The Age of Persuasion: How Marketing Ate Our Culture

Author:  Terry O'Reilly and Mike Tennant 
The ad men behind CBC Radio’s The Age of Persuasion combine lively social history and years of industry experience to show how the art of persuasion shapes our culture.

Witty, erudite and irrepressibly irreverent, The Age of Persuasion provides a hugely entertaining — and eye-opening — insider’s look at the ever-expanding world of marketing.

The Age of Persuasion is for those who say “advertising doesn’t work on me” as well as those who want to understand how this industry has become inseparable from modern culture. Using their popular CBC Radio series as a starting point, Terry O’Reilly and Mike Tennant tell the fascinating story of how modern marketing came of age — from the early players to the Mad Men of the 1960s and beyond. With insider anecdotes and examples drawn from pop culture, they also probe deeply into the day-to-day workings and ethics of a business that is rapidly evolving in the age of Facebook and YouTube.

Imagination in Place

Author: Wendell Berry

In this varied and vibrant collection of new writings, Wendell Berry covers a wide landscape of interests relevant to us all, ranging from public policy to nature and spirituality. He shares his singular perspective on matters that affect each of us on personal and public levels--indeed, this collection confirms what Berry readers have long known: Few writers in America can match the depth of his thought or the ringing clarity of his prose. Imagination in Place brings to date Berry's perspective on such essential current concerns as agriculture, sustainability, and the economy. He addresses the latter with his much admired essay Faustian Economics, previously published in Harper's Magazine and included here--an especially prescient commentary given our country's current challenges with late capitalism. There are also beautiful essays of tribute, wherein Berry offers insights into the lives and works of writers such as Wallace Stegner, James Still, Gary Snyder, Kathleen Raine, Donald Hall, and Jane Kenyon. Altogether, readers familiar with Wendell Berry's work and those new to his thought will find the essays here to be full of extraordinary power and hope.

Hidden Brain: How Our Unconscious Minds Elect Presidents, Control Markets, Wage Wars, And Save Our Lives

Author: Shankar Vedantam

The hidden brain is Shankar Vedantam's shorthand for a host of brain functions, emotional responses, and cognitive processes that happen outside of our conscious awareness, but that have a decisive effect on how we behave. * The hidden brain has its finger on the scale when we make all of our most complex and important decisions--it decides who we fall in love with, whether we should convict someone of murder, or which way to run when someone yells 'fire!' * * It explains why we can become riveted by the story of a single puppy adrift on an ocean but are quickly bored by a story of genocide. * The hidden brain can also be deliberately manipulated to vote against their interest, or even become suicide terrorists. * * But the most disturbing thing is that it does all of this without our knowing. * * Shankar Vedantam, longtime author of the Washington Post's popular 'Department of Human Behavior' column, takes us on a tour of this phenomenon and explores its consequences. * * Using original reporting that combines the latest scientific research with compulsively readable narratives that take readers from the American campaign trail to terrorist indoctrination camps, from the World Trade Center on 9/11 to, yes, a puppy adrift in the Pacific Ocean, Vedantam illuminates the dark recesses of our minds while making an original argument about how we can compensate for our blind spots-and what happens when we don't.

Evidence of the Afterlife - The Science of Near-Death Experiences

Author: Jeffrey Long


Evidence of the Afterlife shares the firsthand accounts of people who have died and lived to tell about it. Through their work at the Near Death Experience Research Foundation, radiation oncologist Jeffrey Long and his wife, Jody, have gathered thousands of accounts of near-death experiences (NDEs) from all over the world. In addition to sharing the personal narrative of their experiences, visitors to the website are asked to fill out a one hundred–item questionnaire designed to isolate specific elements of the experience and to flag counterfeit accounts.
The website has become the largest NDE research database in the world, containing over 1,600 NDE accounts. The people whose stories are captured in the database span all age groups, races, and religious affiliations and come from all over the world, yet the similarities in their stories are as awe-inspiring as they are revealing. Using this treasure trove of data, Dr. Long explains how medical evidence fails to explain these reports and why there is only one plausible explanation—that people have survived death and traveled to another dimension.

The last taboo : opening the door on the global sanitation crisis

Author: Black, M. and Fawcett, B

This book breaks many silences surrounding today's sanitation crisis. It de-couples the 'water and sanitation' connection, and argues that - to make real progress - we need a radical new mind-set. In the byways of the developing world, much is quietly happening on the excretory frontier. This book takes us on a tour of those endeavours, in the company of today's sanitary heroes. In 2008, the International Year of Sanitation, the authors bring - with humour and impeccable taste - this awkward subject to a wider audience than the world of international filth usually commands. They seek the elimination of the 'Great Distaste' so that people without political clout or economic muscle can claim their right to a dignified and hygienic place to 'go'. Contents: A short history of the unmentionable; Runaway Urbanization and the rediscovery of filth; In dignity and health; Pit stops: the expanding technological menu; Selling sanitation to new users; Shitty livelihoods, or what?; Bringing on the new sanitary revolution. The book is an introduction for practitioners, students, activists and policy makers needing to understand the sanitation crisis.

The Universe - Order Without Design

Author: Carlos Calle

The author sets the scene by reviewing the historical background. Later, he introduces the major breakthroughs in 20th-century astrophysics: the discovery of the cosmic microwave background radiation, a fossil from the hot Big Bang; the startling inflationary theory of the Universe, in which its extent doubled 100 times in almost no time at all; confirmation that unseen dark matter outweighs visible matter by a factor of ten or more in clusters of galaxies; and the realisation that six billion years ago the expansion of the Universe began to accelerate in a cosmic jerk in which mysterious dark energy made itself felt as a version of anti-gravity. In addition to astrophysics, Calle introduces the fundamental aspects of sub-atomic physics, as well as good descriptions of attempts to unify the four forces of nature.
By assembling a mass of evidence from physics and astrophysics, the author is in a position to ask if the Universe is fine-tuned for the origin of life. This is actually an old question, but it has become a pressing issue because the former large uncertainties in the value of cosmological parameters have now been eliminated. The arrival of precision cosmology has fuelled the growth of the intelligent design bandwagon, the movement that uses probabilities to claim that our Universe had a supernatural creator.
Calle tackles intelligent design with some flair by invoking the latest cosmological models that arise from string theory, which suggests that our Universe may be just one among an unimaginable number of universes, each of which has its own set of physical laws. This, of course, turns the probability argument on its head: yes, life is improbable, just as winning the Lotto jackpot is improbable, but jackpots get won, and life exists somewhere if we posit endless cycles of universe creation or we accept the multiverse concept where we can have as many universes as we please in order to get one that is lively.
This account is outstanding in terms of setting out the issues objectively, and thus allowing readers to reach their own conclusions. Those who reject intelligent design are in good intellectual company: Pierre-Simon Laplace famously said to Napoleon, "I had no need for that hypothesis". There is plenty of food for thought in this book.

Secrets of the Universe: How We Discovered the Cosmos

Author: Paul Maurdin

Discoveries in astronomy challenge our fundamental ideas about the universe. Where the astronomers of antiquity once spoke of fixed stars, we now speak of whirling galaxies and giant supernovae. Where we once thought Earth was the center of the universe, we now see it as a small planet among millions of other planetary systems, any number of which could also hold life. These dramatic shifts in our perspective hinge on thousands of individual discoveries: moments when it became clear to someone that some part of the universe—whether a planet or a supermassive black hole—was not as it once seemed.

Secrets of the Universe invites us to participate in these moments of revelation and wonder as scientists first experienced them. Renowned astronomer Paul Murdin here provides an ambitious and exciting overview of astronomy, conveying for newcomers and aficionados alike the most important discoveries of this science and introducing the many people who made them. Lavishly illustrated with more than 400 color images, the book outlines in seventy episodes what humankind has learned about the cosmos—and what scientists around the world are poised to learn in the coming decades. Arranged by types of discovery, it also provides an overarching narrative throughout that explains how the earliest ideas of the cosmos evolved into the cutting-edge astronomy we know today. Along the way, Murdin never forgets that science is a human endeavor, and that every discovery was the result of inspiration, hard work, or luck—usually all three.

The first section of Secrets explores discoveries made before the advent of thetelescope, from stars and constellations to the position of our own sun. The second considers discoveries made within our own solar system, from the phases of Venus and the moons of Jupiter to the comets and asteroids at its distant frontier. The next section delves into discoveries of the dynamic universe, like gravitation, relativity, pulsars, and black holes. A fourth examines discoveries made within our own galaxy, from interstellar nebulae and supernovae to Cepheid variable stars and extrasolar planets. Next Murdin turns to discoveries made within the deepest recesses of the universe, like quasars, supermassive black holes, and gamma ray bursters. In the end, Murdin unveils where astronomy still teeters on the edge of discovery, considering dark matter and alien life.

From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time

Author : Sean Carroll

do things, left by themselves, tend to become messier and more chaotic? What would Maxwell's Demon say to a Boltzmann Brain?
The answers can be traced to the moment of the Big Bang -- or possibly before.
Time pervades our lives -- we keep track of it, lament its loss, put it to good use. The rhythms of our clocks and our bodies let us measure the passage of time, as a ruler lets us measure the distance between two objects. But unlike distances, time has a direction, pointing from past to future. From Eternity to Here examines this arrow of time, which is deeply ingrained in the universe around us. The early universe -- the hot, dense, Big Bang -- was very different from the late universe -- cool, empty, expanding space -- and that difference in felt in all the workings of Nature, from the melting of ice cubes to the evolution of species.
The arrow of time is easy to perceive, much harder to understand. Physicists appeal to the idea of entropy, the disorderliness of a system, which tends to increase according to the celebrated Second Law of Thermodynamics. But why was entropy ever small in the first place? That's a question that has been tackled by thinkers such as Ludwig Boltzmann, Stephen Hawking, Richard Feynman, Roger Penrose, and Alan Guth, all the way back to Lucretius in ancient Rome. But the answer remains elusive.
The only way to understand the origin of entropy is to understand the origin of the universe -- by asking what happened at the Big Bang, and even before. From Eternity to Here discusses how entropy relates to black holes, cosmology, information theory, and the existence of life. The book tells a story that starts in the kitchen, where we can turn eggs into omelets but never the other way around, and takes us to the edges of the universe. Modern discoveries in cosmology -- dark energy and the accelerating universe -- and quantum gravity -- the possibility of time before the Big Bang -- come together to suggest a picture of a multiverse in which the arrow of time emerges naturally from the laws of physics.

The Rebel

Author: Albert Camus

One of Camus' primary arguments in The Rebel concerns the motivation for rebellion and revolution. While the two acts - which can be interpreted from Camus' writing as states of being - are radically different in most respects, they both stem from a basic human rejection of normative justice. If human beings become disenchanted with contemporary applications of justice, Camus suggests that they rebel. This rebellion, then, is the product of a basic contradiction between the human mind's unceasing quest for clarification and the apparently meaningless nature of the world. Described by Camus as "absurd," this latter perception must be examined with what Camus terms "lucidity." Camus concludes that the absurd sensibility contradicts itself because when it claims to believe in nothing, it believes in its own protest and the value of the protester's life. Therefore, this sensibility is logically a "point of departure" that irresistibly "exceeds itself." In the inborn impulse to rebel, on the other hand, we can deduce values that enable us to determine that murder and oppression are illegitimate and conclude with "hope for a new creation."
Another prominent theme in The Rebel, which is tied to the notion of incipient rebellion, is the inevitable failure of attempts at human perfection. Through an examination of various titular revolutions, and in particular the French Revolution, Camus argues that most Revolution has involved a fundamental denial of both history and transcendental values. Such revolutionaries aimed to kill God. In the French Revolution, for instance, this was achieved through the execution of Louis XVI and subsequent eradication of the Divine Right of Kings. The subsequent rise of Utopian and materialist idealism sought "the end of history." Because this end is unattainable, according to Camus, terror ensued as the revolutionaries attempted to coerce results. This culminated in the "temporary" enslaving of people in the name of their future liberation. Notably, Camus' reliance on non-secular sentiment does not involve a defence of religion; indeed, the replacement of divinely-justified morality with pragmatism simply represents Camus' apotheosis of transcendental, moral values.
Faced with the manifest injustices of human existence on one hand, and the poor substitute of revolution on the other, Camus' rebel seeks to fight for justice without abandoning transcendental values, including the principle of the intrinsic value of human life. Consequently, some rebels attempt to justify their actions through a crude form of payment. As Camus argues, the Russian terrorists active in the early 20th Century were prepared to offer their own lives as payment for the lives they took.
A third is that of crime, as Camus discusses how rebels who get carried away lose touch with the original basis of their rebellion and offer various defenses of crime through various historical epochs.
At the end of this book Camus exposes the possible moral superiority of the ethics and political plan of trade unionism.

Darwin's Lost World - The hidden history of animal life

Author: Martin Brasier

The quest of scientists since Darwin to solve a case he found 'inexplicable' - the lack of fossils in rocks before the Cambrian, over 540 million years old An account of the earliest known animals - the enigmatic Ediacaran creatures, and the small shelly fossils - that have hardly ever been described before to a lay audience. (Books by Gould and Conway-Morris focus on the more famous, and much later animals of the Burgess Shale.) A personal account of the piecing together of clues about the lead up to the Cambrian from an Oxford scientist involved at the forefront of work on early life A richly readable and engaging account of the trials and tribulations of expeditions to remote places such as Siberia and Outer Mongolia Tackles deep and still unresolved questions of evolution: when and how did animals evolve and what drove the great evolutionary innovations of the 'Cambrian Explosion'? These are areas of intense and exciting current research and Brasier here gives his own take on the emerging answers, as one of the leading players in the field Darwin made a powerful argument for evolution in the Origin of Species, based on all the evidence available to him. But a few things puzzled him. One was how inheritance works - he did not know about genes. This book concerns another of Darwin's Dilemmas, and the efforts of modern palaeontologists to solve it. What puzzled Darwin is that the most very ancient rocks, before the Cambrian, seemed to be barren, when he would expect them to be teeming with life. Darwin speculated that this was probably because the fossils had not been found yet. Decades of work by modern palaeontologists have indeed brought us amazing fossils from far beyond the Cambrian, from the depths of the Precambrian, so life was certainly around. Yet the fossils are enigmatic, and something does seem to happen around the Cambrian to speed up evolution drastically and produce many of the early forms of animals we know today. In this book, Martin Brasier, a leading palaeontologist working on early life, takes us into the deep, dark ages of the Precambrian to explore Darwin's Lost World. Decoding the evidence in these ancient rocks, piecing together the puzzle of what happened over 540 million years ago to drive what is known as the Cambrian Explosion, is very difficult. The world was vastly different then from the one we know now, and we are in terrain with few familiar landmarks. Brasier is a master storyteller, and combines the account of what we now know of the strange creatures of these ancient times with engaging and amusing anecdotes from his expeditions to Siberia, Outer Mongolia, Barbuda, and other places, giving a vivid impression of the people, places, and challenges involved in such work. He ends by presenting his own take on the Cambrian Explosion, based on the picture emerging from this very active field of research. A vital clue involves worms - burrowing worms are one of the key signs of the start of the Cambrian. This is fitting: Darwin was inordinately fond of worms.Readership: Readers of popular science - particularly those with an interest in earth sciences and the history of life on Earth. Students and researchers in earth sciences, geology, and zoology will also find the book of interest for it provides not only fresh insights into the field, but also stories of adventure too.