A guide for making sense of life--from action (good except when it's not) to thinking (depressing) to youth (a treasure). This book offers a guide to human nature and human experience--a reference book for making sense of life. In thirty-eight short, interconnected essays, Shimon Edelman considers the parameters of the human condition, addressing them in alphabetical order, from action (good except when it's not) to love (only makes sense to the lovers) to thinking (should not be so depressing) to youth (a treasure). In a style that is by turns personal and philosophical, at once informative and entertaining, Edelman offers a series of illuminating takes on the most important aspects of living in the world.

This book is about all things consciousness, great and small. It starts by pointing to the key characteristic of consciousness, without realizing which it cannot be understood: like everything else about the mind, it is fundamentally a kind of computation. Among many other matters, this explains: how it is that we share some aspects of consciousness with bacteria; how it can arise in artificial machines and not just living ones; how the empty cocoon of the self that it spins ends up pretending to be the butterfly; and how consciousness dooms this virtual butterfly to the splendor and the suffering of being awake and aware. Unlike most other books on consciousness, this one includes a discussion of some possible ways whereby we, pinned like butterflies by our species’ history and socioeconomic circumstances, can awake to our collective predicament and join forces to do something about it. It should be of interest to all readers who care about the nature of our lived experience — and about our survival, which depends on developing critical consciousness of our dire situation and the social dynamics that shape it.

One mum's hilarious account of raising adolescents. I've learnt that when I come home from work and my daughter has tidied up her bedroom, swept the back veranda free of cigarette butts, cooked dinner and tells me, after pouring me a glass of wine, 'that's the good news - now here s the bad' that it probably involves body piercing. If I'm lucky Sonia Neale has had enough, her sons are crusty, smelly and permanently hooked to the tV, her daughter has so many piercing she sets off theft-detectors in stores, and as for Sonia herself, well, there's only one thing she wants more than chardonnay and steamy sex with Keanu Reeves: chardonnay and a bit of peace and quiet! But with a house full of teenagers, what are her chances?Funny stories from the lives of an average family as a mother recounts of the delights and horrors (mainly horrors) of parenting three teenagers.