Seasons of a Refractive Mind


Book Description

A wide-ranging collection of poems, aphorisms, and black-and-white photographs by an American writer and public policy scholar born in California in 1953 and raised in the American South and Pacific Northwest. Topics include faith and its loss, nature and the environment, war, social justice, friendship, teaching, chronic pain, mental health, and the struggle to communicate with others when ordinary words fail. The photography emphasizes California and the Northwest, but includes images from the American South and from Japan. Many of the writings and images convey nautical themes or nature themes. A major section addresses the Portland, Oregon, of the 1990s. This is a collection that can be read in any order or sampled a little at a time, and it can be revisited many times with new insight and delight.




Reading Minds


Book Description

The need to understand human social life is basic to our human nature and fuels a life-long quest that we begin in early childhood. Key to this quest is trying to fathom our inner mental states--our hopes, plans, wants, thoughts, and emotions. Scientists deem this developing a "theory of mind." In Reading Minds, Henry Wellman tells the story of our journey into that understanding. Our hard-won, everyday comprehension of people and minds is not spoon-fed or taught. Each of us creates a wide-ranging theory of mind step-by-step and uses it to understand how all people work. Failure to learn these steps cripples a child, and ultimately an adult, in areas as diverse as interacting socially, creating a coherent life story, enjoying drama and movies, and living on one's own. Progressing along these steps--as most of us do--allows us to see the nature of our shared humanity, to understand our children and our childhood selves, to teach and to learn from others, and to better navigate and make sense of our social world. Theory of mind is basic to why some of us become religious believers and others atheists, why some of us become novelists and all of us love stories, why some love scary movies and some hate them. Reading Minds illuminates how we develop this theory of mind as children, how that defines us as individuals, and ultimately how it defines us as human.




Refraction


Book Description

How many times does it take to destroy the world before you can save it?In 1986, physicist Timothy Straus hears voices that teach him how to create a space-warping engine that will change the world. In 2098, a fighter pilot hears voices that help him fight an authoritarian corporatist regime in the ashes of nuclear fallout. In 2155, the only self-aware robot on Mars struggles to steer humanity away from a demagogue who speaks from the shadows. Told through kaleidoscope storytelling across space and time, these three people are connected in ways they could never imagine. As they pull on the strings of the multiverse, what they can't see is that every villain begins as a savior-every enemy starts as a friend. With the power to refract reality, will they learn that one person can't save the people? That only the people can save the people?




Africa Pilot


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The Refractionist


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The Dynamic North


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AGARD Lecture Series


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The Season of Open Water


Book Description

BONUS: This edition contains a The Season of Open Water discussion guide and an excerpt from Dawn Tripp's Game of Secrets. From the critically acclaimed author of Moon Tide comes a mesmerizing novel of love and violence, family and betrayal. The Season of Open Water is the passionate, searing story of a young woman coming of age in a New England seacoast town that is swept up in the dangerous trade of rum-running. It is October 1927. Bridge Weld is nineteen, headstrong and beautiful, working in her grandfather Noel's boatbuilding shop. When Noel is approached by a local bootlegger to refit a boat for smuggling, he feels in his gut that he should not accept the work, yet he takes the job for the money it offers and for the chance it gives him to build a future for his beloved granddaughter, Bridge, and her brother, Luce. What Noel doesn’t count on is that Luce will be lured into the rum work himself and will try to pull Bridge into it with him. But Bridge has embarked on a different course. Caught up in a passion for Henry, a veteran of World War I, Bridge is propelled beyond the confines of her known world, and ultimately she must choose between the man who loves her and the brother to whom she has been loyal all her life. As Bridge strikes out on her own, Luce's fierce attachment spirals out of control. Exquisitely written, haunting in its rendering of place, The Season of Open Water is a superb novel about a family and the lawlessness of the heart, a love story that explores the often inescapable connections between violence and desire.