Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America

Taibbi eviscerates Wall Street for what he considers frauds perpetrated on the American people over the last ten years. Deftly delving deeply into complicated financial history and lingo, Taibbi deftly lays the subject bare, rendering heretofore-dense subject matter simple without being simplistic. Blame for the recent mortgage collapse, commodities bubble, and tech bubble are laid at the feet of a relatively small number of bankers and traders who, in the author's opinion, act without fear of reciprocity from a U.S. government no longer representative of the American people. He begins by awarding the title "Biggest Asshole In The Universe" to former-Fed Chief Alan Greenspan, taking him to task for willfully or stupidly disemboweling what little regulation the financial markets may have had before his tenure. This theme resounds throughout, and Taibbi asserts that the collusion between Wall Street and the White House has effectively turned the United States into a massive casino, in which working Americans are regularly bilked out of their savings and homes while the wealthy are repeatedly rewarded for their graft. It's an important and worthy read, but not for the Randian disciple or Goldman-Sachs alum.

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The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot

Winner of the 2008 NAUTILUS SILVER AWARD in the category of Social Change/Activism

In a stunning indictment of the Bush administration and Congress, best-selling author Naomi Wolf lays out her case for saving American democracy. In authoritative research and documentation Wolf explains how events of the last six years parallel steps taken in the early years of the 20th century‚’s worst dictatorships such as Germany, Russia, China, and Chile.

The book cuts across political parties and ideologies and speaks directly to those among us who are concerned about the ever-tightening noose being placed around our liberties.

In this timely call to arms, Naomi Wolf compels us to face the way our free America is under assault. She warns us‚–with the straight-to-fellow-citizens urgency of one of Thomas Paine‚’s revolutionary pamphlets‚–that we have little time to lose if our children are to live in real freedom.

“Recent history has profound lessons for us in the U.S. today about how fascist, totalitarian, and other repressive leaders seize and maintain power, especially in what were once democracies. The secret is that these leaders all tend to take very similar, parallel steps. The Founders of this nation were so deeply familiar with tyranny and the habits and practices of tyrants that they set up our checks and balances precisely out of fear of what is unfolding today. We are seeing these same kinds of tactics now closing down freedoms in America, turning our nation into something that in the near future could be quite other than the open society in which we grew up and learned to love liberty,‚” states Wolf.

Wolf is taking her message directly to the American people in the most accessible form and as part of a large national campaign to reach out to ordinary Americans about the dangers we face today. This includes a lecture and speaking tour, and being part of the nascent American Freedom Campaign, a grassroots efforts to ensure that presidential candidates pledge to uphold the constitution and protect our liberties from further erosion.

The End of America will shock, enrage, and motivate‚–spurring us to act, as the Founders would have counted on us to do in a time such as this, as rebels and patriots‚–to save our liberty and defend our nation.

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The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism

The neo-liberal economic policies—privatization, free trade, slashed social spending—that the Chicago School and the economist Milton Friedman have foisted on the world are catastrophic in two senses, argues this vigorous polemic. Because their results are disastrous—depressions, mass poverty, private corporations looting public wealth, by the author's accounting—their means must be cataclysmic, dependent on political upheavals and natural disasters as coercive pretexts for free-market reforms the public would normally reject. Journalist Klein (No Logo) chronicles decades of such disasters, including the Chicago School makeovers launched by South American coups; the corrupt sale of Russia's state economy to oligarchs following the collapse of the Soviet Union; the privatization of New Orleans's public schools after Katrina; and the seizure of wrecked fishing villages by resort developers after the Asian tsunami. Klein's economic and political analyses are not always meticulous. Likening free-market shock therapies to electroshock torture, she conflates every misdeed of right-wing dictatorships with their economic programs and paints a too simplistic picture of the Iraq conflict as a struggle over American-imposed neo-liberalism. Still, much of her critique hits home, as she demonstrates how free-market ideologues welcome, and provoke, the collapse of other people's economies. The result is a powerful populist indictment of economic orthodoxy.

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God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

Hitchens, one of our great political pugilists, delivers the best of the recent rash of atheist manifestos. The same contrarian spirit that makes him delightful reading as a political commentator, even (or especially) when he's completely wrong, makes him an entertaining huckster prosecutor once he has God placed in the dock. And can he turn a phrase!: "monotheistic religion is a plagiarism of a plagiarism of a hearsay of a hearsay, of an illusion of an illusion, extending all the way back to a fabrication of a few nonevents." Hitchens's one-liners bear the marks of considerable sparring practice with believers. Yet few believers will recognize themselves as Hitchens associates all of them for all time with the worst of history's theocratic and inquisitional moments. All the same, this is salutary reading as a means of culling believers' weaker arguments: that faith offers comfort (false comfort is none at all), or has provided a historical hedge against fascism (it mostly hasn't), or that "Eastern" religions are better (nope). The book's real strength is Hitchens's on-the-ground glimpses of religion's worst face in various war zones and isolated despotic regimes. But its weakness is its almost fanatical insistence that religion poisons "everything," which tips over into barely disguised misanthropy.

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The Warren Buffett Way, Second Edition

Starting with $10,000 in 1956 and today worth some $8.5 billion, with significant holdings in Coca-Cola, Capital Cities/ ABC and the Washington Post Company, Omaha, Nebr.-based Buffet is a major player on Wall Street. Financial consultant Hagstrom, who did not interview his subject but obtained permission to quote from his Berkshire Hathaway annual reports, here outlines Buffet's iconoclastic tenets for investing. Unlike many entrepreneurs who take over companies to sell them off in bits, Buffet buys and holds. He rejects the "efficient market theory"; he doesn't worry about the stock market; and he buys a business, not a stock. He manages with a small staff, no computers and a "hands off" strategy. Learning his secrets here, now the rest of us can do a Buffet? Illustrations. Fortune Book Club dual main selection.

Hagstrom, a principal in a Philadelphia investment firm, describes the investment strategies and techniques used by Warren Buffett to realize enormous success as a professional investor. Aiming his analysis at the individual investor, Hagstrom reviews the influence of Buffett's mentors, Ben Graham and Philip Fisher, and illustrates Buffett's synthesis of their investment philosophies. Hagstrom provides case studies of Buffett's major investments, showing the qualities of the companies that had appeal. Buffett's investment philosophy espouses long-term investing, respect for good management, and recognition of the value of a business franchise. This insightful work is a worthwhile complement to Graham's classic writings, considered essential for new investors.

Joseph Barth, U.S. Military Acad. Lib., West Point, N.Y.

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Breakthrough Rapid Reading

A previous National Director of Education for Evelyn Wood Reading Dynamics presents his do-it-yourself program for increasing reading speed and boosting comprehension.

"Speed reading is one of the truly useful educational ideas of the last few years, and this book can be the least expensive and most efficient way you can learn it." --William Proxmire, United States Senator

The perfect answer to today's information explosion, Peter Kump's rapid reading method has already helped thousands of people to read up to eight times faster, with better concentration and retention.

This program brings together the best of what classroom speed reading courses have to offer, and distills fundamental principles and skills that can be learned at home with the help of the drills and exercises provided. And because it lets readers choose their own material and set their own pace, it's the ideal method for busy people juggling a full schedule.

Breakthrough Rapid Reading makes conquering information overload a reality. So whether it's cutting down on that backlog of business reports and technical matter or scaling that mountain of newspapers and leisure reading, getting up to speed is only a matter of time and practice.

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Handle with Care: A Novel

Perennial bestseller Picoult (Change of Heart) delivers another engrossing family drama, spiced with her trademark blend of medicine, law and love. Charlotte and Sean O'Keefe's daughter, Willow, was born with brittle bone disease, a condition that requires Charlotte to act as full-time caregiver and has strained their emotional and financial limits. Willow's teenaged half-sister, Amelia, suffers as well, overshadowed by Willow's needs and lost in her own adolescent turmoil. When Charlotte decides to sue for wrongful birth in order to obtain a settlement to ensure Willow's future, the already strained family begins to implode. Not only is the defendant Charlotte's longtime friend, but the case requires Charlotte and Sean to claim that had they known of Willow's condition, they would have terminated the pregnancy, a statement that strikes at the core of their faith and family. Picoult individualizes the alternating voices of the narrators more believably than she has previously, and weaves in subplots to underscore the themes of hope, regret, identity and family, leading up to her signature closing twists.

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How to Survive the End of the World as We Know It: Tactics, Techniques, and Technologies for Uncertain Times

The definitive guide on how to prepare for any crisis--from global financial collapse to a pandemic

It would only take one unthinkable event to disrupt our way of life. If there is a terrorist attack, a global pandemic, or sharp currency devaluation--you may be forced to fend for yourself in ways you've never imagined. Where would you get water? How would you communicate with relatives who live in other states? What would you use for fuel?

Survivalist expert James Wesley, Rawles, author of Patriots and editor of SurvivalBlog.com, shares the essential tools and skills you will need for you family to survive, including:

Water: Filtration, transport, storage, and treatment options.

Food Storage: How much to store, pack-it-yourself methods, storage space and rotation, countering vermin.

Fuel and Home Power: Home heating fuels, fuel storage safety, backup generators.

Garden, Orchard Trees, and Small Livestock: Gardening basics, non-hybrid seeds, greenhouses; choosing the right livestock.

Medical Supplies and Training: Building a first aid kit, minor surgery, chronic health issues.

Communications: Following international news, staying in touch with loved ones.

Home Security: Your panic room, self-defense training and tools.

When to Get Outta Dodge: Vehicle selection, kit packing lists, routes and planning.

Investing and Barter: Tangibles investing, building your barter stockpile. And much more.

How to Survive the End of the World as We Know It is a must-have for every well-prepared family.

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This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession

Think of a song that resonates deep down in your being. Now imagine sitting down with someone who was there when the song was recorded and can tell you how that series of sounds was committed to tape, and who can also explain why that particular combination of rhythms, timbres and pitches has lodged in your memory, making your pulse race and your heart swell every time you hear it. Remarkably, Levitin does all this and more, interrogating the basic nature of hearing and of music making (this is likely the only book whose jacket sports blurbs from both Oliver Sacks and Stevie Wonder), without losing an affectionate appreciation for the songs he's reducing to neural impulses. Levitin is the ideal guide to this material: he enjoyed a successful career as a rock musician and studio producer before turning to cognitive neuroscience, earning a Ph.D. and becoming a top researcher into how our brains interpret music. Though the book starts off a little dryly (the first chapter is a crash course in music theory), Levitin's snappy prose and relaxed style quickly win one over and will leave readers thinking about the contents of their iPods in an entirely new way.

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Cutting for Stone

Lauded for his sensitive memoir (My Own Country) about his time as a doctor in eastern Tennessee at the onset of the AIDS epidemic in the 80s, Verghese turns his formidable talents to fiction, mining his own life and experiences in a magnificent, sweeping novel that moves from India to Ethiopia to an inner-city hospital in New York City over decades and generations. Sister Mary Joseph Praise, a devout young nun, leaves the south Indian state of Kerala in 1947 for a missionary post in Yemen. During the arduous sea voyage, she saves the life of an English doctor bound for Ethiopia, Thomas Stone, who becomes a key player in her destiny when they meet up again at Missing Hospital in Addis Ababa. Seven years later, Sister Praise dies birthing twin boys: Shiva and Marion, the latter narrating his own and his brothers long, dramatic, biblical story set against the backdrop of political turmoil in Ethiopia, the life of the hospital compound in which they grow up and the love story of their adopted parents, both doctors at Missing. The boys become doctors as well and Vergheses weaving of the practice of medicine into the narrative is fascinating even as the story bobs and weaves with the power and coincidences of the best 19th-century novel.

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He's Just Not That Into You: The No-Excuses Truth to Understanding Guys

It’s a classic single-woman scenario: you really like this guy, but he’s giving mixed messages. You make excuses, decide he’s confused, afraid of commitment. Behrendt, a former executive story editor for Sex and the City—and a formerly single (now happily married) guy who knows all the excuses—provides a simple answer: he’s just not that into you. Stop kidding yourself, let go and look for someone else who will be. After all, as Behrendt sensibly puts it, "if a (sane) guy really likes you, there ain’t nothing that’s going to get in his way." If you’re not convinced yet, by all means read this smart, funny and surprisingly upbeat little book, full of q’s and a’s covering every excuse woman has ever made to avoid admitting to herself that a man just wasn’t that smitten with her.

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The Book Thief

Grade 9 Up–Zusak has created a work that deserves the attention of sophisticated teen and adult readers. Death himself narrates the World War II-era story of Liesel Meminger from the time she is taken, at age nine, to live in Molching, Germany, with a foster family in a working-class neighborhood of tough kids, acid-tongued mothers, and loving fathers who earn their living by the work of their hands. The child arrives having just stolen her first book–although she has not yet learned how to read–and her foster father uses it, The Gravediggers Handbook, to lull her to sleep when shes roused by regular nightmares about her younger brothers death. Across the ensuing years of the late 1930s and into the 1940s, Liesel collects more stolen books as well as a peculiar set of friends: the boy Rudy, the Jewish refugee Max, the mayors reclusive wife (who has a whole library from which she allows Liesel to steal), and especially her foster parents. Zusak not only creates a mesmerizing and original story but also writes with poetic syntax, causing readers to deliberate over phrases and lines, even as the action impels them forward. Death is not a sentimental storyteller, but he does attend to an array of satisfying details, giving Liesels story all the nuances of chance, folly, and fulfilled expectation that it deserves.

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Everything Is Illuminated: A Novel

What would it sound like if a foreigner wrote a novel in broken English? Foer answers this question to marvelous effect in his inspired though uneven first novel. Much of the book is narrated by Ukrainian student Alex Perchov, whose hilarious and, in their own way, pitch-perfect malapropisms flourish under the influence of a thesaurus. Alex works for his family's travel agency, which caters to Jews who want to explore their ancestral shtetls. Jonathan Safran Foer, the novel's other hero, is such a Jew an American college student looking for the Ukrainian woman who hid his grandfather from the Nazis. He, Alex, Alex's depressive grandfather and his grandfather's "seeing-eye bitch" set out to find the elusive woman. Alex's descriptions of this "very rigid search" and his accompanying letters to Jonathan are interspersed with Jonathan's own mythical history of his grandfather's shtetl. Jonathan's great-great-great-great-great-grandmother Brod is the central figure in this history, which focuses mostly on the 18th and 19th centuries. Though there are some moments of demented genius here, on the whole the historical sections are less assured. There's a whiff of kitsch in Foer's jolly cast of pompous rabbis, cuckolded usurers and sharp-tongued widows, and the tone wavers between cozy ethnic humor, heady pontification and sentimental magic-realist whimsy. Nonetheless, Foer deftly handles the intricate story-within-a-story plot, and the layers of suspense build as the shtetl hurtles toward the devastation of the 20th century while Alex and Jonathan and Grandfather close in on the object of their search. An impressive, original debut. (Apr. 16)Forecast: Eagerly awaited since an excerpt was featured in the New Yorker's 2001 "Debut Fiction" issue, Everything Is Illuminated comes reasonably close to living up to the hype. Rights have so far been sold in 12 countries, the novel is a selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club and a main selection of Traditions Book Club, and Foer will embark on an author tour expect lively sales.

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The Five People You Meet in Heaven

"At the time of his death, Eddie was an old man with a barrel chest and a torso as squat as a soup can," writes Albom, author of the bestselling phenomenon Tuesdays with Morrie, in a brief first novel that is going to make a huge impact on many hearts and minds. Wearing a work shirt with a patch on the chest that reads "Eddie" over "Maintenance," limping around with a cane thanks to an old war injury, Eddie was the kind of guy everybody, including Eddie himself, tended to write off as one of life's minor characters, a gruff bit of background color. He spent most of his life maintaining the rides at Ruby Pier, a seaside amusement park, greasing tracks and tightening bolts and listening for strange sounds, "keeping them safe." The children who visited the pier were drawn to Eddie "like cold hands to a fire." Yet Eddie believed that he lived a "nothing" life-gone nowhere he "wasn't shipped to with a rifle," doing work that "required no more brains than washing a dish." On his 83rd birthday, however, Eddie dies trying to save a little girl. He wakes up in heaven, where a succession of five people are waiting to show him the true meaning and value of his life. One by one, these mostly unexpected characters remind him that we all live in a vast web of interconnection with other lives; that all our stories overlap; that acts of sacrifice seemingly small or fruitless do affect others; and that loyalty and love matter to a degree we can never fathom. Simply told, sentimental and profoundly true, this is a contemporary American fable that will be cherished by a vast readership. Bringing into the spotlight the anonymous Eddies of the world, the men and women who get lost in our cultural obsession with fame and fortune, this slim tale, like Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol, reminds us of what really matters here on earth, of what our lives are given to us for.

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90 Minutes in Heaven: A True Story of Death & Life

More than 4 million copies sold!

On the way home from a conference, Don Piper's car was crushed by a semi-truck that crossed into his lane. Medical personnel said he died instantly. While his body lay lifeless inside the ruins of his car, Piper experienced the glories of heaven, awed by its beauty and music.

90 minutes after the wreck, while a minister prayed for him, Piper miraculously returned to life on earth with only the memory of inexpressible heavenly bliss. His faith in God was severely tested as he faced an uncertain and grueling recovery. Now he'd like to share his life-changing story with you.

90 Minutes in Heaven offers a glimpse into a very real dimension of God's reality. This New York Times bestseller encourages those recovering from serious injuries and those dealing with the loss of a loved one. The experience dramatically changed Piper's life, and it will change yours too.

"A friend handed me this book at about midnight, and come two or three in the morning, I was still reading, my heart pumping, bumps on my arms, the hairs on the back of my neck on end. It's a wonderful and inspiring story that brightens your perspective, giving you a sense of security, clarity and warmth."--Donald Miller, author, Blue Like Jazz

"The book describes the brief but sweet heavenly reunion Piper enjoyed with deceased relatives (as well as his grueling recovery, which has included 34 surgeries)."--Publishers Weekly

"Captivating and well written, this books holds your attention and often holds your heart. Don tells his story, his experience that all Christians long to hear. I appreciate especially his honesty and candid feelings of dealing with his recovery and pain. Don's experience will lift your spirit and soften any pain."--Ron Hill, pastor, The Fellowship of San Antonio

"Don Piper's ninety minutes in heaven changed his life and his perspective. Reading his book will give you the assurance that God is faithful to bring you through even the most horrific of circumstances. May his eyewitness account of the hope that lies before you change your perspective of this life as well!"--Michael Carter, CBN chief financial officer

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The Shack

Mackenzie Allen Philips' youngest daughter, Missy, has been abducted during a family vacation and evidence that she may have been brutally murdered is found in an abandoned shack deep in the Oregon wilderness. Four years later in the midst of his Great Sadness, Mack receives a suspicious note, apparently from God, inviting him back to that shack for a weekend. Against his better judgment he arrives at the shack on a wintry afternoon and walks back into his darkest nightmare. What he finds there will change Mack's world forever. In a world where religion seems to grow increasingly irrelevant "The Shack" wrestles with the timeless question, "Where is God in a world so filled with unspeakable pain?" The answers Mack gets will astound you and perhaps transform you as much as it did him. You'll want everyone you know to read this book!

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The Purpose Driven® Life: What on Earth Am I Here For?

Pastor of Saddleback Church, a Southern Baptist mega-church in southern California with weekly attendance of more than 15,000, Warren now applies his highly successful "purpose-driven" framework, developed in the best-seller The Purpose-Driven Church, to individual experience. The same principles Warren has taught to thousands of pastors to help churches be healthy and effective can also drive lives, he says. The book argues that discerning and living five God-ordained purposes-worship, community, discipleship, ministry and evangelism-is key to effective living. His 40 short chapters are intended to be read over 40 days' time, giving readers small pieces of his purpose-discovering program to chew on. Warren certainly knows his Bible. Of 800-plus footnotes, only 18 don't refer to Christian Scripture. He deliberately works with 15 different Bible translations, leaning heavily on contemporary translations and paraphrases, as an interesting way of plumbing biblical text. The almost exclusively biblical frame of reference stakes out the audience niche for this manual for Christian living. It's practical yet paradoxically abstract, lacking the kind of real-life examples and stories that life-application books usually provide in abundance. The book has flaws editing might have fixed. People are quoted without being identified, and subheads simply repeat lines of text, which tends to make the prose sound too simple. This book is not for all, but for those needing a certain kind of scriptural rock, it is solid.

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The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs: How to Be Insanely Great in Front of Any Audience

“The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs reveals the operating system behind any great presentation and provides you with a quick-start guide to design your own passionate interfaces with your audiences.” —Cliff Atkinson, author of Beyond Bullet Points and The Activist Audience

Apple CEO Steve Jobs’s wildly popular presentations have set a new global gold standard—and now this step-by-step guide shows you exactly how to use his crowd-pleasing techniques in your own presentations. The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs is as close as you’ll ever get to having the master presenter himself speak directly in your ear. Communications expert Carmine Gallo has studied and analyzed the very best of Jobs’s performances, offering point-by-point examples, tried-and-true techniques, and proven presentation secrets that work every time. With this revolutionary approach, you’ll be surprised at how easy it is to sell your ideas, share your enthusiasm, and wow your audience the Steve Jobs way.

“No other leader captures an audience like Steve Jobs does and, like no other book, The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs captures the formula Steve uses to enthrall audiences.”

--Rob Enderle, The Enderle Group

“Now you can learn from the best there is--both Jobs and Gallo. No matter whether you are a novice presenter or a professional speaker like me, you will read and reread this book with the same enthusiasm that people bring to their iPods."

--David Meerman Scott, bestselling author of The New Rules of Marketing & PR and World Wide Rave

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Just Listen: Discover the Secret to Getting Through to Absolutely Anyone

Goulston (Get Out of Your Own Way at Work) returns with a primer on dealing with hard-to-reach people in virtually every scenario—defiant executives, angry employees, families in turmoil, warring couples—through use of well-honed psychological techniques. Negotiating intractable situations is like driving up a steep hill, he posits, but most of us make the mistake of creating more resistance by shifting up; downshift, and you get control, he writes. His Persuasion Cycle filters illustrative snippets from counseling sessions during which he digs into an impressive bag of tricks—Magic Paradox, Impossibility Question, Empathy Jolt—techniques like martial arts moves: potent on their own, but even more powerful when you combine them. His successful persuasion case studies include negotiating a police standoff and assisting a married couple's conflict resolution. Chapter summaries feature action steps preparing readers to encounter similar scenarios, yielding a guide that is as entertaining as it is useful. (Sept.)

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I Hope They Serve Beer In Hell

My name is Tucker Max, and I am an asshole. I get excessively drunk at inappropriate times, disregard social norms, indulge every whim, ignore the consequences of my actions, mock idiots and posers, sleep with more women than is safe or reasonable, and just generally act like a raging dickhead. But, I do contribute to humanity in one very important way: I share my adventures with the world. —from the Introduction Actual reader feedback:

"I am completely baffled as to how you can congratulate yourself for being a womanizer and a raging drunk, or think anyone cares about an idiot like you. Do you really think that exploiting the insecurities of others while getting wasted is a legitimate thing to offer?"

"Thank you, thank you, thank you—for sharing with us your wonderful tales of drunken revelry, for teaching me what it means to be a man, for just existing so I know that there is another option; I too can say ‘screw the system’ and be myself and have fun. My life truly began when I finished reading your stories. Now, when faced with a quandary about what course of action I should take, I just ask myself, ‘What Would Tucker Do?’—and I do it, and I am a better man for it."

"I find it truly appalling that there are people in the world like you. You are a disgusting, vile, repulsive, repugnant, foul creature. Because of you, I don’t believe in God anymore. No just God would allow someone like you to exist."

"I’ll stay with God as my lord, but you are my savior. I just finished reading your brilliant stories, and I laughed so hard I almost vomited. I want to bring that kind of joy to people. You’re an artist of the highest order and a true humanitarian to boot. I'm in both shock and awe at how much I want to be you."

"You are the coolest person I can even imagine existing. If you slept with my girlfriend, it'd make me love her more."

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The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

Eminent Cornell astronomer and bestselling author Sagan debunks the paranormal and the unexplained in a study that will reassure hardcore skeptics but may leave others unsatisfied. To him, purported UFO encounters and alien abductions are products of gullibility, hallucination, misidentification, hoax and therapists' pressure; some alleged encounters, he suggests, may screen memories of sexual abuse. He labels as hoaxes the crop circles, complex pictograms that appear in southern England's wheat and barley fields, and he dismisses as a natural formation the Sphinx-like humanoid face incised on a mesa on Mars, first photographed by a Viking orbiter spacecraft in 1976 and considered by some scientists to be the engineered artifact of an alien civilization. In a passionate plea for scientific literacy, Sagan deftly debunks the myth of Atlantis, Filipino psychic surgeons and mediums such as J.Z. Knight, who claims to be in touch with a 35,000-year-old entity called Ramtha. He also brands as superstition ghosts, angels, fairies, demons, astrology, Bigfoot, the Loch Ness monster and religious apparitions.

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Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life

Martin Seligman, a renowned psychologist and clinical researcher, has been studying optimists and pessimists for 25 years. Pessimists believe that bad events are their fault, will last a long time, and undermine everything. They feel helpless and may sink into depression, which is epidemic today, especially among youths. Optimists, on the other hand, believe that defeat is a temporary setback or a challenge--it doesn't knock them down. "Pessimism is escapable," asserts Seligman, by learning a new set of cognitive skills that will enable you to take charge, resist depression, and make yourself feel better and accomplish more.

About two-thirds of this book is a psychological discussion of pessimism, optimism, learned helplessness (giving up because you feel unable to change things), explanatory style (how you habitually explain to yourself why events happen), and depression, and how these affect success, health, and quality of life. Seligman supports his points with animal research and human cases. He includes tests for you and your child--whose achievement may be related more to his or her level of optimism/pessimism than ability. The final chapters teach the skills of changing from pessimism to optimism, with worksheet pages to guide you and your child. --Joan Price

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Mastery: The Keys to Success and Long-Term Fulfillment

Drawing on Zen philosophy and his expertise in the martial art of aikido, bestselling author George Leonard shows how the process of mastery can help us attain a higher level of excellence and a deeper sense of satisfaction and fulfillment in our daily lives. Whether you’re seeking to improve your career or your intimate relationships, increase self-esteem or create harmony within yourself, this inspiring prescriptive guide will help you master anything you choose and achieve success in all areas of your life.

In Mastery, you’ll discover:

The 5 Essential Keys to Mastery Tools for Mastery Mastery and Energy How to Master Your Athletic Potential The 3 Personality Types that Are Obstacles to Mastery How to Avoid Pitfalls Along the Path

and more . . .

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Reading People: How to Understand People and Predict Their Behavior--Anytime, Anyplace

Now famous for her role in the O.J. Simpson murder trial, Dimitrius shares the people-reading techniques she developed over 15 years as a jury consultant. In so doing, she provides a wealth of tips and strategies for ferreting out people's real viewpoints, motives and character traits. Claiming that "reading people is neither a science nor an innate gift," Dimitrius advocates sharpening and fine-tuning powers of observation and deduction. Gathering enough information to establish an overall pattern is the key to her method. Differentiating between "elective and nonelective" traits; setting aside assumptions, prejudices and stereotypes; recognizing body language; and identifying meanings behind personal choices of dress and behaviorAall converge to reveal personality, attitude and life experience. Dimitrius rates people on scales of "hardness" or compassion, socioeconomic background and "satisfaction with life"Athe three most "consistently reliable" predictors of behavior, according to her. Whether interviewing a baby-sitter, meeting a new date or selecting a jury, this thorough, detailed guide of what to look for could probably improve anyone's ability at seeing and being seen. Author tour.

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Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them (P.S.)

Long before there were creative-writing workshops and degrees, how did aspiring writers learn to write? By reading the work of their predecessors and contemporaries, says Francine Prose.

In Reading Like a Writer, Prose invites you to sit by her side and take a guided tour of the tools and the tricks of the masters. She reads the work of the very best writers—Dostoyevsky, Flaubert, Kafka, Austen, Dickens, Woolf, Chekhov—and discovers why their work has endured. She takes pleasure in the long and magnificent sentences of Philip Roth and the breathtaking paragraphs of Isaac Babel; she is deeply moved by the brilliant characterization in George Eliot's Middlemarch. She looks to John Le Carré for a lesson in how to advance plot through dialogue, to Flannery O'Connor for the cunning use of the telling detail, and to James Joyce and Katherine Mansfield for clever examples of how to employ gesture to create character. She cautions readers to slow down and pay attention to words, the raw material out of which literature is crafted.

Written with passion, humor, and wisdom, Reading Like a Writer will inspire readers to return to literature with a fresh eye and an eager heart.

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