“A landmark book in the science of emotions and its implications for ethics and human universals.”―Library Journal, starred review
In this startling study of human emotion, Dacher Keltner investigates an unanswered question of human evolution: If humans are hardwired to lead lives that are “nasty, brutish, and short,” why have we evolved with positive emotions like gratitude, amusement, awe, and compassion that promote ethical action and cooperative societies? Illustrated with more than fifty photographs of human emotions, Born to Be Good takes us on a journey through scientific discovery, personal narrative, and Eastern philosophy. Positive emotions, Keltner finds, lie at the core of human nature and shape our everyday behavior―and they just may be the key to understanding how we can live our lives better. 60 photos
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As a guardian for his colony, Julian Sawyer travels to Earth to bring back the Chosen - women who possess energy potent enough to help revitalize his people. The stunning, silver-clad beauty who strides into his club one night radiates a sensual magnetism unlike any he's encountered, and Julian realizes that Asia Callahan is not just Chosen, she is his kindra: his one true mate. For months, Asia has tracked the beautiful and mysterious Julian across the country, convinced that he's behind the disappearance of her sister and a dozen other women. She's prepared to believe he's a ruthless killer, but when she presents herself as bait, she discovers that the truth is far more shocking. Taken to a strange, hazardous realm she never knew existed, Asia will face the ultimate choice - between abandoning the life she's always known, and forsaking a passion as dangerous as it is powerful. Views: 26
Containing work reprinted in Best Non-Required Reading 2008, Best New American Voices 2010, and The Pushcart Prizes 2010, the stories in Laura van den Berg's rich and inventive debut illuminate the intersection of the mythic and the mundane.A failed actress takes a job as a Bigfoot inpersonator. A bontanist seeking a rare flower crosses path with a group of men hunting the Loch Ness Monster. A disillusioned missionary in Africa grapples with grief and a growing obsession with a creature rumored to live in the forest of the Congo. And in the title story, a young woman traveling with her scientist mother in Madagascar confronts her burgeoning sexuality and her dream of becoming a long-distance swimmer.Rendered with precision and longing, the women who narrate these starkly beautiful stories are consumed with searching -- for absolution, for solace, for the flash of extraordinary in the ordinary that will forever alter their lives. Views: 26
Amazon.com ReviewMorgan Stanley's David M. Darst on Dear Mr. Buffett: What an Investor Learns 1,269 Miles from Wall Street In 14 Chapters, 265 pages, and 443 footnotes drawing upon 119 sources, structured finance and derivatives consultant and expert witness Janet M. Tavakoli writes about her “meeting with Warren Buffett on the eve of the greatest market meltdown in history” and how meeting him subtly changed the way she looks at global financial markets.But Dear Mr. Buffett: What an Investor Learns 1,269 Miles from Wall Street is much more than a personal investing bildungsroman. The book is so loaded with lessons, warnings, admonishments, and recommendations that readers will find themselves copiously underlining the text and filling the margins with stars, checkmarks, and exclamation points. Dear Mr. Buffett is wide ranging and hard hitting, written with humility, great specificity, honesty, humanity, and historical awareness.Captious (or offended) readers may criticize the book as: too harsh in parts; overly broad-brush in its treatment of micro and macro events; and possibly bordering on solipsism when Tavakoli frequently cites her own articles, letters, e-mail exchanges, telephone conversations, and television appearances. Serious financial debacles in the post-Millennium years have left plenty of blame to be apportioned among firms, regulators, the financial system, and let’s face it, human nature, and though polite and deferential, Tavakoli (called by Business Week “the Cassandra of credit derivatives”) is not reticent. At times, her tone can be Biblically prophetic.That said, Dear Mr. Buffett is worth its weight in gold for two main reasons. First, the timeless investment lessons laced throughout the book. To cite a few: Warren does not rely on a price because that is what you pay. He relies on value because that is what you get (page 23). The five most dangerous words in business may be “Everybody else is doing it” (page 38). Janet Tavakoli’s Theory of Everything in Finance: The value of any financial transaction is based on the timing of cash flows, the frequency of cash flows, the magnitude of cash flows, and the probability of receipt of those cash flows (page 69). One of Warren Buffet’s core principles: Don’t lend money to people who can’t pay you back. If you do not understand something, do not invest (page 105). The fraud triangle: need, opportunity, and the ability to rationalize one’s behavior (page 199). Second, the book contains lucid, lapidary descriptions of options backdating (Chapter 3); mortgages (Chapter 5); complex structured products, securitizations, and off-balance sheet vehicles (Chapter 7); and the perils of leverage and the developments leading to the difficulties at Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, and other financial enterprises (Chapters 8 and 9).Parts of the book read like replaying a YouTube video of a hurricane. Whether or not you agree with Tavakoli in all cases on the details and/or her approach, what comes through in every sentence is her conviction and courage in recounting what happened and her creativity and concretization in proposing safeguards and solutions. In the Preface, she says she is “still learning,” and the financial realm stands the richer from her energy, discernment, persistence, erudition, curiosity, insight, and human empathy.Read this book as soon as you can. As Warren Edward Buffett has said, “Janet Tavakoli should have been listened to much more carefully in the past... and will be in the future.”David M. Darst is a Managing Director at Morgan Stanley. He serves as Chief Investment Strategist of the firm's Global Wealth Management Group and is the Chairman of the Asset Allocation Committee. Darst is also the founding president of the Morgan Stanley Investment Group. Prior to joining Morgan Stanley in 1996, he was with Goldman Sachs for over twenty years, where he served as a senior executive in the Equities Division. Darst is often quoted in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Financial Times, among others. He is also a frequent guest on CNBC, Bloomberg, and FOX News. He earned his MBA from Harvard Business School and received a BA in economics from Yale University. Darst is a CFA charterholder.ReviewAltogether this book is an excellent read, loaded with information about the goings-on in the financial sector in the US till as recently as September 2008. The is informal, almost like a conversation in a lounge bar, racy, laced with wit and when it comments on leading actors in the drama, dipped in vitriol. Tavakoli is a name we will be hearing about frequently in the near future. (_Business Standard_) "_Dear Buffett_ is must reading . . . in a way that only Tavakoli could provide. . . Tavakoli knows her stuff. She knows where the bodies are buried in the complex formulas. . . And, almost as a bonus, we get Buffett's views and insights into his derivatives trading. There's nothing more you could ask for in a financial book in this day and age of financial derivatives meltdown." (_Economic Policy Journal_) "...full of anecdotes, details and character sketches that add depth...she knows her stuff, has strong opinions and turns a colourful quote." (_Financial Times_, February 21st 2009) "A clear and pacy run through the multitude of sins and sinners in the modern financial world. . . full of anecdotes, details and character sketches that add depth and colour to even the best known episodes of the past two years. [Tavakoli] also covers events only a few years before the current crisis that should have been big warning signs. The correspondence between Buffett and Tavakoli over the past three years reinforced her existing views on the dangers of complex finance. And with Buffett's blessing, this book will find a ready-made fan base with little marketing effort. . . Tavakoli makes for an attractive pundit - she knows her stuff, has strong opinions and turns a colourful quote. . . There is a healthy dose of "I told you so" about this volume - but, to be fair, Tavakoli is one of the few who did." (_Financial Times_) "[Tavakoli has] been railing against emperors wearing no clothes in the credit derivatives markets forever...
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He's an officer...but is he a gentleman?Not if you ask feisty single mom Kate MacDonald! Everything about Lieutenant Craig Cole, Nantucket's new Coast Guard commander, rubs her the wrong way. Worse, everyone else is smitten with the man--including Kate's four-year-old daughter. Local gossip reveals that Craig has saved many in the line of duty. He's a true hero. Kate doesn't want to like him--she certainly doesn't want to love him--but Craig's quiet honor could win her heart after all. Views: 26
Known for her passionate, sensual and edgy poetry, Dorothy Porter was one of Australia's truly original writers. She was twice short-listed for Australia's premier literary award, the Miles Franklin, and her verse novel The Monkey's Mask is a modern Australian classic.The Bee Hut, her fifteenth book, brings together the poems she wrote in the last five years of her life. By turns expansive and intimate, effusive and contemplative, these poems roam widely: there are journeys into history and to sacred places both mythic and deeply personal. As Andrea Goldsmith writes in her preface, Porter's writing "glows and shimmers" with passionate curiosity and exuberant love of life."Moving and powerful...it shows all of Porter's strengths." – the Age"Her imagery is fresh and acute...one is very aware of the intellect at work here" – Sydney Morning Herald"It's hard not to be uplifted by this writing and this woman" – Courier... Views: 26
A little pony sparkling with magic. But his big wish is for a special friend!And so Steph's lonely stable days suddenly become filled with magical fun when she meets shy little piebald pony, Comet... Views: 26
Book One of The Tununda Mysteries With the discovery of a campaign journal from an American Revolutionary War officer who fought against the Iroquois Indians, the U.S. Army calls in their top field historian to assess its contents. Jake Tununda, combat vet, Freemason, and half-Seneca Indian is stunned when he gleans from the journal's cryptic Masonic passages clues to the location of an ancient shaman's crown once protected by the White Deer Society, a secret cult of his forefathers. Jake soon realizes why his ancestors' history was best kept buried. And why peaceful, rural central New York's Finger Lakes region can be deadlier than any battlefield he had ever faced. CROWN OF SERPENTS, a mystery thriller set in the former heartland of the Iroquois Empire, takes Jake on a fast-paced hunt to find the elusive crown and protect it. He teams up with Rae Hart, an alluring state police investigator, as they snake their way across a politically turbulent landscape marked with murder, arson, lies, and deceit. Deciphering codes, digging up war loot, and fending off the henchmen of billionaire Alex Nero, a ruthless Indian casino magnate, Jake and Rae's survival skills are put to the test. The clues to the crown ultimately lead them deep within sacred Indian caves hidden under the abandoned Seneca Army Depot where the magnitude of the crown's power is revealed. Like CROWN OF SERPENTS? Get MAP OF THIEVES (Book Two of The Tununda Mysteries) at: http://www.amazon.com/Thieves-Tununda-Mysteries-Michael-Karpovage-ebook/dp/B00I921P1OReviewI thought: Indiana Jones meets the Godfather! Read the entire book in two sittings. Had to pause occasionally during the first eight-hour readathon to catch my breath. One of the best novels I have ever read! --- Paulette Likoudis, Finger Lakes Times columnist, Lodi, NYAbout the AuthorMichael Karpovage is a native of western New York and a graduate of the Rochester Institute of Technology. He has worked in the graphic design and marketing field for over twenty years as an award-winning art director and map illustrator. Michael now runs his independent design and publishing firm called Karpovage Creative. He lives in Roswell, GA. Views: 26
