Well World

Early-morning jackhammering from construction down the block. The dull roar of jet overflights. Your officemate's phone conversations. Noise is everywhere, disrupting our sleep, ratcheting up our stress, destroying our concentration—yet it's a problem that many of us shrug off once the immediate annoyance passes. In Clamor, Chris Berdik reveals noise as one of the most pervasive, yet underacknowledged, pollutants in our daily lives, the harms of which extend far beyond our hearing, from our children's learning outcomes to our longevity to the natural world around us.

Human sacrifice still goes on uncomfortably close to home - cases have been found in the U.S., Europe, and the United Kingdom. In other parts of the world, such as South America, ritual killing is almost commonplace. Human Sacrifice investigates the terrifying current spate of human sacrifices and ritual killings. Jimmy Lee Shreeve draws on police reports and interviews with the victims' families to paint a horrifying picture of ritual sacrifice at home and abroad.

In The Burnout Fix, award-winning psychologist and board-certified leadership coach Dr. Jacinta M. Jimenez shows you how to harness science-backed resilience strategies to survive, and thrive, in today's "always on, always connected" world - where a reported 60 percent of employees report being stressed out all or most of the time at work.

In The Distracted Mind, leading psychologist Larry Rosen and pioneering neuroscientist Adam Gazzaley explain why our minds have become addicted to email, text messages, virtual worlds, and social media such as Facebook and Twitter. Through compelling true stories and scientific research, they show how digital distractions affect every aspect of life, from work, safety, and communication to our relationships and health.

In this first-of-its-kind book, Sol Smith combines current research, his personal experience as a late-diagnosed autistic adult, and lessons learned as an educator to show how you can transcend common mischaracterizations, overcome shame, and gain the skills to flourish. Sol knows that neurodivergent people often feel that nothing they have been taught relates to how they experience the world. To resolve this conflict, they try to change or mask who they are, which can cause isolation, depression, and anxiety. He advises the opposite: Understand yourself, accept yourself, and reduce conflict.

Elinor Cleghorn became an unwell woman 10 years ago. She was diagnosed with an autoimmune disease after a long period of being told her symptoms were anything from psychosomatic to a possible pregnancy. As Elinor learned to live with her unpredictable disease, she turned to history for answers, and found an enraging legacy of suffering, mystification, and misdiagnosis. In Unwell Women, Elinor Cleghorn traces the almost unbelievable history of how medicine has failed women by treating their bodies as alien and other, often to perilous effect.

War can settle disputes, topple tyrants, and bend the trajectory of civilization—sometimes to the breaking point. From Troy to Hiroshima, moments when war has ended in utter annihilation have reverberated through the centuries, signaling the end of political systems, cultures, and epochs. Though much has changed over the millennia, human nature remains the same. In The End of Everything, military historian Victor Davis Hanson narrates a series of sieges and sackings that span the age of antiquity to the conquest of the New World to show how societies descend into barbarism and obliteration.

A gripping intellectual adventure story, Sailing from Byzantium sweeps you from the deserts of Arabia to the dark forests of northern Russia, from the colorful towns of Renaissance Italy to the final moments of a millennial city under siege.

Are you constantly glued to your phone, endlessly scrolling, or feeling overwhelmed by digital distractions? The Essential Digital Detox Plan is your step-by-step guide to breaking free from tech overload and regaining control of your time, focus, and well-being.

This collection of short stories and novelettes includes the previously published stories "The Potter's Daughter" (a prequel to the novel The Element of Fire), "Holy Places", "Rites of Passage", "Houses of the Dead", "Reflections" (the Giliead and Ilias stories, prequels to the Fall of Ile-Rien trilogy), as well as "Night at the Opera" (a Nicholas and Reynard story original to this collection, set before the Nebula-nominated novel The Death of the Necromancer).

Plenty of experts argue that anyone who wants to develop a skill, play an instrument, or lead their field should start early, focus intensely, and rack up as many hours of deliberate practice as possible. But a closer look at research on the world’s top performers shows that early specialization is the exception, not the rule. David Epstein examined the world’s most successful athletes, artists, musicians, inventors, forecasters and scientists. He discovered that in most fields—especially those that are complex and unpredictable—generalists, not specialists, are primed to excel.

If there is one belief that has united the left and the right, psychologists and philosophers, ancient thinkers and modern ones, it is the tacit assumption that humans are bad. It's a notion that drives newspaper headlines and guides the laws that shape our lives. From Machiavelli to Hobbes, Freud to Pinker, the roots of this belief have sunk deep into Western thought. Human beings, we're taught, are by nature selfish and governed primarily by self-interest.

The night after a shooting star is seen streaking through the sky from Mars, a cylinder is discovered on Horsell Common in London. At first, naïve locals approach the cylinder armed just with a white flag - only to be quickly killed by an all-destroying heat ray, as terrifying tentacled invaders emerge. Soon the whole of human civilisation is under threat, as powerful Martians build gigantic killing machines, destroy all in their path with black gas and burning rays, and feast on the warm blood of trapped, still-living human prey.

Now more than ever, our children need to learn about the people who live all around the world. This engaging guide to other lands weaves world history into a storybook format. Designed as a project for parents and children to share (or for older listeners to enjoy alone), this book covers the major historical events in the years 1600-1850 on each continent, with tales from each culture.

From his impoverished childhood in a working-class English family and determination to educate himself at any cost to his complicated marriages, love affair with socialism, and the serious ill health that dominated his twenties and thirties, H. G. Wells's extraordinary early life would set him on a path to become one of the world's most influential writers. In this remarkable biography, Claire Tomalin paints a fascinating portrait of a man like no other, driven by curiosity and desiring reform, a socialist and a futurist whose new and imaginative worlds continue to inspire today.

Athena Aktipis of Arizona State University is a self-professed apocalypse enthusiast, and as the host of the podcast Zombified, she knows the undead inside and out. With Zombified: Real-World Lessons from Fictional Apocalypses, she’s compiled her research and insights into a fascinating Audible Original that will have you thinking deeper about all those shambling, brain-hungry corpses in pop culture—not to mention our everyday lives. Drawing on years of research on zombies and zombification, these six lessons offer a fun way to explore and understand the many forces that influence us.

Despite the immense popularity of yoga today, there is surprisingly little knowledge of its roots among practitioners. This book brings together the core teachings of yoga in the words of their authors, rather than in the secondary versions of modern interpreters. Including key passages from the Upanishads, the Buddhist and Jaina traditions, the yoga sections of the Indian Tantras, and many texts that are being critically translated for the first time, Roots of Yoga provides a comprehensive and immediate insight into the essential texts of the Indian traditions of yoga.

Written by an author with plenty of experience holding a scalpel, Dr. David Schneider's in-depth biography is an encompassing history of the practice that has leapt forward over the centuries from the dangerous guesswork of ancient Greek physicians through the world-changing implant revolution of the 20th century.

Known as the "Big Book", the basic text of Alcoholics Anonymous has helped millions of people worldwide get and stay sober since the first edition appeared in 1939. Opening chapters articulate A.A.’s program of recovery from alcoholism - the original Twelve Steps - and recount the personal histories of A.A.'s co-founders, Bill W. and Dr. Bob.

When three-month-old Lia Lee arrived at the county hospital emergency room in Merced, California, a chain of events was set in motion from which neither she nor her parents nor her doctors would ever recover. Lia's parents, Foua and Nao Kao, were part of a large Hmong community in Merced, refugees from the CIA-run "Quiet War" in Laos.