Norse Mythology : A Guide to Gods, Heroes, Rituals, and Beliefs ($1.99)

Title:Norse Mythology : A Guide to Gods, Heroes, Rituals, and Beliefs
Author: John Lindow
Publisher:Oxford University Press
Print length:384 pages
Price:$1.99
Amazon description:Norse Mythology explores the magical myths and legends of Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Iceland and Viking-Age Greenland--outlining along the way the prehistoric tales and beliefs from these regions that have remained embedded in the imagination of the world. The book begins with an Introduction that helps put Scandinavian mythology in place in history, followed by a chapter that explains the meaning of mythic time, and a third section that presents in-depth explanations of each mythological term. These fascinating entries identify particular deities and giants, as well as the places where they dwell and the varied and wily means by which they forge their existence and battle one another. We meet Thor, one of the most powerful gods, who specializes in killing giants using a hammer made for him by dwarfs, not to mention myriad trolls, ogres, humans and strange animals. We learn of the ongoing struggle between the gods, who create the cosmos, and the jotnar, or giants, who aim to destroy it. In the enchanted world where this mythology takes place, we encounter turbulent rivers, majestic mountains, dense forests, storms, fierce winters, eagles, ravens, salmon and snakes in a landscape closely resembling Scandinavia. Beings travel on ships and on horseback; they eat slaughtered meat and drink mead. Spanning from the inception of the universe and the birth of human beings to the universe's destruction and the mythic future, these sparkling tales of creation and destruction, death and rebirth, gods and heroes will entertain readers and offer insight into the relationship between Scandinavian myth, history, and culture.

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Consequential Strangers: The Power of People Who Don't Seem to Matter. . . But Really Do ($1.70)

Title: Consequential Strangers: The Power of People Who Don't Seem to Matter. . . But Really Do
Author:Karen L. Fingerman and Melinda Blau
Publisher:W. W. Norton & Company
Print length:298 pages
Price: $1.70

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Reinventing Knowledge: From Alexandria to the Internet ($3.88)

Title:Reinventing Knowledge: From Alexandria to the Internet
Author: Lisa Wolverton
Publisher:Norton
Print length:352 pages
Price:$3.88
Amazon description: A dazzling intellectual history of the West served up with verve and insight by two brilliant young historians.

Here is an intellectual entertainment, a sweeping history of the key institutions that have organized knowledge in the West from the classical period onward. With elegance and wit, this exhilarating history alights at the pivotal points of cultural transformation. The motivating question throughout: How does history help us understand the vast changes we are now experiencing in the landscape of knowledge?

Beginning in Alexandria and its great center of Hellenistic learning and imperial power, we then see the monastery in the wilderness of a collapsed civilization, the rambunctious universities of the late medieval cities, and the thick social networks of the Enlightenment republic of letters. The development of science and the laboratory as a dominant knowledge institution brings us to the present, seeking patterns in the new digital networks of knowledge.

Full of memorable characters, this fresh history succeeds in restoring the strangeness and the significance of the past.

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Mexico - Culture Smart!: The Essential Guide to Customs & Culture

Title: Mexico - Culture Smart!: The Essential Guide to Customs & Culture
Author:Guy Mavor
Publisher:$2.39
Print length:168 pages
Price:Kuperard
Amazon description:Culture Smart! provides essential information on attitudes, beliefs and behavior in different countries, ensuring that you arrive at your destination aware of basic manners, common courtesies, and sensitive issues. These concise guides tell you what to expect, how to behave, and how to establish a rapport with your hosts. This inside knowledge will enable you to steer clear of embarrassing gaffes and mistakes, feel confident in unfamiliar situations, and develop trust, friendships, and successful business relationships.

Culture Smart! offers illuminating insights into the culture and society of a particular country. It will help you to turn your visit-whether on business or for pleasure-into a memorable and enriching experience. Contents include


* customs, values, and traditions
* historical, religious, and political background
* life at home
* leisure, social, and cultural life
* eating and drinking
* do's, don'ts, and taboos
* business practices
* communication, spoken and unspoken

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Malaysia - Culture Smart!: The Essential Guide to Customs & Culture ($2.39)

Title:Malaysia - Culture Smart!: The Essential Guide to Customs & Culture
Author: Victor King
Publisher:Kuperard
Print length:168 pages
Price:$2.39
Amazon description:Culture Smart! provides essential information on attitudes, beliefs and behavior in different countries, ensuring that you arrive at your destination aware of basic manners, common courtesies, and sensitive issues. These concise guides tell you what to expect, how to behave, and how to establish a rapport with your hosts. This inside knowledge will enable you to steer clear of embarrassing gaffes and mistakes, feel confident in unfamiliar situations, and develop trust, friendships, and successful business relationships.

Culture Smart! offers illuminating insights into the culture and society of a particular country. It will help you to turn your visit-whether on business or for pleasure-into a memorable and enriching experience. Contents include


* customs, values, and traditions
* historical, religious, and political background
* life at home
* leisure, social, and cultural life
* eating and drinking
* dos, don'ts, and taboos
* business practices
* communication, spoken and unspoken


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Uncommon Opportunities - An Agenda for Peace and Equitable Development ($1.00)

Title:Uncommon Opportunities - An Agenda for Peace and Equitable Development
Author: The International Commission on Peace and Food
Publisher:Zed Books Ltd
Print length:240 pages
Price:$1.00
Amazon description:This report is different from its distinguished predecessors - Brandt and Brundtland. First, the end of the Cold War and the worldwide trends towards democratization and economic reform have opened up unprecedented opportunities to discard old thinking and embrace new proposals. Secondly, the Commission has spent much time developing practical proposals in specific countries - which are already making an impact.

Among the wide-ranging ideas put forward are those for a global cooperative security system supported by a standing world army; strategies for full employment in both the industrial and developing countries; an agricultural revolution to eliminate hunger, reduce inequality and promote jobs and economic growth; and an approach to rapid transition in Eastern Europe and the former soviet Union that accelerates growth without the damage to people's lives wrought by the recent headlong rush to marketization.

The Commission delivers a message of hope - but hope rooted in the realities of human resourcefulness and practical measures that citizens' groups, governments and international institutions could take up. It is a message we all should heed and act upon.

The emphasis of this report on the emerging challenges and opportunities of the 21st century are as relevant today as when the report was first published and presented to the United Nations in 1994


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Millions Fed: Proven Successes in Agricultural Development ($1.99)

Title: Millions Fed: Proven Successes in Agricultural Development
Author: David J. Spielman and Rajul Pandya-Lorch
Publisher: International Food Policy Research Institute
Print length: 176 pages
Price: $1.99
Amazon description:Humanity has made enormous progress in the past 50 years toward eliminating hunger and malnutrition. Some five billion people--more than 80 percent of the world's population--have enough food to live healthy, productive lives. Agricultural development has contributed significantly to these gains, while also fostering economic growth and poverty reduction in some of the world's poorest countries.

This book examines how policies, programs, and investments in pro-poor agricultural development have helped to substantially reduce hunger across Africa, Asia, and Latin America. The 20 success stories presented here provide both lessons and inspiration for continued efforts to eradicate hunger and malnutrition among the one billion people still facing this scourge.

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Breaking Up America: Advertisers and the New Media World ($2.12)

Title: Breaking Up America: Advertisers and the New Media World
Author:Joe Turow
Publisher: University Of Chicago Press
Print length: 256 pages
Price: $2.12
Amazon description: Now that Americans are dividing up into militias and staking out a few acres of inviolable homeland, perhaps it's time to ask how the country came to be so deeply fragmented. Joseph Turow points to the ways that the techniques of "target marketing" by advertising agencies exploited and exacerbated existing fissures in U.S. society. Turow is too subtle a thinker to believe that advertising is responsible for the differences between people, but he makes a strong case that the way those differences have been used to distinguish different markets for different products has, simply by defining and presenting various subcultures, furthered those differences. This vicious cycle of targeting and producing target markets is analyzed both historically and politically to show the difficult effects of assuming that Americans are not united, except against each other.

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Globalization and the Politics of Development in the Middle East ($2.28)

Title: Globalization and the Politics of Development in the Middle East
Author: Clement Moore Henry and Robert Springborg
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print length: 380 pages
Price: $2.28
Amazon description: In a new edition of their book on the economic development of the Middle East and North Africa, Clement Henry and Robert Springborg reflect on what has happened to the region's economy since 2001. How have the various countries in the Middle East responded to the challenges of globalization and to the rise of political Islam, and what changes, for better or for worse, have occurred? Utilizing the country categories they applied in the previous book and further elaborating the significance of the structural power of capital and Islamic finance, they demonstrate how over the past decade the monarchies (as exemplified by Jordan, Morocco and those of the Gulf Cooperation Council) and the conditional democracies (Israel, Turkey and Lebanon) continue to do better than the military dictatorships or 'bullies' (Egypt, Tunisia and now Iran) and 'the bunker states' (Algeria, Iraq, Libya, Sudan, Syria and Yemen).

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Flat Broke in the Free Market: How Globalization Fleeced Working People ($2.89)

Title: Flat Broke in the Free Market: How Globalization Fleeced Working People
Author: Jon Jeter
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Print length: 256 pages
Price: $2.89
Amazon description:This moving account of what poverty looks like in Mexico, Malawi, and Johannesburg (among other sites) by a former Washington Post bureau chief gently sings with the indignity of it all. By personalizing the struggle for survival around the globe (and based on seven years of interviews), whether it’s an Argentine prostitute or a Zambian tomato seller, Jeter dramatically paints the pictures of the “have nots,” pointing to political machinations, economic greed, failed governmental policies, and the deconstruction of the family framework as contributing causes to famine, disease, and crime. Readers will recognize many contemporary portraits, including that of Illinois Congressman Bobby Rush, now far from his roots as a Black Panther “power to the people,” and that of Chicago Afro-American Sonia, who cannot find a comparable mate. Yet he also profiles two countries—Chile and Venezuela—that have bucked the system and invested in manufacturing and exports, with no small reduction of the world’s chasm between wealthy and dirt-poor. An impassioned storyteller, Jeter wisely refrains from polemics and preachifying, gaining a powerful voice that, one hopes, will not be ignored. --Barbara Jacobs

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The European Union ($2.20)

Title: The European Union
Author: Clive Archer
Publisher: T & F Books UK
Print length: 180 pages
Price: $2.20
Amazon description: Making often complex concepts easily comprehended, this book enables the reader to quickly build a solid and well-rounded understanding of the EU's history and present, covering key debates on Europe, the ambiguous relationship with the US, the EU's internal and external activities, structure and institutions, future developments and new directions.

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The Other Side of the Fence: American Migrants in Mexico ($5.29)

Title: The Other Side of the Fence: American Migrants in Mexico
Author: Sheila Croucher
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Print length: 270 pages
Price: $5.29
Amazon description: A growing number of Americans, many of them retirees, are migrating to Mexico's beach resorts, border towns, and picturesque heartland. While considerable attention has been paid to Mexicans who immigrate to the U.S., the reverse scenario receives little scrutiny. Shifting the traditional lens of North American migration, "The Other Side of the Fence" takes a fascinating look at a demographic trend that presents significant implications for the United States and Mexico. The first in-depth account of this trend, Sheila Croucher's study describes the cultural, economic, and political lives of these migrants of privilege. Focusing primarily on two towns, San Miguel de Allende in the mountains and Ajijic along the shores of Lake Chapala, Croucher depicts the surprising similarities between immigrant populations on both sides of the border. Few Americans living in Mexico are fluent in the language of their new land, and most continue to practice the culture and celebrate the national holidays of their homeland, maintaining close political, economic, and social ties to the United States while making political demands on Mexico, where they reside. Accessible, timely, and brimming with eye-opening, often ironic, findings, "The Other Side of the Fence" brings an important perspective to borderlands debates.

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Why we read fiction ($1.99)

Title: Why we read fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel
Author: Lisa Zunshine
Publisher: Ohio State University Press
Print length: 198 pages
Price: $1.99
Amazon description: Why We Read Fiction offers a lucid overview of the most exciting area of research in contemporary cognitive psychology known as "Theory of Mind" and discusses its implications for literary studies. It covers a broad range of fictional narratives, from Richardson’s Clarissa, Dostoyevski’s Crime and Punishment, and Austen’s Pride and Prejudice to Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, Nabokov’s Lolita, and Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon. Zunshine’s surprising new interpretations of well-known literary texts and popular cultural representations constantly prod her readers to rethink their own interest in fictional narrative. Written for a general audience, this study provides a jargon-free introduction to the rapidly growing interdisciplinary field known as cognitive approaches to literature and culture.


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The Development of Play ($2.63)

Title: The Development of Play
Author: David Cohen
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Print length: 216 pages
Price: $2.63
Amazon description: Examines our understanding of why children play and how it helps them to grow both emotionally and socially.

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Determinants of Animal Behaviour ($1.29)

Title: Determinants of Animal Behaviour
Author: Jo-Ann Cartwright
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Print length: 208 pages
Price: $1.29
Amazon description: Are animals intelligent? How do they learn to solve everyday survival problems? Can they be intentionally deceptive? The investigation of animal behavior is an important and fascinating aspect of comparative psychology. Firstly the evolutionary explanations of animal behavior are discussed, including the biological explanations of apparent altruism. Secondly the nature of classical and operant conditioning in animal behavior is considered and finally the role of social learning in animals is investigated. Real-life examples are used throughout the book to illustrate the arguments presented. Determinants of Animal Behaviour is an ideal introductory text to the subject, full of real-life examples and both traditional and cutting-edge research. It will be of interest to all students new to comparative psychology and highly accessible to anyone wishing to know more about the diversity and ingenuity of animal behavior.

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