Entine, winner of a National Press Club Award, explores the genetic, cultural, and physiological roots of black athletic superiority. Drawing on recent scientific research, he reveals stunning differences between athletes of Western African heritage and those from East Africa, and explains why the favored explanation for black dominance, a dearth of opportunities, fails to explain the dimensions of black athletic superiority. He tells the story of blacks in sports, and discusses circumstance that have made addressing the facts so controversial. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Introduction: a confluence of streams and a flowering of possibilities -- Session 1. Meditation-based clinical interventions : science, practice, and implementation. How Buddhist meditative practices can inform our understanding of pain and suffering, the potential for healing, the relief of suffering, and the underlying nature of the human mind and body / Ajahn Amaro. Some clinical applications of mindfulness meditation in medicine and psychiatry : the case of mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) / Jon Kabat-Zinn. Mind-brain-body interaction and meditation / Richard J. Davidson. Session 1 dialogue -- Session 2. Possible biological substrates of meditation. Synchronization of brain rhythms as a possible mechanism for the unification of distributed mental processes / Wolf Singer. The neurobiology of the adaptive and deleterious features of stress / Robert Sapolsky. Session 2 dialogue -- Session 3. Clinical research 1 : meditation and mental health. Mindfulness-based cognitive therapy and the prevention of relapse in recurrent depression / Zindel Segal. Paths to recovery : neural substrates of cognitive and mindfulness-based interventions for the treatment of depression / Helen Mayberg. Session 3 dialogue -- Interlude preceding session 4. The Buddhist science of human flourishing / Alan Wallace. Interlude dialogue -- Session 4. Clinical research 2 : meditation and physical health. Mindfulness-based stress reduction and cardiovascular disease / David Sheps. Neural-immune interaction / John Sheridan. Session 4 dialogue -- Session 5. Integration and final reflections. Meditation and the future of health care / Ralph Snyderman. Some reflections on the evolution and nature of mind and self and their implications for humanity / Wolf Singer. Session 5 dialogue

New York Times –bestselling author of The Psychopath Test Jon Ronson writes about the dark, uncanny sides of humanity with clarity and humor. Lost at Sea —now with new material—reveals how deep our collective craziness lies, even in the most mundane circumstances. Ronson investigates the strange things we’re willing to believe in, from robots programmed with our loved ones’ personalities to indigo children to the Insane Clown Posse’s juggalo fans. He looks at ordinary lives that take on extraordinary perspectives. Among them: a pop singer whose greatest passion is the coming alien invasion, assisted-suicide practitioners, and an Alaskan town’s Christmas-induced high school mass-murder plot. He explores all these tales with a sense of higher purpose and universality, yet they are stories not about the fringe of society. They are about all of us. Incisive and hilarious, poignant and maddening, revealing and disturbing—Ronson writes about our modern world, and reveals how deep our collective craziness lies, and the chaos stirring at the edge of our daily lives.

Three young brothers trained in the ways of the ninja battle an organized crime ring and outwit some very persistent kidnappers.

Number one bestselling science writer Jonah Lehrer explores the “only happiness that lasts”—love—in a book that “is interesting on nearly every page” (David Brooks, The New York Times Book Review ). Weaving together scientific studies from clinical psychologists, longitudinal studies of health and happiness, historical accounts and literary depictions, child-rearing manuals, and the language of online dating sites, Jonah Lehrer’s A Book About Love plumbs the most mysterious, most formative, most important impulse governing our lives. Love confuses and compels us—and it can destroy and define us. It has inspired our greatest poetry, defined our societies and our beliefs, and governs our biology. From the way infants attach to their parents, to the way we fall in love with another person, to the way some find a love for God or their pets, to the way we remember and mourn love after it expires, this book focuses on research that attempts, even in glancing ways, to deal with the long-term and the everyday. The most dangerous myth of love is that it’s easy, that we fall into the feeling and then the feeling takes care of itself. While we can easily measure the dopamine that causes the initial feelings of “falling” in love, the partnerships and devotions that last decades or longer remain a mystery. “Lehrer uses scores of detailed vignettes to traverse a complicated intellectual landscape, eventually arriving at modern theories of love…He is a talent” ( USA TODAY ), and A Book About Love decodes the set of skills necessary to cultivate a lifetime of love. Love, Lehrer argues, is not built solely on overwhelming passion, but, fascinatingly, on a set of skills to be cultivated over a lifetime.

A former Marine and ex-FBI agent, Joe has seen one too many crime scenes and known too much trauma, and not just in his professional life. Solitary and haunted, he prefers to be invisible. He doesn't allow himself friends or lovers and makes a living rescuing young girls from the deadly clutches of the sex trade. But when a high-ranking New York politician hires him to extricate his teenage daughter from a Manhattan brothel, Joe uncovers a web of corruption that even he may be able to unravel. When the men on his trial take the only person left in the world who matters to him, he forsakes his pledge to do no harm. If anyone can kill his way to the truth, it's Joe.

A traveler encounters a man known only as "the teacher." They begin an odyssey through desert mountains, valleys, and plains; encounter nomads, ancient ruins, and chambers of scrolls. Over the year the traveler writes down each of the mysteries given to him by the teacher, one for each day of the year. The result is a daily devotional unlike any other, full of revelations from heaven, secrets of the ages, and the hidden keys that can transform your life to joy, success, and blessing.

The blockbuster new novel from award-winning journalist (and #1 international bestselling author of fiction, under the pseudonym Sam Bourne) Jonathan Freedland, The Third Woman is a chilling high-concept thriller featuring a brilliant, neurotic female investigative reporter who ends up fighting for her life: perfect for fans of Daniel Silva and Terry Hayes The United States and China have struck a shocking bargain: in return for forgiving trillions in debt, the People's Republic of China-now the world's dominant global superpower-has established a permanent military presence on US soil. Years of decline have left America economically vulnerable, and evidence of China's cultural and political dominance is everywhere. Los Angeles journalist Madison Webb is obsessed with exposing the lies and corruption that have corroded her once great society. When her sister is savagely murdered, the police insist it's an isolated crime. But Madison suspects the cops are hiding something. Digging for answers, she discovers her sister's death may be one of many . . . and part of a dangerous conspiracy. Even though her life is on the line, Madison refuses to give up on the story. And sooner or later, she will have to confront the consequences of exposing the powerful forces intent on hiding the truth.

I’ll Seize the Day Tomorrow is the story of Jonathan Goldstein’s journey to find some great truth on his road to forty. In a series of wonderfully funny stories, the host of CBC’s WireTap recounts the highs and lows of his last year in his thirties. Throughout the year, Goldstein asks weighty questions that would stump a person less seasoned. For example: What is it about a McRib that drives people crazy? Can we replace extending an olive leaf with extending an olive jar? How much wisdom can we glean from episodes of Welcome Back, Kotter ? His friends and family, many of them known through their appearances on WireTap , weigh in with hilarious results as Goldstein eats, sleeps, and watches bad TV all the way to his date with destiny.

Astrobiology: A Multi-Disciplinary Approach is the most comprehensive textbook designed for emerging upper level courses in astrobiology. Internationally renowned authority Jonathan Lunine provides a solid foundation in the essential concepts of physics, chemistry, biology, and other relevant sciences to help readers achieve a more well-rounded understanding of the fascinating study of the origin of life, planetary evolution, and life in the cosmos. The basics of astrobiology focusing on essential concepts in physics, chemistry, biology, and other sciences.

The Enlightenment shaped modernity. Western values of representative democracy and basic human rights and freedoms form an interlocking system that derives directly from the Enlightenment's philosophical revolution. This is uncontested--yet remarkably few historians or philosophers have attempted to trace the process of ideas from the political and social turmoil of the late eighteenth century to the present day. This is precisely what Jonathan Israel does in the third part of his revisionist series. He demonstrates that the Enlightenment was an essentially revolutionary process, driven by philosophical debate. From 1789, its impetus came from a small group of philosophe-revolutionnaires. Not aligned to any of the social groups represented in the French National Assembly, they nonetheless forged "la philosophie moderne"--in effect Radical Enlightenment ideas--into a world-transforming ideology that had a lasting impact in Latin America, Canada and eastern Europe as well as the countries from which it sprang. --

The Enlightenment shaped modernity. Western values of representative democracy and basic human rights and freedoms form an interlocking system that derives directly from the Enlightenment's philosophical revolution. This is uncontested--yet remarkably few historians or philosophers have attempted to trace the process of ideas from the political and social turmoil of the late eighteenth century to the present day. This is precisely what Jonathan Israel does in the third part of his revisionist series. He demonstrates that the Enlightenment was an essentially revolutionary process, driven by philosophical debate. From 1789, its impetus came from a small group of philosophe-revolutionnaires. Not aligned to any of the social groups represented in the French National Assembly, they nonetheless forged "la philosophie moderne"--in effect Radical Enlightenment ideas--into a world-transforming ideology that had a lasting impact in Latin America, Canada and eastern Europe as well as the countries from which it sprang. --

"A major intellectual history of the American Revolution and its influence on later revolutions in Europe and the Americas, the Expanding Blaze is a sweeping history of how the American Revolution inspired revolutions throughout Europe and the Atlantic world in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Jonathan Israel, one of the world's leading historians of the Enlightenment, shows how the radical ideas of American founders such as Paine, Jefferson, Franklin, Madison, and Monroe set the pattern for democratic revolutions, movements, and constitutions in France, Britain, Ireland, the Netherlands, Belgium, Poland, Greece, Canada, Haiti, Brazil, and Spanish America. The Expanding Blaze reminds us that the American Revolution was an astonishingly radical event--and that it didn't end with the transformation and independence of America. Rather, the revolution continued to reverberate in Europe and the Americas for the next three-quarters of a century. This comprehensive history of the revolution's international influence traces how American efforts to implement Radical Enlightenment ideas--including the destruction of the old regime and the promotion of democratic republicanism, self-government, and liberty--helped drive revolutions abroad, as foreign leaders explicitly followed the American example and espoused American democratic values. The first major new intellectual history of the age of democratic revolution in decades, The Expanding Blaze returns the American Revolution to its global context."--

Index. Bibliographical notes: p. 285-300.

Sex. Violence. Scandal. These are words we rarely associate with the sacred text of the Bible. Yet in this brilliant new book, Jonathan Kirsch shows that the Old Testament is filled with some of the most startling and explicit stories in all of Western literature. These tales of seduction and rape, voyeurism and exhibitionism, intermarriage and illegitimacy, assassination and murder have been suppressed by religious authorities throughout history precisely because they are so shocking. "You mean that's in the Bible?" is the common reaction of the contemporary reader to the stories that Kirsch retells and explores. In The Harlot by the Side of the Road, Kirsch recounts these suppressed and mistranslated tales in the grand storytelling tradition. Here is the tale of Dinah, the young Israelite daughter raped by a princely suitor. The price for her hand in marriage? The circumcision of every man in his kingdom. Here, too, is the story of Lot's daughters, who, when faced with the possibility that they are the last survivors on earth, must copulate with their drunken father to continue their race. And the story of Tamar, the harlot by the side of the road, who must disguise herself as a prostitute and seduce her father-in-law in order to bear the child who has been promised her. Kirsch places each story within the political and social context of its time, and delves into the latest biblical scholarship to explain why each story was originally censored. He also brings to light when and where each story was first written down, and how it found its way into the Bible. And he shows how these stories have something important to say to contemporary readers who might never pick up a Bible. Kirsch reveals that the Bible's real power lies in its unflinching lessons in human nature. And he illuminates the surprising modernity of the Bible's characters: these were, like us, people delicately balanced between their destructive and generous natures. Certain to excite controversy and ignite intellectual debate, The Harlot by the Side of the Road will undoubtedly be one of the year's most talked-about books.

Since the war and the bombs, Hatfork, Wyoming, is a broken-down, mutant-ridden town. Young Chaos lives in the projection booth of the abandoned multiplex, trying to blot out his present unable to remember his past. Then the local tyrant, Kellogg, reveals to him to over a can of dog food that the bombs never fell. The truth is a little more complicated. With a fur-covered girl and an automobile, Chaos sets out on journey, following the empty highway to the edge of the American nightmare, ins search of a missing identity and a stolen love. The truth he finds,is indeed a little more complicated. or a lot . .

Fictional memoir of Dr. Max Aue, a former Nazi officer who survived the war and has reinvented himself, many years later, as a middle-class entrepreneur and family man in northern France. Max is an intellectual steeped in philosophy, literature, and classical music. He is also a cold-blooded assassin and the consummate bureaucrat. Through the eyes of this cultivated yet monstrous man, we experience the horrors of the Second World War and the Nazi genocide of the Jews in graphic, disturbingly precise detail from the dark and disturbing point of view of the executioner rather than the victim. During the period from June 1941 through April 1945, Max is posted to Poland, the Ukraine, and the Caucasus; he is present at the Battle of Stalingrad, at Auschwitz and Cracow; he visits occupied Paris and lives through the chaos of the final days of the Nazi regime in Berlin. Although Max is a totally imagined character, his world is peopled by real historical figures, such as Eichmann, Himmler, Göring, Speer, Heydrich, Hoss, and Hitler himself.