The Secret Life of Money leads readers on a fascinating journey to uncover the sources of our monetary desires. By understanding why money has the power to obsess us, we gain the power to end destructive patterns and discover riches of the soul. Midas who can turn all to gold, fishermen who will not share their catch, Dorothy and her companions on the golden road to the Emerald City, Scrooge who cannot give, the hunter who shares not only food but also debt, money that falls from the skies, buried treasures that can be spiritual wealth or be stolen, how debt can be like inheritance, the symbolism of the bulls and bears of Wall Street, the all-seeing eye on the back of the dollar bill—all these and many other stories and myths from around the world are given delightful retellings and searching analyses in The Secret Life of Money. Chapters include The Many Forms of Money: Understanding Its Symbolic Value; The Almighty Dollar: Why Money Is So Easily Worshipped; Money and Sacrifice: When Money Feels More Important Than Life; Hoarding Money: Why the Life Energy of Misers Is Stolen; The Source of Riches: Gaining a New Understanding of Supply; Inheritance: The Actual andSymbolic Wealth of Our Parents; Indebtedness: How the Debtor’s Tower Connects Earth to Heaven; Changing Symbols: Money, Credit Cards, and Banks; Bulls and Bears: How the Stock Market Reflects the Renewing Cycles of Life.

From its arrival on earth to the vast areas it traverses before emptying into the sea, water holds all the knowledge and experience it has acquired. As phenomenal as it may seem, water carries its whole history, just as we carry ours. It carries secrets, too. In The Secret Life of Water, bestselling author Masaru Emoto guides us along water’s remarkable journey through our planet and continues his work to reveal water’s secret life to humankind. He shows how we can apply its wisdom to our own lives, and how, by learning to respect and appreciate water, we can better confront the challenges that face the twenty-first century—and rejuvenate the planet.

“An absolutely fascinating blend of history, design, sociology, and cultural poetics—highly recommended.”—Maria Popova, Brain Pickings A charming and indispensable tour of two thousand years of the written word, Shady Characters weaves a fascinating trail across the parallel histories of language and typography. Whether investigating the asterisk (*) and dagger (†)—which alternately illuminated and skewered heretical verses of the early Bible—or the at sign (@), which languished in obscurity for centuries until rescued by the Internet, Keith Houston draws on myriad sources to chart the life and times of these enigmatic squiggles, both exotic (¶) and everyday (&). From the Library of Alexandria to the halls of Bell Labs, figures as diverse as Charlemagne, Vladimir Nabokov, and George W. Bush cross paths with marks as obscure as the interrobang (?) and as divisive as the dash (—). Ancient Roman graffiti, Venetian trading shorthand, Cold War double agents, and Madison Avenue round out an ever more diverse set of episodes, characters, and artifacts. Richly illustrated, ranging across time, typographies, and countries, Shady Characters will delight and entertain all who cherish the unpredictable and surprising in the writing life.

In a world where so many books by and about footballers are little more than bland PR exercises, Full Time breaks the mould decisively. Stripping away the facade of what we think life must be like for an international football star, Paul Kimmage reveals a different story when it comes to Irish footballer Tony Cascarino. Scarred by his childhood, haunted by indiscretion and troubled by a secret from his past, Cascarino is struggling to find answers as he speeds towards the most terrifying juncture in sport: the end. As Cascarino opens up about his fears,crippling loss of confidence and sexual indiscretion, no wonder TheTimes voted it one of the Top Ten football books of all time, and Eamon Dunply said of it: 'If it were fiction this book could win the Booker Prize.'

How do you ignore a ghost? Sparrow Delaney absolutely, positively does not want to be a medium like her six older sisters, her mother, and her grandmother. She does not want to see, hear, smell, or talk to ghosts. If she sticks to her rules and doesn't let anyone know that she can do all those things—everywhere, all the time—Sparrow just might pass as a normal tenth grader at her new high school. She makes a new best friend and meets an irritatingly appealing guy in her history class. But when another boy catches her eye, all Sparrow's dreams of being ordinary go up in smoke. Because this boy is a dead one—a persistent, charming, infuriating ghost, who won't let her be until she agrees to help him Move On.

Secrets come in all shapes and sizes. And for families as well as individuals, they are built on a complex web of shifting motives and emotions. But today, when personal revelations are posted on the Internet or sensationalized on afternoon talk shows, we risk losing touch with how important secrets are--how they are used and abused, their power to harm and heal. In this important work, Evan Imber-Black explores the nature of secrets, helping us understand: The distinction between healthy privacy and toxic secrecy What to tell--and not to tell--young children How to safely confront a family "zone of silence" Why adolescents need to have some secrets--and where to draw the line The effect of "official" secrets, like sealed adoption records and medical testing What to consider before revealing an important secret And much more Filled with moving first-person stories, The Secret Life of Families provides perspective on some of today's most sensitive personal and social issues. Giving voice to our deepest fears and to our power to overcome them, this is a book that will be talked about for years to come.

A surprising and entertaining explanation of how the words we use (even the ones we don't notice) reveal our personalities, emotions, and identities. We spend our lives communicating. In the last fifty years, we've zoomed through radically different forms of communication, from typewriters to tablet computers, text messages to tweets. We generate more and more words with each passing day. Hiding in that deluge of language are amazing insights into who we are, how we think, and what we feel. In The Secret Life of Pronouns, social psychologist and language expert James W. Pennebaker uses his groundbreaking research in computational linguistics-in essence, counting the frequency of words we use-to show that our language carries secrets about our feelings, our self-concept, and our social intelligence. Our most forgettable words, such as pronouns and prepositions, can be the most revealing: their patterns are as distinctive as fingerprints. Using innovative analytic techniques, Pennebaker X-rays everything from Craigslist advertisements to the Federalist Papers-or your own writing, in quizzes you can take yourself-to yield unexpected insights. Who would have predicted that the high school student who uses too many verbs in her college admissions essay is likely to make lower grades in college? Or that a world leader's use of pronouns could reliably presage whether he led his country into war? You'll learn why it's bad when politicians use "we" instead of "I," what Lady Gaga and William Butler Yeats have in common, and how Ebenezer Scrooge's syntax hints at his self-deception and repressed emotion. Barack Obama, Sylvia Plath, and King Lear are among the figures who make cameo appearances in this sprightly, surprising tour of what our words are saying-whether we mean them to or not.