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How to Ruin Your Financial Life

Anyone can write a book about how to get rich. The bookstores are full of them. They rarely work, though, which isn’t surprising since the people who write them rarely know much about money.

Jews in South Florida

A lavishly illustrated and lively introduction to a unique American Jewish community.

Golems Among Us

In this book, Byron Sherwin briefly traces the fascinating history of the golem legend in Western culture, then shows how we can use it to navigate a safe journey--philosophically, theologically, ethically, and in public policy.

Freeing God's Children

Given unprecedented insider access, author Allen D. Hertzke charts the rise of this faith-based movement for global human rights and tells the compelling story of the personalities and forces, clashes and compromises, strategies and protests that shape it. In doing so, Hertzke shows that by raising issues-such as global religious persecution, Sudanese atrocities, North Korean gulags, and sex trafficking-the movement is impacting foreign policy around the world.

Freakonomics

Economics is not widely considered to be one of the sexier sciences. The annual Nobel Prize winner in that field never receives as much publicity as his or her compatriots in peace, literature, or physics. But if such slights are based on the notion that economics is dull, or that economists are concerned only with finance itself, Steven D. Levitt will change some minds. In Freakonomics (written with Stephen J. Dubner), Levitt argues that many apparent mysteries of everyday life don't need to be so mysterious: they could be illuminated and made even more fascinating by asking the right questions and drawing connections.

Africa Unchained

Why haven't the poorest Africans been able to prosper in the twenty-first century? Celebrated economist George Ayittey thinks the answer is obvious: economic freedom was denied to them, first by foreign colonial powers and now by indigenous leaders with similarly oppressive practices. As war and conflict replaced peace, Africa's infrastructure crumbled. Instead of bemoaning the myriad difficulties facing the continent today, Ayittey boldly proposes a program of development--a way forward--for Africa. Africa Unchained investigates how Africa can modernize, build, and improve its indigenous institutions, and argues forcefully that Africa should build and expand upon traditions of free markets and free trade rather than continuing to use exploitative economic structures. The economic model here is uniquely African and takes little heed from the developed world; this is sure to be a highly controversial plan for moving Africa forward.

Nobodies to Somebodies

Peter Han cofounded a software company soon after college and sold it a few years later. By any measure he was already successful, but he still was curious about how others found long-term meaning in their work. So he set out to learn what a diverse group of influential "somebodies" had done back when they were still "nobodies."

Blink

Blink is about the first two seconds of looking-the decisive glance that knows in an instant. Gladwell, the best-selling author of The Tipping Point, campaigns for snap judgments and mind reading with a gift for translating research into splendid storytelling. Building his case with scenes from a marriage, heart attack triage, speed dating, choking on the golf course, selling cars, and military maneuvers, he persuades readers to think small and focus on the meaning of "thin slices" of behavior. The key is to rely on our "adaptive unconscious"--a 24/7 mental valet--that provides us with instant and sophisticated information to warn of danger, read a stranger, or react to a new idea.

The Oxford English Dictionary

The accepted authority on the evolution of the English language over the last millennium. It is an unsurpassed guide to the meaning, history, and pronunciation of over half a million words, both present and past. It traces the usage of words through 2.5 million quotations [more]

The Plot Against America

The Plot Against America explores a wholly imagined thesis and sees it through to the end: Charles A. Lindbergh defeats FDR for the Presidency in 1940. Lindbergh, the "Lone Eagle," captured the country's imagination by his solo Atlantic crossing in 1927 in the monoplane, Spirit of St. Louis, then had the country's sympathy upon the kidnapping and murder of his young son. He was a true American hero: brave, modest, handsome, a patriot. According to some reliable sources, he was also a rabid isolationist, Nazi sympathizer, and a crypto-fascist. It is these latter attributes of Lindbergh that inform the novel.