AMIDST THE WRECKAGE OF FINANCIAL RUIN, PEOPLE ARE LEFT PUZZLING ABOUT HOW IT HAPPENED. WHERE DID ALL THE PROBLEMS BEGIN? For the answer, Jack Cashill, a journalist as shrewd as he is seasoned, looks past the headlines and deep into pages of history and comes back with the goods. From Plato to payday loans, from Aristotle to AIG, from Shakespeare to the Salomon Brothers, from the Medici to Bernie Madoff-in Popes and Bankers Jack Cashill unfurls a fascinating...

Culture, Not Politics. We live in a politicized time. Culture wars and increasingly partisan conflicts have reduced public discourse to shouting matches between ideologues. But rather than merely bemoaning the vulgarity and sloganeering of this era, says acclaimed author and editor Gregory Wolfe, we should seek to enrich the language of civil discourse. And the best way to do that, Wolfe believes, is to draw nourishment from the deepest sources of...

Contrary to popular belief fostered in countless school classrooms the world over, Christopher Columbus did not discover that the earth was round. The idea of a spherical world had been widely accepted in educated circles from as early as the fourth century B.C. Yet, bizarrely, it was not until the supposedly more rational nineteenth century that the notion of a flat earth really took hold. Even more bizarrely, it persists to this day, despite Apollo...

This book uniquely explores the rare event of poor people who become nationally or internationally famous. This book describe how poverty is a severe disability that stunts areas of growth and opportunity among children. Nevertheless, using a sample of 27 people including Charlie Chaplin, Billie Holiday, Marilyn Monroe, Richard Pryor, Babe Ruth, Oprah Winfrey, and Malcolm X, the book shows how these figures both coped, but faced life-long challenges...

Una de las consecuencias del excesivo uso del patrimonialismo como herramienta de dominación desde el siglo XIX fue la homogeneización y la uniformidad social. Hoy las estrategias giran al reconocimiento de la diversidad en la modernidad neoliberal e intercultural, con una tendencia creciente hacia la patrimonialización de la cultura. Pero al intervenir instituciones y gestores culturales en la declaración patrimonial de prácticas culturales,...

This book is a collection of al artworks of motivationals and shortstories around South Africa.

We trace one family, generation by generation, throughout the one thousand years of the second millennium. The trilogy sets the family within its social environment, describing its migration from the continent, and across England, Scotland, and Ireland to settle in the New World. From that we get a vivid picture of what affected, motivated, worried, and encouraged this Saxon family and how they coped. Since the migration of this family was typical...

It seems that ever since mankind was kicked out of the Garden of Eden for eating the forbidden fruit, we've been trying to get back in. Or at least, we've been wondering where the Garden might have been. St. Augustine had a theory, and so did medieval monks, John Calvin, and Christopher Columbus. But when Darwin's theory of evolution permanently altered our understanding of human origins, shouldn't the search for a literal Eden have faded away? Not...

In The Overlooked Americans, public policy expert Elizabeth Currid-Halkett breaks through stereotypes about rural America. She traces how small towns are doing as well as, or better than, cities by many measures. She also shows how rural and urban Americans share core values, from opposing racism and upholding environmentalism to believing in democracy. When we focus too heavily on the far-right fringe, we overlook the millions of rural Americans...

In the spirit of A Short History of Nearly Everything comes Periodic Tales. Award-winning science writer Hugh Andersey-Williams offers readers a captivating look at the elements-and the amazing, little-known stories behind their discoveries. Periodic Tales is an energetic and wide-ranging book of innovations and innovators, of superstition and science and the myriad ways the chemical elements are woven into our culture, history, and language. It will...