With The Worlds People

In the creation of Earth's Elders, Jerry Friedman met, interviewed and photographed some of the world's oldest elders – 110 years old or older (supercentenarians, as researchers call them). Jerry Friedman, photographer, author and founder of Earth's Elders, spent four years on a landmark project to introduce the world to the sixty oldest people on earth. Using his lens to capture a community that has never before been documented, the award-winning photographer has shed new light on the "invisible" world of people 110 years and older. With each visit on his globetrotting journey to capture the lives of these "super centenarians," Friedman gained a deeper understanding of what the elderly in every culture have to offer. Inspired by the opportunity to improve the quality of life of the elderly, to teach children to recognize the wisdom and value of the elderly as essential parts of our society, and to improve the health of our communities through intergenerational tolerance and communication, Friedman created Earth’s Elders.

Today we are living longer than ever before, and a few of us can expect to live to 100 or more. But many people feel that they will inevitably suffer the diseases of old age in their final years. Pharmaceutical companies have spent billions of dollars trying to find a cure for the "diseases of aging"—they may have found ways to stem some of the symptoms, but they have yet to find a panacea. Yet there are places in the world where, all along, people have commonly lived to 100 or more without suffering so much as a headache. How do they do it? The answer is simple: through sound dietary habits and balanced, healthy lifestyles. The 50 Secrets of the World's Longest Living People looks at the nutrition and lifestyle mores of the world's five most remarkable longevity hotspots—Okinawa, Japan; Bama, China; Campodimele, Italy; Symi, Greece; and Hunza, Pakistan—and explains how we too can incorporate the wisdom of these people into our everyday lives. It offers each of the secrets in detail, provides delicious, authentic recipes, and outlines a simple-to-master plan for putting it all together and living your best, and longest, life.

Ever wondered if a seven-year-old can bench press double his own bodyweight? Or who holds the record for the biggest enhanced breasts? Mark Dolan knows - he's actually met these people in his quest to discover the world’s most extraordinary person.

Join the happiness revolution! The author of the New York Times bestseller The Little Book of Hygge offers more inspiration and suggestions for achieving greater happiness, by practicing Lykke (LOO-ka)—pursuing and finding the good that exists in the world around us every day. While the Danes are the happiest people on the planet, happiness isn’t exclusively Danish; cultures around the world have their own unique approaches to leading a contented, fulfilled life. For his work at the Happiness Research Institute in Copenhagen, Meik Wiking travels the globe from Dubai to Finland, Rio de Janeiro to Bhutan, South Korea to the United States, to discover the secrets of the very happiest people. In The Little Book of Lykke, Meik identifies the six factors that explain the majority of differences in happiness across the world—togetherness, money, health, freedom, trust, and kindness—and explores what actions we can take to become happier. As he reveals, we can deepen our blissfulness and contentment with little adjustments in our behavior, whether it’s eating like the French (sitting around a table and savoring our time) or dancing the tango like Argentinians in Buenos Aires. With his trademark warmth and wit, Meik explores the happiness gap for parents, how much money you really need to buy happiness, how we can be healthier without having to go to the gym, how we can learn to build trust and collaboration, how we can help ourselves by helping others, and why our expectations often outweigh our reality. Weaving together original research and personal anecdotes, The Little Book of Lykke is a global roadmap for joy that offers a new approach to achieving everyday happiness that not only improve our own lives, but help us build better communities and a better world.

Worlds of Dissent analyzes the myths of Central European resistance popularized by Western journalists and historians, and replaces them with a picture of the struggle against state repression as the dissidents themselves understood, debated, and lived it. In the late 1970s, when Czech intellectuals, writers, and artists drafted Charter 77 and called on their government to respect human rights, they hesitated to name themselves "dissidents." Their personal and political experiences--diverse, uncertain, nameless--have been obscured by victory narratives that portray them as larger-than-life heroes who defeated Communism in Czechoslovakia. Jonathan Bolton draws on diaries, letters, personal essays, and other first-person texts to analyze Czech dissent less as a political philosophy than as an everyday experience. Bolton considers not only Václav Havel but also a range of men and women writers who have received less attention in the West--including Ludvík Vaculík, whose 1980 diary The Czech Dream Book is a compelling portrait of dissident life. Bolton recovers the stories that dissidents told about themselves, and brings their dilemmas and decisions to life for contemporary readers. Dissidents often debated, and even doubted, their own influence as they confronted incommensurable choices and the messiness of real life. Portraying dissent as a human, imperfect phenomenon, Bolton frees the dissidents from the suffocating confines of moral absolutes. Worlds of Dissent offers a rare opportunity tounderstand the texture of dissent in a closed society.

Discover the cognitive tools that lead to creative thinking and problem-solving with this “well-written and easy-to-follow” guide (Library Journal). Explore the “thinking tools” of extraordinary people, from Albert Einstein and Jane Goodall to Mozart and Virginia Woolf, and learn how you can practice the same imaginative skills to become your creative best. With engaging narratives and examples, Robert and Michèle Root-Bernstein investigate cognitive tools such as observing, recognizing patterns, modeling, playing, and more. Sparks of Genius is “a clever, detailed and demanding fitness program for the creative mind” and a groundbreaking guidebook for anyone interested in imaginative thinking, lifelong learning, and transdisciplinary education (Kirkus Reviews). “How different the painter at the easel and the physicist in the laboratory! Yet the Root-Bernsteins recognize the deep-down similarity of all creative thinking, whether in art or science. They demonstrate this similarity by comparing the accounts that various pioneers and inventors have left of their own creative processes: for Picasso just as for Einstein, for Klee just as for Feynman, the creative impulse always begins in vision, in emotion, in intuition. . . . With a lavishly illustrated chapter devoted to each tool, readers quickly realize just how far the imagination can stretch.” —Booklist “A powerful book . . . Sparks of Genius presents radically different ways of approaching problems.” —American Scientist

As the twenty-first century begins, significant changes are occurring in the way that services and goods are produced and consumed. One of the key drivers of this change is information and communications technology (ICT). It has transformed the role of space and time in patterns of economic development, in the rise of globalization and in the scale and structure of organizations. ICT has therefore accelerated the process of continual change and evolution that is the hallmark of both the capitalist economy and of organizations. Giving a student-friendly account of the diversity of theoretical perspectives, this outstanding book aids understanding the evolving economic geography of advanced capitalist economies. A series of detailed firm and employees' case studies from Europe, North America and the Asia Pacific, are used to inform useful theoretical case studies, which also investigate the significance of increased blurring of the lines between services and manufacturing functions in the production and consumption process.