Development Sociology

In 1979, a fiery preacher named Jane Whaley attracted a small group of followers with a promise that she could turn their lives around. In the years since, Whaley’s following has expanded to include thousands of congregants across three continents. Based on hundreds of interviews, secretly recorded conversations, and thousands of pages of documents, Pulitzer Prize winner Mitch Weiss and Holbrook Mohr’s Broken Faith is a terrifying portrait life inside the Word of Faith Fellowship, and the harrowing account of one family who escaped after two decades.

In The Power of Strangers, Joe Keohane sets out on a journey to discover what happens when we bridge the distance between us and people we don’t know. He learns that while we’re wired to sometimes fear, distrust, and even hate strangers, people and societies that have learned to connect with strangers benefit immensely.

In Talk, Harvard professor Alison Wood Brooks shows how simple changes in how we communicate can enhance our relationships, our performance at work and our lives; who we talk to affects our happiness; and how to talk across differences. Her original research, based on thousands of conversations from sales calls to speed dating, provides fascinating insights.

Committing to a long-term relationship is a big deal - especially if you have doubts. With a focus on common sense over emotion, world-renowned sex and relationship therapist Dr. Ruth Westheimer offers straight-up advice on whether you should stick it out or cut your losses and move on.

On Instagram, the private work of mothering has been turned into a public performance that’s generating billions of dollars, and the message is simple: that we’re all just a couple of clicks away from a better, more beautiful experience of motherhood. Momfluenced examines the performance of motherhood—producers of it and consumers of it—through the multilayered phenomenon of the mommy influencer.

In Talking Across the Divide, social justice activist Justin Lee explains how to break through the five key barriers that make people resist differing opinions. With a combination of psychological research, pop-culture references, and anecdotes from Justin's many years of experience mediating contentious conversations, this book will help you understand people on the other side of the argument and give you the tools you need to change their minds - even if they've fallen for "fake news."

When We Walk By takes an urgent look at homelessness in America, showing us what we lose—in ourselves and as a society—when we choose to walk past and ignore our neighbors in shelters, insecure housing, or on the streets. And it brilliantly shows what we stand to gain when we embrace our humanity and move toward evidence-based people-first, community-driven solutions, offering social analysis, economic and political histories, and the real stories of unhoused people.

We can find oneness in meditation, in community, or in awe at the beauty around us. Another option: psychedelic medicines that can catalyze a connection with the self, with nature, or the cosmos. Good Chemistry points us on the right path to forging true and deeper attachments with our own souls, to one another, and even to our planet, helping us heal ourselves and our world.

If you want relations that bring joy, fulfilment, and peace into your life. Then you’re looking at the right book. Most people have a hard time nurturing long-term, meaningful relationships. You’re exposed to new people daily at work, at the gym, or even at the supermarket. Despite this, less than one in ten interactions end up flourishing into a friendship.

We experience change in four phases. The first is panic. Then we adapt. Then we find a new normal. And then, finally, we reach the phase we could not have imagined in the beginning, the moment when we realize that we wouldn’t go back. Build for Tomorrow is designed to accelerate that process—to help you lessen your panic, adapt faster, define the new normal, and thrive going forward. And it arrives as we all, in some way, have felt a shift in our lives.

Ideas are everywhere, but those with the greatest problem-solving, business-transforming, and life-changing potential are often hard to identify. Even when we recognize good ideas, applying them to everyday obstacles - whether in the workplace, our homes, or our civic institutions - can seem insurmountable. According to Matthew Syed, it doesn't have to be this way. In Rebel Ideas, Syed argues that our brainpower as individuals isn't enough. To tackle problems from climate change to economic decline, we'll need to employ the power of "cognitive diversity".

Physician Ed Wheat has helped thousands of couples improve their love lives and build happier marriages. In Love Life for Every Married Couple, he'll help you improve your marriage through sharing, touching, appreciating, and focusing healing attention on your mate. Answering physical, psychological, and stress-related questions in a Christian context, Dr. Wheat demonstrates how to bring your feelings of love back to life.

Parenting teenagers is one of the biggest challenges parents face. New realities make becoming independent more difficult. Teens are traveling a different road and are moving at a different pace than those of previous generations. Today's cultural environment is more complicated and confusing than ever. But fear not! Family expert Jim Burns provides a handy guide for parenting teens.

In The Wheel of Life, when Kübler-Ross was 71 years old and facing her own death, this world-renowned healer told the story of her extraordinary life. Having taught the world how to die well, she offered a lesson on how to live well. The Wheel of Life is an adventure of the heart - powerful, controversial, inspirational - a fitting legacy of a powerful life.

Elevate the Debate helps researchers of all types more effectively communicate their work in any number of areas, from traditional news outlets to the new media platforms of the digital age. After listening to this book, you will be inspired and equipped to use traditional and digital media environments to your advantage. This real-world guide helps you present your data-driven research with greater clarity, coherence, and impact.

In this groundbreaking book, New York Times best-selling author and Hollywood producer DeVon Franklin dishes the real truth about men by making the compelling case that men aren’t dogs, but all men share the same struggle. He uses the metaphor of a dog that needs training as a way to explore why behavior persists in men that can lead them to act against their vows, their integrity, and even their character.

When Professor Bernadette Atuahene moved to Detroit, she planned to study the city’s squatting phenomenon. What she accidentally found was too urgent to ignore. Her neighbors, many of whom had owned their homes for decades, were losing them to property tax foreclosure, leaving once bustling Black neighborhoods blighted with vacant homes. Through years of dogged investigation and research, Atuahene uncovered a system of predatory governance, where public officials raise public dollars through laws and processes that produce or sustain racial inequity.

What really drives success and failure? Can I trust you? It's the question that strikes at the heart of human existence. Whether we're talking about business partnerships, romantic relationships, child-parent bonds, or the brave new world of virtual interaction, trust, when correctly placed, is what makes our world spin and lives flourish. Renowned psychologist David DeSteno brings together the latest research from diverse fields, including psychology, economics, biology, and robotics, to create a compelling narrative about the forces that have shaped the human mind's propensities to trust.

In this must-have for anyone who wants to better understand their love life, a mathematician pulls back the curtain and reveals the hidden patterns—from dating sites to divorce, sex to marriage—behind the rituals of love. The roller coaster of romance is hard to quantify; defining how lovers might feel from a set of simple equations is impossible. But that doesn’t mean that mathematics isn’t a crucial tool for understanding love. Love, like most things in life, is full of patterns. And mathematics is ultimately the study of patterns—from predicting the weather to the fluctuations of the stock market, the movement of planets or the growth of cities. These patterns twist and turn and warp and evolve just as the rituals of love do.

According to the 2010 US census, more than 70 percent of Black women in America are unmarried. Black Women, Black Love reveals how four centuries of laws, policies, and customs have created that crisis. Dianne Stewart begins in the colonial era, when slave owners denied Blacks the right to marry, divided families, and, in many cases, raped enslaved women and girls. Later, during Reconstruction and the ensuing decades, violence split couples again as millions embarked on the Great Migration north.