This book answers the most obvious, the most important, yet the most difficult question about human history: why history unfolded so differently on different continents. Geography and biography, not race, moulded the contrasting fates of Europeans, Asians, Native Americans, sub-Saharan Africans, and aboriginal Australians. An ambitious synthesis of history, biology, ecology and linguistics, Guns, Germs and Steel is one of the most important and humane works of popular science.
(2008) Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s famous investigations of “optimal experience” have revealed that what makes an experience genuinely satisfying is a state of consciousness called flow. During flow, people typically experience deep enjoyment, creativity, and a total involvement with life. In this new edition of his groundbreaking classic work, Csikszentmihalyi (“the leading researcher into ‘flow states’” —Newsweek) demonstrates the ways this positive state can be controlled, not just left to chance. Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience teaches how, by ordering the information that enters our consciousness, we can discover true happiness and greatly improve the quality of our lives.
Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish examine the inevitable stresses faced by parents of teenagers. Through role play and discussion, they show how to keep communication open with rebellious offspring, how to let go gracefully and yet retain respect and some degree of co-operation throughout these difficult years.
This is a new paperback edition of the first collected volume from the Cairo School of Urban Studies. Bringing together a distinguished interdisciplinary group of scholars, this volume explores what happens when new forms of privatization meet collectivist pasts, public space is sold off to satisfy investor needs and tourist gazes, and the state plans for Egypt’s future in desert cities while stigmatizing and neglecting Cairo’s popular neighborhoods. These dynamics produce surprising contradictions and juxtapositions that are coming to define today’s Middle East. The original publication of this volume launched the Cairo School of Urban Studies, committed to fusing political-economy and ethnographic methods and sensitive to ambivalence and contingency, to reveal the new contours and patterns of modern power emerging in the urban frame.
(2017) A sociological study of Gypsies in modern-day Cairo and Alexandria Little is known about Egypt’s Gypsies, called Dom by scholars, but variously referred to by Egyptians as Ghagar, Nawar, Halebi, or Hanagra, depending on their location. Moreover, most Egyptians are oblivious to the fact that there are today large numbers of Gypsies dispersed from the outskirts of villages in Upper Egypt to impoverished neighborhoods in Cairo and Alexandria. In Gypsies in Contemporary Egypt sociologist Alexandra Parrs draws on two years of fieldwork to explore how Dom identities are constructed, negotiated, and contested in the specifically Egyptian national context. With an eye to the pitfalls and evolution of scholarly work on the vastly more studied European Roma, she traces the scattered representations of Egyptian Dom, from accounts of them by nineteenth-century European Orientalists to their portrayal in Egyptian cinema as belly-dancers in the 1950s and beggars and thieves more recently. She explores the boundaries—religious, cultural, racial, linguistic—between Dom and non-Dom Egyptians and examines the ways in which the Dom position themselves within the limitations of media discourses about them and in turn differentiate themselves from the dominant population. This interplay of attitudes, argues Parrs, sheds light on the values and markers of belonging of the majority population and the paradigms of nation-state formation at the governmental level. Based on extensive interviews with government workers and ordinary individuals in routine contact with the Dom, as well with Dom engaged in a variety of trades in Cairo and Alexandria, Gypsies in Contemporary Egypt is about the search for the fragments of identity of the Egyptian Dom.
(2018) Filled with heartbreak, betrayal and triumph, The Right Time is an uplifting novel about pursuing one’s ambition from the world’s favourite storyteller, Danielle Steel. Abandoned by her mother at age seven, Alexandra Winslow takes solace in the mysteries she reads with her devoted father and soon she is writing them herself, with a talent far beyond her years. After her father’s untimely death, Alex is taken in by the nuns of a local convent, who encourage her to follow her dream. Alex writes in every spare moment and completes her first novel in college. It’s quickly snapped up by a publisher, but Alex, remembering her late father’s advice, insists on writing under a male pseudonym, with her true identity known only to a few. Success comes easily to Alex, but its toll is heavy. Her secret life as the mysterious Alexander Green exposes her to the envious, the arrogant, and the Hollywood players who have no idea who she really is. The right time to open up always seems just out of reach. Once her double life and fame are established, the price of the truth is always too high.
(2014) When Tate Collins finds airline pilot Miles Archer passed out in front of her apartment door, it is definitely not love at first sight. They wouldn’t even go so far as to consider themselves friends. But what they do have is an undeniable mutual attraction. He doesn’t want love and she doesn’t have time for a relationship, but their chemistry cannot be ignored. Once their desires are out in the open, they realize they have the perfect set-up, as long as Tate can stick to two rules: Never ask about the past and don’t expect a future. Tate is determined that she can handle it, but when she realises that she can’t, will she be able to say no to her sexy pilot when he lives just next door! This new romance from Colleen Hoover will have you laughing and crying in equal measure – definitely her best book yet
