Shanghai Baby, interdit, saisi et pilonné dans son pays comme au bon vieux temps de la Révolution culturelle, bouscule hardiment les tabous et souffle un vent nouveau et provocateur sur la Chine.
Coco, une jeune femme sans complexes animée d'une prodigieuse soif de vivre et de tout découvrir, raconte le roman de sa vie aimantée par ces deux pôles que sont Tiantian le frère de coeur, peintre fragile et impuissant, et Mark, l'amant allemand. Pour décor, Shanghai et le goût de ses nuits scintillantes.
A mother is brutally raped by a man on their North Dakota reservation where she lives with her husband and thirteen-year-old son, Joe. Traumatized and afraid, she takes to her bed and refuses to talk to anyone - including the police.
Winter Parva, a Cotswolds village, has decided to throw a celebratory hog roast to mark the beginning of the winter holiday festivities and Agatha Raisin has arrived with friend and rival in the sleuthing business, Toni, to enjoy the merriment. But as the spit pig is carried towards the bed of fiery charcoal Agatha, things aren't as they seem...
@00000400@World-renowned Stanford University psychologist Carol Dweck, in decades of research on achievement and success, has discovered a truly groundbreaking idea-the power of our mindset.@00000163@@00000400@Dweck explains why it's not just our abilities and talent that bring us success-but whether we approach them with a fixed or growth mindset. She makes clear why praising intelligence and ability doesn't foster self-esteem and lead to accomplishment, but may actually jeopardize success. With the right mindset, we can motivate our kids and help them to raise their grades, as well as reach our own goals-personal and professional. Dweck reveals what all great parents, teachers, CEOs, and athletes already know: how a simple idea about the brain can create a love of learning and a resilience that is the basis of great accomplishment in every area.@00000163@
A radical, provocative argument that the global population will soon begin to decline, dramatically reshaping the social, political and economic landscape. For half a century, statisticians, pundits and politicians have warned that a burgeoning planetary population will soon overwhelm the earth's resources. But a growing number of experts are sounding a different kind of alarm. Rather than growing exponentially, they argue, the global population is headed for a steep decline. Throughout history, depopulation was the product of catastrophe: ice ages, plagues, the collapse of civilizations. This time, however, we're thinning ourselves deliberately, by choosing to have fewer babies than we need to replace ourselves. In much of the developed and developing world, that decline is already underway, as urbanisation, women's empowerment, and waning religiosity lead to smaller and smaller families. In Empty Planet , Ibbitson and Bricker travel from South Florida to Sao Paulo, Seoul to Nairobi, Brussels to Delhi to Beijing, drawing on a wealth of research and firsthand reporting to illustrate the dramatic consequences of this population decline - and to show us why the rest of the developing world will soon join in. They find that a smaller global population will bring with it a number of benefits: fewer workers will command higher wages; good jobs will prompt innovation; the environment will improve; the risk of famine will wane; and falling birthrates in the developing world will bring greater affluence and autonomy for women. But enormous disruption lies ahead, too. We can already see the effects in Europe and parts of Asia, as aging populations and worker shortages weaken the economy and impose crippling demands on healthcare and vital social services. There may be earth-shaking implications on a geopolitical scale as well. Empty Planet is a hugely important book for our times. Captivating and persuasive, it is a story about urbanisation, access to education and the empowerment of women to choose their own destinies. It is about the secularisation of societies and the vital role that immigration has to play in our futures. Rigorously researched and deeply compelling, Empty Planet offers a vision of a future that we can no longer prevent - but one that we can shape, if we choose to.
Phryne Fisher - she of the grey-green eyes and diamante garters - is rapidly tiring of the boredom of chit-chatting with retired colonels and foxtrotting with weak-chinned wonders. Instead, Phryne decides it might be amusing to try her hand at being a lady detective - on the other side of the world.
Whether foiling kidnappers' plans, walking the wings of a Tiger Moth or simply deciding what to wear for dinner, Phryne handles everything with her usual panache and flair. This title takes you on an adventure with glamorous heroine Phryne Fisher.
With a foreword by Athene Donald, Professor of Experimental Physics, University of Cambridge and Master of Churchill College. Ten Women Who Changed Science tells the moving stories of the physicists, biologists, chemists, astronomers and doctors who helped to shape our world with their extraordinary breakthroughs and inventions, and outlines their remarkable achievements. These scientists overcame significant obstacles, often simply because they were women their science and their lives were driven by personal tragedies and shaped by seismic world events. What drove these remarkable women to cure previously incurable diseases, disprove existing theories or discover new sources of energy? Some were rewarded with the Nobel Prize for their pioneering achievements - Madame Curie, twice - others were not and, even if they had, many are not household names. Despite living during periods when the contribution of women was disregarded, if not ignored, these resilient women persevered with their research, whether creating life-saving drugs or expanding our knowledge of the cosmos. By daring to ask 'How?' and 'Why?' and persevering against the odds, each of these women, in a variety of ways, has made the world a better place. Astronomy Henrietta Leavitt (United States of America) (1868-1921) - discovered the period-luminosity relation(ship) for Cepheid variable stars, which enabled us to measure the size of our Galaxy and the Universe. Physics Lise Meitner (Austria) (1878-1968) - fled Nazi Germany in 1938, taking with her the experimental results which showed that she and Otto Hahn had split the nucleus and discovered nuclear fission. Chien-Shiung Wu (United States of America) (1912-1997) - Chinese-American who disproved one of the most accepted 'laws of nature', that not all processes can be mirrored. She showed that the 'law of parity', the idea that a left-spinning and right-spinning sub-atomic particle would behave identically, was wrong. Chemistry Marie Curie (France) (1867-1934) - the only person in history to have won Nobel prizes in two different fields of science. Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin (United Kingdom) (1910-1994) - British chemist who won the Nobel prize for Chemistry in 1964. Among the most prominent of a generation of great protein crystallographers. The field was revolutionized under her. She pioneered the X-ray study of large molecules of biochemical importance: the structures of cholesterol, penicillin, vitamin B12 and insulin, leading to DNA structure analysis by Franklin etc. Medicine Virginia Apgar (United States of America) (1909-1974) - of Apgar Score fame. Gertrude Elion (United States of America) (1918-1999) - won the Nobel Prize for Physiology/Medicine in 1988 for developing some important principles for drug development. Biology Rita Levi-Montalicini (Italy) (1909-2012) - the so-called 'Lady of the Cells'. She won the Nobel Prize for Physiology/Medicine in 1986 for her co-discovery in 1954 of NGF (nerve growth factor). Elsie Widdowson (United Kingdom) (1906-2000) - a pioneer of the science of nutrition who was instrumental in devising the WW2 diet, in part through self-experimentation. Rachel Carson (United States of America) (1907-1964) - marine biologist and author of Silent Spring who is credited with having advanced the environmental movement.
When Phryne Fisher arranges to go to Ballarat for a week, she eschews the excitement of her Hispano-Suiza for the sedate safety of the train. But as the passengers sleep, they are all overcome by chloroform poisoning.
In The Learning Revolution Sanjay Sarma argues that the emerging focus on actual 'learning' over ineffectually just 'educating' is timely and essential to our future. In a networked and digitised world, our ability to learn over the course of a lifetime has never been greater. But as a result, the demands for a dynamic, adaptive, and enduring approach to knowledge acquisition and application have increased - we can't just 'do our learning in school' and then settle in for the long haul of a narrowly defined, static work life. In this book, readers will travel to the forefront of the current revolution in our understanding of learning, as the convergence of technology, neuroscience, and experimentation fundamentally transforms the act of learning from a craft, to a science, and, ultimately, to something that we engineer - to ever greater outcomes for ourselves, our children, our students, our colleagues, and humanity at large. The Learning Revolution shows why the pace of learning is far more important than the kind of learning; why cramming is a really poor way to actually learn information; how we can prime curiosity to maximize information absorption and storage; and how our knowledge develops through stages of recognition, fluency and creative application.
A revolution is under way across the globe, yet very few people understand it. Basic Blockchain will explain everything you need to know to understand the technology that will soon disrupt and revolutionise everything from financial and health services to the property market and how we vote. Born of an obscure body of research on game theory developed at MIT, originally championed by child pornographers and drug dealers seeking to launder ill-gotten gains, accelerated by entrepreneurs seeking to improve financial access for the poor, funded by giant corporate interests attracted to the potential for billions of dollars of cost savings, blockchain heralds a new era of financial inclusion, legal inclusion for the dispossessed and lower prices for consumers. In short, it will enact radical change on our lives. In this book, David L. Shrier, one of MIT and Oxford University's leading futurists, explains for the general reader: - The history of blockchain, its apocryphal progenitor Satoshi Nakamoto and the socioeconomic context of its origins in the 2008 financial crisis. - How blockchain works, including the core technologies that drive it such as cryptographic hashes and network theory, all described in simple, understandable terms. - The potential of blockchain, including its impact on our jobs, industry and society as a whole. Blockchain is the new internet, and it will disrupt and transform the economy and society in the same way. Most people don't understand it (yet), but this accessible book, written by a global authority on blockchain, is the essential introduction to the next technological revolution.
'Brilliantly inventive and entertaining questions from the bookworm's bookworm' Mark Mason, author of Walk the Lines , Question Time and many more This is a literary quiz book with a difference. Rather than basic sets of questions, The Book Lover's Quiz Book mirrors the format of Gary's live quizzes, at the Betsey Trotwood in London and elsewhere. So, there are lots of multiple-choice questions, some amusing answers, clever red herrings, little-known facts about authors and some of the much-loved Say What You See picture round. Also, there are fixed and variable rounds - fixed ones include 'Blankety Books' (one word missing from the title - always with a theme), 'Literary Links and lists' (what connects/next in the list etc.) and '2 of a Kind' (name the character and the author that share the same initials). The changeable rounds keep the quizzes fresh and include 'What the Dickens?' (real or made-up Dickens names), 'RomeNo or JuliYess' (real or made-up Shakespearian insults) and 'Book Bingo!' (identify the correct number). There are also more standard rounds such as 'First Lines', 'Working Titles' and 'Banned Books'. The aim of all Gary's quizzes, and this book, is that people should have fun and be able to guess (if they don't know) as much as possible.
In this book one of America's most distinguished psychologists describes his experiences in helping people to discover the path to personal growth through an understanding of their own limitations and potential. What is personal growth? Under what conditions is it possible? How can one person help another? What is creativity, and how can it be fostered? These are some of the issues raised, which challenge many concepts of traditional psychology. Contemporary psychology derives largely from the experimental laboratory, or from Freudian theory. It is preoccupied with minute aspects of animal and human behaviour, or with the mentally ill. But there are rebels, of whom the author counts himself as one, along with Gordon Allport, Abraham Maslow and Rollo May, who feel that psychology and psychiatry should be aiming higher, and be more concerned with growth and potentiality in man. The interest of such a psychology is in the production of harmoniously mature individuals, given that we all have qualities and possibilities infinitely capable of development. Successful development makes us more flexible in relationships, more creative, and less open to suggestion and control. This book, philosophical and provocative, summarizes Dr Rogers' experience.Non-technical in its language, it is not only for psychologists and psychiatrists, but for teachers and counsellors, religious and social workers, labour-management specialists and anyone interested in 'becoming'.
It's Indiana, 1818. Moonlight falls through the dense woods that surround a one-room cabin, where a nine-year-old Abraham Lincoln kneels at his suffering mother's bedside. 'My baby boy...' she whispers before dying. Only later will the grieving Abe learn that his mother's fatal affliction was actually the work of a vampire.
When we look at Chinese history for a guide to business, we commonly reach for Sun Tzu's The Art of War , but that is a military text. It focuses on an enemy, not a trading partner, and it certainly doesn't mention customers and their role in strategy. To come to terms with Chinese commerce, we don't need to know the Art of War . We need to know the art of business. This book explains Chinese business in history: its practices, values and achievements. As we explore business through time, we discover the strategies which enabled Chinese merchants to become rich and gain insights into how Chinese business evolved, and continues to evolve. The Art of Business goes beyond the Silk Road, Marco Polo and the opium trade to examine how the many different Chinese businesses made money. It asks how merchants mastered the spatial and temporal dimensions of the market and built substantial wealth in doing so. It explores the commercial revolutions that occurred in the Tang and Song dynasties and the late Ming, and reveals business practices carried into the Ching dynasty. It explores salt merchants, the porcelain industry, Huizhou and Shanxi merchant groups, and Howqua, who became the world's richest man. The evolving nature of world commerce will place new demands on tomorrow's businesses. By examining the past, we can better understand the future in which China will once again stand like a giant.
The world of business books is a curious place where one can find everyone from great businesspeople like Warren Buffett, Steve Jobs and Elon Musk, to the most spectacular business failures such as Enron and the sub-prime business market. There are geniuses, hard workers, academics and entrepreneurs as well a few charlatans and hucksters. There's even room for Donald Trump. The 70 titles covered were chosen with various parameters in mind: to cover a range of areas of business, from sales and marketing to negotiation, entrepreneurship to investing, leadership to innovation, and from traditional and corporate models of business to start-up manuals and alternative angles on the subject. Obvious bestselling titles such as How to Make Friends and Influence People or 7 Habits of Highly Effective People have been included, but there are also those books of more questionable value often included on recommended lists of business classics, included here by way of warning. The chosen books also cover a wide span of time and acknowledge that some of the most powerful or entertaining insights into business can be found in texts that aren't perceived as being 'business books', for instance The Art of War, Microserfs, Thinking Fast and Slow and The Wealth of Nations. The selection includes a good range of the most recent successes in business publishing with which readers may be less familiar. The titles are arranged chronologically, allowing the reader to dip in, but also casting an intriguing light on how trends in business titles have changed over the years. Among these titles, you will find expert advice, based on solid research (for instance The Effective Executive or Getting to Yes ), and inspirational guides to setting up businesses and running them on sound foundations (such as True North, Crucial Conversations, or We) alongside dubious management manuals that take a single flawed idea and stretch it out to the point of absurdity. The hope is that the reader will be inspired to read the best of these titles, ignore the worst of them, and will come away with at least a basic idea of what each has to teach us about business.
'The very best book on the subject ever published' Bernard Ewell, Personal Property Journal (the trade publication of the American Society of Appraisers) The art world can appear impenetrable to the beginner. This classic book, in print since 1990, is an invaluable primer that will help anyone to penetrate the thickets of inscrutable 'insider info' and esoteric jargon. Updated for today's art market, including online buying, The Art of Buying Art is without a doubt the most accessible book on how to research, evaluate, price and buy artworks - for anyone who wants to buy art. No previous knowledgeof art or the art business is necessary. Topics include: · how to research and evaluate art prices like the professionals · how to build a quality collection · how to spot fakes and forgeries · how to buy art at auctions and directly from artists · how to negotiate prices · how to tell the difference between an original and a reproduction Bamberger provides the information needed to transform anyone into an informed art consumer, to protect collectors from bad buys and to help them locate the best art at the correct prices.
'I can't imagine how they whittled it down to just 50 people' - comedian Nik Rabinowitz 'A fantastic thought-provoking book that renews my appreciation for history. It reminds us how we got here and how we can avoid things getting worse' Mandla Shongwe, SAFM Lifestyle A fascinating, terrific read. Gareth Cliff, CliffCentral From drug lords, drug cheats and the morally corrupt to political despots and plain, old crackpots - the twentieth century certainly saw its fair share of villains. Be it through politics, war, sport, culture or just their general idiocy, these are men and women of infamy who have steered our good ship Humanity towards the World-War-fighting, smart-phone-tapping age we are mired in today. 50 People Who Messed Up the World brings together the nastiest names from the last century and beyond in one highly unpleasant yet hilarious package. Nasty names such as Stalin, Hideki Tojo and Chairman Mao make up a murderer's row of historically horrible figures, alongside more recent sordid celebs including Kim Kardashian, Justin Bieber and Lance Armstrong. Each entry offers a sharply sardonic and scathingly thorough profile, accompanied by hilarious mono illustrations from award-winning cartoonist Zapiro. Treading the delicate balance between cynicism and optimism, Alexander Parker and Tim Richman offend and entertain in equal measure in this delightfully scornful read.
'Witty, pacy and fascinating . . . the best book on science I've ever read.' Karl Dixon How many bananas would it take to give you radiation sickness? Can human beings really spontaneously combust? What's the strongest acid ever made? The answers to all these questions and many, many more can be found in the periodic table of elements. Passionate science educator Tim James provides an informative, entertaining and quirkily illustrated guide to the table that shows clearly how this abstract and seemingly jumbled graphic is relevant to our day-to-day lives. As he puts it, elements are 'the building blocks nature uses for cosmic cookery; the purest substances making up everything from beetroot to bicycles.' In June 2016, with the addition of four final elements - nihonium, moscovium, tennessine and oganesson - the table was finally completed, enabling Elemental to examine the table in its final form. Whether you're studying the periodic table for the first time or are simply interested in the fundamental building blocks of the universe - from the core of the sun to the networks in your brain - Elemental is the perfect guide.
From Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People , published in 1936, which has sold over 30 million copies to date, to the mind management programme of Professor Steve Peters' The Chimp Paradox , a concise and insightful guide to seventy of the most influential self-help books ever published An entertaining, accessible companion, for readers of self-help books and sceptics alike. The titles include classics on achieving success, confidence and happiness, mindfulness, how to change your life, self-control, overcoming anxiety and self-esteem issues and stress relief. The chronological arrangement of the titles reveals the intriguing story of how early self-improvement titles were succeeded by increasingly personality-based, materialistic titles and shows how breakout classics often influenced other titles for decades to come. Each book is summarised to convey a brief idea of what it has to offer the interested reader, while a 'Speed Read' for each book delivers a quick sense of what each writer is like to read and a highly compressed summary of the main points of the book in question. This is a work of reference to dip into, that acknowledges that some of the most powerful insights into ourselves can be found in texts that aren't perceived as being 'self-help' books, and that wisdom and consolation can be found in the strangest places.
From the founder of Bitcoin Market Journal comes a user-friendly book that explains the groundbreaking technology behind bitcoin and blockchain for non-technical readers. When John Hargrave first invested in cryptocurrency, the price of a single bitcoin was about $125; a few years later, that same bitcoin was worth $20,000. Today, it has fallen to $6,400 but that's still fifty times what he paid. Bitcoin has unleashed a tidal wave of new cryptocurrencies, which have the potential to fundamentally disrupt the world economy. Already, these new digital assets are worth £380 billion - value created out of thin air in just the last few years. Cryptocurrency is especially complicated because it marries finance and technology: two complicated subjects that get even more complex when put together. Blockchain for Everyone is the key to understanding that complexity: a guide that helps people understand these new digital assets and teaches them how to invest wisely. Sir John Hargrave is an entrepreneur and the author of three books, including Mind Hacking . Over the past year, Sir John Hargrave has been writing, teaching and speaking around the world explaining bitcoin and blockchain in simple terms that everyone can understand.
The most contentious area of English, the one that raises the most debate, discomfort and even fear is the use of taboo words and contentious expressions. Many people assume that these words must relate principally to sex and body parts but forbidden terms shift through the ages, with the result that current verbal taboos are just as likely to occupy racial and even political areas rather than sexual ones. However blase or sophisticated we consider ourselves, plenty of these terms, whether connected to sex or religion or race, retain their power to shock as well as having an intrinsic fascination. Where do they come from? When did they enter the English language and how have they changed in form or impact over the years? And how is it that a short string of letters and sounds, a single syllable or two, can possess the almost magical power to offend, distress or infuriate? Are we less or more easily upset or outraged these days or is it that our focus shifted to different areas? Does the requirement to be shocked meet some psychological need and exist independent of the actual taboo terms? Bad Words looks at the history and current state of some of the most controversial and provocative words in the English language. These range far beyond the seven 'dirty words' which US comedian William Carlin promised would 'infect your soul, curve your spine and lose the war for the Allies', and the book - discursive, anecdotal, analytical - will cover expressions connected to religion, ethnicity, nationality, politics, swearing and oaths, using examples from past and present, and concentrating especially on those expressions which have an intriguing or scandalous history. Among the terms examined are: alternative; alt-right; arse; arsehole; balls; bastard; bitch; black; blind; bloody; bollocks; bourgeois; bugger; bullshit; bureaucrat(-cy); butch; capitalism; censorship; chink; choice; Christmas; class; cock; cocksucker; coloured; communist(ic)/commy; crap; crazy; cretin; cuck; cum; cunt; customer; dago; deaf; delivery; (holocaust/climate change) denier; dick; dickhead; dumb; dyke; elite/elitist; English; evolution; extremist; faggot; fanny; fart; fascist; federal; feminist; forefathers; freedom; frog; fuck; gay; gentleman; ghetto; girl; God; gook; gyp/gyppo; heritage; Hitler; holocaust; identity politics; investment; Irish; Jesus (Christ); jew(ish); kike; knob; kraut; lady; lefty; lez; liberal; manpower; marxist; mental; metropolitan; moderate; moron; motherfucker; multicultural; nazi; negro; niggardly; nigger; nutter; organic; Orwellian; paddy; piss; politically correct; poof; populist; prick; pro-choice; pro-life; psycho; pussy; queer; racist; regime; retard(ed); schizo; Scottish; scum; shit; slag; slut; snowflake; socialist; solution; spade; spaz/spastic; spic; suburban; system; terror(ist); tits; traveller; turd; twat; unacceptable; vagina; victim; wanker; Welsh; whore; wop; workmanlike; yid; zionist Some of the by-ways of dangerous language explored include: minced oaths, double entendres, bowdlerisms, euphemisms and expurgations, speech codes, hate speech, and censorship. And then there's the little matter of political correctness, and its misuse especially by those on the right . . . Bad Words provides an entertaining overview of all kinds of dark linguistic nooks and crannies as well as examining the traditional four-letter favourites.
Whether you are a masterpoint hunter at congresses or an afternoon rubber bridge player, Paul Mendelson's entertaining, thoroughly accessible and incisive text guides you, sharpens your zest and wills you to win.
