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Displaying records 1 through 10 of 3062 |
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Price: $27.99
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Sale: $13.99
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Manufacturer: Little, Brown and Company
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Number of Items: 1
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Binding: Hardcover
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Author: Malcolm Gladwell
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Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
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Dewey Decimal Number: 302
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Publication Date: 2008-11-18
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Reading Level: 320
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Description: 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 case for how successful people rise on a tide of advantages, "some deserved, some not, some earned, some just plain lucky."
Outliers can be enjoyed for its bits of trivia, like why most pro hockey players were born in January, how many hours of practice it takes to master a skill, why the descendents of Jewish immigrant garment workers became the most powerful lawyers in New York, how a pilots' culture impacts their crash record, how a centuries-old culture of rice farming helps Asian kids master math. But there's more to it than that. Throughout all of these examples--and in more that delve into the social benefits of lighter skin color, and the reasons for school achievement gaps--Gladwell invites conversations about the complex ways privilege manifests in our culture. He leaves us pondering the gifts of our own history, and how the world could benefit if more of our kids were granted the opportunities to fulfill their remarkable potential. --Mari Malcolm
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Price: $25.95
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Sale: $14.99
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Manufacturer: Portfolio Hardcover
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Number of Items: 1
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Binding: Hardcover
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Author: Geoff Colvin
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Publisher: Portfolio Hardcover
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Dewey Decimal Number: 153.9
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Publication Date: 2008-10-16
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Reading Level: 224
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Description: Expanding on a landmark cover story in Fortune, a top journalist debunks the myths of exceptional performance.
One of the most popular Fortune articles in many years was a cover story called “What It Takes to Be Great.” Geoff Colvin offered new evidence that top performers in any field--from Tiger Woods and Winston Churchill to Warren Buffett and Jack Welch--are not determined by their inborn talents. Greatness doesn’t come from DNA but from practice and perseverance honed over decades.
And not just plain old hard work, like your grandmother might have advocated, but a very specific kind of work. The key is how you practice, how you analyze the results of your progress and learn from your mistakes, that enables you to achieve greatness.
Now Colvin has expanded his article with much more scientific background and real-world examples. He shows that the skills of business—negotiating deals, evaluating financial statements, and all the rest—obey the principles that lead to greatness, so that anyone can get better at them with the right kind of effort. Even the hardest decisions and interactions can be systematically improved.
This new mind-set, combined with Colvin’s practical advice, will change the way you think about your job and career—and will inspire you to achieve more in all you do.
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Price: $17.95
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Sale: $9.49
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Manufacturer: Collins Business
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Number of Items: 1
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Binding: Paperback
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Author: Robert B. Cialdini
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Publisher: Collins Business
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Edition: Revised
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Dewey Decimal Number: 153.852
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Publication Date: 2007-01-01
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Reading Level: 336
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Description: Arguably the best book ever on what is increasingly becoming the science of persuasion. Whether you're a mere consumer or someone weaving the web of persuasion to urge others to buy or vote for your product, this is an essential book for understanding the psychological foundations of marketing. Recommended.
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Price: $24.95
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Sale: $14.88
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Manufacturer: Knopf
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Number of Items: 1
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Binding: Hardcover
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Author: Tom Vanderbilt
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Publisher: Knopf
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Edition: 1
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Dewey Decimal Number: 629.283
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Publication Date: 2008-07-29
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Reading Level: 416
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Description:
Amazon Best of the Month, July 2008: How could no one have written this book before? These days we spend almost as much time driving as we do eating (in fact, we do a lot of our eating while driving), but I can't remember the last time I saw a book on all the time we spend stuck in our cars. It's a topic of nearly universal interest, though: everybody has a strategy for beating the traffic. Tom Vanderbilt's Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us) has plenty of advice for those shortcut schemers (Vanderbilt may well convince you to become, as he has, a dreaded "Late Merger"), but more than that it's the sort of wide-ranging contrarian compendium that makes a familiar subject new. I'm not the first or last to call Traffic the Freakonomics of cars, but it's true that it fits right in with the school of smart and popular recent books by Leavitt, Gladwell, Surowiecki, Ariely, and others that use the latest in economic, sociological, psychological, and in this case civil engineering research to make us rethink a topic we live with every day. Want to know how much city traffic is just people looking for parking? (It's a lot.) Or why street signs don't work (but congestion pricing does), why new cars crash more than old cars, and why Saturdays now have the worst traffic of the week? Read Traffic, or better yet, listen to the audio book on your endless commute. --Tom Nissley
Questions for Tom Vanderbilt, author of Traffic
Q: Was this book really born on a New Jersey highway?
A: Yes, though it could have been any highway in the world, where countless drivers, driving on a crowded road that is about to lose a lane, have had to make a simple decision: When to merge. For my entire driving life, I had always merged "early," thinking it was the polite and efficient thing to do. I viewed those who kept driving to the merge point, to the front of line, as selfish jerks who were making life miserable for the rest of us. I began to wonder: Were they really making things worse? Was I making things worse? Could merging be made easier? Why were there late mergers and early mergers, and why did people get so worked up about the whole thing? In that everyday moment I seemed to sense a vast, largely under-explored wilderness before me: Traffic.
Q: Is it true that the most common cause of stress on the highway is merging? Why of the myriad things to cause stress on the road is this at the top?
A: Merging is the most stressful single activity we face in everyday driving, according to a survey by the Texas Transportation Institute. People who have done studies at highway construction work zones have also told me of extraordinarily bad behavior, triggered by this simple act of trying to get two lanes of traffic into one. Sometimes, it’s simply the difficult mechanics of driving — trying to enter a stream of traffic flowing at a higher speed than you are, for example. Drivers, to quote a physicist who was actually talking about grains, are objects "who do not easily interact." But I also think there’s something about the forward flow of traffic that makes us register progress only by our own unimpeded movement; as in life, we seem to register losses more powerfully than gains, and registering these losses boosts stress.
Q: You say that, "For most of us who are not brain surgeons, driving is probably the most complex everyday thing we do in our lives." How so?
A: Researchers have estimated there are anywhere from 1500 to 2500 discrete skills and activities we undertake while driving. Even the simplest thing — shifting gears — is a decision-making process consuming what is called "cognitive workload." We’re operating heavy machinery at speeds beyond our long evolutionary history, absorbing (and discarding) huge amounts of information, and having to make snap decisions — often based on limited situational awareness, guesses about what others are going to do, or a hazy knowledge of the actual traffic law. It took years of research, for example, by some of the country’s top robotics researchers, to create expensive, sophisticated self-driving "autonomous vehicles" that are basically mediocre beginning drivers that you’d never want to let loose in everyday traffic. When we forget that driving isn’t necessarily as easy as it seems to be, we get into trouble.
Q: Drivers polled in America say the roads are getting less civil with each passing year. ‘Road Rage’ is an ever more common term. What is to blame? Hummers? Or are we just getting ruder?
A: Every year, more people are driving more miles, so one reason for the sense that the roads are getting less civil is simply that there are many more chances for you to have an encounter with an aggressive or rude driver. It’s tough to put numbers on it, but I happen to feel, like many people, that behavior has gotten qualitatively worse — surveys have suggested, for example, that using the turn signal is an increasingly optional activity. Leaving aside the issue that not signaling is illegal (because, let’s face it, we’re never going to be able ticket everyone who doesn’t do it, nor do we probably want to), it’s one of those small things, requiring little effort from the driver, that makes traffic flow more smoothly — I myself have honked countless times at "idiots" slowing for no apparent reason, only to seem them eventually make a turn. It’s antisocial behavior, the equivalent of having the door held open for you and saying nothing in return. So why don’t people signal? My immediate theory is that they’re using a cell phone and are distracted or physically incapable of signaling. But a deeper reason, I suspect, may be seen in the surveys of psychologists who measure narcissism in American culture. They find, as time goes on, more people are willing to say things like "If I ruled the world, it would be a better place." Traffic is filled with people who think that roads belong only to them — it’s "MySpace" — that being inside the car absolves them from any obligation to anyone else. People are glad to tell you that their child is a middle school honor student — as if anyone cared! — but they deem it less important to tell you what they’re going to do in traffic.
Q: So much of what you uncover about life on the road seems counterintuitive. Like the fact that drivers drive closer to oncoming cars when there is a center line divider then when there is not; that most accidents happen close to home in familiar, not foreign, surroundings; that dangerous roads can be safer; safer cars can be more dangerous; that suburbs are often riskier than the inner city; the roundabout safer than the intersection. When it comes to traffic why are things so different from how we instinctively perceive them?
A: I think part of the reason is it’s easy for us to confuse what feels dangerous or safe in the moment and what might be, in a larger sense, safe or dangerous. We have a windshield’s eye view of driving that sometimes blinds us to larger realities or skews our perception. Roundabouts feel dangerous because of all the work one has to do, like looking for an opening, jockeying for positioning. But it’s precisely because we have to do all that, and because of the way roundabouts are designed, that we have to slow down. By contrast, it feels quite "safe" to sail through a big intersection where the lights are telling you that you have the right to speed through. We can, in essence, put our brain on hold. But those same intersections contain so many more chances for what engineers call "conflict," and at much higher speeds, than roundabouts. So when what seems quite safe suddenly turns quite dangerous — will we be as well prepared? Similarly, we might be reassured that that yellow or white dividing line on a road is telling us where we should be, but how does that knowledge then change our behavior, to the point where may actually be driving closer — and faster — to the stream of oncoming traffic? Accidents are more likely to occur closer to home. Mostly this is because we do most driving closer to home, but studies do show that we pay less attention to signs and signals on local roads, because we "know" them, yet this knowledge actually give us a false sense of security.
Q: What were some of the things that most surprised you in researching this book?
A: Things that surprised me the most were those that challenged my own long-held beliefs as a driver, like that "late mergers" simply must be somehow worse for the traffic flow at work-zones, that roundabouts were dangerous places, that warning signs were there because they must be working, that car drivers were more of a contributing factor in truck-car crashes than truck drivers. It was also quite a revelation to learn about the many ways our eyes and our minds deceive us while driving, the ways we "look but don’t see," the way we sometimes believe, to slightly change up the warning our mirrors gives us, that objects are further away than they actually are. Then there were the things I had never really thought about, but were surprising nonetheless — that drivers seem to pass closer to cyclists when those cyclists are wearing helmets, how the ways in which drivers honk at each other contain subtle indications of status and demographics, how much traffic on the streets is simply people looking for parking. I was also unpleasantly surprised to learn how far the U.S. had slipped in terms of traffic safety in the world, where it was once the leader.
Q: You write, "The truth is the road itself tells us far more than signs do." So do traffic signs work?
A: We’ve probably all had the somewhat absurd moment of driving in the country, past a big red barn, the pungent smell of cow manure on the breeze, and then seeing a yellow traffic sign with a cow on it. Does anyone need that sign to remind them that cows may be nearby? To quote Hans Monderman, the legendary Dutch traffic engineer who was opposed to excessive signing, "if you treat people like idiots, they’ll act like idiots." Then again, perhaps someone did come blazing along and hit a crossing cow or a tractor, and in response engineers may have been forced to put up a sign. The question is: Would that person have done that regardless of the sign? The bulk of evidence is that people don’t change their behavior in the presence of such signs. Children playing, School zone? People speed through those warnings, faster than they even thought, if you query them later. To take another example, the majority of people killed at railroad crossings in the U.S. are killed at crossings where the gates are down. If this is insufficient warning that they should not cross the tracks then is a sign warning that a train might be coming really going to change behavior? At what point do people need to rely on their own judgment? We as humans seem to act on the message that traffic signs give us in complex ways — studies have shown, for example, that people drive faster around curved roads that are marked with signs telling them the road is curved. We tend to behave more cautiously in the face of uncertainty.
Q: What is "psychological traffic calming"?
A: Traditional "traffic calming" relies on putting big, visually obvious obstructions in the road, like speed bumps, or the wider, flatter speed humps. Unfortunately, since the bulk of drivers, like tantrum-throwing toddlers, really don’t like to be calmed, a lot of these don’t work as well as hoped, or produce negative, unintended consequences, like the fact that people will raise their speed between the bumps to make up for the time lost slowing to traverse the bump. So-called "psychological traffic calming" basically tries to calm traffic without drivers even realizing they’re being calmed. It does so through things like reducing the width of roads, using pavements of different colors or textures, even removing center-line dividers, which studies have shown is one way to get drivers to slow down. Even creating visual interest along the side of the road, a no-no in traditional traffic engineering because it’s a "distraction," can be used to calm traffic — when something’s worth seeing, after all, people slow down. The most radical approach is removing any signage at all, and forcing drivers to rely on their own wits, as well as the dynamics of human interaction, as has been seen in some interesting experiments in the Netherlands.
Q: You cite 20 miles per hour as the speed at which eye contact becomes impossible. How central to understanding traffic, and human communication generally, is this statistic?
A: Eye contact is a fundamental human signal — all kinds of studies have shown, for example, how people are more likely to cooperate with one another when they can make eye contact. When we don’t have it, when we become anonymous, we not only lose some of that impulse towards cooperation, we seem to become susceptible to all kinds of behavior we might not otherwise engage in. In most driving situations, of course, we lose eye contact, and have to make do with our rather limited vocabulary of traffic signals. At much slower speeds, however, like those seen in the experimental roundabouts in the Netherlands were most signage has been stripped away, it is fascinating to see how intricately all the traffic can interweave — exactly because some of those human signals have been restored.
Q: We’ve all had the experience of the annoying passenger who can’t stop critiquing our driving when we know are driving just perfectly. Then again, we’ve all been the back seat driver to people who think they are driving perfectly when we know for sure they are about to kill us. What accounts for the way drivers vs. passengers experience the same ride?
A: First of all, I should stress that passengers, even annoying back-seat drivers, are good for us: Statistics show that people are less likely to crash when they are accompanied in the car (except, interestingly, teen drivers). But there’s several interesting things going on between drivers and passengers. For one, driving as an activity often lacks regular feedback — we’re often not aware in the moment of how close to a crash we almost came, or our own culpability in that. Secondly, drivers tend to self-enhance. They all tend to think they are better than average, or at least average drivers — it’s been called the "Lake Woebegone Effect." Passengers are not caught up in this dynamic — there’s no such thing as a "better than average" passenger — nor do they feel themselves joined to the mechanics of the car, the way a driver does. Brain scans of people doing simulated driving have even revealed different results from people acting as simulated passengers. In the end, a back-seat driver, like it or not, is providing feedback, the same way someone can view footage of their golf swing to learn what they couldn’t see in the moment.
Q: You talk about numerous experiments going on around the world to study traffic, what are some of the ones that you found most interesting?
A: One of the most fascinating things that is happening, thanks to technology like TiVo style cameras and feedback sensors, is that researchers are becoming increasingly able to study how drivers really behave on the road, learning curious details about, for example, how much time drivers spend looking in certain places — forward at the road, in the rear-view mirrors, away from traffic, at the radio, etc. With companies like DriveCam, this information is actually being used to coach drivers — beginners but also experienced drivers — based on the crashes they narrowly avoided. The work of Hans Monderman, who unfortunately died in January, in the Netherlands was also utterly fascinating. Faced with a visually unappealing, traffic clogged intersection in the heart of the Dutch city of Drachten, Monderman turned it into a roundabout, with fountains and plantings but no traffic lights and virtually no signage — the result, more than a year later, is the traffic moves more efficiently through the town, and there have been fewer crashes. It was also quite memorable to be in Los Angeles’ "traffic bunker" on Oscar Night. They set up special traffic patterns so that the stars’ limos can all get to the red carpet at roughly the same time. It was striking to see how one person, sitting alone at a computer screen, can orchestrate the whole city’s flows, its competing patterns of desire.
Q: You have been all over the world studying traffic. So, where was it the worst and how does the city in which we live dictate our highway behavior?
A: It depends on how you define worst! I’ve been in nasty jams from Seoul to San Francisco. The places that felt the most chaotic were cities like Hanoi, which currently has the highest level of motorbikes per capita in the world, and where, in many parts of the city, the only way one can cross the street is by simply wading into the flow. New Delhi was also quite unnerving, not just for the hustle and bustle of so many modes of transportation on the road at once, but the chronic disobedience of traffic rules. In Beijing, where "driver" not that long ago was only the title of a job, driving was hectic but I found it quite difficult as well to be a pedestrian — drivers were always plunging into the crosswalks when I had the "walk" man, I was always having to climb bridges or submerge into tunnels to cross streets, and the city’s "super-blocks" are sort of oppressive — I walk quickly but it took me nearly an hour to walk around the block on which my hotel was located.
I think traffic behavior is dictated by a complicated mix of cultural factors and the traffic engineering measures in place. In Copenhagen, home of the world’s largest anarchist community, people on foot are astonishingly law-abiding in terms of not crossing against the light. In New York, an arguably more individualistic, ego-driven sort of place, you’re viewed as a tourist if you don’t jaywalk. But in London, for example, studies have shown that the number of pedestrians who violate red lights literally changes with each block; it’s not that those people’s culture changed from one block to the next, it was simply that some lights were too punishingly long to wait for.
Q: You seem to feel pretty strongly about what constitutes an "accident" on the road. While drugs and alcohol are called out as criminal, cell phone use, texting and general disregard for traffic laws are not. Do you think we are heading toward stricter laws on this front? Should we?
A: Since the car was invented, drivers have been reluctant to give up what they see as their "rights," even as these supposed rights keep changing. This is why, for example, cars are sold without "speed governors," a device that would greatly reduce, if not eliminate, the illegal — let’s call it what it is — act of speeding, and certainly reduce fatalities and injuries. It took years for people to accept that drinking and then getting behind the wheel was not a good idea, and obviously many still do think it’s acceptable. As the science emerges that cell phone conversations, not simply dialing, can seriously impair a driver’s attention and reaction times, the very reasons we criminalize drunken driving, I’m not sure what the distinction is that should be made if a driver kills a pedestrian while drunk versus while on their cell phone, or for that matter who kills a pedestrian because they were driving 25 miles over the speed limit. Does one get years in jail and the other a slap on the wrist? Don’t they both show an equal disregard for the law? People are leery of imposing stricter laws on negligent driving because it’s always been viewed as a "folk crime," like fudging your taxes, sort of widespread and not as serious as others. People are reluctant to criminalize what they see as "normal" behavior. But how did it become normal behavior? When I got my driver’s license, the cell phone hadn’t been invented, and somehow as a society we managed to get along. The economy didn’t collapse, and, if you believe surveys, people were no less happy then they are now. No one wants to get into an accident, they’re certainly not premeditated, but were people doing everything they reasonably could to avoid an "accidental" crash when it later turns out they were talking on a cell phone while driving? It’s something we’re going to have wrestle with as a society as the science really begins to come in.
Q: What is "a forgiving road"?
A: This is a school of thought that says, drivers are only human, they’re going to make mistakes, so let’s build things so that if they do make a mistake, they won’t be seriously injured or killed. Sounds good in theory, and in some places, it’s good practice. If you’re cruising along the highway at 75 mph and your tire blows out, wouldn’t you want a guardrail to prevent you from crashing into a tree? The problem is: Where do you draw the line? The early traffic engineers thought the forgiving road was such a good idea they argued it should be extended to every road in the country. Even residential streets, they argued, shouldn’t be lined with trees, and instead should have massive "clear zones" for people to skid off into without killing themselves. The problem, apart from the fact that forgiving roads don’t really make for nice residential or city environments, is that the forgiving road principles, can, in effect, give permission to drivers to drive more recklessly, which is not good for other drivers, pedestrians, or cyclists — and often not good for them. Just as the only safe car is the one that never leaves the garage, the only truly safe road is the one that’s never driven. Trying to make roads "too safe" for drivers leads to all sorts of unintended consequences.
Q: You write that "as the inner life of the driver begins to come into focus, it is becoming clear not only that distraction is the single biggest problem on the road, but that we have little concept of just how distracted we are." Can you explain?
A: To give you an idea, I took a test on a driving simulator. I was doing a kind of logic exercise via a hands-free phone while I drove on the highway. I smacked into the back of a truck. When I looked at the software that tracked my eye movements, they were locked onto the back of that truck. Did I realize how distracted I was? Not at all. Think of when you zone out as someone’s talking to you. You’re only made aware of it when they ask if you’re listening to them. Or take the famous "gorilla video" experiment. You’re trying to pay attention to people passing the basketball to each other. In the meantime, a guy in a gorilla suit strolls by. Most people don’t see it. You’re distracted from the gorilla by the act of counting passes, but you’ve no idea. This kind of thing, scarily, happens in driving all the time. There are times we know we’re distracted in some way, like physically dialing a phone, but other times when we’re not aware of the extent of our distraction because we think we’re paying attention.
Q: You write about the cars and technologies of the future and as you put it, "It is probably no accident that whenever one hears of a "smart" technology, it refers to something that has been taken out of human control." Are we headed towards the driverless automobile?
A: We’re definitely already in the era of "driver-assist" automobiles, with blind-spot warnings and adaptive cruise control and the like. As people who study automation have noted, these "semiautomated" processes come with very particular challenges — drivers may relax their vigilance, thinking everything is fine thanks to the car’s technology, but something might happen that actually confounds the car’s systems, and suddenly the driver is "out of the loop." This kind of thing has been seen in airline crashes. That said, were it to be fully achievable, full automated driving would have all kinds of benefits, from smoother traffic flow to a reduction in crashes. But that’s a ways away — the legal issues, for one, are massive — but maybe by 2050, like in the film Minority Report, we’ll all have little autonomous pods connected to a grid…
Q: If you had to choose from the vast array of prescriptions, what would be some of the top things you would recommend to make our roads safer and our traffic less maddening?
A: 1. Pay attention to the task at hand. You are operating heavy machinery, not driving a big phone booth or a make-up mirror. Every glance away from the road, every phone call, every fumbling for your last McNugget, not only disrupts traffic flow, it boosts the risk for a crash, which is itself one of the leading causes of congestion. Even though we often read about how much money we’re losing because of traffic congestion, which people often site as reason to build more roads, it’s been estimated that crashes cost us more in economic terms than congestion itself.
2. Remember the ants. Army ants are among the world’s best commuters, for a single reason: They’re all cooperating. They move in unison, they help each other out, the individual doesn’t consider his own interests above that of the traffic stream. We all want to assert our individuality, or our sense of superiority on the road, but as everyone does that, it makes it worse for everyone else, and the whole system gets worse.
3. Keep in mind you’re not as good a driver as you think you are. On the road, we’re moving faster than our evolutionary history has prepared us. We cope pretty well regardless, but we’re still susceptible to all kinds of flaws and distortions in our sensory and decision-making equipment. Just because your eyes are on the road and your hands upon the wheel doesn’t mean you’re actually prepared to deal with an emergency.
4. We can’t build our way out of traffic, but we can think our way out. Building more roads when they’re already under-funded doesn’t seem workable, and given that most roads are only congested part of the time, it’s not really the most efficient solution anyway, for loads of reasons. As a former Disney engineer told me when I asked why they didn’t just build more rides instead of worrying about new ways to manage the long queues, "you don’t build a church for Easter Sunday." But being able to clear a stalled car quickly because sensors detect the traffic flow has changed, knowing which routes are crowded in that moment, and possibly charging accordingly; or, perhaps, making traffic lights adapt to changing demand — or getting rid of traffic lights altogether — there’s countless innovative solutions out there that are more sophisticated, and more sustainable,than simply laying more asphalt, and that don’t necessarily involve not driving — though that of course is the ultimate traffic solution.
Q: Okay so the big question. We know you have learned a lot about traffic but what have you learned about we humans behind the wheels?
A: In a word, that we’re …human! We make mistakes, we misjudge our abilities, we’re not as aware of what’s happening in traffic as we think we are, we act differently in different situations, we get angry over things that matter little in the long run, we’re susceptible to distortions in our sense of time, we have trouble living beyond the moment, of seeing the big picture — oh, and also, that everyone has a different opinion on who the worst drivers are and where they live…"Los Angeles! L.A. drivers are the worst… No, Atlanta has terrible drivers… No way, Boston drivers are nuts…" Try this with your friends sometime.
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Price: $23.00
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Sale: $12.82
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Manufacturer: Bantam
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Number of Items: 1
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Binding: Hardcover
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Author: Barbara Pease::Allan Pease
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Publisher: Bantam
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Dewey Decimal Number: 153.69
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Publication Date: 2006-07-25
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Reading Level: 400
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Description: Available for the first time in the United States, this international bestseller reveals the secrets of nonverbal communication to give you confidence and control in any face-to-face encounter–from making a great first impression and acing a job interview to finding the right partner.
It is a scientific fact that people’s gestures give away their true intentions. Yet most of us don’t know how to read body language–and don’t realize how our own physical movements speak to others. Now the world’s foremost experts on the subject share their techniques for reading body language signals to achieve success in every area of life.
Drawing upon more than thirty years in the field, as well as cutting-edge research from evolutionary biology, psychology, and medical technologies that demonstrate what happens in the brain, the authors examine each component of body language and give you the basic vocabulary to read attitudes and emotions through behavior.
Discover:
• How palms and handshakes are used to gain control
• The most common gestures of liars
• How the legs reveal what the mind wants to do
• The most common male and female courtship gestures and signals
• The secret signals of cigarettes, glasses, and makeup
• The magic of smiles–including smiling advice for women
• How to use nonverbal cues and signals to communicate more effectively and get the reactions you want
Filled with fascinating insights, humorous observations, and simple strategies that you can apply to any situation, this intriguing book will enrich your communication with and understanding of others–as well as yourself.
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Price: $21.95
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Sale: $13.09
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Manufacturer: Doubleday Business
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Number of Items: 1
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Binding: Hardcover
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Author: Ori Brafman::Rom Brafman
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Publisher: Doubleday Business
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Edition: 1
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Dewey Decimal Number: 155.92
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Publication Date: 2008-06-03
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Reading Level: 224
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Description: A fascinating journey into the hidden psychological influences that derail our decision-making, Sway will change the way you think about the way you think.
Why is it so difficult to sell a plummeting stock or end a doomed relationship? Why do we listen to advice just because it came from someone “important”? Why are we more likely to fall in love when there’s danger involved? In Sway, renowned organizational thinker Ori Brafman and his brother, psychologist Rom Brafman, answer all these questions and more.
Drawing on cutting-edge research from the fields of social psychology, behavioral economics, and organizational behavior, Sway reveals dynamic forces that influence every aspect of our personal and business lives, including loss aversion (our tendency to go to great lengths to avoid perceived losses), the diagnosis bias (our inability to reevaluate our initial diagnosis of a person or situation), and the “chameleon effect” (our tendency to take on characteristics that have been arbitrarily assigned to us).
Sway introduces us to the Harvard Business School professor who got his students to pay $204 for a $20 bill, the head of airline safety whose disregard for his years of training led to the transformation of an entire industry, and the football coach who turned conventional strategy on its head to lead his team to victory. We also learn the curse of the NBA draft, discover why interviews are a terrible way to gauge future job performance, and go inside a session with the Supreme Court to see how the world’s most powerful justices avoid the dangers of group dynamics.
Every once in a while, a book comes along that not only challenges our views of the world but changes the way we think. In Sway, Ori and Rom Brafman not only uncover rational explanations for a wide variety of irrational behaviors but also point readers toward ways to avoid succumbing to their pull.
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Price: $16.95
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Sale: $8.97
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Manufacturer: Harper Perennial Modern Classics
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Number of Items: 1
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Binding: Paperback
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Author: Robert M. Pirsig
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Publisher: Harper Perennial Modern Classics
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Dewey Decimal Number: 813
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Publication Date: 2008-10-01
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Reading Level: 448
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Description: In his now classic Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig brings us a literary chautauqua, a novel that is meant to both entertain and edify. It scores high on both counts. Phaedrus, our narrator, takes a present-tense cross-country motorcycle trip with his son during which the maintenance of the motorcycle becomes an illustration of how we can unify the cold, rational realm of technology with the warm, imaginative realm of artistry. As in Zen, the trick is to become one with the activity, to engage in it fully, to see and appreciate all details--be it hiking in the woods, penning an essay, or tightening the chain on a motorcycle. In his autobiographical first novel, Pirsig wrestles both with the ghost of his past and with the most important philosophical questions of the 20th century--why has technology alienated us from our world? what are the limits of rational analysis? if we can't define the good, how can we live it? Unfortunately, while exploring the defects of our philosophical heritage from Socrates and the Sophists to Hume and Kant, Pirsig inexplicably stops at the middle of the 19th century. With the exception of Poincaré, he ignores the more recent philosophers who have tackled his most urgent questions, thinkers such as Peirce, Nietzsche (to whom Phaedrus bears a passing resemblance), Heidegger, Whitehead, Dewey, Sartre, Wittgenstein, and Kuhn. In the end, the narrator's claims to originality turn out to be overstated, his reasoning questionable, and his understanding of the history of Western thought sketchy. His solution to a synthesis of the rational and creative by elevating Quality to a metaphysical level simply repeats the mistakes of the premodern philosophers. But in contrast to most other philosophers, Pirsig writes a compelling story. And he is a true innovator in his attempt to popularize a reconciliation of Eastern mindfulness and nonrationalism with Western subject/object dualism. The magic of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance turns out to lie not in the answers it gives, but in the questions it raises and the way it raises them. Like a cross between The Razor's Edge and Sophie's World, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance takes us into "the high country of the mind" and opens our eyes to vistas of possibility. --Brian Bruya
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Price: $12.95
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Sale: $7.24
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Manufacturer: Portfolio Hardcover
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Number of Items: 1
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Binding: Hardcover
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Author: Seth Godin
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Publisher: Portfolio Hardcover
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Dewey Decimal Number: 158.1
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Publication Date: 2007-05-10
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Reading Level: 96
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Description: The old saying is wrong-winners do quit, and quitters do win.
Every new project (or job, or hobby, or company) starts out exciting and fun. Then it gets harder and less fun, until it hits a low point-really hard, and not much fun at all.
And then you find yourself asking if the goal is even worth the hassle. Maybe you're in a Dip-a temporary setback that will get better if you keep pushing. But maybe it's really a Cul-de-Sac, which will never get better, no matter how hard you try.
According to bestselling author Seth Godin, what really sets superstars apart from everyone else is the ability to escape dead ends quickly, while staying focused and motivated when it really counts.
Winners quit fast, quit often, and quit without guilt-until they commit to beating the right Dip for the right reasons. In fact, winners seek out the Dip. They realize that the bigger the barrier, the bigger the reward for getting past it. If you can become number one in your niche, you'll get more than your fair share of profits, glory, and long-term security.
Losers, on the other hand, fall into two basic traps. Either they fail to stick out the Dip-they get to the moment of truth and then give up-or they never even find the right Dip to conquer.
Whether you're a graphic designer, a sales rep, an athlete, or an aspiring CEO, this fun little book will help you figure out if you're in a Dip that's worthy of your time, effort, and talents. If you are, The Dip will inspire you to hang tough. If not, it will help you find the courage to quit-so you can be number one at something else.
Seth Godin doesn't claim to have all the answers. But he will teach you how to ask the right questions.
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Price: $28.00
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Sale: $15.98
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Manufacturer: Bantam
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Number of Items: 1
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Binding: Hardcover
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Author: Jack Kornfield
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Publisher: Bantam
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Dewey Decimal Number: 294.3422
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Publication Date: 2008-04-29
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Reading Level: 448
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Description: You have within you unlimited capacities for love, for joy, for communion with life, and for unshakable freedom—and here is how to awaken them. In The Wise Heart, one of the leading spiritual teachers of our time offers the most accessible and illuminating guide to Buddhism’s transformational psychology ever published in the West.
Trained as a monk in Thailand, Burma, and India, Jack Kornfield experienced at first hand the life-changing power of Buddhist teachings: the emphasis on the nobility and sacredness of the human spirit, the fine-grained analysis of emotion and thought, the precise techniques for healing, training, and transforming the mind and heart. In contrast to the medical orientation of most Western psychology and psychiatry, here is a vision of radiant human dignity, and a practical path for realizing it in our own lives.
The Wise Heart is the fruit of a life’s work that includes such classics as A Path with Heart and After the Ecstasy, the Laundry. Filled with stories from Kornfield’s Buddhist psychotherapy practice and portraits of remarkable teachers, it also includes a moving account of his own recovery from a violence-filled childhood. For meditators and mental health professionals, Buddhists and non-Buddhists alike, The Wise Heart offers an extraordinary journey from the roots of consciousness to the highest expression of human possibility.
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Price: $24.99
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Sale: $11.24
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Manufacturer: Fireside
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Number of Items: 1
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Binding: Hardcover
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Author: Travis Bradberry::Jean Greaves
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Publisher: Fireside
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Edition: 1
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Dewey Decimal Number: 152.4
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Publication Date: 2005-06-13
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Reading Level: 188
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Description: First popularized by Daniel Goleman in his book Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ, the concept of emotional intelligence is now widely accepted, not only within the psychological arena, but also, ever-increasingly, within the business world. In The Emotional Intelligence Quick Book, authors Bradberry and Greaves outline techniques anyone can use to achieve goals in an easier and more fulfilling way, improve relationships, enhance health, and become more accomplished in the work force. Starting with a discussion on what emotional intelligence (EQ, for short) is and how it impacts our lives, Bardberry and Greaves then provide readers with instructions for determining their own EQ via the book’s companion Web site (the passcode for doing so can be found on the inside of the book’s dust jacket). They also provide a variety of ways readers can increase their EQ and put it to use in their personal and professional lives. Based on research with more than 500,000 people, The Emotional Intelligence Quick Book is exactly that, a quick and easy-to-read resource that empowers readers to master their EQ and more effectively incorporate it into all aspects of their daily lives. Larry Trivieri Jr.
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