Higher Worlds

The religious turn to their faith to find meaning. But what about the many people who lead secular lives and are also hungry for meaning? What guides, what approaches are available to them? Distinguished philosophers Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly explain that a secular life charged with meaning is indeed within reach.

The air war over Europe during World War II proved that combat in the sky can be even more devastating than combat on the ground. When the war ended, every major city in Germany was virtually destroyed. A German writer admitted that his own nation, in taking up the sword to conquer the world, had "summoned up those bands of furies which raced across the German skies".

Ruth Ben-Ghiat is the expert on the "strongman" playbook employed by authoritarian demagogues from Mussolini to Putin. In Strongmen, she lays bare the blueprint these leaders have followed over the past 100 years, and empowers us to recognize, resist, and prevent their disastrous rule in the future.

Set on a planet in a parallel universe where magic is a reality, these high fantasy novels from the Witch World series transport you to the western continent of High Hallack, illustrating why prolific author Andre Norton was named a Grand Master by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America.

Llyn Roberts shares her years of experience with indigenous healers, shamans, and Elders who come from cultures that know how to shapeshift realities. She translates ancient techniques into easy-to-understand modern practices that you can use every day to transform personal imbalances, open to your life purpose, deepen your relationship with spirit and nature, and reclaim your power to make a positive difference in the world.

In this monumental story of American imperial conquest and capitalist development, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Steven Hahn dismantles the conventional histories of the 19th century and offers a perspective that promises to be as enduring as it is controversial. It begins and ends in Mexico and is throughout internationalist in orientation. It challenges the political narrative of sectionalism, emphasizing the national footing of slavery and the struggle between the Northeast and the Mississippi Valley for continental supremacy.

Rules of the quantum world seem to say that a cat can be both alive and dead at the same time and a particle can be in two places at once. And that particle is also a wave; everything in the quantum world can described in terms of waves - or entirely in terms of particles. These interpretations were all established by the end of the 1920s, by Erwin Schrödinger, Werner Heisenberg, Paul Dirac, and others. But no one has yet come up with a common sense explanation of what is going on.

When the towers fell on September 11, 2001, nowhere were the reverberations more powerfully felt than at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. Almost overnight, the intelligence organization evolved into a warfighting intelligence service, constructing what was known internally as "the Program": a web of top-secret detention facilities intended to help prevent future attacks on American soil and around the world. With Black Site, former deputy director of the CIA Counterterrorist Center Philip Mudd presents a full, never-before-told story of this now-controversial program.

Leadership is often a risky, lonely role possessing nearly unbearable lows and fleeting highs. Despite this emotionally and intellectually draining roller coaster, a handful of leaders deliver stunning results, with great consistency. They push past current leadership trends in order to achieve the most extremely challenging goals. They don't fall prey to the platitudes or cliches we see so often see in leadership theory. Instead, they succeed by recognizing and surviving the dangers that challenge them as they take themselves and their teams to higher levels.

In the Void beyond Aster Fall, Sam stands watch at the fortress of Silverguard, protecting the world from an ancient enemy. His strength as an Astral Titan is all that stands between it and destruction. Meanwhile, dimensional cracks are spreading through the World Seal, the barrier that protects Aster Fall from invasion by the Outsider galaxy. Flaws are appearing with increasing frequency as demonic armies flood through, including old enemies from the First War. If the seal fails completely, Aster Fall will break and disaster will follow.

Good Poems includes poems about lovers, children, failure, everyday life, death, and transcendence. It features the work of classic poets, such as Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, and Robert Frost, as well as the work of contemporary greats such as Howard Nemerov, Charles Bukowski, Donald Hall, Billy Collins, Robert Bly, and Sharon Olds Good Poems includes poems about lovers, children, failure, everyday life, death, and transcendence.

Light of the Stars is science at the grandest of scales, and it tells a radically new story about what we are: one world in a universe awash in planets. Building on his widely discussed scientific papers and New York Times op-eds, astrophysicist Adam Frank shows that not only is it likely that alien civilizations have existed many times before, but also that many of them have driven their own worlds into dangerous eras of change.

The Western Front evokes images of mud-spattered men in waterlogged trenches, shielded from artillery blasts and machine-gun fire by a few feet of dirt. This iconic setting was the most critical arena of the Great War. In this epic narrative history, the first volume in a groundbreaking trilogy on the Great War, Nick Lloyd captures the horrific fighting on the Western Front beginning with the surprise German invasion of Belgium in August 1914 and taking us to the Armistice of November 1918.

In How the World Sees You, author and personal branding expert Sally Hogshead applies the principles of fascination triggers to understanding "personality brands"—how individuals use different triggers to influence, persuade, and captivate others. You already know how you see yourself and the world. But how does the world see you? If you want to be heard and remembered, if you want people to take action on your ideas and opinions, then you need to get the full picture.

In this groundbreaking work, evolutionary biologist Jared Diamond stunningly dismantles racially based theories of human history by revealing the environmental factors actually responsible for history's broadest patterns. It is a story that spans 13,000 years of human history, beginning when Stone Age hunter-gatherers constituted the entire human population. Guns, Germs, and Steel is a world history that really is a history of all the world's peoples, a unified narrative of human life.

All of us are faced countless times with the challenge of persuading others, whether we're trying to win a trivial argument with a friend or convince our coworkers about an important decision. Instead of relying on untrained instinct - and often failing as a result - we'd win more arguments if we learned the timeless art of verbal persuasion, or rhetoric.

Drawing on new and often startling information from newly opened Soviet, Eastern European, and Chinese archives, this thrilling account explores the strategic dynamics that drove the Cold War, provides illuminating portraits of its major personalities, and offers much fresh insight into its most crucial events. Riveting, revelatory, and wise, it tells a story whose lessons it is vitally necessary to understand as America once more faces an implacable ideological enemy.

The plan had sounded simple, Step into Hell and save a Tree. That was all I had needed to do. However, that plan was becoming more complicated by the minute and that list was growing eternally bigger. Like killing demonic Queens, Removing Claiming Hexes Outrunning hungry beasts And mainly, trying not to piss off Vampire boyfriends, any more than being constantly kidnapped down in Hell is likely to do. And now fate had chosen me to be its blood queen. Only one fuelled by… The Roots of Rage.

From ants scurrying under leaf litter to bees able to fly higher than Mount Kilimanjaro, insects are everywhere. Three out of every four of our planet's known animal species are insects. In The Insect Crisis, Oliver Milman dives into the torrent of recent evidence that suggests this kaleidoscopic group of creatures is suffering the greatest existential crisis in its remarkable 400-million-year history.

Managing the Unexpected, third edition, is a thoroughly revised text that offers an updated look at the groundbreaking ideas explored in the first and second editions. Revised to reflect events emblematic of the unique challenges that organizations have faced in recent years, including bank failures, intelligence failures, quality failures, and other organizational misfortunes, often sparked by organizational actions, this critical book focuses on why some organizations are better able to sustain high performance in the face of unanticipated change.