Have you ever experienced an unnerving fear that because your life is moving along just too perfectly, some terrible event must be looming in the future? Julia Schofield has it all - a promising career, a father who is a powerful senator, a loyal best friend, and an old flame back in town. But Julia's perfect world is about to crash to the ground. Julia is haunted by the childhood loss of her mother and plagued by insomnia and a recurring nightmare. As well, she has the terrifying realization that she is being stalked; Julia's mental and physical health is in rapid decline. Four people tied by a buried past live separate and distinguishable lives. Julia, her father Paul, the beautiful and promiscuous Madeline and congressional hopeful Richard Eberly share a secret; a secret so powerful that when discovered, it could destroy them all.

NAUTILUS BOOK AWARD GOLD MEDALIST — BODY, MIND, SPIRIT PRACTICES “Combining an extraordinary range of scholarship with an accessible and entertaining writing style, The Infinite Staircase . . . provides a coherent and unified platform for a full human life.” —Midwest Book Review In this bold new book, high-tech’s best-known strategist makes a seminal contribution to the search for meaning in a secular era. Two questions fundamental to human existence have always been the metaphysical “where do I fit in the grand scheme of things?” and the ethical “how should I behave?” Religion is no longer a source of answers for many people, and nothing has replaced it. Moore uses his signature framework-based approach to answer these questions, taking us on an intellectual roller coaster ride through physics, chemistry, biology, the social sciences and the humanities. Along the way, he builds a metaphorical ladder that leads from the big bang to the need for ethical action in our daily lives. Combining an extraordinary range of scholarship with an accessible and entertaining writing style, The Infinite Staircase: What the Universe Tells Us About Life, Ethics, and Mortality provides a coherent and unified platform for a full human life.

How do children acquire the vast array of concepts, strategies, and skills that distinguish the thinking of infants and toddlers from that of preschoolers, older children, and adolescents? In this new book, Robert Siegler addresses these and other fundamental questions about children's thinking. Previous theories have tended to depict cognitive development much like a staircase. At an early age, children think in one way; as they get older, they step up to increasingly higher ways of thinking. Siegler proposes that viewing the development within an evolutionary framework is more useful than a staircase model. The evolution of species depends on mechanisms for generating variability, for choosing adaptively among the variants, and for preserving the lessons of past experience so that successful variants become increasingly prevalent. The development of children's thinking appears to depend on mechanisms to fulfill these same functions. Siegler's theory is consistent with a great deal of evidence. It unifies phenomena from such areas as problem solving, reasoning, and memory, and reveals commonalities in the thinking of people of all ages. Most important, it leads to valuable insights regarding a basic question about children's thinking asked by cognitive, developmental, and educational psychologists: How does change occur?

This study examines the narrative tools, techniques, and structures that Marja-Liisa Vartio, a classic of Finnish post-war modernism, used in presenting fictional minds in her narrative prose. The study contributes to the academic discussion on formal and thematic conventions of modernism by addressing the ways in which fictional minds work in interaction, and in relation to the enfolding fictional world. The epistemic problem of how accurately the world, the self, and the other can be known is approached by analyzing two co-operating ways of portraying fictional minds, both from external and internal perspectives. The external perspective relies on detachment and emotional restraint dominating in Vartio’s early novels Se on sitten kevät and Mies kuin mies, tyttö kuin tyttö. The internal perspective pertains to the mental processes of self-reflection, speculation, and excessive imagining that gain more importance in her later novels Kaikki naiset näkevät unia, Tunteet, and Hänen olivat linnut. In the theoretical chapter of this study, fictional minds are discussed in the context of the acclaimed “inward turn” of modernist fiction, by suggesting alternative methods for reading modernist minds as embodied, emotional, and social entities. In respect to fictional minds’ interaction, this study elaborates on the ideas of “mind-reading,” “intersubjectivity,” and the “social mind” established within post-classical cognitive narratology. Furthermore, it employs possible world poetics when addressing the complexity, incompleteness, and (in)accessibility of Vartio’s epistemic worlds, including the characters’ private worlds of knowledge, beliefs, emotions, hallucinations, and dreams. In regards to the emotional emplotment of fictional worlds, this study also benefits from affective narratology as well as the plot theory being influenced by possible world semantics, narrative dynamics, and cognitive narratology. As the five analysis chapters of this study show, fictional minds in Vartio’s fiction are not only introspective, solipsist, and streaming, but also embodied and social entities. In the readings of the primary texts, the concept of embodiedness is used to examine the situated presence of an experiencing mind within the time and space of the storyworld. Fictional minds’ (inter)actions are also demonstrated as evolving from local experientiality to long-term calculations that turn emotional incidents into episodes, and episodes into stories. In Vartio’s novels, the emotional story structure of certain conventional story patterns, such as the narratives of female development and the romance plot, the sentimental novel, and epistolary fiction, are modified and causally altered in the portrayal of the embodied interactions between the self, the other, and the world. The trajectories of female self-discovery in Vartio’s novels are analyzed through the emotional responses of characters: their experiences of randomness, their ways of counterfactualizing their traumatic past, their procrastinatory or akratic reactions or indecisiveness. The gradual move away from the percepts of the external world to the excessive imaginings and (mis)readings of other minds (triggered by the interaction of worlds and minds), challenges the contemporary and more recent accounts of modernism both in Finnish and international contexts.

The young girl with the Bohemian style was on the floor where she’d fallen, between Parker's computer case and her file cabinet. She wore a long, flowing skirt—lavender, the color of calm—and camel-colored Uggs. She lay on her back, her long, wavy blonde hair matted with blood. For struggling singer/songwriter Parker James, the music business has just turned deadly. Her desk in the reception area of a busy recording studio has become a crime scene, and Parker finds herself drawn into a mystery where nothing is as it seems. Unraveling the truth puts her own life at risk when she uncovers high-level industry corruption and is terrorized by a menacing stalker. As the danger escalates, Parker begins to question her dreams, her future, and even her faith. Double Minds is a double treat—combining a compelling suspense novel with an inside look at the world of the Christian music industry in Nashville. Terri Blackstock grabs readers at page one and keeps them riveted until the final plot twist is untangled.

Peppered Minds is about the journey of a young geologist, Neeraj, beginning his professional life. His imaginative mind conjures up a thesis presented on a brainstorming session for the welfare of his countrymen and the nation. The book provides an interesting insight to explain blatant problems that contribute to the lack of innovation, misconduct and all kinds of frenzy we see around today. The writing of the book is a lighthearted account of the protagonist, Neeraj, brought up in a conservative middle-class god-fearing family, who travels from Jaipur to Hyderabad to start his professional life as a geologist. The story depicts his bitter and heartening experiences, be it meeting an astrologer, making a railway reservation, going on a rail journey from Jaipur, joining up at his new office in Hyderabad or eventually completing a successful geological expedition in the wild. Neeraj’s tryst with the various characters along his brief journey brings to light the mind set, personal traits, beliefs and culture of a vast cross section of the ordinary public that span age groups ranging from the child to the octogenarian. The book depicts several interplays of events that envelope the geologists in the office as well as in the field. One of the momentous events that overwhelms Neeraj is his meeting with the Moon and learning of the unbelievable history of human existence on earth. There are also hilarious episodes, including the one which describes the use of kerosene as the basic material for nuclear research.

When a man is found murdered at Bethesda House, a home for adults with learning difficulties, local people start to accuse the home's residents of being behind the killing. The victim was a manager at the home, and seemingly a respectable and well-liked family man. DI Winter Meadows knows there's more to the case than meets the eye at first, though. As he and his team investigate, Meadows discovers a culture of fear at the home - and some very sinister dealings going on between the staff. Does the answer to the case lie in the relationships between the staff and the residents - or is there something even more sinister afoot? The second in the thrilling DI Meadows series by Cheryl Rees-Price.

The Times hailed Richard Burdon Haldane as ‘one of the most powerful … intellects’ British statesmanship had ever seen. His brother John, a great physiologist, invented the first gas masks used in World War One. Their sister Elizabeth was among the first women to become a senior public servant. Their mother Mary, friend and advisor to top politicians and churchmen, nurtured these exceptional minds. Mary’s grandchildren swapped her traditional roots for radical socialism, but continued the brilliant family legacy. Naomi Mitchison was a doyenne of Scottish literature; one Nobel prizewinner called her brother, the geneticist J.B.S. Haldane, ‘the cleverest man I ever knew’. Like the Darwins and Keyneses, this clan of thinkers lived in rapidly changing times, and helped to remake the world around them. Drawing on extensive family interviews and previously unseen private papers, Serious Mindsdetails scandal, tragedy and achievement within a dynasty that shaped modern Britain–from the welfare state, education system and military, to our understanding of energy, the human body, and the origins of life itself.

First Published in 1994. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

In Our Fictional Minds, David C. Fisher, Ph.D. challenges often-cherished convictions about ourselves and the world around us. By drawing on psychology, physics, neuroscience, as well as Western and Buddhist philosophies, he shows how common views of reality, consciousness, and the mind both serve and limit us. This revolutionary book helps readers: Identify mental shortcuts that limit our openness to new or opposing ideas. Become more comfortable with ambiguity, encouraging creativity and flexibility. See the nature and origins of their conceptions of “self” through a striking case example of hypnosis. Consider viewpoints challenging the appearance of free will. Develop flexible thinking to prevent being manipulated. Reimagine introspection and consciousness. Develop fluid and interconnected concepts of the self, enhancing self-acceptance, resilience, and empathy. Conceive reality itself from a fresh perspective, bringing a sense of interconnectedness and inner peace. Embracing such new approaches usually means confronting, and ultimately discarding, deeply held convictions about ourselves and reality. Those who can meet these challenges embark on an enlightening journey of self-discovery. By bringing this new thinking to the forefront, readers will see not only themselves as part of something vast and extraordinary, but better understand the potential in us all for transformation.