I’ve always loved fantasy books with female main characters, but as I’ve grown older, it’s been difficult to find contemporary women’s fantasy with main characters over the age of thirty-five. So when I discovered paranormal women’s fiction, a new genre label for stories of midlife women with magic, I was instantly hooked. I read everything I could get my hands on. After that, I was so inspired that I decided to write a contemporary fantasy series of my own, one in which every protagonist was a woman over the age of forty.
Once you read the opening scene where a Tupperware party hilariously goes up in flames, you won't be able to stop reading.
Author Denise Grover Swank is best known for her women's fiction, and her experience in crafting realistic characters and relationships shines in this book. This book is the whole package of fun and magic.
Let It All Burn also helped inspire the elemental magic in my own book!
I am Professor of Economics at Washington State University. My research focuses on applying Industrial Organization to polluting industries and other regulated markets. I analyze how firms strategically respond to environmental regulation, including their output and pricing decisions, their investments in clean technologies, and mergers decisions, both under complete and incomplete information contexts.
This is still regarded as the Microeconomics “bible” among PhD students at top programs.
Most students often say they “had to suffer” this book (typically known as MWG) after being able to fully understand its details years later (hopefully before completing their PhD degrees!). While relatively technical in some chapters, it is extremely useful to get used to writing style of journal articles.
Detailed exposition of general equilibrium theory.
I have studied creativity for 40 years and, along with the textbook I wrote, I am continually teaching my marketing students how to become more creative. I have unequivocally demonstrated that everyone who wants to become more creative can do so with the appropriate tutelage. This is why I get so much satisfaction from teaching creativity and it is why I wrote my book that I am highlighting here.
This is a book with various chapters written by psychologists who have studied metacognition extensively. Metacognition involves thinking about your own thinking, and psychologists all agree that it is a prime requisite to becoming creative. A creative person has to understand how his/her/their brain actually thinks. This book taught me the pitfalls in human metacognitive processes, the value of recall, the feeling of knowing or not knowing, portions of the brain responsible for various creative functions, metacognitive possibilities in older age, and metacognition’s influence on problem identification and solving. This book opened my eyes to the critical nature of metacognition to optimal human performance, and I spend significant time with my students discussing and practicing metacognition.
The term metacognition describes our self-knowledge about how we perceive, remember, think, and act. This volume contains 12 original contributions that describe psychological research on metacognition and the conditions under which metacognitive beliefs are either veridical, spurious, or biased. They explore how self-reflective processes are affected by subject variables such as developmental changes or neurological impairment. Finally, they identify methodological and theoretical issues important for this kind of research. Annotation copyright Book News, Inc. Portland, Or.
I’m one of those odd people who always needs to know why. Why do computers work, why do societies break down? Why do humans kill? Why are cat videos so irresistible? All of those questions explore what it means to be human, but science fiction takes those questions to the extreme, pitting people against the most extreme environments and situations in order to see how they’ll react. To me, that never grows old, and the books I love the most are the ones that do it the best. In my humble opinion, of course.
Cyteen won a Hugo Award in 1989 and pushed the envelope on both world building and character development. For me though, it was the author’s exploration of what it means to be human that made this book one of my all-time favourites.
In Cyteen, there are born humans and made people. Some of the made people are clones of a particularly powerful individual, but most are created to perform a function. These lower-ranked people are taught everything they need to know by ‘tape’, while they sleep.
The book asks some deep philosophical questions about what makes a person human, and whether any of us have the right to create ‘sub-humans’ for our own benefit. These are powerful questions that still beg for answers.
The saga of two young friends trapped in an endless nightmare of suspicion and surveillance, of cyber-programmed servants and a ruling class with century-long lives - and the enigmatic woman who dominates them all. Narrators Jonathan Davis and Gabra Zackman skillfully split up this sweeping sci-fi epic that is "at once a psychological novel, a murder mystery, and an examination of power on a grand scale." (Locus)
I am a shaman, seer, and spiritual teacher who lives in Austin, Texas with my husband Luke Storey, black cat Jelly Bean and dog Cookie. I’m devoted to being of service by living by the calls of inner wisdom, mysticism, energy medicine, and shamanic practices I’ve mastered through studies with spiritual teachers, both of and beyond this world. I lead global courses, events, and talks to reconnect people to their fullest power and confidence through sacred practices. My book was named “a top meditation to try” by O, The Oprah Magazine, and I’ve been called "a leading shaman for expanding others into their full gifts and power" by Forbes.
This powerful book will return you to the remembrance of how to trust your own intuition and get into a most miraculous and co-creative space with the Divine. Filled with personal stories of growing up with their father, the late renowned spiritual teacher Dr. Wayne Dyer and their mother, Marcelene, The Knowing is a trusted ally in opening yourself up to remembering the spiritual wisdom within you. The book also clearly shares 11 lessons to understand the quiet urges of your soul, which provide a comprehensive pathway to reconnect to the power you’ve always had, but now know how to unlock.
To his millions of fans around the world, Dr. Wayne Dyer was the beloved "Father of Motivation," but to Serena and Saje and their six siblings, he was simply "Dad." When he died suddenly in 2015, the sisters were blindsided by grief and felt unprepared to navigate life's challenges and conflicts without his guidance.
The experience launched them on an adventure from loss to understanding as they came to realize and metabolize their father's teachings with a new urgency, intimacy, and power as they applied them to their lives. As their journey unfolded, they realized their father's wisdom-"The Knowing"-was embedded…
I've been scammed several times. Even getting out of one and then being suckered into another. So after the last time, I just quit buying stuff until I'd gotten how and why I could get flim-flammed to begin with. So people could wise themselves up and get their freedom back. It only took a couple of years of my life, but I was able to use all my experiences of being scammed, so the research technically started many years earlier. I've got several degrees including a doctorate, and have published hundreds of titles from the research I've done in various fields. Even one on how to research.
This is a rare book, but in spite of the 1945 language, the author breaks down the principles of financial success. It tells what can motivate you to succeed, and what will be your ruin. When I reviewed this again recently, I was surprised how many of these key principles were common in other success and “make money” books. Well worth getting your own copy if you can find it.
"Many rich and successful men and women," declares the author of this helpful book, "have no more brains or energy than anyone else. They are usually driven to success. "Frequently they are so helpless they can't stop moving ahead even when they want to. Their money is made in spite of themselves!" Louis M. Grafe, who made his own fortune, lost it, and then went on to earn another fortune, presents an astonishingly simple formula for wealth and success. He has tested it in his own experience and has found that it has brought wealth not only to him but…
When people ask me why I became a statistician, and what its attraction is, I simply tell them that, using statistics, I have been on voyages of discovery and travelled to worlds they didn’t know existed. Using data and statistical methods instead of light and optics, I have seen things others could not imagine. Like an explorer of old, I have joined adventures peeling back the mysteries of the world around us. In my books on statistics, data science, data mining, and artificial intelligence, I have tried to convey some of this excitement, and to show the reader how they too can take part in this wonderful modern adventure.
This is a wonderful book because it says it all. Of course, that’s an exaggeration because no book could possibly encompass the vast breadth of modern statistics, but anyone who read through this multi-volume work would have an enviable knowledge of the discipline. It’s an unsurpassed general source of information about the foundational concepts and tools of statistics, and a reference source I regularly turn to when I need to remind myself of the theory underlying a concept or method.
When I worked in clinical practice as a psychotherapist, I worked with many burnt-out clients and always found it frustrating that the conventional wisdom was to take time off or stop working, which is just not practical (or desirable) for many people. I was always looking for alternative things people could do to help themselves. Then I experienced burnout myself, and whilst it was dreadful, I learnt first hand how to put all of this into practice, hence my research on the topic. I now work with people and organisations in high pressured, innovative environments where the focus is on preventing burnout rather than recovering.
For me, beating burnout involves knowing yourself well, and this book helps with a critical aspect of that: understanding my interactions with others.
The book is so easy to read and understand without being oversimplified. I’ve used the material to help teach people how to create and maintain healthy boundaries in life and work.
As a life coach and author of two dozen self-help books, I’ve spent the past twenty years helping people treat themselves better. Doing so is fundamental to personal growth and making real, purposeful change. When you fully appreciate yourself and treat yourself well, you will feel so much better! You will be in a much stronger position to overcome challenges, achieve your goals, and get more out of life.
Step one in treating yourself better is to cease focusing on what isn't going well and to put your attention on what is. Be truly thankful for your blessings. No matter what challenges or situations you are facing, there are things you can be grateful for. You have air to breathe and water to drink, for example. Start there. The more you focus on the positives in your life, the more good things you will attract. This book guides you through a month of gratitude activities that will have you feeling better about every aspect of your life.
In The Magic a great mystery from a sacred text is revealed, and with this knowledge Rhonda Byrne takes the reader on a life-changing journey for 28 days. Step by step, day-by-day, secret teachings, revelations, and scientific law are brought together to form 28 simple practices that open the reader's eyes to a new world, and lead them to a dream life.
As an interdisciplinary scholar with professional musical training, I surveyed the literature in cognitive science for conceptual frameworks that would shed light on tacit processes in musical activity. I was tired of research that treats the musician either as a “lab rat” not quite capable of fully understanding what they do or as a “channel” for the mysterious and divine. I view musicians as human beings who engage in meaningful activity with instruments and with each other. Musicians are knowledgeable, skilled, and deeply creative. The authors on this list turn a scientific lens on human activity that further defines how we make ourselves through meaningful work and interactions.
I love this book because it demonstrates the human value of being excellentin personal and professional contexts. Like many musicians, I strive for excellence and in this book Schwartz & Sharpe draw a picture of excellence that includes “practical wisdom” – knowing how to do the right thing at the right time in the right way for the right reasons. A lovely book that is sure to be a helpful guide for those of us seeking personal fulfillment through any kind of meaningful activity.
A reasoned yet urgent call to embrace and protect the essential, practical human quality that has been drummed out of our lives: wisdom.
It's in our nature to want to succeed. It's also human nature to want to do right. But we've lost how to balance the two. How do we get it back?
Practical Wisdom can help. "Practical wisdom" is the essential human quality that combines the fruits of our individual experiences with our empathy and intellect-an aim that Aristotle identified millennia ago. It's learning "the right way to do the right thing in a particular circumstance, with a…
