Crazy Like Us

Crazy Like Us PDF Author: Ethan Watters
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1416587195
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 322

Book Description
“A blistering and truly original work of reporting and analysis, uncovering America’s role in homogenizing how the world defines wellness and healing” (Po Bronson). In Crazy Like Us, Ethan Watters reveals that the most devastating consequence of the spread of American culture has not been our golden arches or our bomb craters but our bulldozing of the human psyche itself: We are in the process of homogenizing the way the world goes mad. It is well known that American culture is a dominant force at home and abroad; our exportation of everything from movies to junk food is a well-documented phenomenon. But is it possible America's most troubling impact on the globalizing world has yet to be accounted for? American-style depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, and anorexia have begun to spread around the world like contagions, and the virus is us. Traveling from Hong Kong to Sri Lanka to Zanzibar to Japan, acclaimed journalist Ethan Watters witnesses firsthand how Western healers often steamroll indigenous expressions of mental health and madness and replace them with our own. In teaching the rest of the world to think like us, we have been homogenizing the way the world goes mad.

The Talent Code

The Talent Code PDF Author: Daniel Coyle
Publisher: Bantam
ISBN: 0553906496
Category : Self-Help
Languages : en
Pages : 258

Book Description
What is the secret of talent? How do we unlock it? This groundbreaking work provides readers with tools they can use to maximize potential in themselves and others. Whether you’re coaching soccer or teaching a child to play the piano, writing a novel or trying to improve your golf swing, this revolutionary book shows you how to grow talent by tapping into a newly discovered brain mechanism. Drawing on cutting-edge neurology and firsthand research gathered on journeys to nine of the world’s talent hotbeds—from the baseball fields of the Caribbean to a classical-music academy in upstate New York—Coyle identifies the three key elements that will allow you to develop your gifts and optimize your performance in sports, art, music, math, or just about anything. • Deep Practice Everyone knows that practice is a key to success. What everyone doesn’t know is that specific kinds of practice can increase skill up to ten times faster than conventional practice. • Ignition We all need a little motivation to get started. But what separates truly high achievers from the rest of the pack? A higher level of commitment—call it passion—born out of our deepest unconscious desires and triggered by certain primal cues. Understanding how these signals work can help you ignite passion and catalyze skill development. • Master Coaching What are the secrets of the world’s most effective teachers, trainers, and coaches? Discover the four virtues that enable these “talent whisperers” to fuel passion, inspire deep practice, and bring out the best in their students. These three elements work together within your brain to form myelin, a microscopic neural substance that adds vast amounts of speed and accuracy to your movements and thoughts. Scientists have discovered that myelin might just be the holy grail: the foundation of all forms of greatness, from Michelangelo’s to Michael Jordan’s. The good news about myelin is that it isn’t fixed at birth; to the contrary, it grows, and like anything that grows, it can be cultivated and nourished. Combining revelatory analysis with illuminating examples of regular people who have achieved greatness, this book will not only change the way you think about talent, but equip you to reach your own highest potential.

The World Until Yesterday

The World Until Yesterday PDF Author: Jared Diamond
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101606002
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 727

Book Description
The bestselling author of Collapse and Guns, Germs and Steel surveys the history of human societies to answer the question: What can we learn from traditional societies that can make the world a better place for all of us? “As he did in his Pulitzer Prize-winning Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond continues to make us think with his mesmerizing and absorbing new book." Bookpage Most of us take for granted the features of our modern society, from air travel and telecommunications to literacy and obesity. Yet for nearly all of its six million years of existence, human society had none of these things. While the gulf that divides us from our primitive ancestors may seem unbridgeably wide, we can glimpse much of our former lifestyle in those largely traditional societies still or recently in existence. Societies like those of the New Guinea Highlanders remind us that it was only yesterday—in evolutionary time—when everything changed and that we moderns still possess bodies and social practices often better adapted to traditional than to modern conditions.The World Until Yesterday provides a mesmerizing firsthand picture of the human past as it had been for millions of years—a past that has mostly vanished—and considers what the differences between that past and our present mean for our lives today. This is Jared Diamond’s most personal book to date, as he draws extensively from his decades of field work in the Pacific islands, as well as evidence from Inuit, Amazonian Indians, Kalahari San people, and others. Diamond doesn’t romanticize traditional societies—after all, we are shocked by some of their practices—but he finds that their solutions to universal human problems such as child rearing, elder care, dispute resolution, risk, and physical fitness have much to teach us. Provocative, enlightening, and entertaining, The World Until Yesterday is an essential and fascinating read.

Pros and Cons

Pros and Cons PDF Author: Debbie Newman
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134616724
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 509

Book Description
Pros and Cons: A Debaters Handbook offers a unique and invaluable guide to the arguments both for and against over 140 current controversies and global issues. Since it was first published in 1896 the handbook has been regularly updated and this nineteenth edition includes new entries on topics such as the right to possess nuclear weapons, the bailing out of failing industries, the protection of indigenous languages and the torture of suspected terrorists. Equal coverage is given to both sides of each debate in a dual column format which allows for easy comparison. Each entry also includes a list of related topics and suggestions for possible motions. The introductory essay describes debating technique, covering the rules, structure and type of debate, and offering tips on how to become a successful speaker. The book is then divided into eight thematic sections, where specific subjects are covered individually.

Life's That Way

Life's That Way PDF Author: Jim Beaver
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101032618
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 328

Book Description
A remarkable memoir that shows the capacity of the human heart to heal after the challenge of having to say goodbye. Even the hardest lessons contain great gifts. Jim Beaver and his wife Cecily Adams appeared to have it all-following years of fertility treatments, they were finally parents and they were building their dream home and successful Hollywood careers. Life was good. But then their daughter, Maddie, was diagnosed as autistic. Weeks later, Cecily, a non-smoker, was diagnosed with Stage IV lung cancer. Sadly, after 14 years of marriage, Jim became a widower and a single dad. Faced with overwhelming grief, Jim reached out to family and friends by writing a nightly email-a habit he established when Cecily was first diagnosed. Initially a cathartic exercise for Jim, the prose became an unforgettable journey for his readers. Life's That Way is a compilation of those profound, compelling emails.

The Cultural Cold War

The Cultural Cold War PDF Author: Frances Stonor Saunders
Publisher: New Press, The
ISBN: 1595589147
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 458

Book Description
During the Cold War, freedom of expression was vaunted as liberal democracy’s most cherished possession—but such freedom was put in service of a hidden agenda. In The Cultural Cold War, Frances Stonor Saunders reveals the extraordinary efforts of a secret campaign in which some of the most vocal exponents of intellectual freedom in the West were working for or subsidized by the CIA—whether they knew it or not. Called "the most comprehensive account yet of the [CIA’s] activities between 1947 and 1967" by the New York Times, the book presents shocking evidence of the CIA’s undercover program of cultural interventions in Western Europe and at home, drawing together declassified documents and exclusive interviews to expose the CIA’s astonishing campaign to deploy the likes of Hannah Arendt, Isaiah Berlin, Leonard Bernstein, Robert Lowell, George Orwell, and Jackson Pollock as weapons in the Cold War. Translated into ten languages, this classic work—now with a new preface by the author—is "a real contribution to popular understanding of the postwar period" (The Wall Street Journal), and its story of covert cultural efforts to win hearts and minds continues to be relevant today.

Alan Lomax

Alan Lomax PDF Author: Ronald Cohen
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135949212
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 320

Book Description
Alan Lomax is a legendary figure in American folk music circles. Although he published many books, hundreds of recordings and dozens of films, his contributions to popular and academic journals have never been collected. This collection of writings, introduced by Lomax's daughter Anna, reintroduces these essential writings. Drawing on the Lomax Archives in New York, this book brings together articles from the 30s onwards. It is divided into four sections, each capturing a distinct period in the development of Lomax's life and career: the original years as a collector and promoter; the period from 1950-58 when Lomax was recording thorughout Europe; the folk music revival years; and finally his work in academia.

The Conjugal Dictatorship of Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos

The Conjugal Dictatorship of Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos PDF Author: Primitivo Mijares
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781523292196
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 430

Book Description
Author's Foreword This book is unfinished. The Filipino people shall finish it for me. I wrote this volume very, very slowly. 1 could have done with it In three months after my defection from the conjugal dictatorship of Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos on February 20.1975. Instead, I found myself availing of every excuse to slow it down. A close associate, Marcelino P. Sarmiento, even warned me, "Baka mapanis 'yan." (Your book could become stale.)While I availed of almost any excuse not to finish the manuscript of this volume, I felt the tangible voices of a muted people back home in the Philippines beckoning to me from across the vast Pacific Ocean. In whichever way I turned, I was confronted by the distraught images of the Filipino multitudes cryingout to me to finish this work, lest the frailty of human memory -- or any incident a la Nalundasan - consign to oblivion the matters I had in mind to form the vital parts of this book. It was as if the Filipino multitudes and history itself were surging in an endless wave presenting a compelling demand on me toSan Francisco, California perpetuate the personal knowledge I have gained on the infamous machinations of Ferdinand E. Marcos and his overly ambitious wife, Imelda, that led to a day of infamy in my country, that Black Friday on September 22, 1972, when martial law was declared as a means to establish history's first conjugal dictatorship. The sense of urgency in finishing this work was also goaded by the thought that Marcos does not have eternal life and that the Filipino people are of unimaginable forgiving posture. I thought that, if I did not perpetuate this work for posterity, Marcos might unduly benefit from a Laurelian statement that, when a man dies, the virtues of his past are magnified and his faults are reduced to molehills. This is a book for which so much has been offered and done by Marcos and his minions so that it would never see the light of print. Now that it is off the press. I entertain greater fear that so much more will be done to prevent its circulation, not only in the Philippines but also in the United States.But this work now belongs to history. Let it speak for itself in the context of developments within the coming months or years. Although it finds great relevance in the present life of the present life of the Filipinos and of Americans interested in the study of subversion of democratic governments by apparently legal means, this work seeks to find its proper niche in history which mustinevitably render its judgment on the seizure of government power from the people by a lame duck Philippine President.If I had finished this work immediately after my defection from the totalitarian regime of Ferdinand and Imelda, or after the vicious campaign of the dictatorship to vilify me in July-August. 1975, then I could have done so only in anger. Anger did influence my production of certain portions of the manu-script. However, as I put the finishing touches to my work, I found myself expurgating it of the personal venom, the virulence and intemperate language of my original draft.Some of the materials that went into this work had been of public knowledge in the Philippines. If I had used them, it was with the intention of utilizing them as links to heretofore unrevealed facets of the various ruses that Marcos employed to establish his dictatorship.Now, I have kept faith with the Filipino people. I have kept my rendezvous with history. I have, with this work, discharged my obligation to myself, my profession of journalism, my family and my country.I had one other compelling reason for coming out with this work at the great risks of being uprooted from my beloved country, of forced separation from my wife and children and losing their affection, and of losing everything I have in my name in the Philippines - or losing life itself. It is that I wanted to makea public expiation for the little influence that I had . . . .(more inside)
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