内容简介 本书是关于我们如何从科学的视角重新认识这个世界的科普读物,阐述了宇宙、世界、生命科学视角下,对世界本源的认识,并结合生物学、数学、物理学和计算机科学知识,更加细致入微地解释我们观察到的世界中的各类现象。 在这本书中,作者希望表明我们的宇宙不仅仅是一座没有生命、毫无意义的数学机器。在我们真正了解意识和人类思想的奇迹之前,我们能真正了解宇宙吗?为了做到这一点,作者超越了物理世界去寻找答案。对于对生命、宇宙和一切事物的深层问题感到好奇的读者来说,《世界本身》是一本必不可少的读物。
What I Love About You offers a fresh way to say "I loveyou." This fill-in-the-blank book prompts you to say what is in yourheart, but may not always be at the tip of your tongue. Tell themost important person in your life just how much they mean to youby completing the scores of unique, evocative checklists, shortanswers, and phrases in this attractive gift book: If we'd first met in a comic strip, the thought bubble over myhead would have said... I adore this little daily ritual or habit we have... One of your most irresistible physical features is... I missed you when... Playful, tender, and personal, this is the perfect gift for theperson in your life who makes your pulse race.
The Vegetarian Way is the vegetarian bible.It is an authoritative, comprehensive, single-source reference bookfor the growing number of people who are embracing a vegetariandiet, as well as for more than 12 million Americans who are alreadycommitted vegetarians.
At the beginning of thetwentieth century, the South Pole was the most coveted prize in thefiercely nationalistic modern age of exploration. In this brilliantdual biography, the award-winning writer Roland Huntford reexaminesevery detail of the great race to the South Pole between Britain'sRobert Scott and Norway's Roald Amundsen. Scott, who died along theway with four of his men only eleven miles from his next cache ofsupplies, became Britain's beloved failure, while Amundsen, who notonly beat Scott to the Pole but returned alive, was largelyforgotten. This account of their race is a gripping, highlyreadable history that captures the driving ambitions of the era andthe complex, often deeply flawed men who were charged with carryingthem out. The Last Place on Earth is the first of Huntford's masterly trilogyof polar biographies. It is also the only work on the subject inthe English language based on the original Norwegian sources, towhich Huntford returned to revise and update this edition.
The most riveting political biography of our time, Robert A.Caro’s life of Lyndon B. Johnson, continues. Master of theSenate takes Johnson’s story through one of its most remarkableperiods: his twelve years, from 1949 through 1960, in the UnitedStates Senate. Once the most august and revered body in politics,by the time Johnson arrived the Senate had become a parody ofitself and an obstacle that for decades had blocked desperatelyneeded liberal legislation. Caro shows how Johnson’s brilliance,charm, and ruthlessness enabled him to become the youngest and mostpowerful Majority Leader in history and how he used hisincomparable legislative genius--seducing both Northern liberalsand Southern conservatives--to pass the first Civil Rightslegislation since Reconstruction. Brilliantly weaving rich detailinto a gripping narrative, Caro gives us both a galvanizingportrait of Johnson himself and a definitive and revelatory studyof the workings of legislative power.
The long-awaited, complete guide to the popular, vigorousAmerican method of yoga that is deeply rooted in ancient wisdom and*ures “In this day and age of health and fitness trends, it is assuringto know that Sharon and David encourage their students to drawinspiration from the classical texts of Yoga and timeless*ural sources. What I appreciate so much about David andSharon is how they help their Yoga students to understand andappreciate the wisdom of all the great saints and jivamuktas whohave contributed to raising consciousness. Ultimately, it isSelf-Realization, that is the true goal of Yoga.” –SRI SWAMI SATCHIDANANDA Creators of the extremely popular Jivamukti Yoga method andcofounders of the New York City studios where it is taught, SharonGannon and David Life present their unique style of yoga for thefirst time in book form. As they explain their intensely physicaland spiritual system of flowing postures, they provide inspiringexpert instruction to guide you
Based on the combination of human development theories with feminist theories, this book has made deep analysis of the problems concerning women's development in contemporary China and put forward realistic solutions to these problems. Chapter one probes into the key and hot points of women' s development in the transforming period and asks what the reasonable mode of women's development is. Chapter two gives theoretical analysis of women's development and emphasizes the significance of gender perspective in human development. Chapter three reviews the historical course of Chinese women's development covering its merits and demerits,experience and characteristics.
Want to read faster — and recall more of what you read? Thispractical, hands-on guide gives you the techniques you need toincrease your reading speed and retention, whether you're readingbooks, e-mails, magazines, or even technical journals! You'll findreading aids and plenty of exercises to help you read faster andbetter comprehend the text. Yes, you can speed read — discover the skills you need to readquickly and effectively, break your bad reading habits, and take inmore text at a glance Focus on the fundamentals — widen your vision span and see how toincrease your comprehension, retention, and recall Advance your speed-reading skills — read blocks of text, heightenyour concentration, and follow an author's thought patterns Zero in on key points — skim, scan, and preread to quickly locatethe information you want Expand your vocabulary — recognize the most common words andphrases to help you move through the text more quickly Open the book and find:
Have you ever wanted to set up your own totally cool club?Then check out this fabulous book to guide you on your way.
An absolutely wonderful book. --Russell Baker "Rick Bragg writes like a man on fire. And All Over but theShoutin' is a work of art. While reading this book, I fell in lovewith Rick Bragg's mother, Margaret Bragg, a hundred times. I feltlike I was reading one of the prophets in the Old Testament whenreading parts of this book. I thought of Melville, I thought ofFaulkner. Because I love the English language, I knew I was readingone of the best books I've ever read. By explaining his life to theworld, Rick Bragg explained part of my life to me. You feel thingsin every line this man writes. His sentences bleed on you. I weptwhen the book ended. I never met Rick Bragg in my life, but Icalled him up and told him he'd written a masterpiece, and I sentflowers to his mother." --Pat Conroy "Searingly honest, beautifully written, All Over but the Shoutin'is perhaps the most courageous thing Pulitzer Prize-winningjournalist Rick Bragg has ever written. Making his reputation on
Most people think of yoga as a solitary activity that isinherently therapeutic. While that is generally true, yoga posesand breathing practices can also be prescribed for specific healthproblems—often in combination with dietary advice taken fromAyurveda, traditional Indian medicine. Yoga Therapy is an essentialguide for yoga teachers, advanced practitioners, and anyone whowants to make therapeutic use of yoga. A. G. and Indra Mohanprescribe postures, breathing techniques, and basic Ayurvedicprinciples for a variety of common health problems, includingasthma, back pain, constipation, hip pain, knee pain, menstrualproblems, and scoliosis. Yoga Therapy is one of the few books that shows yoga teachers howto put together appropriate yoga sequences and breathing techniquesfor their students. Mohan details how to correctly move into, hold,and move out of poses, how to breathe during practice to achievespecific results, and how to customize a yoga practice by creatingsequences of yoga poses for a particular pers
F.A. Hayek (1899-1992) was among the most important economistsand political philosophers of the twentieth century. He is widelyregarded as the principal intellectual force behind the triumph ofglobal capitalism, an 'anti-Marx' who did more than any otherrecent thinker to elucidate the theoretical foundations of the freemarket economy. His account of the role played by market prices intransmitting economic knowledge constituted a devastating critiqueof the socialist ideal of central economic planning, and his famousbook The Road to Serfdom was a prophetic statement of the dangerswhich socialism posed to a free and open society. He also madesignificant contributions to fields as diverse as the philosophy oflaw, the theory of complex systems, and cognitive science. Theessays in this volume, by an international team of contributors,provide a critical introduction to all aspects of Hayek'sthought.
"This book is a gift, and not only to Jordan."–USA Today In 2005, First Sergeant Charles Monroe King began to write whatwould become a two-hundred-page journal for his son in case he didnot make it home from the war in Iraq. He was killed by a roadsidebomb on October 14, 2006. His son, Jordan, was seven months old. AJournal for Jordan is a mother’s letter to her son about the fatherhe lost before he could even speak–including a fiercely honestaccount of her search for answers about Charles’s death. It is alsoa father’s advice and prayers for the son he will never know.Finally, this is the story of Dana and Charles together–twoseemingly mismatched souls who loved each other deeply and losteach other too soon.
The only thing wrong with this readable, funny memoir of a magazine writer's yearlong travels across the world in search of pleasure and balance is that it seems so much like a Jennifer Aniston movie. Like Jen, Liz is a plucky blond American woman in her thirties with no children and no major money worries. As the book opens, she is going through a really bad divorce and subsequent stormy rebound love affair. Awash in tears in the middle of the night on the floor of the bathroom, she begins to pray for guidance, "you know -- like, to God." God answers. He tells her to go back to bed. I started seeing the Star headlines: "Jen's New Faith!" "What Really Happened at the Ashram!" "Jen's Brazilian Sugar Daddy -- Exclusive Photos!" Please understand that Gilbert, whose earlier nonfiction book, The Last American Man, portrayed a contemporary frontiersman, is serious about her quest. But because she never leaves her self-deprecating humor at home, her journey out of depression and toward belief lacks a certain gravit
A great master of the early Renaissance, Piero della Francescacre-ated paintings for ecclesiastics, confraternities, andillustriousnobles throughout the Italian peninsula. Since the earlytwentiethcentury, the rational space, abstract designs, lucidillumination,and naturalistic details of his pictures haveattracted a wide audi-ence. Piero's treatises on mathematics andperspective also fasci-nate scholars in a wide range ofdisciplines. The Cambridge Com-panion to Piero della Francescabrings together new essays thatoffer a synthesis and overview ofPiero's life and accomplishmentsas a painter and theoretician. Theyexplore a variety of themesassociated with the artist's career,including the historical and reli-gious circumstances surroundingPiero's altarpieces and frescoes;the politics underlying hisportraits; the significance of clothing inhis paintings; theinfluence of his theories on perspective andmathematics; and theartist's enduring fascination for modernpainters and writers.
The #1 New York Times bestselling memoir that inspiredthe film October Sky, Rocket Boys is a uniquelyAmerican memoir--a powerful, luminous story of coming of age at thedawn of the 1960s, of a mother's love and a father's fears, of agroup of young men who dreamed of launching rockets into outerspace . . . and who made those dreams come true. With the grace of a natural storyteller, NASA engineer Homer Hickampaints a warm, vivid portrait of the harsh West Virginia miningtown of his youth, evoking a time of innocence and promise, whenanything was possible, even in a company town that swallowed itsmen alive. A story of romance and loss, of growing up and gettingout, Homer Hickam's lush, lyrical memoir is a chronicle oftriumph--at once exquisitely written and marvelouslyentertaining. Now with 8 pages of photographs.
Since her death in 1979, Jean Rhys's reputation as an importantmodernist author has grown. Her finely crafted prose fiction lendsitself to multiple interpretations from radically differentcritical perspectives; formalism, feminism, and postcolonialstudies among them. This Introduction offers a reliable andstimulating account of her life, work, contexts and criticalreception. Her masterpiece, Wide Sargasso Sea, is analyzed togetherwith her other novels, including Quartet and After Leaving MrMackenzie, and her short stories. Through close readings of theworks, Elaine Savory reveals their common themes and connects theseto different critical approaches. The book maps Rhys's fictionaluse of the actual geography of Paris, London and the Caribbean,showing how key understanding her relationships with themetropolitan and colonial spheres is to reading her texts. In thisinvaluable introduction for students, Savory explains thesignificance of Rhys as a writer both in her lifetime andtoday.
Part diary and part reportage, The Soccer War is aremarkable chronicle of war in the late twentieth century. Between1958 and 1980, working primarily for the Polish Press Agency,Kapuscinski covered twenty-seven revolutions and coups in Africa,Latin America, and the Middle East. Here, with characteristiccogency and emotional immediacy, he recounts the stories behind hisofficial press dispatches—searing firsthand accounts of thefrightening, grotesque, and comically absurd aspects of life duringwar. The Soccer War is a singular work of journalism.
The tormenting of the body by the troubled mind, hysteria isamong the most pervasive of human disorders - yet at the same timeit is the most elusive. Freud's recognition that hysteria stemmedfrom traumas in the patient's past transformed the way we thinkabout sexuality. "Studies in Hysteria" is one of the founding textsof psychoanalysis, revolutionizing our understanding of love,desire and the human psyche.
Here is a personal tribute to “the father of modern yoga” SriTirumalai Krishnamacharya (1888–1989), written by one of hislongtime disciples. Krishnamacharya was a renowned Indian yogamaster, Ayurvedic healer, and scholar who modernized yoga practiceand whose students—including B. K. S. Iyengar, K. Pattabhi Jois, T.K. V. Desikachar, and Indra Devi—dramatically popularized yoga inthe West. In this book, the author, A. G. Mohan, a well-respected yogateacher and yoga therapist, draws on his own memories andKrishnamacharya’s diaries and recorded material, to present afascinating view of the man and his teachings, and Mohan's own warmand inspiring relationship with the master. This portrait of thegreat teacher will be a compelling and informative read for yogateachers and students who truly want to understand the source oftheir tradition and practice.
In 1927, the same year that The Jazz Singer became the firsttalkie, a group of film and studio visionaries organized TheAcademy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. What the Academy beganin 1927 has led to a 75 year parade of glitz, glamour, stars,stargazing, envy, embarrassment, tears, turmoil, controversy,cattiness, style, silliness, excitement and over-the-top emotion asonly Hollywood can serve up. Nowhere has the history of the Oscarsbeen chronicled so lavishly as in the pages of Life, and so, in theSpring of 2003, Life will publish a special celebratory edition:OSCAR! 75 Years of the Academy Awards.
An electrifying memoir from the acclaimed Nicaraguan writer(“A wonderfully free and original talent”—Harold Pinter) andcentral figure in the Sandinista Revolution. Until her early twenties, Gioconda Belli inhabited an upper-classcocoon: sheltered from the poverty in Managua in a world of countryclubs and debutante balls; educated abroad; early marriage andmotherhood. But in 1970, everything changed. Her growingdissatisfaction with domestic life, and a blossoming awareness ofthe social inequities in Nicaragua, led her to join theSandinistas, then a burgeoning but still hidden organization. Shewould be involved with them over the next twenty years at thehighest, and often most dangerous, levels. Her memoir is both a revelatory insider’s account of the Revolutionand a vivid, intensely felt story about coming of age underextraordinary circumstances. Belli writes with both strikinglyricism and candor about her personal and political lives: abouther family, her children, the men in her life; about her po
Freud's religious unbeliefs are too easily dismissed as thestandard scientific rationalism of the twentieth-centuryintellectual, yet he scorned the high-minded humanism of hiscontemporaries. In "Mass Psychology and Analysis of the 'I'" heexplores the notion of 'mass-psychology' - his findings would proveall too prophetic in the years that followed. Writings such as "AReligious Experience" and "The Future of an Illusion" continueearlier work on the essential savagery of the civilized mind, and"Moses the Man" and "Monotheistic Religion" excavates the roots ofreligion and racism, which he concludes are inextricablyintertwined. This remarkable collection reveals Freud not only athis most radically pessimistic, but also at his most personallycourageous - engaging with his own adherences, his own antecedents,his own identity.
In this riveting and relentless nonfiction thriller,award-winning investigative reporter William C. Rempel tells theharrowing story of former Cali cartel insider Jorge Salcedo, anordinary man facing an extraordinary dilemma—a man forced to riskeverything to escape the powerful and treacherous Cali crimesyndicate. Colombia in the 1990s is a country in chaos, as a weak governmentbattles guerrilla movements and narco-traffickers, including thenotorious Pablo Escobar and his rivals in the Cali cartel. EnterJorge Salcedo, a part-time soldier, a gifted engineer, a respectedbusinessman and family man—and a man who despises Pablo Escobar forpatriotic and deeply personal reasons. He is introduced to thegodfathers of the Cali cartel, who are at war with Escobar anddesperately want their foe dead. With mixed feelings, Jorge agreesto help them. Once inside, Jorge rises to become head of security for MiguelRodríguez Orejuela, principal godfather of the $7-billion-a-yearCali drug cartel. Jorge tries