ou812gregg

In My Stroke of Insight, Taylor shares her unique perspective on the brain and its capacity for recovery, and the sense of omniscient understanding she gained from this unusual and inspiring voyage out of the abyss of a wounded brain. It would take eight years for Taylor to heal completely. Because of her knowledge of how the brain works, her respect for the cells composing her human form, and most of all an amazing mother, Taylor completely repaired her mind and recalibrated her understanding of the world.

How does the brain generate a conscious thought? And why does so much of our knowledge remain unconscious? Thanks to clever psychological and brain-imaging experiments, scientists are closer to cracking this mystery than ever before. In this lively book, Stanislas Dehaene describes the pioneering work his lab and the labs of other cognitive neuroscientists worldwide have accomplished in defining, testing, and explaining the brain events behind a conscious state.

Until five years ago, Alexandra Heminsley was decidedly not a runner. Nor was she athletic in any sense of the word. She was an ordinary, curvy woman who was convinced that sports of any kind, especially running, were beyond her. But she's made running part of her life, and gets to reap the rewards: not just the obvious things, like a touch of weight loss, health and glowing skin, but self-belief, and immeasurable daily pleasure.

After a decade-long addiction to crack cocaine and alcohol, Charlie Engle hit bottom with a near-fatal six-day binge that ended in a hail of bullets. As Engle got sober, he turned to running, which became his lifeline, his pastime, and his salvation. He began with marathons, and when marathons weren't far enough he began to take on ultramarathons, races that went for 35, 50, and sometimes hundreds of miles, traveling to some of the most unforgiving places on earth to race.

We live in a competition loving culture. We love the performance, the big win, the ticking seconds of the clock as the game comes down to the wire. We watch games and cheer, sometimes to the point of obsession, but if we really wanted to see greatness - wanted to cheer for it, see it happen, understand what made it happen - we’d spend our time watching, obsessing on, and maybe even cheering the practices instead.

Meet Michael Blutrich, mild-mannered New York lawyer and founder of Scores, the hottest strip club in New York City history, funded by the proceeds of an insurance embezzlement scheme. All Blutrich wanted was to lay low, make the club a success, and put his criminal acts behind him. But the Mafia got involved, and soon the FBI came knocking. Scores became wildly popular, in part thanks to Blutrich's ability to successfully bend the rules of adult entertainment. Unfortunately for Blutrich, it would all soon implode.

The history of colonial America is a story of extraordinary scope, with Europeans, Africans, and the native peoples of North America interacting in a drama of settlement and conflict that lasted nearly three centuries. Go back in time and relive this epic story in 36 spellbinding lectures. While concentrating on British North America, Professor Allison also covers developments in the colonial outposts of Spain, France, the Netherlands, and the all-important British possessions in the West Indies, which were the source of the most lucrative crop in the New World - sugar - and the reason for the enormous growth in the slave trade.

With dramatic flair, Jeff Guinn delivers the definitive portrait of Bonnie and Clyde. These media-savvy outlaws appealed to America's Depression-era hunger for swashbuckling characters. Glowing radio and newspaper reports transformed these "public enemies" into celebrities - much like the cinema gangsters of the time.

This riveting narrative explores the world of placebos, hypnosis, false memories, and neurology to reveal the groundbreaking science of our suggestible minds. Could the secrets to personal health lie within our own brains? Journalist Erik Vance explores the surprising ways our expectations and beliefs influence our bodily responses to pain, disease, and everyday events.

In Indelible Ink, acclaimed social historian Richard Kluger recreates in rich detail this dramatic clash of powerful antagonists that marked the beginning of press freedom in America and its role in vanquishing colonial tyranny. Here is an enduring lesson that resounds to this day on the vital importance of free public expression as the underpinning of democracy.