"In 1923, in this volume, [the author] worked out important implications of the structural theory of mind that he had first set forth three years earlier in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. [This book] ranks high among the works of [his] later years. The heart of his concern is the ego, which he sees battling with three forces: the id, the super-ego, and the outside world."--P. [4] of cover.

"Talking to Strangers is a classically Gladwellian intellectual adventure, a challenging and controversial excursion through history, psychology, and scandals taken straight from the news. He revisits the deceptions of Bernie Madoff, the trial of Amanda Knox, the suicide of Sylvia Plath, the Jerry Sandusky pedophilia scandal at Penn State University, and the death of Sandra Bland - throwing our understanding of these and other stories into doubt....

Bittersweetness is a tendency to states of longing, poignancy, and sorrow; an acute awareness of passing time; and a curiously piercing joy when beholding beauty. It recognizes that light and dark, birth and death-bitter and sweet-are forever paired. A song in a minor key, an elegiac poem, or even a touching television commercial all can bring us to this sublime, even holy, state of mind-and, ultimately, to greater kinship with our fellow humans....

"Two teenagers, a Greek Cypriot and a Turkish Cypriot, meet at a taverna on the island they both call home. In the taverna, hidden beneath garlands of garlic, chili peppers and creeping honeysuckle, Kostas and Defne grow in their forbidden love for each other. A fig tree stretches through a cavity in the roof, and this tree bears witness to their hushed, happy meetings and eventually, to their silent, surreptitious departures. The tree is there when...

"Weaving decades of field observations with exciting new discoveries about the brain, Carl Safina's landmark book offers an intimate view of animal behavior to challenge the fixed boundary between humans and nonhuman animals. In Beyond Words, readers travel to Amboseli National Park in the threatened landscape of Kenya and witness struggling elephant families work out how to survive poaching and drought, then to Yellowstone National Park to observe...

In an experimental government center for troubled Vietnam veterans, the inmates run the asylum. One works on an adaptation of Shakespeare ... for dogs. Another fancies himself a caped superhero. Still others masquerade as frogmen, nurses, nuns, pirates, doctors. Yet Colonel Hudson Kane, the psychiatrist in charge, eyes all with a stoic reserve. Maybe too stoic: there's a mystery here. And its final resolution is like a thunderclap.

"In a working-class town in a county west of London, a schoolgirl scribbles in the back pages of her exercise book, thrilling to the first sparks of her own inventiveness. As she grows, she becomes one on whom nothing is lost. Not the novels an eccentric customer slips her at the grocery store where she works as a checkout clerk, or the indelible outline of the careening creature himself. Not the growing heaps of books in which she loses-and finds-herself....

"Rock breaks scissors is based on a simple principle: people are unable to act randomly. Instead they display unconscious patterns that the savvy person can outguess. The principle applies to friends playing rock, paper, scissors for a bar tab as well as to the crowds that create markets for homes and stocks. With a gift for distilling psychology and behavioral economics into accessible advice, Poundstone proves that outguessing is easy, fun, and...

Recounts the troubled romance of Rosa Bud and Edwin Drood, whose disappearance reveals the jealousy of Drood's uncle John Jasper, who coveted Rosa and may have killed Drood.

"Born Anxious introduces a new word into our lexicon: “methylated.” It?s short for “epigenetic methylation,” and it offers insight into behaviors we have all observed but never understood?the boss who goes ballistic at the slightest error; the infant who can?t be calmed; the husband who can?t fall asleep at night. In each case, because of an exposure to environmental adversity in utero or during the first year of life, a key stress system...