Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson’s groundbreaking bestseller, When Elephants Weep, was the first book since Darwin’s time to explore emotions in the animal kingdom, particularly from animals in the wild. Now, he focuses exclusively on the contained world of the farm animal, revealing startling, irrefutable evidence that barnyard creatures have feelings too, even consciousness. Weaving history, literature, anecdotes, scientific studies, and Masson’s own vivid experiences observing pigs, cows, sheep, goats, and chickens over the course of five years, this important book at last gives voice, meaning, and dignity to these gentle beasts that are bred to be milked, shorn, butchered, and eaten. Can we ever know what makes an animal happy? Many animal behaviorists say no. But Jeffrey Masson has a different view: An animal is happy if it can live according to its own nature. Farm animals suffer greatly in this regard. Chickens, for instance, like to perch in trees at night, to avoid predators and to nestle with friends. The obvious conclusion: They cannot be happy when confined twenty to a cage. From field and barn, to pen and coop, Masson bears witness to the emotions and intelligence of these remarkable farm animals, each unique with distinct qualities. Curious, intelligent, self-reliant–many will find it hard to believe that these attributes describe a pig. In fact, there is much that humans share with pigs. They dream, know their names, and can see colors. Mother cows mourn the loss of their calves when their babies are taken away to slaughter. Given a choice between food that is nutritious or lacking in minerals, sheep will select the former, balancing their diet and correcting the deficiency. Goats display quite a sense of humor, dignity, and fearlessness (Indian goats have been known to kill leopards). Chickens are naturally sociable–they will gather around a human companion and stand there serenely preening themselves or sit quietly on the ground beside someone they trust. For far too long farm animals have been denigrated and treated merely as creatures of instinct rather than as sentient beings. Shattering the abhorrent myth of the “dumb animal without feelings,” Jeffrey Masson has written a revolutionary book that is sure to stir human emotions far and wide. From the Hardcover edition.

Through a distinguished career of critical scholarship and translation, Robert Alter has equipped us to read the Hebrew Bible as a powerful, cohesive work of literature. The culmination of this work, Alter's masterly new translation and probing commentary combine to give contemporary readers the definitive edition of The Five Books . Alter's majestic translation recovers the mesmerizing effect of these ancient stories—the profound and haunting enigmas, the ambiguities of motive and image, and the distinctive cadences and lovely precision of the Hebrew text. Other modern translations either recast these features for contemporary clarity, thereby losing the character of the original, or fail to give readers a suitably fluid English as a point of contact. Alter's translation conveys the music and the meaning of the Hebrew text in a lyrical, lucid English. His accompanying commentary illuminates the text with learned insight and reflection on its literary and historical dimensions.

Nelly Sachs was the co-winner of the 1966 Nobel Prize for Literature. This book, containing nearly half of her verse, is her first to be published in the English language. The book includes in its entirety one of her most important poem sequences, 'Glowing Enigmas, I, II, and III,' written in the 1960's; poems from six other collections: 'In the Habitations of Death,' 'Eclipse of the Stars,' 'And No One Knows How to Go On,' 'Flight and Metamorphosis, Journey into a Dustless Realm,' and 'Death Still Celebrates Life'; and the complete text of 'Eli,' a mystery play of the sufferings of Israel.

The Chess Mind lucidly presents a modern and original approach to an old game. This is the first authoritative attempt to make the Chess player conscious of his intellectual processes, and so to help him in the use and control of his mental powers whenever he plays. The book contains some hundreds of Chess 'gems,' including a large number of annotated games. These are presented and analyzed, both as instructive Chess and in order to show the nature of the thinking that operates in Master-play. Many aspects and degrees of mental activity are illustrated on the chess Vision or Intuition, reasoning, Calculation, Imagination, Memory, and will Power. Individual style and psychological causes of error are also investigated. In studying the examples that reveal these factors in action, the reader is learning some of the underlying principles of Strategy, and some Chess technique. He is at once improving his game, and finding an importance for Chess in his general educational equipment. In days when mental processes are being questioned - the days of Technocracy and Chess machines - this book is a corrective to conventional approaches. It is independently valuable as a contribution to Chess literature and to Psychology.