Laurence Gonzales turns his talent for gripping narrative, knowledge of the way our minds and bodies work, and bottomless curiosity about the world to the topic of how we can best use the lessons of our evolutionary history to overcome the hazards of everyday life. He finds that natural laws profoundly affect our actions, and he reveals the hidden causes and costs of our behavior, whether as individuals or as a species whose decisions may be leading to darker times. Whether you are climbing a mountain or the corporate ladder, Everyday Survival will change the way you view your choices in our complex, dangerous, and quickly changing world.

A New Yorker staff writer, bestselling author, and professor at Harvard Medical School unravels the mystery of how doctors figure out the best treatments---or fail to do so. This book describes the warning signs of flawed medical thinking and offers intelligent questions patients can ask.

"What should we have for dinner?" To one degree or another this simple question assails any creature faced with a wide choice of things to eat. Anthropologists call it the omnivore's dilemma.

In his million-copy bestseller Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond examined how and why Western civilizations developed the technologies and immunities that allowed them to dominate much of the world. Now in this brilliant companion volume, Diamond probes the other side of the equation: What caused some of the great civilizations of the past to collapse into ruin, and what can we learn from their fates?

Long-time physician Sherwin B. Nuland presents a provocative and stimulating collection of stories illustrating the vagaries of medical practice over the years. Among the fascinating and probing questions that Nuland investigates are:

---What does the first Hippocratic Oath really mean?

---What happens when knowledge comes before we're ready for it?

---Why does major surgery using only acupuncture work?

---Is there really sympathy between the organs of the body?

---What happens when someone yells, "Is there a doctor in the house?" and you are the doctor?

---What goes through the mind of a heart transplant candidate who doesn't make it?

Giving voice to a population rarely acknowledged in writings about the South, Sweet Tea collects life stories from black gay men who were born, raised, and continue to live in the southern United States. E. Patrick Johnson challenges stereotypes of the South as "backward" or "repressive," suggesting that these men draw upon the performance of "southernness"--politeness, coded speech, and religiosity, for example--to legitimate themselves as members of both southern and black cultures. At the same time, Johnson argues, they deploy those same codes to establish and build friendship networks and to find sexual partners and life partners.

Traveling to every southern state, Johnson conducted interviews with more than seventy black gay men between the ages of 19 and 93. The voices collected here dispute the idea that gay subcultures flourish primarily in northern, secular, urban areas. In addition to filling a gap in the sexual history of the South, Sweet Tea offers a window into the ways that black gay men negotiate their sexual and racial identities with their southern cultural and religious identities. The narratives also reveal how they build and maintain community in many spaces and activities, some of which may appear to be antigay. Ultimately, Sweet Tea validates the lives of these black gay men and reinforces the role of storytelling in both African American and southern cultures.

Tracy Kidder is a winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the author of several bestsellers. He has been described by the Baltimore Sun as the "master of the non-fiction narrative." This powerful and inspiring audiobook shows how one person can make a difference, as Kidder tells the true story of a gifted man who is in love with the world and has set out to do all he can to cure it.

At the center of MOUNTAINS BEYOND MOUNTAINS stands Paul Farmer. Doctor, Harvard professor, renowned infectious-disease specialist, anthropologist, the recipient of a MacArthur "genius" grant, world-class Robin Hood, Farmer was brought up in a bus and on a boat, and in medical school found his life’s calling: to diagnose and cure infectious diseases and to bring the lifesaving tools of modern medicine to those who need them most. This magnificent book shows how radical change can be fostered in situations that seem insurmountable, and it also shows how a meaningful life can be created, as Farmer—brilliant, charismatic, charming, both a leader in international health and a doctor who finds time to make house calls in Boston and the mountains of Haiti—blasts through convention to get results.

MOUNTAINS BEYOND MOUNTAINS takes us from Harvard to Haiti, Peru, Cuba, and Russia as Farmer changes minds and practices through his dedication to the philosophy that "the only real nation is humanity" - a philosophy that is embodied in the small public charity he founded, Partners In Health. He enlists the help of the Gates Foundation, George Soros, the U.N.’s World Health Organization, and others in his quest to cure the world. At the heart of this book is the example of a life based on hope, and on an understanding of the truth of the Haitian proverb "Beyond mountains there are mountains": as you solve one problem, another problem presents itself, and so you go on and try to solve that one too.

A Notable Book for Adults (American Library Association)

If you think your mind and your brain are one and the same, think again. According to interpersonal neurobiology pioneer Daniel J. Siegel, the mind actually emerges out of the interaction between your brain and your relationships. Now, on The Neurobiology of “We”, Dr. Siegel invites you on a journey to discover this revolutionary new model of human development—one that can positively transform trauma, move you from stress to calm and equanimity, and promote well–being for you, your family, or even your community.

This is a study of how intellectuals as a class affect modern societies by shaping the climate of opinion in which official policies develop, on issues ranging from economics to law to war and peace.

The thesis of Intellectuals and Society is that the influence of intellectuals is not only greater than in previous eras but also takes a very different form from that envisioned by those like Machiavelli and others who have wanted to directly influence rulers. It has not been by shaping the opinions or directing the actions of the holders of power that modern intellectuals have most influenced the course of events, but by shaping public opinion in ways that affect the actions of power holders in democratic societies, whether or not those power holders accept the general vision or the particular policies favored by intellectuals. Even government leaders with disdain or contempt for intellectuals have had to bend to the climate of opinion shaped by those intellectuals.

Intellectuals and Society not only examines the track record of intellectuals in the things they have advocated but also analyzes the incentives and constraints under which their views and visions have emerged. One of the most surprising aspects of this study is how often intellectuals have been proved not only wrong, but grossly and disastrously wrong in their prescriptions for the ills of society—and how little their views have changed in response to empirical evidence of the disasters entailed by those views.

The story of the young sociologist who studied a Chicago crack-dealing gang from the inside captured the world’s attention when it was first described in Freakonomics. Gang Leader for a Day is the fascinating full story of how Sudhir Venkatest managed to gain entree into the gang, what he learned, and how his method revolutionized the academic establishment.

When Venkatesh walked into an abandoned building in one of Chicago’s most notorious housing projects, he was looking for people to take a multiple-choice survey on urban poverty. A first-year grad student hoping to impress his professors with his boldness, he never imagined that as a result of the assignment he would befriend a gang leader named JT and spend the better part of a decade inside the projects under JT’s protection, documenting what he saw there.

Over the next seven years, Venkatesh got to know the neighborhood dealers, crackheads, squatters, prostitutes, pimps, activists, cops, organizers, and officials. From his privileged position of unprecedented access, he observed JTand the rest of the gang as they operated their crackselling business, conducted PR within their community, and rose up or fell within the ranks of the gang’s complex organizational structure.

In Hollywood speak, Gang Leader for a Day is The Wire meets the University of Chicago. It’s a brazen, page turning and fundamentally honest view into the morally ambiguous, highly intricate, often corrupt struggle to survive in what is tantamount to an urban war zone. It is also the story of a complicated friendship between Sudhir and JT -two young and ambitious men a universe apart.

A spellbinding report from the front line of the gender wars-one woman's account of her undercover year as a man.

Over the past decade, Malcolm Gladwell has become the most gifted and influential journalist in America. In The New Yorker, his writings are such must-reads that the magazine charges advertisers significantly more money for ads that run within his articles. With his #1 bestsellers, The Tipping Point, Blink and Outliers, he has reached millions of readers. And now the very best and most famous of his New Yorker pieces are collected in a brilliant and provocative anthology. Among the pieces: his investigation into why there are so many different kinds of mustard but only one kind of ketchup; a surprising assessment of what makes for a safer automobile; a look at how we hire when we can't tell who's right for the job; an examination of machine built to predict hit movies; the reasons why homelessness might be easier to solve than manage; his famous profile of inventor and entrepreneur Ron Popeil; a look at why employers love personality tests; a dissection of Ivy League admissions and who gets in; the saga of the quest to invent the perfect cookie; and a look at hair dye and the hidden history of postwar America.

For the millions of Malcolm Gladwell fans, this anthology is like a greatest hits compilation-a mix tape from America's alpha mind

The Divided Mind is the crowning achievement of Dr. John E. Sarno’s long and successful career as a groundbreaking medical pioneer. While his earlier books dealt almost exclusively with musculoskeletal pain disorders, here Dr. Sarno address the entire spectrum of psychosomatic (mindbody) disorders. In Dr. Sarno’s view, the crucial interaction between the reasonable, rational, ethical, moral conscious mind and the repressed feelings of emotional pain, hurt, sadness and anger characteristic of the unconscious mind is the basis for many mindbody disorders. The Divided Mind traces the history of psychosomatic medicine, including Freud’s crucial role as well as his failures. Most important, it describes  the psychology of the human condition that is responsible for the broad range of psychosomatic illness. Dr. Sarno believes that the failure of medicine’s practitioners to recognize and appropriately treat mindbody disorders has produced public health and economic problems of major proportions in the United States. One of the most interesting and important aspects of psychosomatic phenomena is the fact that knowledge and awareness of the process clearly have healing powers.

In this first non-fiction book since THE HOT ZONE, Richard Preston takes us inside top-secret military labs to deliver a true-life thriller about the return of smallpox - in an even deadlier, genetically engineered form. Eradicated in 1979, smallpox now has crept onto the international black market, where it is prized as the mother of all biological weapons. THE DEMON IN THE FREEZER is the story of a crusade by three doctors - two men at the height of their careers and a feisty twenty-eight-year-old woman infectious disease expert - to stay a step ahead of the bioterrorists and neutralize the most contagious pathogen known. But they can't agree on how it should be done. And when you're working in the hot zone, conflict comes at a lethal price.

A poignant and hilarious tour of the last frontier, the ultimate forbidden zone, The Vagina Monologues is a celebration of female sexuality in all its complexity and mystery. In this stunning phenomenon that has swept the nation, Eve Ensler gives us real women's stories of intimacy, vulnerability, and sexual self-discovery.

Celebrated as the bible for a new generation of women, The Vagina Monologues has been performed in cities all across America and at hundreds of college campuses. It has inspired a dynamic grassroots movement—V-Day—to stop violence against women. Witty and irreverent, compassionate and wise, Eve Ensler's Obie Award-winning masterpiece gives voice to women's deepest fantasies and fears, guaranteeing that no one who reads it will ever look at a woman's body, or think of sex, in quite the same way again.

Included in this special edition are testimonials—both joyous and heartbreaking—from young women who have performed The Vagina Monologues at their colleges for V-Day, February 14, to raise money for organizations fighting to protect women.