Author: Daniel Coyle File Type: mobi The Little Book of Talent is a manual for building a faster brain and a better you. It is an easy-to-use handbook of scientifically proven, field-tested methods to improve skillsyour skills, your kids skills, your organizations skillsin sports, music, art, math, and business. The product of five years of reporting from the worlds greatest talent hotbeds and interviews with successful master coaches, it distills the daunting complexity of skill development into 52 clear, concise directives. Whether youre age 10 or 100, whether youre on the sports field or the stage, in the classroom or the corner office, this is an essential guide for anyone who ever asked, How do I get better?The Little Book of Talent should be given to every graduate at commencement, every new parent in a delivery room, every executive on the first day of work. It is a guidebookbeautiful in its simplicity and backed by hard sciencefor nurturing excellence.Charles Duhigg, bestselling author of *The Power of HabitIts so juvenile to throw around hyperbolic terms such as life-changing, but theres no other way to describe The Little Book of Talent. I was avidly trying new things within the first half hour of reading it and havent stopped since. Brilliant. And yes life-changing.Tom Peters, co-author of *In Search of Excellence**

Author: Tony Judt File Type: mobi Amazon.com ReviewAmazon Best Books of the Month, November 2010 In 2008 Tony Judt, the historian and essayist whose book Postwar was quickly recognized as one of the landmark works of our time, was diagnosed with Lou Gehrigs disease. He was soon almost fully paralyzed, but before his death in the summer of 2010 he managed to produce not only two works of political and intellectual history, Ill Fares the Land and the upcoming Thinking the Twentieth Century, but also a series of short essays that had a breathtaking reception when they appeared, a few at a time, in the New York Review of Books. The pieces were remarkable both for their content and their method of composition isolated at night in the prison of his paralysis, Judt would sort through his memories, arranging them, to better remember them, in the rooms of a Swiss chalet he recalled from an idyllic childhood visit, before dictating them in the morning to be published. The essays are at times political but always personal, calling up memories of food, youth, sex, education, train travel, and other subjects with a clarity and intensity born of both his historians skills of observation and judgment and the heightened awareness of times passage imposed by his undeniable mortality. Collected now in The Memory Chalet, these reflections make up a memoir that evokes, with clear-eyed passion, the life of the mind, as well as the body. --Tom Nissleybr From Bookmarks MagazineLoss is loss, Judt writes, and nothing is gained by calling it a nicer name. Many of these chronological essays written while Judt struggled with ALS first appeared in the New York Review of Books, but taken together, they offer an astute portrait of a life cut shortbut one also fully, richly lived. Judt writes with the same incisive intellectual clarity and polished writing of his other books, here evoking specific experiences formative to his childhood and intellectual growth. Yet, as critics point out, The Memory Chalet is no typical memoir. Instead, it goes well beyond personal, self-driven recollections to ruminate on the larger importance of Judts experiences. In the end, perhaps The Memory Chalet isnt an uplifting work, concludes the Denver Post. It is better than that It is a sustaining one.

Author: Donald S. Lopez File Type: pdf Beginning in the nineteenth century and continuing to the present day, both Buddhists and admirers of Buddhism have proclaimed the compatibility of Buddhism and science. Their assertions have ranged from modest claims about the efficacy of meditation for mental health to grander declarations that the Buddha himself anticipated the theories of relativity, quantum physics and the big bang more than two millennia ago. In Buddhism and Science, Donald S. Lopez Jr. is less interested in evaluating the accuracy of such claims than in exploring how and why these two seemingly disparate modes of understanding the inner and outer universe have been so persistently linked. Lopez opens with an account of the rise and fall of Mount Meru, the great peak that stands at the center of the flat earth of Buddhist cosmographyand which was interpreted anew once it proved incompatible with modern geography. From there, he analyzes the way in which Buddhist concepts of spiritual nobility were enlisted to support the notorious science of race in the nineteenth century. Bringing the story to the present, Lopez explores the Dalai Lamas interest in scientific discoveries, as well as the implications of research on meditation for neuroscience. Lopez argues that by presenting an ancient Asian tradition as compatible withand even anticipatingscientific discoveries, European enthusiasts and Asian elites have sidestepped the debates on the relevance of religion in the modern world that began in the nineteenth century and still flare today. As new discoveries continue to reshape our understanding of mind and matter, Buddhism and Science will be indispensable reading for those fascinated by religion, science, and their often vexed relation.

Author: Benjamin Sidney Michael Schwantes File Type: pdf div id=iframeContent dir=autoTo many people in the nineteenth century, the railroad and the telegraph were powerful, transformative forces, ones that seemed to work closely together to shape the economy, society, and politics of the United States. However, the perceptionboth popular and scholarlyof the intrinsic connections between these two institutions has largely obscured a far more complex and contested relationship, one that created profound divisions between entrepreneurial telegraph promoters and warier railroad managers.In The Train and the Telegraph, Benjamin Sidney Michael Schwantes argues that uncertainty, mutual suspicion, and cautious experimentation more aptly describe how railroad officials and telegraph entrepreneurs hesitantly established a business and technical relationship. The two industries, Schwantes reveals, were drawn together gradually through external factors such as war, state and federal safety regulations, and financial necessity, rather than because of any perception that the two industries were naturally related or beneficial to each other.Complicating the existing scholarship by demonstrating that the railroad and telegraph in the United States were uneasy partners at bestand more often outright antagoniststhroughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,The Train and the Telegraph will appeal to scholars of communication, transportation, and American business history and political economy, as well as to enthusiasts of the nineteenth-century American railroad industry.ReviewThe Train and the Telegraph blows up the assumption of many historiansmyself includedthat railroad and telegraph development unfolded in a kind of mutually beneficial way. It is rare to see a complete inversion of a well-established historical assumption Schwantes should be congratulated on making his case so forcefully and effectively. This is a great book clean, concise, effective, and tightly organized. (Sean Patrick Adams, University of Florida, author of Home Fires How Americans Kept Warm in the Nineteenth Century) Schwantes effectively weaves together the technologies of transportation and communication during the nineteenth century, debunking many of the myths that have appeared in earlier, and on occasion quite scholarly, works. Expanding our understanding of the symbiotic relationship between business history and the history of technology, this lucid book is well researched and well written it should be of interest to a diverse readership. (Albert J. Churella, Kennesaw State University, author of The Pennsylvania Railroad, volume 1 Building an Empire, 18461917) Schwantess history of the relationship between the American telegraph and railroad industries shows us that the processes of technological diffusion and adoption are highly complex and contingent. Historians of technology and of capitalism will profit from this engagingly written and thoroughly researched book. (David Hochfelder, University at Albany, SUNY, author of The Telegraph in America, 18321920) In The Train and the Telegraph, Benjamin Schwantes offers the kind of complex and eye-opening contribution to an established literature that can only be achieved by digging for details in the archives. Schwantes refutes the received wisdom that the telegraph and railroad industries developed in tandem, with a synergy created by cooperating executives. Instead, he shows that they evolved in a multifaceted technological and business environment and that their innovators often based decisions on expediency. This is indeed revisionist history, in the best sense. (Susan Strasser, Professor Emerita, University of Delaware, author of Satisfaction Guaranteed The Making of the American Mass Market ) The Train and the Telegraph breaks new ground in describing how two parallel systemsrailroads and telegraphsbecame intermingled. Schwantes deftly shows how officials navigated countless obstacles, including fickle regulators, the volatile economy, and the American Civil War, in their quest to control and profit from these iconic technological systems. (Andrew L. Russell, SUNY Polytechnic Institute, coauthor of Adas Legacy Cultures of Computing from the Victorian to the Digital Age ) Schwantes explores the surprisingly fraught relationships between telegraph companies and railroads. Telegraphic train management was met with resistance by all but a handful of progressive managers. Exogenous factors such as war, federal legislation, and finally the telephone played an enormous role in the process of adoption, or lack thereof. The story told is compelling. (William J. Hausman, College of William & Mary, coauthor of Global Electrification Multinational Enterprise and International Finance in the History of Light and Power, 18782007 ) About the AuthorbBenjamin Sidney Michael Schwantesb is the managing editor of the JANNAF Journal of Propulsion and Energetics and a lecturer at Widener Universitys Center for Extended Learning.