"Traditionally, the goal of psychology has been to relieve human suffering, but the goal of the Positive Psychology movement, which Dr. Seligman has led for fifteen years, is different&—it's about actually raising the bar for the human condition. Flourish builds on Dr. Seligman's game-changing work on optimism, motivation, and character to show how to get the most out of life, unveiling an electrifying new theory of what makes a good life&—for individuals, for communities, and for nations. In a fascinating evolution of thought and practice, Flourish refines what Positive Psychology is all about. While certainly a part of well-being, happiness alone doesn't give life meaning. Seligman now asks, What is it that enables you to cultivate your talents, to build deep, lasting relationships with others, to feel pleasure, and to contribute meaningfully to the world? In a word, what is it that allows you to flourish? “Well-being” takes the stage front and center, and Happiness (or Positive Emotion) becomes one of the five pillars of Positive Psychology, along with Engagement, Relationships, Meaning, and Accomplishment&—or PERMA, the permanent building blocks for a life of profound fulfillment. Thought-provoking in its implications for education, economics, therapy, medicine, and public policy&—the very fabric of society&—Flourish tells inspiring stories of Positive Psychology in action, including how the entire U.S. Army is now trained in emotional resilience; how innovative schools can educate for fulfillment in life and not just for workplace success; and how corporations can improve performance at the same time as they raise employee well-being. With interactive exercises to help readers explore their own attitudes and aims, Flourish is a watershed in the understanding of happiness as well as a tool for getting the most out of life. "--Publisher.

The concerns and stylistic evolution of the famed futuristic writer are revealed in seven science fiction tales

From the author of the New York Times bestselling Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, comes UNHOLY NIGHT, the next evolution in dark historical revisionism. They're an iconic part of history's most celebrated birth. But what do we really know about the Three Kings of the Nativity, besides the fact that they followed a star to Bethlehem bearing strange gifts? The Bible has little to say about this enigmatic trio. But leave it to Seth Grahame-Smith, the brilliant and twisted mind behind Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter and Pride and Prejudice and Zombies to take a little mystery, bend a little history, and weave an epic tale. In Grahame-Smith's telling, the so-called "Three Wise Men" are infamous thieves, led by the dark, murderous Balthazar. After a daring escape from Herod's prison, they stumble upon the famous manger and its newborn king. The last thing Balthazar needs is to be slowed down by young Joseph, Mary and their infant. But when Herod's men begin to slaughter the first born in Judea, he has no choice but to help them escape to Egypt. It's the beginning of an adventure that will see them fight the last magical creatures of the Old Testament; cross paths with biblical figures like Pontius Pilate and John the Baptist; and finally deliver them to Egypt. It may just be the greatest story never told.

"Just ahead lies all the fun and games which Darwin missed" ... So sayeth Jack "The King" Kirby in describing the creative spark behind his enchanting Devil Dinosaur, an alternate-reality fable that recounts what might have happened had humans and dinsoaurs roamed the Earth at the same time - and in typical "King" Kirby fashion, finds the author wondering, "Who says they didn't?" One of his latter-day titles from his final stint at Marvel, Devil Dinosaur's nine-issue run came and went in 1978, going mostly unrecognized for its gritty charm and episodic mythologizing. Seemingly crafted for an audience far younger than the other fare he was generating for Marvel at the time, Jack's grand tale is a prehistoric fable that seems to sell the notion that cooperation, friendship and loyalty were the lights that guided man out of the swamps and into civilization. Putting into play these notions were Devil Dinosaur and Moon Boy, brothers bonded not by blood, but rather an uncommon spark of curiosity about their sourrounding world. It was this curiosity - this compulsion to investigate and not take for granted the conventional wisdom of others - that separated them from their peers and put them at the vanguard of evolution. Naturally, the dinosaurs in Devil's world came in many shapes and sizes, from triceratops, pterodactyls, and ankylosaurs to tyrannosaurs rex - Jack draws 'em all! And aside from Devil, Moon Boy finds himself rejected by his Small Folk kin for making friends with a fearsome T. Rex, and bullied by the Killer Folk that try to gain dominance in the forest by force! Devil and Moon Boy's curiosity often leads them into heaps of trouble, but that's where the fun is for readers! Besides the vicious Killer Folk, led by the warlord Seven Scars, the boy and his dinosaur are beset by a host of dinosaurs, giant spiders and armies of enormous ants, and are visited by aliens from outer space! But in the end, it is their friendship and fierce loyalty to each other that manifests itself in courageous heroism that eventually wins the day - and as Jack seems keen to note through subtext, evolves the species! Nearly thirty years after they were first created, this Omnibus edition dusts off the rare and woefully ignored pages of Jack Kirby's wild adventures in a prehistoric land and restores them for a new generation of readers - perfect for any child, or the child within you!

Jamaica Kincaid's new novel is the haunting, deeply charged story of a woman's life on the island of Dominica. Xuela Claudette Richardson, daughter of a Carib mother and a half-Scottish, half-African father, was delivered to his laundress as an infant, bundled up like his clothes. The Autobiography of My Mother is a story of love, fear, loss, and the forging of a character, an account of one woman's inexorable evolution evoked in startling and magical poetry.

On September 23, 1926, and Austrian experimental biologist named Dr. Paul Kammerer blew his brains out on a footpath in the Austrian mountains. His suicide was the climax of a great evolutionary controversy which his experiments had aroused. The battle was between the followers of Lamarck, who maintained that acquired characteristics could be inherited, and the neo-Darwinists, who upheld the theory of chance mutations preserved by natural selection. Dr. Kammerer's experiments with various amphibians, including salamanders and the midwife toad (Alytes obstetricans), lent much weight to the Lamarckian argument and drew upon him the full fury of the orthodox neo-Darwinists. Arthur Koestler had known about Dr. Kammerer's work when he himself was a student in Vienna, and he has always been interested in this tragic story. He gives a fascinating description of the venomous atmosphere in which the battle was fought and of the lengths to which apparently respectable scholars would go to discredit their opponents. Heading the attack on Kammerer was a British scientist, William Bateson, who hinted that the Viennese's experiments were fakes, but who failed to examine the evidence, including the so-called nuptial pads of Kammerer's last remaining specimen of the midwife toad. It was a young American scientist who delivered the coup de grace; on a visit to Vienna, he discovered that the discoloration of the nuptial pads was due not to natural causes but to the injection Indian ink. When his findings were published, Kammerer shot himself. Mr. Koestler, whose recent writings, in books such as The Act of Creation and The Ghost in the Machine, have been in part concerned with evolutionary theory, decided to investigate this old mystery. When he started on his researches, he expected to relate the tragedy of a man who had betrayed his calling, for Kammerer's suicide was accepted as a confession of guilt and his work was discredited from that day to this. Instead, as Mr. Koestler read the contemporary papers, corresponded with Kammerer's daughter, Bateson's son, and the surviving scientists who attended Kammerer's lecture in Cambridge, he found himself writing a vindication of a man who in all probability was himself betrayed. The story that emerges is, on one level, fascinating piece of scientific detection; on another, it is a moving and human narrative about a much abused, brilliant and lovable figure. Though no Lamarckian himself, Mr. Koestler ends the book with an appeal to biologists to repeat Kammerer's experiments with an open mind in order to verify or refute them. If Kammerer's claims were posthumously confirmed our outlook on evolution would be significantly changed. A superb intellectual thriller whose implications still reverberate today, The Case of the Midwife Toad is an entirely new kind of book for Mr. Koestler, and perhaps only he could have written it, for it required expert knowledge and familiarity with the academic world of science, combined with the creativity and imaginative insight of an outstanding novelist.

"Sophie is an amateur naturalist with a rare genetic gift: the ability to see a marvelous kingdom of invisible, sentient creatures that share a vital, symbiotic relationship with humankind. To record her observations, Sophie creates a personal bestiary and, as she relates the strange abilities of these endangered beings, her tales become extraordinary meditations on love, sex, evolution, extinction, truth, and self-knowledge"--

In the past hundred years, since the publication of Bram Stoker's infamous book, no literary figure has enjoyed a more horrific resiliency than Count Dracula. In film, television, novels, and short stories, he keeps coming back to life, fed by the vital imaginative energies of a world-wide audience that cannot seem to resist his abominable charms. Aristocratic and urbane, deeply erotic and profoundly evil, Dracula's bloodsucking savagery has cast a mesmerizing fascination not only over his victims but over his readers as well. And, as Leonard Wolf suggests, "Vampire fiction...exerts an amazing pull on readers for a reason that we may find disturbing. The blood exchange—the taking of blood by the vampire from his or her victim is, all by itself, felt to be a singularly symbolic event. Symbolic and attractive!" Now, in Blood Thirst: One Hundred Years of Vampire Fiction, Leonard Wolf brings together thirty tales in which vampires of all varieties make their ghastly presence felt—male and female, human and non-human, humorous and heroic—all of them kin to the dreadful bat. From Lafcadio Hearn, Mary E. Wilkins-Freeman, Edith Wharton, August Derleth, and Ray Bradbury to such contemporary masters as Anne Rice, Stephen King, Joyce Carol Oates, John Cheever, and Woody Allen, and in settings as diverse as rural New England and outer space, this collection offers readers a dazzling compendium of vampire stories. Wolf organizes the collection into six categories—The Classic Adventure Tale, The Psychic Vampire, The Science Fiction Vampire, The Non-Human Vampire, The Comic Vampire, and The Heroic Vampire—which allows readers to see the many guises Dracula's descendants have assumed and the many ways they can be interpreted. In his penetrating introduction, Wolf argues that such an arrangement enables us to see the evolution of the vampire from an unmitigated evil to a creature we are more likely to identify with. "In a century in which God and Satan have become increasingly irrelevant in the popular arts, there has been an accompanying secularization of the vampire idea. And, as the stories in Blood Thirst will show, sympathy for the vampire has grown as we have become increasingly interested in the workings of the mind." Indeed, the vampire's ability to change over time, to draw into itself such a richness of symbolic meanings, to conjure itself into so many diabolical shapes, may account for the enduring appeal of the literature written about it. Here, then, is a definitive collection for aficionados and novices alike, and whether readers find the vampires who inhabit these pages sympathetic or horrific, psychologically intriguing or spiritually repellent, morbidly seductive or comically absurd, Blood Thirst gives us all something to sink our teeth into.

"Jonathan Shaw's Scab Vendor: Confessions of a Tattoo Artist is a surreal, multi-generational roller coaster ride through the underbelly of modern culture, charting the course of a life measured by extremes, and all the people, places, and events that shaped that life into a survivor's tale of epic proportions. In its pages, Shaw takes the reader deep, not only into the recesses of his extraordinary mind and adventures, but also into the strange and magical process of memoir-writing itself. If truth is indeed stranger than fiction, then, as Shaw's friend and literary mentor Charles Bukowski once told him, much of this book would have to be lived before it could be written. In that sense, Scab Vendor: Confessions of a Tattoo Artist is much more than a fascinating chronicle of a popular outlaw artist's creative evolution. It is a multicolored, cinematic, modern-day Odyssey, written in blood, ink, and tears--a kaleidoscopic, visionary roadmap to the journey of the human soul."--Page 4 of cover.

Upstate New York, at the confluence of the great Hudson River and its mighty tributary the Mohawk —from this stunning landscape came the creation of a new world of science. In 1887, Thomas Edison moved his Edison Machine Works here and in 1892, it became the headquarters of a major manufacturing company, giving the town its nickname: Electric City. The peak of Autumn, 1919: The pull of scientific discovery brings Charles Proteus Steimetz, a brilliant mathematician and recent arrival from Ellis Island, to town. His ability to capture lightning in a bottle earns him the title "Wizard of Electric City." Barely four feet tall with a deeply curving spine, Steinmetz's physical deformity belies his great intellect. Allied with his Mohawk friend Joseph Longboat and his adopted eleven–year–old granddaughter Midget, the advancements he makes in Electric City will, quite simply, change the world. The peak of Autumn, 1965: Sophie Levine, the daughter of a company man, one of the many scientists working at The Company, whose electric logo can be seen from everywhere in town. Her family escaped Europe just before World War II, leaving behind a wake of annihilation and persecution. Ensconced in Electric City, Sophie is coming of age just as the town is gasping its last breaths. The town, and America as a whole, is on the cusp of great instability: blackouts, social unrest over Vietnam, and soon the advent of the seventies. Into her orbit drifts Henry Van Curler, the favored son of one of Electric City's founding Dutch families, as well as Martin Longboat, grandson of Joseph Longboat. This new generation of Electric City will face both the history of their town and their own uncertain future, struggling to bridge the gap between the old world and the new. Electric City is a vital, pulsing, epic novel of America, of its great scientific ingenuity and its emotional ambition; one that frames the birth and evolution of its towns against the struggles of its indigenous tribes, the immigrant experience, a country divided, and the technological advancements that ushered in the modern world.

"This capstone novel in Library of America's Bernard Malamud edition brings together his three final novels: The Tenants, about the growing tension between two male writers--one Jewish, the other Black--who are the only inhabitants of a crumbling Manhattan tenement house; Dubin's Lives, a revealing study in the perils and promise of love in middle age thought to be Malamud's most autobiographical work; and God's Grace, a postapocalyptic tale of upended evolution in which redemption depends on the lone human survivor's ability to find common ground with a talking chimp. Edited by Malamud's definitive biographer, the volume is rounded out with thirteen masterful short stories and the memoir 'Long Work, Short Life' as well as a fascinating autobiographic sketch, 'A Lost Bar-Mitzvah,' published here for the first time."--Dust jacket.

A collection of 17 essays that cover topics ranging from human evolution to the formation of the solar system. With penetrating insight and solid scientific knowledge, Asimov tackles the problems of over-population, need for alternative fuels, fear of radiation, what makes humans different from other two-legged creatures, and more.

Cryptozoologicon is a celebration of the myths, legends, evolution and biology of hidden animals. Always sceptical, but always willing to indulge in speculative fun, Cryptozoologicon aims to provide a new way to approach cryptozoology: as fictional biology.

Despite his lack of physical stature, the five-foot-tall John Dee was a towering figure in Renaissance Europe: to royalty, enemy to the vicious de Medici clan -- and confidant of Dyckson, a member of the alien race known as the Roc. Ancient and wise, the Roc have come to Earth to observe the evolution of humanity, not to interfere. But during the course of his studies, Dyckson has come to call Dee friend. When the de Medicis arrest Dee in Venice, Dyckson chooses to save his friend from prison and leave him in suspended animation until the year 2099. The "philosopher of Albion" wakes in a confusing future where humanity is on the brink of developing the ultimate weapon -- a weapon that will mean the destruction of the human race! The only thing that can prevent Armageddon is a genius from the past -- but can even the great John Dee save humanity from itself?

In his workbook, a New York City novelist records the contents of his teeming brain -- a virtual repository of the predominant ideas and historical disasters of the twentieth century. But now he has a story he thinks will become his next novel: The large brass altar cross from a run-down Episcopal church in lower Manhattan disappeared, then mysteriously reappeared on the roof of the Synagogue for evolutionary Judaism on the Upper West Side. He befriends the church's maverick rector and the synagogue's young female rabbi as they try to learn who committed this strange double act of desecration and why.

The best-selling authors of Every Spy a Prince journey behind the scenes to examine the four-decade evolution of the complex political, strategic, and economic relationship between Israel and the United States.

"Totempole is Sanford Friedman's radical coming-of-age novel, featuring Stephen Wolfe, a young Jewish boy growing up in New York City and its environs during the Depression and war years. In eight discrete chapters, which trace Stephen's evolution from a two-year-old boy to a twenty-two-year-old man, Friedman describes with psychological acuity and great empathy Stephen's intellectual, moral, and sexual maturation. Taught to abhor his body for the sake of his soul, Stephen finds salvation in the eventual unification of the two, the recognition that body and soul should not be partitioned but treated as one being, one complete man"--

"Roger Casement was an internationally renowned figure at the beginning of the 20th century, famous for exposing the widespread atrocities against the indigenous people in King Leopold's Congo and his subsequent exposure--for which he was knighted in 1911--of the brutal conditions of enslaved labor in Peru. An Irish nationalist of profound conviction, he attempted, at the outbreak of World War I, to obtain German support and weapons for an armed rebellion against British rule. Apprehended and convicted of treason in a notorious trial that captured worldwide attention, Casement was sentenced to die on the gallows. A powerful petition drive for the commutation of his sentence was inaugurated by George Bernard Shaw and a host of other influential figures. A gay man, Casement kept detailed diaries of his sexual escapades, and the British government, upon discovering the diaries, circulated its pages to public figures, thereby crippling what had been a mounting petition for clemency. In 1916, he was hanged. In this gripping reimagining, acclaimed historian Martin Duberman paints a full portrait of the man for the first time. Tracing his evolution from servant of the empire to his work as a humanitarian activist and anti-imperialist, Duberman resurrects and recognizes all facets--from the professional to the personal--of the fantastic life of this pioneer for human rights"--Provided by publisher.

Juan Gutierrez, a cancer researcher, has spent years studying the genome of animals that exhibit immunity to some types of cancer. Over the course of his study, Juan discovers a pattern that allows him to predict the course of a species' evolution across thousands of generations. Using the algorithm he's developed from the pattern, Juan uncovers what he believes to be the key to conquering humanity's susceptibility to cancer. Others are interested in using what Juan has dubbed "Darwin's Cipher," however, instead of cancer research, they see very different applications for the new genetic algorithm. Nate Carrington, an FBI forensic analyst has been struggling with several cold cases when he's alerted to an incident at a nearby ranch. It's a case of a newborn calf who is found in the middle of a herd of dead cattle. It provides a single link to Nate's other cold cases: the DNA analysis of the calf doesn't match anything in the FBI's database. Somewhere in a rural hospital in West Virginia, four hospital workers are dead and a newborn child has been transported to the NIH's level-4 bio-containment unit. It's only when the NIH sends out an alert to all hospitals and law enforcement agencies that the world realizes the danger that faces them.

Originally written in 1950, then revised and first published in 1992, The Dwarfs is Harold Pinter's only novel. Set in postwar Britain, The Dwarfs describes the intertwined lives and concerns of four young Londoners: Len, working at the Euston train station but fascinated by abstract mathematics; Mark, a sometime actor; and Virginia and Pete, a young couple trying to define their relationship amid the powerful, sometimes destructive forces at work among the four. In the evolution of this quadrilateral friendship and the strains it creates, Harold Pinter explores how ordinary lives are molded by the limitations and boundaries of sexuality, intimacy, and mortality. It is a world populated by dwarfs -- young people who have departed, only to leave emptiness. Funny, vivid, and haunting, The Dwarfs is a brilliantly intriguing and chillingly perceptive novel by a writer whose imagination has shaped our lives.