Well World

This is a thrilling historical account of the worst cholera outbreak in Victorian London and a brilliant exploration of how Dr. John Snow's solution revolutionized the way we think about disease, cities, science, and the modern world.

A metallic cylinder falls to earth, landing in the sands of Horsell Common, Surrey, generating curiosity and awe. But what's inside soon induces only terror. The story that unfolds is a breathless first-person account of an inconceivable reality: an extraterrestrial war has been waged on the planet.

Attention is not just receptive, but actively creative of the world we inhabit. How we attend makes all the difference to the world we experience. And nowadays in the West we generally attend in a rather unusual way: governed by the narrowly focused, target-driven left hemisphere of the brain.

Are you above average? Is your child an A student? Is your employee an introvert or an extrovert? Every day we are measured against the yardstick of averages, judged according to how close we come to it or how far we deviate from it. The assumption that metrics comparing us to an average—like GPAs, personality test results, and performance review ratings—reveal something meaningful about our potential is so ingrained in our consciousness that we don't even question it. That assumption, says Harvard's Todd Rose, is spectacularly—and scientifically—wrong.

Learn how to use the power of your imagination to create what you want in life! Based on Shakti Gawain's best selling book, Creative Visualization, this presentation teaches you methods for using mental imagery and affirmation to produce positive change. Today, creative visualization techniques are used successfully in the fields of health, athletics, business, education, and the creative arts.

Patpong, in the heart of Bangkok, teems with bars and sex shows, catering mainly to farangs - foreigners. Cleo Odzer, a young anthropologist, spent three years studying the area. Gaining the confidence of the bar girls and bar boys, she interviewed them at length, lived among them, accompanied several back to their families in remote villages. She also got to know their customers, those in for a night or in forever (many fell in love and stayed on in Patpong). From Odzer's account emerges a far different picture from the cliched image of the prostitute.

After being murdered, his consciousness dormant and unaware of the passing of time while confined in an elaborate water trap, Kai wakes to find a lesser mage attempting to harness Kai’s magic to his own advantage. That was never going to go well. But why was Kai imprisoned in the first place? What has changed in the world since his assassination? And why does the Rising World Coalition appear to be growing in influence? Kai will need to pull his allies close and draw on all his pain magic if he is to answer even the least of these questions.

Whether you are stuck in the distress of life, or appear like nothing’s wrong, you may have faced trauma, or incredible stress, or suffocating fear. Maybe you wonder whether those emotions, memories, and experiences are blocking you from being as fulfilled and happy as you could be. Maybe you’re stuck in patterns that simply no longer work for you. What if you could change it all? What if you could feel safe and solid and secure inside your own body? What if your life could be peaceful and centered and fulfilled?

Ian Karmel has weighed eight pounds and he has weighed 420 pounds and right now he’s almost exactly in between the two, but this book is not a weight-loss book. It’s about being a fat person in a skinny world. It’s about gym class and football practice, about chicken wings and juice cleanses, about airplane seats and roller coasters, about fat jokes and Jabba the Hutt, about crying in the Big and Tall section and the joys of being a sneakerhead, about prediabetes and gout, and about realizing that you actually don’t want to eat yourself to death and hoping it’s not too late.

The garden has always been a place of peace and perseverance, of nurture and reward. Using contemporary neuroscience, psychoanalysis and compelling real-life stories, The Well Gardened Mind investigates the remarkable effects of nature on our health and well-being. From the science of the brain’s own ‘gardener cells’ to the beauty of flowers and the grounding effects of working with nature’s rhythms of growth, decay and regeneration, Stuart-Smith provides a new perspective on the power of gardening. Prisoners given the chance to grow plants are less likely to reoffend.

At the verge of turning 40, Peter Sagal - brainiac Harvard grad, short, bald Jew with a disposition toward heft, and a sedentary star of public radio - started running seriously. And much to his own surprise, he kept going, faster and further, running 14 marathons and logging tens of thousands of miles on roads, sidewalks, paths, and trails all over the US and the world, including the 2013 Boston Marathon, where he crossed the finish line moments before the bombings.

Over the past several decades, globalization has homogenized what we eat, and done so ruthlessly. The numbers are stark: Of the roughly 6,000 different plants once consumed by human beings, only nine remain major staples today. Just three of these - rice, wheat, and corn - now provide 50 percent of all our calories. Dig deeper and the trends are more worrisome still.

With 10 percent of the Western world’s children suspected of having Attention Deficit Disorder, or ADHD, and a growing number of adults self-diagnosing after decades of struggle, the question must be raised: How could Nature make such a “mistake”? In this updated edition of his groundbreaking classic, Thom Hartmann explains that people with ADHD are not abnormal, disordered, or dysfunctional, but simply “hunters in a farmer’s world.”

A fascinating account of the world’s most famous disease - polio - told as you have never heard it before. Epidemics of paralysis began to rage in the early 1900s, seemingly out of nowhere. Doctors, parents, and health officials were at a loss to explain why this formerly unheard-of disease began paralyzing so many children. Why did this disease start to become such a horrible problem during the late 1800s? Why did it affect children more often than adults? Why was it originally called teething paralysis by mothers and their doctors?

Why was gin and tonic the cocktail of choice for British colonists in India and Africa? What does Starbucks have to thank for its global domination? What has protected the lives of popes for millennia? Why did Scotland surrender its sovereignty to England? What was George Washington's secret weapon during the American Revolution? The answer to all these questions, and many more, is the mosquito. Driven by surprising insights and fast-paced storytelling, The Mosquito is the extraordinary untold story of the mosquito’s reign through human history.

In this gripping narrative history, Laura Spinney traces the overlooked pandemic to reveal how the virus travelled across the globe, exposing mankind's vulnerability and putting our ingenuity to the test. As socially significant as both world wars, the Spanish flu dramatically disrupted - and often permanently altered - global politics, race relations, and family structures while spurring innovation in medicine, religion, and the arts.

In its Native American meaning, wetiko is an evil cannibalistic spirit that can take over people’s minds, leading to selfishness, insatiable greed, and consumption as an end in itself, destructively turning our intrinsic creative genius against our own humanity. Revealing the presence of wetiko in our modern world behind every form of destruction our species is carrying out, both individual and collective, Paul Levy shows how this mind-virus is so embedded in our psyches that it is almost undetectable - and it is our blindness to it that gives wetiko its power.

Maude Julien's parents were fanatics who believed it was their sacred duty to turn her into the ultimate survivor - raising her in isolation and subjecting her to endless drills designed to "eliminate weakness." She endured a life without heat, hot water, adequate food, friendship, or any kind of affectionate treatment. But Maude's parents could not rule her inner life. Befriending the animals on the lonely estate as well as the characters in the novels she read in secret, young Maude nurtured in herself the compassion and love that her parents forbid as weak.

The Nobel laureate Otto Warburg was widely regarded in his day as one of the most important biochemists of the 20th century, a man whose research was integral to humanity’s understanding of cancer. He was also among the most despised figures in Nazi Germany. As a Jewish homosexual living openly with his male partner, Warburg represented all that the Third Reich abhorred. Yet Hitler and his top advisors dreaded cancer, and protected Warburg in the hope that he could cure it.

A puzzling series of dental explosions beginning in the 19th century is just one of many strange tales that have long lain undiscovered in the pages of old medical journals. Award-winning medical historian Thomas Morris delivers one of the most remarkable, cringe-inducing collections of stories ever assembled.