Dream It. List It. Do It! is the ultimate do-it-yourself guide to self-improvement. Drawing from the true stories and experiences of the 1.5 million registered users of 43things.com, a Webby Award–winning social networking site, Dream It. List It. Do It! works on the proven principle that creating a life list, sharing your progress, and checking things off as done gives a person momentum toward a bigger and bolder life.
This book surveys the ways sex and sexuality have been made the subjects of history. It critically analyses some of the key histories of the last forty years; from the early efforts of historians like Steven Marcus to work out a model for sexual history, through to the extraordinary impact of French philosopher Michel Foucault. It explores the vigorous debates about essentialism and social constructionism in the 1980s and early 1990s and the emergence of contemporary debates about historicism, queer theory, embodiment, gender and cultural history shaping the now vast and diverse historical scholarship on sex and sexuality. Histories of Sexuality also focuses on a number of key debates about the history of sex and sexuality in Britain, Europe and America.
Whether they prefer scotch on the rocks or a double mocha latte, readers will enjoy Braun's dissection of caffeine, alcohol and the processes by which they work. For one thing, the presentation of complicated scientific concepts is understandable without being condescending. Braun makes analogies ("Drinking caffeine is thus like putting a block of wood under one of the brain's primary brake pedals") that help the reader to visualize what's going on. also helped by the author's inclusion of stories and humorous moments. From David Letterman quotes ("If it weren't for the caffeine, I'd have no identifiable personality whatsoever") to personal anecdotes about the effects these two mood-altering substances had upon the formulation of his book, Braun manages to take abstract concepts and mold them into something highly readable. Science novices should find this book as enjoyable and well-written as those who have spent their lives working with biology or chemistry..
Throughout the world there is a common belief that the dead may return to life. In Europe the most exotic form of this belief is the legend of the vampire. In this engrossing book, Paul Barber surveys centuries of folklore about vampires—from the tale of a sixteenth-century shoemaker from Breslau whose ghost terrorized everyone in the city, to the testimony of a doctor who presided over the exhumation and dissection of a graveyard full of Serbian vampires. Analyzing these reports, Barber offers
for the first time a scientific explanation for the origin of the vampire legends. The accounts compiled here by Barber of exhumations of suspected vampires include descriptions of blood on the lips of the dead body,how the corpse cried out when a stake was driven into its heart, and how the corpse partly rose from the grave. These descriptions led to further assumptions about vampires; that after coming to life again, they would prey on the living, sucking their blood or killing them in other ways. Barber studies the descriptions of exhumed cadavers in light of what is now known about forensic pathology and shows that they are clinically possible. Barber thus argues that the lore about vampires is an elaborate folk-hypothesis that sought to make sense out of a wide variety of natural phenomena, including the events of decomposition.
His book will be fascinating reading for scientists and anthropologists as well as for everyone interested in folklore. Paul Barber, a former teacher of German language and folklore at Princeton University and Occidental College, is a writer.
Is Dave Barry going mature on us? Well, no. But in Dave Barry Turns 40, he does do some thinking out loud about the aging process, aiming his thoughts at his "career-pursuing, insurance-buying, fitness-observing, Lamaze-class-taking, breast-feeding, data-processing, mortgage-paying, Parents'-Night-attending, business-card-exchanging, compact-disc-owning, tooth-flossing" contemporaries. Funny and true-to-life, especially if you were born before 1957.
