We've all asked, "What is the world coming to?" But we seldom ask, "How bad was the world in the past?" Cognitive scientist Steven Pinker shows that the past was much worse. Evidence of a bloody history has always been around us: genocides in the Old Testament, gory mutilations in Shakespeare and Grimm, monarchs who beheaded their relatives, and American founders who dueled with their rivals. The murder rate in medieval Europe was more than thirty times what it is today. Slavery, sadistic punishments, and frivolous executions were common features of life for millennia, then were suddenly abolished. How could this have happened, if human nature has not changed? Pinker argues that thanks to the spread of government, literacy, trade, and cosmopolitanism, we increasingly control our impulses, empathize with others, debunk toxic ideologies, and deploy our powers of reason to reduce the temptations of violence.

#1 New York Times bestselling author and financial expert Suze Orman helped millions of Americans change the course of their financial destiny and prosper in every way with The Courage to Be Rich . Now, Suze has revised and updated this million-copy bestseller to further inspire readers to find the courage to start over in these changing times and realize their true potential for material and spiritual wealth—even in today’s challenging economic climate. Now available in trade paperback for the first time, this edition goes beyond Suze’s earlier work in outlining a life-changing process for manifesting abundance and brings her revolutionary ideas of combining the spiritual and the financial up to date. With honesty, empathy, and a dazzling knowledge of how the world of money works, the country’s most trusted financial expert motivates readers to summon the courage to cope with tragedy—whether it’s personal or global—along with its economic aftermath. Rich in spirit, The Courage to Be Rich also reveals how a sagging economy may influence the money readers have—and have yet to make—and what they need to do to safeguard their financial future without sacrificing their generosity. With new information that pertains to recent changes in tax laws and how they affect IRAs, The Courage to Be Rich addresses the financial issues and milestones we face throughout our lives—marriage, divorce, and death; buying a home; and spending (and overspending) on life's necessities and luxuries. Suze shows readers how to take control of their financial tomorrows today with her trademark expertise and compassion, and convinces us that we can alter our financial destinies only when our intentions are in harmony our actions. That process begins with overcoming and forgiving feelings of fear—an emotion that acts as an internal obstacle to wealth. Suze explains how to make room for more money by eliminating all the clutter—thoughts, words, actions, and material objects—blocking its path. This newfound clarity will empower readers to start afresh to create the true wealth they want and deserve. In The Courage to Be Rich , Suze urges readers to live beyond the bottom line by passing money through their hearts and hands out into the world, to make it a better place. She demonstrates how every action taken is an offering to the world that repays in kind, and how charity has the power to enhance every life. Best of all, she explains how to determine when one is giving too much and when one is giving too little. Combining practical strategies, personal exercises, compelling case studies, and her trademark provocative insights, Suze guides readers through the financial rites of passage, detailing how to: Find the courage to endure financial setbacks and overcome feelings of shame, fear, or anger about money Keep money safe in a weak economy Speak the language of wealth rather than the language of poverty Break debilitating patterns that keep you from having more and being more Protect your life against the financial "what-ifs" Start over from nothing Use your home to secure your retirement years Prepare safely and wisely for the future Bring together the laws of wealth with the laws of life For Suze, The Courage to Be Rich means valuing people over money and money over things. It means having all that you love and loving all that you have. It means turning toward your money and turning some of your money toward others. Ultimately, it means taking the courageous steps necessary to attain your material and spiritual wealth. Practical, spiritual, and above all, soundly financial, The Courage to Be Rich is a book for today’s challenging times.

THE STORY: Nestled in the Catskills—1962's land of dirty dancing and Borscht Belt comedy—an inconspicuous bungalow colony catered to a very special clientele: heterosexual men who delighted in dressing and acting as women. These white-collar professionals would discreetly escape their families to spend their weekends safely inhabiting their chosen female alter-egos. But given the opportunity to share their secret lives with the world, the members of this sorority had to decide whether the freedom gained by openness was worth the risk of personal ruin. Based on real events and infused with Fierstein's trademark wit, this moving, insightful, and delightfully entertaining work offers a glimpse into the lives of a group of "self-made women" as they search for acceptance and happiness in their very own Garden of Eden.

From the international bestselling author of Black, White, and Jewish comes a "wonderfully insightful" ( Associated Press ) book that's destined to become a motherhood classic. Now in trade. Like many women her age, thirty-four-year-old Rebecca Walker was brought up to be skeptical of motherhood. As an adult she longed for a baby but feared losing her independence. In this very smart memoir, Walker explores some of the larger sociological trends of her generation while delivering her own story about the emotional and intellectual transformation that led her to motherhood.

What has happened to the American family in the last few decades? And what are these changes doing to our children? A renowned child psychologist and author of several influential works on child development, David Elkind has devoted his career to these urgent questions. This eloquent book - the culmination of his inquiry - puts together all the pieces, puzzling facts, and conflicting accounts, and shows us as never before what the American family has become. Today's postmodern family is under enormous stress. And as a result, the needs of hurried children have been sacrificed to the needs of their harried parents. Childhood innocence has been supplanted by the illusion of childhood competence; teenage immaturity has given way to pseudo-sophistication; and parental intuition has been traded in for a mechanical reliance on technique. These changes and a host of others have undermined the well-being of children and adolescents. From Freud to Friedan to Foucault, Elkind traces the roots of the postmodern family back to the failure of the modern nuclear family and its supporting institutions - the media, the so-called helping professions, the legal system, and the schools - to meet the needs of parents. The new postmodern family is more flexible, more permeable, more urbane, but also out of balance because it fails to meet the needs of children. Treated like miniature adults, today's children and adolescents go without the protection and security they need, while their once-sheltered baby-boomer parents, facing new economic pressures for which they are unprepared, secretly wonder why they've never really felt like grown-ups. But all is not bleak. Elkind finds evidence of an emerging vital family that melds the best of the modern and postmodern, one in which the needs of all family members are held in a dynamic, if delicate, balance. Many books have decried the decline in family values, the negative impact of divorce, the increase in single-mother families, and impoverished prospects for our children. But none has pulled all these fragments together as Elkind's does and put them into a solid framework, one that finally makes sense of the way we were, and what we as families may become.

An encounter with the death of another is often an occasion when the bereaved need to be sustained in their loss, relieved of the anxiety that the meeting with death engenders, and comforted in their grief. It is a time when those left behind often seek to redress wrongs in themselves or in the relationships that death has shaken and upset. In both collective and individual responses to the trauma of encountering death, we witness efforts to counter the misfortune and to explain the meaning of the loss, to turn memory into blessing, to reconcile life with death, to regenerate life, and redeem both the bereaved and the dead. Sometimes loss may transform the bereaved in ways that lead to growth and maturity; other times a loss leads to unremitting anger or melancholia. There may be a variety of spiritual expressions that the bereaved experience in their time of loss, but there appears to be some common elements in all of them. Overtime, survivors' feelings are transformed into growing exploration of the spiritual, a profound sense of rebirth, newfound feelings of self-mastery or confidence, and a deeply held conviction that "life goes on." The contributions to this volume are based on a conference held in New York on the first anniversary of September 11, 2001. Contributors include Peter Metcalf, Robert Jay Lifton, Ilana Harlow, Robert A. Neimeyer, Samuel Heilman, and Neil Gillman. This sensitive and heartfelt volume relates specifically to issues of death, bereavement, and mourning in the aftermath of the attack on the World Trade Center, but the applications to other individual and catastrophic events is obvious. The contributions do not simply explore how people deal with bereavement or are psychologically affected by extreme grief: they address how people can try to find meaning in tragedy and loss, and strive to help restore order in the wake of chaos. The multidisciplinary perspectives include those of anthropology, psychology, theology, social work, and art. Samuel Heilman is the Distinguished Professor of Sociology and holder of the Harold Proshansky Chair in Jewish Studies and Sociology at the City University of New York, and has also taught at the University of Illinois at Chicago, the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv University, and the Universities of New South Wales and Melbourne. He is the author of several books, including Synagogue Life and The People of the Book , both published in paperback by Transaction.

Claims unconscious desire plays a constitutive role in global political economy. This is the first book to examine global political economy from a psychoanalytic perspective. It claims that the libidinal-the site of unconscious desire-plays not a supplementary or trivial, but a constitutive role in global political economy. Consumption, for example, is not simply a way of satisfying a material or biological need but a doomed attempt at soothing our deeply held sense of loss; and capital is not just a means to material growth and prosperity but is invested with "drive" that seduces, beguiles, and manipulates in the service of unending accumulation. Thus, in contrast to political economy, which assumes a rational subject, libidinal economy is founded on the notion of a desiring subject, who obeys a logic not of good sense or self-interest but profligacy and irrationality. By applying a psychoanalytic lens, Global Libidinal Economy thereby seeks to uncover the unconscious excesses and antagonisms emergent in such key political economy categories as "production," "trade," and "ecology," while also bringing out significant contemporary themes relating to "gender" and "race."