pop fifty:

The Road to Serfdom: Text and Documents--The Definitive Edition (The Collected Works of F. A. Hay...

By: F. A. Hayek

University Of Chicago Press

Outliers: The Story of Success

By: Malcolm Gladwell

Little, Brown and Company

Amazon Best of the Month, November 2008: Now that he's gotten us talking about the viral life of ideas and the power of gut reactions, Malcolm Gladwell poses a more provocative question in Outliers: why do some people succeed, living remarkably productive and impactful lives, while so many more never reach their potential? Challenging our cherished belief of the "self-made man," he makes the democratic assertion that superstars don't arise out of nowhere, propelled by genius and talent: "they are invariably the beneficiaries of hidden advantages and extraordinary opportunities and cultural legacies that allow them to learn and work hard and make sense of the world in ways others cannot." Examining the lives of outliers from Mozart to Bill Gates, he builds a convincing ca...

The Obama Diaries

By: Laura Ingraham

Threshold Editions

(WASHINGTON, D.C.) On May 20, 2010, Laura Ingraham received a package from an anonymous source that will change the history of the United States and the legacy of President Barack Obama. While retrieving her automobile from the underground garage at the Watergate complex (where she had just enjoyed her weekly pedicure), Ingraham discovered a manila envelope on the hood of her car. When she picked it up, a deep baritone voice called out from a nearby stairwell: "Just read it. You’ll know what to do." The shadowy figure then disappeared into the darkness without another word.

The envelope contained copies of what appeared to be diary entries written by President Barack Obama, his family, and high-ranking administration officials. Because the "diaries" are so revealing, Ing...

Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen

By: Christopher McDougall

Knopf

ECOTOPIA

The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals

By: Michael Pollan

Penguin

A national bestseller that has changed the way readers view the ecology of eating, this revolutionary book by award winner Michael Pollan asks the seemingly simple question: What should we have for dinner? Tracing from source to table each of the food chains that sustain us whether industrial or organic, alternative or processedhe develops a portrait of the American way of eating. The result is a sweeping, surprising exploration of the hungers that have shaped our evolution, and of the profound implications our food choices have for the health of our species and the future of our planet.

The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference

By: Malcolm Gladwell

Back Bay Books

This is the best book written by Malcolm Gladwell in my opinion. This is the book that started it all for him. Autographed by the man himself from a talk he did in Santa Barbara, California.

Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything (P.S.)

By: Steven D. Levitt, Stephen J. Dubner

Harper Perennial

Economics is not widely considered to be one of the sexier sciences. The annual Nobel Prize winner in that field never receives as much publicity as his or her compatriots in peace, literature, or physics. But if such slights are based on the notion that economics is dull, or that economists are concerned only with finance itself, Steven D. Levitt will change some minds. In Freakonomics (written with Stephen J. Dubner), Levitt argues that many apparent mysteries of everyday life don't need to be so mysterious: they could be illuminated and made even more fascinating by asking the right questions and drawing connections. For example, Levitt traces the drop in violent crime rates to a drop in violent criminals and, digging further, to the Roe v. Wade decision that preempted the exi...

A People's History of the United States: 1492 to Present

By: Howard Zinn

Harper Perennial Modern Classics

Consistently lauded for its lively, readable prose, this revised and updated edition of A People's History of the United States turns traditional textbook history on its head. Howard Zinn infuses the often-submerged voices of blacks, women, American Indians, war resisters, and poor laborers of all nationalities into this thorough narrative that spans American history from Christopher Columbus's arrival to an afterword on the Clinton presidency.

Addressing his trademark reversals of perspective, Zinn--a teacher, historian, and social activist for more than 20 years--explains, "My point is not that we must, in telling history, accuse, judge, condemn Columbus in absentia. It is too late for that; it would be a useless scholarly exercise in morality. But the e...

Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide (Vintage)

By: Nicholas D. Kristof, Sheryl WuDunn

Vintage

From two of our most fiercely moral voices, a passionate call to arms against our era’s most pervasive human rights violation: the oppression of women and girls in the developing world.

With Pulitzer Prize winners Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn as our guides, we undertake an odyssey through Africa and Asia to meet the extraordinary women struggling there, among them a Cambodian teenager sold into sex slavery and an Ethiopian woman who suffered devastating injuries in childbirth. Drawing on the breadth of their combined reporting experience, Kristof and WuDunn depict our world with anger, sadness, clarity, and, ultimately, hope.

They show how a little help can transform the lives of women and girls abroad. That Cambodian girl eventually escaped from her brothel...

The 7 Habits Of Highly Effective Teens

By: Sean Covey

Fireside

Based on his father's bestselling The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Sean Covey applies the same principles to teens, using a vivacious, entertaining style. To keep it fun, Covey writes, he "stuffed it full of cartoons, clever ideas, great quotes, and incredible stories about real teens from all over the world... along with a few other surprises." Did he ever! Flip open to any page and become instantly absorbed in real-life stories of teens who have overcome obstacles to succeed, and step-by-step guides to shifting paradigms, building equity in "relationship bank accounts," creating action plans, and much more.

As a self-acknowledged guinea pig for many of his dad's theories, Sean Covey is a living example of someone who has taken each of the seven h...

Fifth Avenue, 5 A.M.: Audrey Hepburn, Breakfast at Tiffany's, and the Dawn of the Modern Woman

By: Sam Wasson

Harper

Audrey Hepburn is an icon like no other, yet the image many of us have of Audrey—dainty, immaculate—is anything but true to life. Here, for the first time, Sam Wasson presents the woman behind the little black dress that rocked the nation in 1961. The first complete account of the making of Breakfast at Tiffany's, Fifth Avenue, 5 A.M. reveals little-known facts about the cinema classic: Truman Capote desperately wanted Marilyn Monroe for the leading role; director Blake Edwards filmed multiple endings; Hepburn herself felt very conflicted about balancing the roles of mother and movie star. With a colorful cast of characters including Truman Capote, Edith Head, Givenchy, "Moon River" composer Henry Mancini, and, of course, Hepburn herself, Wasson immerses us i...

Can America Survive?: 10 Prophetic Signs That We Are The Terminal Generation

By: John Hagee

Howard Books

This new book by New York Times best-selling author and pastor, John Hagee, says the United States is heading into a “Perfect Storm.” Titanic. John F. Kennedy’s assassination. 9/11. John Hagee maintains that these American tragedies all have one element in common: they were unthinkable. And in the opening pages of his newest book, Can America Survive? Hagee uses these tragedies to prove two points: that the unthinkable can happen and, given the right conditions, the unthinkable can quickly become the inevitable.

In Can America Survive? Hagee asserts that the seeds for tragedy are once again being sown, evidenced by the disturbing economic, geopolitical, and religious trends that now threaten to dismantl...

Control Freaks: 7 Ways Liberals Plan to Ruin Your Life

By: Terry Jeffrey

Regnery Press

Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality

By: Christopher Ryan, Cacilda Jethá

Harper

Since Darwin's day, we've been told that sexual monogamy comes naturally to our species. Mainstream science--as well as religious and cultural institutions--has maintained that men and women evolved in families in which a man's possessions and protection were exchanged for a woman's fertility and fidelity. But this narrative is collapsing. Fewer and fewer couples are getting married, and divorce rates keep climbing as adultery and flagging libido drag down even seemingly solid marriages.
How can reality be reconciled with the accepted narrative? It can't be, according to renegade thinkers Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jeth. While debunking almost everything we "know" about sex, they offer a bold alternative explanation in this provocative and brilliant book.
Ryan and Jeth's ...

The Happiness Project: Or, Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fi...

By: Gretchen Rubin

Harper

Gift quality. Unable to ship to APO and FPO at this time.

The Black Swan: Second Edition: The Impact of the Highly Improbable: With a new section: "On Robu...

By: Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Random House Trade Paperbacks

Bestselling author Nassim Nicholas Taleb continues his exploration of randomness in his fascinating new book, The Black Swan, in which he examines the influence of highly improbable and unpredictable events that have massive impact. Engaging and enlightening, The Black Swan is a book that may change the way you think about the world, a book that Chris Anderson calls, "a delightful romp through history, economics, and the frailties of human nature." See Anderson's entire guest review below.

The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right

By: Atul Gawande

Metropolitan Books

Amazon Best Books of the Month, December 2009: With a title like The Checklist Manifesto, it would be natural to expect that Atul Gawande is bent on revolutionizing that most loved-hated activity of workers the world over: the to-do list. But it's not the list itself he wants to change; there are no programmatic steps or tables here to help you reshuffle daily tasks. What you'll find instead is a remarkably liberating and persuasive inquiry into what it takes to work successfully and with a personal sense of satisfaction. The first thing you'll realize is that it takes more than just one person to do a job well. This is a toppling revelation made all the more powerful by Gawande's skillful blend of anecdote and practical wisdom as he profiles his own experience...

The 48 Laws of Power

By: Robert Greene

Penguin (Non-Classics)

Amoral, cunning, ruthless, and instructive, this piercing work distills three thousand years of the history of power in to forty-eight well explicated laws. As attention--grabbing in its design as it is in its content, this bold volume outlines the laws of power in their unvarnished essence, synthesizing the philosophies of Machiavelli, Sun-tzu, Carl von Clausewitz, and other great thinkers. Some laws teach the need for prudence ("Law 1: Never Outshine the Master"), the virtue of stealth ("Law 3: Conceal Your Intentions"), and many demand the total absence of mercy ("Law 15: Crush Your Enemy Totally"), but like it or not, all have applications in real life. Illustrated through the tactics of Queen Elizabeth I, Henry Kissinger, P. T. Barnum, and other famous figures who have wielded--or ...

Nullification: How to Resist Federal Tyranny in the 21st Century

By: Thomas E. Woods Jr.

Regnery Press

A Patriot's History of the United States: From Columbus's Great Discovery to the War on Terror

By: Larry Schweikart, Michael Allen

Sentinel Trade

Gift quality. Unable to ship to APO and FPO at this time.

Eating Animals

By: Jonathan Safran Foer

Little, Brown and Company

Jonathan Safran Foer spent much of his teenage and college years oscillating between omnivore and vegetarian. But on the brink of fatherhood-facing the prospect of having to make dietary choices on a child's behalf-his casual questioning took on an urgency His quest for answers ultimately required him to visit factory farms in the middle of the night, dissect the emotional ingredients of meals from his childhood, and probe some of his most primal instincts about right and wrong. Brilliantly synthesizing philosophy, literature, science, memoir and his own detective work, Eating Animals explores the many fictions we use to justify our eating habits-from folklore to pop culture to family traditions and national myth-and how such tales can lull us into a brutal forgetting. Marke...

Hitch-22: A Memoir

By: Christopher Hitchens

Twelve

Over the course of his 60 years, Christopher Hitchens has been a citizen of both the United States and the United Kingdom. He has been both a socialist opposed to the war in Vietnam and a supporter of the U.S. war against Islamic extremism in Iraq. He has been both a foreign correspondent in some of the world's most dangerous places and a legendary bon vivant with an unquenchable thirst for alcohol and literature. He is a fervent atheist, raised as a Christian, by a mother whose Jewish heritage was not revealed to him until her suicide.

In other words, Christopher Hitchens contains multitudes. He sees all sides of an argument. And he believes the personal is political.

This is the story of his life, lived large.

The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down

By: Anne Fadiman

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Lia Lee was born in 1981 to a family of recent Hmong immigrants, and soon developed symptoms of epilepsy. By 1988 she was living at home but was brain dead after a tragic cycle of misunderstanding, overmedication, and culture clash: "What the doctors viewed as clinical efficiency the Hmong viewed as frosty arrogance." The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down is a tragedy of Shakespearean dimensions, written with the deepest of human feeling. Sherwin Nuland said of the account, "There are no villains in Fadiman's tale, just as there are no heroes. People are presented as she saw them, in their humility and their frailty--and their nobility."

SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life...

By: Steven D. Levitt, Stephen J. Dubner

William Morrow

Gift quality. Unable to ship to APO and FPO at this time.

Mythology

By: Edith Hamilton

Back Bay Books

Edith Hamilton loved the ancient Western myths with a passion--and this classic compendium is her tribute. "The tales of Greek mythology do not throw any clear light upon what early mankind was like," Hamilton explains in her introduction. "They do throw an abundance of light upon what early Greeks were like--a matter, it would seem, of more importance to us, who are their descendents intellectually, artistically, and politically. Nothing we learn about them is alien to ourselves." Fans of Greek mythology will find all the great stories and characters here--Perseus, Hercules, and Odysseus--each discussed in generous detail by the voice of an impressively knowledgeable and engaging (with occasional lapses) narrator. This is also an excellent primer for middle- and high-school ...

The Manchurian President: Barack Obama's Ties to Communists, Socialists and Other Anti-American E...

By: Aaron Klein, Brenda J. Elliott

WND Books

BRAND NEW 2010 HARDBACK EDITION. SOME SHELFWEAR MARKS. OVERSTOCK MARK..

Game Change: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime

By: John Heilemann, Mark Halperin

Harper

In Game Change, John Heilemann and Mark Halperin, two of the country's leading political reporters, use their unrivaled access to pull back the curtain on the Obama, Clinton, McCain, and Palin campaigns.

Based on hundreds of interviews with the people who lived the story, Game Change is a reportorial tour de force that reads like a fast-paced novel. Character-driven and dialogue-rich, replete with extravagantly detailed scenes, it's an intimate portrait of some of the most powerful and fascinating figures in American life—the occasionally shocking, often hilarious, ultimately definitive account of the campaign of a lifetime.

NurtureShock: New Thinking About Children

By: Po Bronson, Ashley Merryman

Twelve

In a world of modern, involved, caring parents, why are so many kids aggressive and cruel? Where is intelligence hidden in the brain, and why does that matter? Why do cross-racial friendships decrease in schools that are more integrated? If 98% of kids think lying is morally wrong, then why do 98% of kids lie? What's the single most important thing that helps infants learn language?
NurtureShock is a groundbreaking collaboration between award-winning science journalists Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman. They argue that when it comes to children, we've mistaken good intentions for good ideas. With impeccable storytelling and razor-sharp analysis,they demonstrate that many of modern society's strategies for nurturing children are in fa...

The Post-American Presidency: The Obama Administration's War on America

By: Pamela Geller, Robert Spencer

Threshold Editions

Popular conservative blogger Pamela Geller and New York Times bestselling author Robert Spencer sound a wake-up call for Americans to stop the Obama administration from limiting our hard-won freedoms, silencing our democratic voices, and irreparably harming America for generations to come.

America is being tested in a way that she has never been tested before. Since taking the oath of office in January 2009, President Barack Obama has cheered our enemies and demoralized our allies. He is hard at work "remaking" America by destroying the free-market system and nationalizing major segments of our economy, demonizing dissent and restricting freedom of speech, turning against our longtime friends, and above all, subjecting us to the determinations of foreign authorities.

In ...

The Color of Water 10th Anniversary Edition

By: James McBride

Riverhead Trade

Talking to Girls About Duran Duran: One Young Man's Quest for True Love and a Cooler Haircut

By: Rob Sheffield

Dutton Adult

Amazon Best Books of the Month, July 2010: Don't be fooled by the title: Talking to Girls About Duran Duran may sound like a dream come true to all the women who she-bopped through the 80s, but at heart it's the Feminine Mystique that every boy-next-door has been waiting for (and will actually read). It's something like a prequel to Rob Sheffield's first, fantastic memoir, Love Is a Mix Tape, taking its cue this time from a musical decade so addictive and eclectic that, as he notes, "every night in your town, you can find a bar somewhere hosting an Awesome 80s Prom Night." This hilarious and heartfelt collection of coming-of-age vignettes is arguably a much more satisfying way to spend an evening, though, particularly if you have even an ounce of the...

The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists

By: Neil Strauss

It Books

This item is an Imitation leather softcover book in very good condition there is no dustcover or box for this book. Copyright 2005. Written by Neil Strauss. Are you just another AFC ("average frustrated chump") trying to meet an HB ("hot babe")? How would you like to "full-close" with a Penthouse Pet of the Year? The answers, my friend, are in Neil Strauss's entertaining book The Game. Strauss was a self-described chick repellant--complete with large, bumpy nose, small, beady eyes, glasses, balding head, and, worst of all, painful shyness around women. He felt like "half a man." That is, until a book editor asked him to investigate the community of pickup artists. Strauss's life was transformed. He spent two years bedding some fine chiquitas and studying with some of the North America...

The Upside of Irrationality: The Unexpected Benefits of Defying Logic at Work and at Home

By: Dan Ariely

Harper

The provocative follow-up to the New York Times bestseller Predictably Irrational

• Why can large bonuses make CEOs less productive?
• How can confusing directions actually help us?
• Why is revenge so important to us?
• Why is there such a big difference between what we think will make us happy and what really makes us happy?

In his groundbreaking book Predictably Irrational, social scientist Dan Ariely revealed the multiple biases that lead us into making unwise decisions. Now, in The Upside of Irrationality, he exposes the surprising negative and positive effects irrationality can have on our lives. Focusing on our behaviors at work and in relationships, he offers new insights and eye-openi...

The Party: The Secret World of China's Communist Rulers

By: Richard Mcgregor

Harper

An eye-opening investigation into china's communist party and its integral role in the country's rise as a global superpower and rival of the united states

China's political and economic growth in the past three decades is one of astonishing, epochal dimensions. The country has undergone a remarkable transformation on a scale similar to that of the Industrial Revolution in the West. The most remarkable part of this transformation, however, has been left largely untold—the central role of the Chinese Communist Party.

As an organization alone, the Party is a phenomenon of unique scale and power. Its membership surpasses seventy-three million, and it does more than just rule a country. The Party not only has a grip on every aspect of go...

A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future

By: Daniel H. Pink

Riverhead Trade

Why right brainers will rule the future.Author Daniel H. Pink explains,gone is the age of left-brain dominance.A whole new mind takes readers to a daring new place,and offers a provocative and urgent new way of thinking about a future that has already arrived.Drawing on reasearch from around the world.Long on readable analysis and exercises to build right brain skills.This is a great book for Liberal Arts Graduates.A New York Times and Business Week Bestseller.

Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America

By: Barbara Ehrenreich, Frances Fox Piven

Holt Paperbacks

The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves

By: Matt Ridley

Harper

Life is getting better—and at an accelerating rate. Food availability, income, and life span are up; disease, child mortality, and violence are down — all across the globe. Though the world is far from perfect, necessities and luxuries alike are getting cheaper; population growth is slowing; Africa is following Asia out of poverty; the Internet, the mobile phone, and container shipping are enriching people's lives as never before. The pessimists who dominate public discourse insist that we will soon reach a turning point and things will start to get worse. But they have been saying this for two hundred years.

Yet Matt Ridley does more than describe how things are getting better. He explains why. Prosperity comes from everybody working for everybody else. The habit o...

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness

By: Michelle Alexander

New Press, The

Jarvious Cotton's great-great-grandfather could not vote as a slave. His great-grandfather was beaten to death by the Klu Klux Klan for attempting to vote. His grandfather was prevented from voting by Klan intimidation; his father was barred by poll taxes and literacy tests. Today, Cotton cannot vote because he, like many black men in the United States, has been labeled a felon and is currently on parole.
--FROM THE NEW JIM CROW

As the United States celebrates the nation's "triumph over race" with the election of Barack Obama, the majority of young black men in major American cities are locked behind bars or have been labeled felons for life. Although Jim Crow laws have been wiped off the books, an astounding percentage of the African American community remains trapped...

The Other Wes Moore: One Name, Two Fates

By: Wes Moore

Spiegel & Grau

Two kids with the same name lived in the same decaying city. One went on to be a Rhodes Scholar, decorated combat veteran, White House Fellow, and business leader. The other is serving a life sentence in prison. Here is the story of two boys and the journey of a generation.

In December 2000, the Baltimore Sun ran a small piece about Wes Moore, a local student who had just received a Rhodes Scholarship. The same paper also ran a series of articles about four young men who had allegedly killed a police officer in a spectacularly botched armed robbery. The police were still hunting for two of the suspects who had gone on the lam, a pair of brothers. One was named Wes Moore.

Wes just couldn’t shake off the unsettling coincidence, or the inkling that the tw...

Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal

By: Eric Schlosser

Harper Perennial

On any given day, one out of four Americans opts for a quick and cheap meal at a fast-food restaurant, without giving either its speed or its thriftiness a second thought. Fast food is so ubiquitous that it now seems as American, and harmless, as apple pie. But the industry's drive for consolidation, homogenization, and speed has radically transformed America's diet, landscape, economy, and workforce, often in insidiously destructive ways. Eric Schlosser, an award-winning journalist, opens his ambitious and ultimately devastating expos with an introduction to the iconoclasts and high school dropouts, such as Harlan Sanders and the McDonald brothers, who first applied the principles of a factory assembly line to a commercial kitchen. Quickly, however, he moves behind the counter with the...

Marijuana Horticulture: The Indoor/Outdoor Medical Grower's Bible

By: Jorge Cervantes

Van Patten Publishing

With 512 full color pages and 1120 full color photographs and illustrations, Marijuana Horticulture: The Indoor/Outdoor Medical Grower's Bible is the most complete cultivation book available. The Fifth Edition of the former Indoor Marijuana Horticulture: The Indoor Bible was originally published in 1983, when it immediately became a best seller. More than 500,000 copies of the Indoor Bible are in print in Dutch, English, French, German and Spanish. New greenhouse and outdoor growing chapters make this a book both indoor and outdoor growers will keep under thumb. The other 15 chapters (17 total) are all updated with the most current information, completely rewritten and significantly expanded. For example, Dr. John McPartland contributed an all new medical section - The books cre...

Rules for Radicals

By: Saul Alinsky

Vintage

Gift quality. Unable to ship to APO and FPO at this time.

The Associated Press Stylebook 2009 (Associated Press Stylebook and Briefing on Media Law)

Basic Books

Whether you're a student struggling through Composition 101 or a professional writer on a quest for perfection, The Associated Press Stylebook and Briefing on Media Law is always ready to fill the role of trusted advisor to your creative genius. Revised and updated in 2000, this version contains a 40-page section on media law, guides for punctuation and bibliographies, and specialized glossaries for business and sports writing, all in addition to its 280-page generalized stylebook.

Within each section, entries are alphabetized, and searching for an answer is a fairly simple process. Tricky words--those that can be hyphenated (know-how) or not (jukebox), homonyms, nonstandard spellings (mo-ped)--are given their own short entries. Larger categori...

The Promise: President Obama, Year One

By: Jonathan Alter

Simon & Schuster

Barack Obama’s inauguration as president on January 20, 2009, inspired the world. But the great promise of “Change We Can Believe In” was immediately tested by the threat of another Great Depression, a worsening war in Afghanistan, and an entrenched and deeply partisan system of business as usual in Washington. Despite all the coverage, the backstory of Obama’s historic first year in office has until now remained a mystery.

In The Promise: President Obama, Year One, Jonathan Alter, one of the country’s most respected journalists and historians, uses his unique access to the White House to produce the first inside look at Obama’s difficult debut.

What happened in 2009 inside the Oval Office? What worked and what failed? What is the p...

The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America

By: Andrew C McCarthy

Encounter Books

The 5000 Year Leap (Original Authorized Edition)

By: W. Cleon Skousen

National Center for Constitutional Studies

GLENN BECK, award winning radio and TV host has been talking about "The 5000 Year Leap!" Have you ever read a book which literally changed the course of your thinking and your life? The founder's success formula, as presented in 5000 Year Leap would solve nearly every problem we have in American today if followed. This book will give you a feeling of confidence in today's confused world. Once an individual has a working knowledge of the only correct and proven principles for freedom, prosperity, and peace, then other history can be taught from a whole different perspective. American History becomes a study of how the United States throughout its 200 plus years has either supported the principles of liberty and prospered, or violated these principles and suffered. Can any other kn...

The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom, A Toltec Wisdom Book

By: Don Miguel Ruiz

Amber-Allen Publishing

Sit at the foot of a native elder and listen as great wisdom of days long past is passed down. In The Four Agreements shamanic teacher and healer Don Miguel Ruiz exposes self-limiting beliefs and presents a simple yet effective code of personal conduct learned from his Toltec ancestors. Full of grace and simple truth, this handsomely designed book makes a lovely gift for anyone making an elementary change in life, and it reads in a voice that you would expect from an indigenous shaman. The four agreements are these: Be impeccable with your word. Don't take anything personally. Don't make assumptions. Always do your best. It's the how and why one should do these things that make The Four Agreements worth reading and remembering. --P. Randall Cohan

A Raisin in the Sun

By: Lorraine Hansberry

Vintage

When it was first produced in 1959, A Raisin in the Sun was awarded the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for that season and hailed as a watershed in American drama. A pioneering work by an African-American playwright, the play was a radically new representation of black life. "A play that changed American theater forever."--The New York Times.

Mythology: Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes

By: Edith Hamilton

Grand Central Publishing

MONSTERS, MORTALS, GODS, AND WARRIORS

For over fifty years readers have chosen this book above all others to discover the thrilling, enchanting, and fascinating world of Western mythology. From Odysseus's adventure-filled journey to the Norse god Odin's effort to postpone the final day of doom, Edith Hamilton's classic collection not only retells these stories with brilliant clarity but shows us how the ancients saw their own place in the world and how their themes echo in our consciousness today. An essential part of every home library, MYTHOLOGY is the definitive volume for anyone who wants to know the key dramas, the primary characters, the triumphs, failures, fears, and hopes first narrated thousands of years ago -- and still spellbinding to this day.

Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies

By: Jared Diamond

W. W. Norton & Company

Explaining what William McNeill called The Rise of the West has become the central problem in the study of global history. In Guns, Germs, and Steel Jared Diamond presents the biologist's answer: geography, demography, and ecological happenstance. Diamond evenhandedly reviews human history on every continent since the Ice Age at a rate that emphasizes only the broadest movements of peoples and ideas. Yet his survey is binocular: one eye has the rather distant vision of the evolutionary biologist, while the other eye--and his heart--belongs to the people of New Guinea, where he has done field work for more than 30 years.