argue that only by having a sense of common ground between mind in Science and mind in experience can our understanding of cognition be more complete. Toward that end, they develop a dialogue between cognitive science and Buddhist meditative psychology and situate it in relation to other traditions such as phenomenology and psychoanalysis.

The Translucent Revolution: How People Just Like You Are Waking Up and Changing the World


Arjuna Ardagh - 2005
    Millions of people from all walks of life are experiencing a deep change in awareness, an experience marked by a new sense of well-being, and increasing joy in life, a diminishing of fear — including fear of death — and a natural impulse to serve the world in a real way. The Translucent Revolution describes this awakening and offers readers ample opportunities to cultivate and encourage the qualities of translucence in their own lives. Drawing from a highly convincing body of evidence, observations from pioneers in the field of human consciousness, and a vast pool of powerful stories, the book explores the effects of translucence on many aspects of contemporary western life, including personal relationships, sex, parenting, education, psychotherapy, medicine, aging, business, and global politics.