Speed


Book Description

MORE, BETTER…SLOWER. Feeling rushed, out of control, and overwhelmed? Feeling like you can’t keep up…and can’t stop? It’s not just you. From the need to be constantly connected and the changing definition of “work hours,” to unrealistic expectations of instant gratification, our bodies and brains are being harmed by habits that, as with any kind of addiction, promise short-term satisfaction while doing long-term damage. As a psychologist and addiction expert who practices in Silicon Valley, Stephanie Brown sees firsthand the impact of ever-faster technology and the culture it has spawned. She knows it’s affecting us mentally, physically, and spiritually. In this groundbreaking book, she explores how our beliefs and behaviors are being shaped by the seemingly limitless new world we’ve entered in recent years—and why faster doesn’t always equal better. Dr. Brown offers a step-by-step plan for breaking out of the speed trap. With practical guidelines, she shows us how to ease up on the gas pedal and reconnect with ourselves, learning to accept—and value—our limitations as human beings, reduce our stress levels, and free ourselves from our counterproductive obsession with speed.




Speed Addicts


Book Description

An illustrated book of grand prix motor racing, narrating the history of the sport in the form of a human story.




Addiction


Book Description

Billions of dollars have been expended on educating the public about the dangers of drug and alochol addiction. Despite these massive expenditures, the powerful vortex of addiction continues. Why? Irving Cohen, MD looks at the profile of the addict, the nature of addiction, the pharmacologic nature of the drugs, and explains the roller coaster syndrome that can trap innocent people. Addiction: The High-Low Trap offers a unique perspecive for both the addict and society on how to approach this problem.




The Speed Chronicles


Book Description

An “addictive volume” of amphetamine stories from William T. Vollmann, Sherman Alexie, and more (Publishers Weekly). Speed is the most American of drugs: twice the productivity at half the cost, and equal opportunity for all. It has reinvented itself many times, from miracle cure to biker-gang scourge and everything in between. It goes by many names: crystal meth, amphetamines, Dexedrine, Benzedrine, Adderall; crank, spizz, chickenscratch, oblivious marching powder, the go-fast. And it crosses all ethnicities, genders, and geographies—from immigrants and heartlanders punching double factory shifts to clandestine border warlords; prostitutes to housewives; Hollywood celebs to the poorest Indian on the rez—and they all have plenty of stories. Here is the first contemporary collection of new short fiction dealing with the drug from an array of today’s most compelling authors. The elements of crime and tweaking, bleary-eyed zombies exist alongside heart-wrenching narratives of everyday people, the American Dream going up in flames, and even some accounts of pure joy. Featuring brand-new stories by: Sherman Alexie, William T. Vollmann, James Franco, Megan Abbott, Jerry Stahl, Beth Lisick, Jess Walter, Scott Phillips, James Greer, Tao Lin, Joseph Mattson, Natalie Diaz, Kenji Jasper, and Rose Bunch.




On Slowness


Book Description

Speed is an obvious facet of contemporary society, whereas slowness has often been dismissed as conservative and antimodern. Challenging a long tradition of thought, Lutz Koepnick instead proposes to understand slowness as a strategy of the contemporaryÑa decidedly modern practice that gazes firmly at and into the presentÕs velocity. As he engages with late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century art, photography, video, film, and literature, Koepnick explores slowness as a critical medium to intensify our temporal and spatial experiences. Slowness helps us register the multiple layers of time, history, and motion that constitute our present. It offers a timely (and untimely) mode of aesthetic perception and representation that emphasizes the openness of the future and undermines any conception of the present as a mere replay of the past. Discussing the photography and art of Janet Cardiff, Olafur Eliasson, Hiroshi Sugimoto, and Michael Wesely; the films of Peter Weir and Tom Tykwer; the video installations of Douglas Gordon, Willie Doherty, and Bill Viola; and the fiction of Don DeLillo, Koepnick shows how slowness can carve out spaces within processes of acceleration that allow us to reflect on alternate temporalities and durations.




The Power of Trust


Book Description

Laura Webster appeared to have it all; stunning beauty, intelligence, wealth, privilege and a promising career as a photo journalist. Until the day her life changes dramatically. While on assignment in a working class district with her homosexual friend and colleague, David, they inadvertently wander into a bar and are set on by the sadistic Pete Radeki and his mates. Although David is badly beaten and Laura is nearly raped, two strangers come to their aid and beat off Pete's gang. Two days later, one of the men phones Laura to say he has her purse, dropped in her panic and would return it as he was coming her way due to his work. Thus she comes to meet Rob McCulloch, all feral good looks and animal magnetism. Although initially terrified of his biker's countenance, somehow she finds herself becoming angry with him and practically forces him into her house for coffee. This, in turn leads to another confrontation when her overbearing ex boyfriend; Don Stewart-Campbell, considered to be her social equal and unable to cope with her rejection, arrives unexpectedly and finds himself ordered out of her home. The next day, on her parents' advice, she calls Rob, expecting him to stand as a witness. His refusal stuns her, so, in a fit of anger, she confronts him in person. Another argument flares and she finds herself going on a date to teach him a lesson. From there, the relationship blossoms, even though Rob can and does drive Laura to distraction. However he manages to win over her friends and family with his easy charm and open personality. Yet, for all that, there are secrets in his past he won't divulge, not even at the urging of those who care for him. But other forces were at work. Don couldn't handle their burgeoning relationship, especially since Rob was so adept at humiliating him. He schemes and devises a sinister plot, hoping to capitalise on Laura's relative naivety in all things sordid. He almost succeeds, managing to have Laura arrested and publicly humiliated. But his attempts at playing her saviour are rejected when his boasting trips him up and he inadvertently reveals what he'd done. He finally realises that he'd lost her. But so great has his obsession grown that he decides that, if he can't have her, no one will. Rob must then win a desperate race against time to save the woman he loves from Pete's horrific vengeance.




It’s really complicated!


Book Description

A regular city girl named Alina, with an almost perfect life, falls for a guy and gets into a relationship with him. Will adolescence allow her to stay in a relationship with a possessive guy for a long time? Will she find someone better? Or will she keep tolerating everything because she thinks that what they have is love? Everybody has a different idea about love, and most of the time it is not what you think it to be. Infatuations, attractions and a lot more can be considered love, but these ideas change over time. Priorities change over time. Life has to be taken seriously and life teaches you that at some point through various incidents. That is when you realize and you change. The people in your life play an important role as well. It doesn’t always turn out the same way for everyone. It has a different route and a different pace for everyone. This book is about the route that Alina’s life follows, about the role of her dear ones in this path, about the changes that are incurred in her life and the things that she learns out of them.




Art, the Sublime, and Movement


Book Description

This book is a critical interdisciplinary approach to the study of contemporary visual culture and image studies, exploring ideas about space and place and ultimately contributing to the debates about being human in the digital age. The upward and downward pull seem in a constant contest for humanity’s attention. Both forces are powerful in the effects and affects they invoke. When tracing this iconological history, Amanda du Preez starts in the early nineteenth century, moving into the twentieth century and then spanning the whole century up to contemporary twenty-first century screen culture and space travels. Du Preez parses the intersecting pathways between Heaven and Earth, up and down, flying and falling through the concept of being “spaced out”. The idea of being “spaced out” is applied as a metaphor to trace the visual history of sublime encounters that displace Earth, gravity, locality, belonging, home, real life, and embodiment. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, visual culture, media and cultural studies, phenomenology, digital culture, mobility studies, and urban studies.




The Wild Trees


Book Description

Hidden away in foggy, uncharted rain forest valleys in Northern California are the largest and tallest organisms the world has ever sustained–the coast redwood trees, Sequoia sempervirens. Ninety-six percent of the ancient redwood forests have been destroyed by logging, but the untouched fragments that remain are among the great wonders of nature. The biggest redwoods have trunks up to thirty feet wide and can rise more than thirty-five stories above the ground, forming cathedral-like structures in the air. Until recently, redwoods were thought to be virtually impossible to ascend, and the canopy at the tops of these majestic trees was undiscovered. In The Wild Trees, Richard Preston unfolds the spellbinding story of Steve Sillett, Marie Antoine, and the tiny group of daring botanists and amateur naturalists that found a lost world above California, a world that is dangerous, hauntingly beautiful, and unexplored. The canopy voyagers are young—just college students when they start their quest—and they share a passion for these trees, persevering in spite of sometimes crushing personal obstacles and failings. They take big risks, they ignore common wisdom (such as the notion that there’s nothing left to discover in North America), and they even make love in hammocks stretched between branches three hundred feet in the air. The deep redwood canopy is a vertical Eden filled with mosses, lichens, spotted salamanders, hanging gardens of ferns, and thickets of huckleberry bushes, all growing out of massive trunk systems that have fused and formed flying buttresses, sometimes carved into blackened chambers, hollowed out by fire, called “fire caves.” Thick layers of soil sitting on limbs harbor animal and plant life that is unknown to science. Humans move through the deep canopy suspended on ropes, far out of sight of the ground, knowing that the price of a small mistake can be a plunge to one’s death. Preston’s account of this amazing world, by turns terrifying, moving, and fascinating, is an adventure story told in novelistic detail by a master of nonfiction narrative. The author shares his protagonists’ passion for tall trees, and he mastered the techniques of tall-tree climbing to tell the story in The Wild Trees—the story of the fate of the world’s most splendid forests and of the imperiled biosphere itself.




The SAGE Handbook of Social Psychology


Book Description

`This Volume is everything one would want from a one-volume handbook′ - Choice Magazine In response to market demand, The SAGE Handbook of Social Psychology: Concise Student Edition has been published and represents a slimmer (16 chapters in total), more course focused and student-friendly volume. The editors and authors have also updated all references, provided chapter introductions and summaries and a new Preface outlining the benefits of using the Handbook as an upper level teaching resource. It will prove indispensable reading for all upper level and graduate students studying social psychology.