Bestsellers > Books > Subjects
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Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity»rank: 93by: David Allen
: :With first-chapter allusions to martial arts, 'flow,' 'mind like water,' and other concepts borrowed from the East (and usually mangled), you'd almost think this self-helper from David Allen should have been called Zen and the Art of Schedule Maintenance. Not quite. Yes, Getting Things Done offers a complete system for downloading all those free-floating gotta-do's clogging your brain into a sophisticated framework of files and action lists--all purportedly to free your mind to focus on whatever you're working on. However, it still operates from the decidedly Western notion that if we could just get really, really organized, we could turn ourselves ... |
A Thousand Splendid Suns»rank: 58by: Khaled Hosseini
: :It's difficult to imagine a harder first act to follow than The Kite Runner: a debut novel by an unknown writer about a country many readers knew little about that has gone on to have over four million copies in print worldwide. But when preview copies of Khaled Hosseini's second novel, A Thousand Splendid Suns, started circulating at Amazon.com, readers reacted with a unanimous enthusiasm that few of us could remember seeing before. As special as The Kite Runner was, those readers said, A Thousand Splendid Suns is more so, bringing Hosseini's compassionate storytelling and his sense of personal and national ... |
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The Lace Reader: A Novel»rank: 125by: Brunonia Barry
: :Amazon Best of the Month, August 2008: Brunonia Barry dreamt she saw a prophecy in a piece of lace, a vision so potent she spun it into a novel. The Lace Reader retains the strange magic of a vivid dream, though Barry's portrayal of modern-day Salem, Massachusetts--with its fascinating cast of eccentrics--is reportedly spot-on. Some of its stranger residents include generations of Whitney women, with a gift for seeing the future in the lace they make. Towner Whitney, back to Salem from self-imposed exile on the West Coast, has plans for recuperation that evaporate with her great-aunt Eva's mysterious drowning. Fighting ... |
The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down»rank: 122by: Anne Fadiman
: :Lia Lee was born in 1981 to a family of recent Hmong immigrants, and soon developed symptoms of epilepsy. By 1988 she was living at home but was brain dead after a tragic cycle of misunderstanding, overmedication, and culture clash: 'What the doctors viewed as clinical efficiency the Hmong viewed as frosty arrogance.' The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down is a tragedy of Shakespearean dimensions, written with the deepest of human feeling. Sherwin Nuland said of the account, 'There are no villains in Fadiman's tale, just as there are no heroes. People are presented as she saw them, in ... |
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The Elements of Style (Coyote Canyon Press Classics)»rank: 111by: William Strunk
: :Composition teachers throughout the English-speaking world have been pushing this book on their students since it was first published in 1957. Co-author White later revised it, and it remains the most compact and lucid handbook we have for matters of basic principles of composition, grammar, word usage and misusage, and writing style. :This book is the classic reference text for clear writing and is generally considered a must-have for any student or writer. In this most revered of writing books, Strunk identifies the necessary qualities of proper American English style; and he does it all with wit and grace. Compelling ... |
Pulling Weeds to Picking Stocks»rank: 704by: Beatty Boys
: :Teen authors The Beatty Brothers offer an account of common financial insecurities in their inspirational how-to, Pulling Weeds to Picking Stocks. Heeding their parents advice, David, Devin, and Deric Beatty have spent their childhood and adolescent years pulling weeds for extra cash, preparing and presenting marketing strategies, picking stocks, and investing in their future. Pulling Weeds to Picking Stocks includes their easy-to-follow tips for being rich at fifteen, thirteen, and seven, such as budget worksheets, work ethics, asset liability evaluation, and tithing. No matter what age, you can follow these practical guidelines to make cents of the change in your ... |
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The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference»rank: 101by: Malcolm Gladwell
: :'The best way to understand the dramatic transformation of unknown books into bestsellers, or the rise of teenage smoking, or the phenomena of word of mouth or any number of the other mysterious changes that mark everyday life,' writes Malcolm Gladwell, 'is to think of them as epidemics. Ideas and products and messages and behaviors spread just like viruses do.' Although anyone familiar with the theory of memetics will recognize this concept, Gladwell's The Tipping Point has quite a few interesting twists on the subject. For example, Paul Revere was able to galvanize the forces of resistance so effectively in part ... |
The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How The War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals»rank: 95by: Jane Mayer
: :A dramatic and damning narrative account of how America has fought the 'War on Terror'In the days immediately following September 11th, the most powerful people in the country were panic-stricken. The radical decisions about how to combat terrorists and strengthen national security were made in a state of utter chaos and fear, but the key players, Vice President Dick Cheney and his powerful, secretive adviser David Addington, used the crisis to further a long held agenda to enhance Presidential powers to a degree never known in U.S. history, and obliterate Constitutional protections that define the very essence of the American ... |
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A Writer's Reference»rank: 160by: Diana Hacker
: :Having helped nearly 3 million students at 1600 colleges and universities to write well, A Writer’s Reference succeeds because it has always been grounded in classroom experience. Nearly twenty years ago, Diana Hacker reinvented the college handbook by looking at her own students’ needs. She crafted a first-of-its-kind reference that offered practical solutions to college writing problems in a language students could understand and in a format that was easy for them to use. Her many innovations — hand-edited sentences, grammar checker boxes, student-friendly index entries, ESL coverage, and a lay-flat comb binding — have been widely imitated but never ... |
Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life (P.S.)»rank: 98by: Barbara Kingsolver, Camille Kingsolver, Steven L. Hopp
: : Author Barbara Kingsolver and her family abandoned the industrial-food pipeline to live a rural life—vowing that, for one year, they'd only buy food raised in their own neighborhood, grow it themselves, or learn to live without it. Part memoir, part journalistic investigation, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle is an enthralling narrative that will open your eyes in a hundred new ways to an old truth: You are what you eat. |