Bill Wile is an easygoing, hardworking guy who leads a quiet, ordinary life. One evening, after his usual eight-hour bartending shift, he finds a typewritten note under the windshield wiper of his car. If you don't take this note to the police and get them involved, I will kill a lovely blond schoolteacher. If you do take this note to the police, I will instead kill an elderly woman active in charity work. You have four hours to decide. The choice...

The first book to use the unexpected discoveries of neuroscience to help us make the best decisions

Since Plato, philosophers have described the decision-making process as either rational or emotional: we carefully deliberate, or we "blink" and go with our gut. But as scientists break open the mind's black box with the latest tools of neuroscience, they're discovering that this is not how the mind works. Our best decisions are a finely tuned

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"Colin Hancock is giving his second chance his best shot. With a history of violence and bad decisions behind him and the threat of prison dogging his every step, he's determined to walk a straight line. To Colin, that means applying himself single-mindedly toward his teaching degree and avoiding everything that proved destructive in his earlier life. Reminding himself daily of his hard-earned lessons, the last thing he is looking for is a serious...

A world-renowned psychiatrist, the author of Reality Therapy, calls for a complete overhaul of traditional psychology based on the goal of strengthening relationships by appealing to each individual's basic needs for love, power, freedom, and pleasure

Eyes Wide Open: How to Make Smart Decisions in a Confusing World is Noreena Hertz's practical, cutting-edge guide to help you cut through the data deluge and make smarter and better choices, based on her highly popular TED talk. In this eye-opening handbook, the internationally noted speaker, economics expert, and bestselling author of IOU: The Debt Threat and Silent Takeover reveals the extent to which the biggest decisions in our lives are often...

"One hot summer day, John Cole decides to shut his bookshop early and possibly forever, and drives out of London to see his brother. When his car breaks down on an isolated road, he goes looking for help and finds a dilapidated house. As he approaches, a laughing woman he's never seen before walks out, addresses him by name and explains she's been waiting for him. Once he enters the home, John discovers an enigmatic clan of residents, all of whom...

""So delicately calibrated and precisely beautiful that one might not immediately sense the sledgehammer of pain building inside this book. And I mean that in the best way. What powerful tension and depth this provides!"-Aimee Bender. Fourteen-year-old Linda lives with her parents in the beautiful, austere woods of northern Minnesota, where their nearly abandoned commune stands as a last vestige of a lost counter-culture world. Isolated at home and...

"In ancient Greek mythology, Atlas, a member of the original race of Gods called Titans, leads a rebellion against the new deities, the Olympians. For this he incurs divine wrath: the victorious Olympians force Atlas, guardian of the Garden of Hesperides and its golden apples of life, to bear the weight of the earth and the heavens for eternity. When the hero Heracles, as one of his famous twelve labours, is tasked with stealing these apples he seeks...

Do you often feel you are at the mercy of external forces in your life? If so, this book is for you. Playing the Quantum Field demonstrates that you have the power to shape your own life, showing how your very next choice can change struggle into play. Brenda Anderson presents a fresh approach to everyday life based on the premise that everyone and everything in the universe are interconnected, and she shows you how to play the quantum field to create...

Thaler and Sunstein offer a groundbreaking discussion of how to apply the science of choice to nudge people toward decisions that can improve their lives without restricting their freedom of choice