Published

If we could turn the clock back psychologically, could we also turn the clock back physically? In 1979, social psychologist Ellen Langer conducted a ground-breaking study that aimed to answer this provocative question.

For just one week, Langer arranged for a group of elderly men to live in a house staged as though it were 1959, a time that most of them considered their prime. The men experienced amazing changes across the board: their physical strength, cognition, vision, hearing and taste improved dramatically, and by the end of only the second day, all were less dependent on others to get what they needed.

Drawing on this elegant study and colorful examples from her full body of work, Counterclockwise explores the ways in which our thoughts control our moods and our physical state; how our attitudes define our limits; how our mindless desire for stability actually cuts us off from the healing power of mindfully attending to variability; and what we can do to be free of these restrictions. At once scientifically riveting and immensely inspiring, the theory and advice in Counterclockwise has enormously exciting implications for our general health, for our outlook, for our fundamental happiness. If the elderly men in Langer’s original experiment could produce such dramatic changes in their lives, so too can the rest of us, but we don’t have to live in a time capsule to do so.

Backed by her landmark scientific work on mindfulness and artistic nature, bestselling author and Harvard psychologist Ellen J. Langer shows us that creativity is not a rare gift that only some special few are born with, but rather an integral part of everyone’s makeup. All of us can express our creative impulses—authentically and uniquely—and, in the process, enrich our lives. Why then do so many of us merely dream of someday painting, someday writing, someday making music? More important, why do so many of us tell ourselves that we can’t do so?

With the skill of a gifted logician, Langer demonstrates how we undervalue ourselves and undermine our creativity. By example, she persuades us to have faith in our creative works, not because someone else approves of them but because they’re a true expression of ourselves. Her high-spirited, challenging book sparkles with wit and intelligence and inspires in us an infectious enthusiasm for our creations, our world, and ourselves. It will be of lifelong value to everyone who reads it.

When the pirate operator Oliver Smedley shoots and kills his rival Reg Calvert in Smedley’s country cottage on June 21, 1966, it is a turning point in the careening career of the outlaw radio stations dotting the coastal waters of England. Situated on ships and offshore forts like Shivering Sands, these stations blasted away at the high-minded BBC’s broadcast monopoly with the new beats of the Stones and the Who and DJs like Screaming Lord Sutch. For free-market ideologues like Smedley, the pirate stations were entrepreneurial efforts to undermine the growing British welfare state as embodied by the BBC.

The worlds of high table and underground collide in a riveting story full of memorable characters like the Bondian Kitty Black, an intellectual femme fatale who becomes Smedley’s co-conspirator, and the notorious Kray twins, brazenly violent operators of a London protection racket. Here is a rousing entertainment with an intellectual edge.

Americans often think of their nation’s history as a movement toward ever-greater democracy, equality, and freedom. Wars in this story are understood both as necessary to defend those values and as exceptions to the rule of peaceful progress. In The Dominion of War, historians Fred Anderson and Andrew Cayton boldly reinterpret the development of the United States, arguing instead that war has played a leading role in shaping North America from the sixteenth century to the present.

Anderson and Cayton bring their sweeping narrative to life by structuring it around the lives of eight men—Samuel de Champlain, William Penn, George Washington, Andrew Jackson, Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna, Ulysses S. Grant, Douglas MacArthur, and Colin Powell. The result is a provocative, highly readable account of the ways in which republic and empire have coexisted in American history as two faces of the same coin. The Dominion of War recasts familiar triumphs as tragedies, proposes an unconventional set of turning points, and depicts imperialism and republicanism as inseparable influences in a pattern of development in which war and freedom have long been intertwined. It offers a new perspective on America’s attempts to define its role in the world at the dawn of the twenty-first century.

Winner of the William J. Goode Award

Millie Acevedo bore her first child before the age of 16 and dropped out of high school to care for her newborn. Now 27, she is the unmarried mother of three and is raising her kids in one of Philadelphia’s poorest neighborhoods. Would she and her children be better off if she had waited to have them and had married their father first? Why do so many poor American youth like Millie continue to have children before they can afford to take care of them?

Over a span of five years, sociologists Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas talked in-depth with 162 low-income single moms like Millie to learn how they think about marriage and family. Promises I Can Keep offers an intimate look at what marriage and motherhood mean to these women and provides the most extensive on-the-ground study to date of why they put children before marriage despite the daunting challenges they know lie ahead.