Why does God exist? How have the three dominant monotheistic religions shaped and altered the conception of God? How have these religions influenced each other and the human journey? Karen Armstrong, one of the world's foremost commentators on religious culture, traces the history of how men and women have perceived and experienced God, from the time of Abraham to the present. The epic story begins with the Jews' gradual transformation of pagan idol worship in Babylon into true monotheism— a concept previously unknown in the world. Christianity and Islam both rose on the foundation of this revolutionary idea, but these religions refashioned “the one God” to suit the social and political needs of their followers. From classical philosophy and medieval mysticism to the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and the modern age of skepticism, Karen Armstrong distils the intellectual and practical history of monotheism into one very readable volume.

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This vivid and detailed biography strips away centuries of distortion and myth and presents a balanced view of the man whose religion continues to dramatically affect the course of history. Says the author in a new preface, written post September 11, 2003, “We need the Prophet's story at this dangerous time… Muhammad had no blueprint, no clear plan of action, when he began his mission. Any such plan would inevitably have been rooted in the old, violent world of attack, retaliation, and counter-attack, which he knew must be superseded. Instead of forming a policy and sticking to it, Muhammad simply listened, with attention, intelligence and sensitivity to events as they unfolded, allowed their inner logic to speak to him, saw further than his contemporaries, and responded accordingly. Thus he was able to bring about a solution for war-torn Arabia that would have been utterly inconceivable at the onset. … above all, we can learn from Muhammad how to make peace. His whole career shows that the first priority must be to extirpate greed, hatred and contempt from our own hearts and to reform our own society. Only then is it possible to build a safe, stable world, where people can live together in harmony and respect.”

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In Beyond Culture, Hall argues that for too long, people have taken their own ways of life for granted, ignoring the vast international cultural community that surrounds them. Humankind must now embark on the difficult journey beyond culture, to the discovery of a lost self and a sense of perspective.

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THE SILENT LANGUAGE
Edward T. Hall

In the everyday but unspoken give-and-take of human relationships, the “silent” language plays a vitally important role. In this book Dr. Hall analyzes the many ways people “talk” to one another without the use of words, including how we use concepts of “space” and “time” as tools to transmit messages.

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Over a quarter million copies sold! How does this information make you feel about the book? If, even for a moment, you thought that such a popular book might be the one you were interested in, you may have been persuaded by a potent principle of influence — in this case, the principle of social proof. Have you ever found yourself saying “yes” to a child selling candy and then wondering why you have just agreed to buy something you really don't want? We like to think of ourselves as in control of our opinions, decisions and actions, but backed by 25 years of research, psychologist Robert Cialdini identifies six basic psychological pressures almost guaranteed to induce our compliance: reciprocation, consistency, social proof, liking, authority, and scarcity. Understanding and recognizing these pressures can go a long way to helping us towards more mindful responses in a world of increasingly sophisticated tactics of sales and propaganda.

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In this revealing look at the “riddles” of life, cultural anthropologist Marvin Harris answers such questions as: Why do Hindus worship cows? Why do Jews and Moslems refuse to eat pork? How is it that a Peaceful Messiah flourished at a time in Jewish history when military messianism was traditionally and consistently prophesied? Why did so many people in post-medieval Europe believe in witches? And why have witches, or their equivalent — people who are interested in higher consciousness — managed to stage such a successful comeback in the modern world? This book opens the mind to a new way of thinking and looking at cultures. No matter how bizarre a people's behavior or attitudes may seem, they can be shown to stem from identifiable and intelligent sources.

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The distinguished American anthropologist Marvin Harris shows how the endless varieties of cultural behavior, often so puzzling at first glance, can be explained as adaptations to particular ecological conditions. His aim is to account for the evolution of cultural forms as Darwin accounted for the evolution of biological forms: to show how cultures adopt their characteristic forms in response to changing ecological modes.

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Anthropologist Harris here presents his findings on the “puzzling eating habits” of humans. Drawing from his research on a wide range of ancient and modern societies, he offers his theories of the effects that religious laws and customs have had on cultural attitudes toward foods. There are chapters on the approved and the forbidden: beef, horsemeat and the flesh of other animals, including humans, fish, insects. Harris documents his provocative views on regulations governing comestibles in various cultures. For instance, he concludes that swine herding was impractical for nomadic desert dwellers, hence pork became taboo not because pigs were unclean but because they needed too much care. As for taste preferences, Harris notes that “good to eat” translates as “good to sell” in profit-conscious countries like the U.S.

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One of the world's most celebrated writers addresses the prime questions before us all: how to think for ourselves, how to understand what we know, how to pick a path in a world deluged with opinions and information, and how to look at ourselves and our society with fresh eyes.

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This is the story of the lives, feelings and culture of the Pygmy people, the oldest inhabitants of Africa, living in the Ituri rain forest of what is now Zaire in Central Africa. It is a delightful, inspiring and remarkable ethnography: Turnbull knows these people so well you are transported into their world and the journey is enriching and unforgettable. The book gives you a taste of being “part of the forest.” You too, for a time, become a hunter-gatherer and share Turnbull's friendship with these people, and along the way your assumptions will be challenged. Your ideas about the nature of man, his value systems, his relationships both with his neighbors and his environment will be reassessed and revitalized.

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As The Forest People restores one's faith in basic human goodness, The Mountain People shatters the security of this feeling and makes us realize just how fragile this goodness is. This is the story of the Ik tribe, forced out of its natural environment to face starvation. The book describes, as a possible foretaste, the breakdown of a civilization. Living in conditions not dissimilar to what one might imagine possible in our not-too-distant future, as the world population increases and resources decrease, the individual's adaptive mechanisms strive for one thing only: its own survival at the expense of everyone else's. Turnbull concludes, “Those positive qualities we value so highly are no longer functional for the Ik; even more than in our own society, they spell ruin and disaster. It seems that far from being basic human qualities, they are superficial luxuries we can afford in times of plenty, or mere mechanisms for survival and security.”

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What makes us act the way we do? Biologist Paul R. Ehrlich suggests that although people share a similar genetic makeup, these genes “do not shout commands at us … at the very most, they whisper suggestions.” He argues that human nature is as much the result of genetic coding as it is of cultural and environmental factors. With examples and personal anecdotes, Ehrlich conveys the facts about what science does and does not know. After reading this lucid guide to genetics and evolution, the old saying, “You can't change human nature,” will never have the same meaning again.

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This notable contribution to our understanding of ourselves, explores the realm of human behavior in social situations and the way that we appear to others. Dr. Goffman uses the metaphor of theatrical performance as a framework. Each person in everyday social intercourse presents himself and his activity to others, attempts to guide and control the impressions they form of him, and employs certain techniques in order to sustain his performance, just as an actor presents a character to an audience. The discussions of these social techniques offered here are based upon detailed research and observation of social customs in many regions.

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Genes determine our eye color, blood type, and tendency toward certain diseases. That much is clear. For most of this century, we have considered parents and the general environment to be the primary sculptors of personality and psychological traits — who we are and what we can become. In this book, Peter B. Neubauer, M.D., Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at New York University, and his son, Alexander Neubauer, right the balance in the nature-nurture debate. They show how our genes affect the way we react to the world, interact with it, and behave in many situations. Based on fifty years of clinical practice and on studies of identical twins, Nature's Thumbprint explores the range of inborn inclinations upon which personality is later built: individual timetables of maturation; adaptation to the family and the environment; reasons why some children are more vulnerable to environmental obstacles than others; and why some parents are stymied by children who do not match their expectations, while others respond in positive ways. Sure to redefine thinking in psychiatry, psychology, and psychotherapy, Nature's Thumbprint will also give parents a new understanding of their children. It offers a hopeful message to us all, for only when we understand the biological as well as the psychological underpinnings of personality can we come to a genuine understanding of ourselves and our lives.

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Martin Seligman, a renowned psychologist and clinical researcher, has been studying optimists and pessimists for 25 years. Pessimists believe that bad events are their fault, will last a long time, and undermine everything. They feel helpless and may sink into depression. Optimists believe that defeat is a temporary setback or a challenge--it doesn't knock them down. “Pessimism is escapable,” asserts Seligman, by learning a new set of cognitive skills that will enable you to take charge, resist depression, and make yourself feel better and accomplish more. The book describes explanatory style (how you habitually explain to yourself why events happen) and how it affects your success, health, and quality of life. Seligman supports his points with animal research and human cases. He includes tests for readers and their children, whose achievement may be related more to level of optimism/pessimism than ability. The final chapters teach the skills of changing from pessimism to optimism.

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Drawing on the latest neuroimaging research showing the brain as it learns and remembers, Harvard psychologist Daniel L. Schacter classifies seven pitfalls which can make human memory inaccurate and unreliable: transience, the weakening of memory over time; blocking, the inability to recall a familiar name or fact; misattribution, assigning a memory to the wrong source; suggestibility, the implanting of memories through leading questions; bias, the unconscious reshaping of a memory under the influence of later events or opinions; and persistence, the repeated recall of disturbing information or events that one would prefer to forget. He says these often enraging and sometimes damaging “sins” of memory are adaptive aspects of our mental system which also benefit us by protecting against overload, helping the memory “to retain information that is most likely to be needed in the environment in which it operates.”

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The “user illusion” in computing is the desktop graphical user interface (GUI): the friendly, comprehensible illusion presented to the user to conceal all the bouncing bits and bytes that do the actual work. Tor Nørretranders writes that “our consciousness is a user illusion for ourselves and the world ... one's very own map of oneself and one's possibilities of intervening in the world.” The illusion of how we think our minds work has little to do with what research tells us. In any second, our senses process some 11 million bits of information, but consciousness processes only about 16 bits. Intuition and the unconscious process far more than is available to the conscious mind. Evoked potentials show evidence of decisions and ideas about a half second before we are aware of them. Our conscious construction of reality is mostly a delayed assemblage of bits of information in the process of being discarded. This book examines more than a century of psychological, information processing, and physical research relevant to consciousness.

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The frontal lobes perform the most advanced and complex functions in the brain, the so-called “executive functions.” They are involved in intentionality, purposefulness, and complex decision making. Alexandr Luria called them 'the organ of civilization.' They are involved in leadership, motivation, drive, vision, self-awareness and awareness of others, creativity, gender-linked cognitive styles, social maturity and social responsibility, cognitive development and learning, dementias, personality, and neurological and psychiatric illness. This book describes the functions of the frontal lobes, the great range of frontal lobe 'styles' in normal people, the tragedies of neurological disease or brain damage, the ways in which these functions can be tested, and ways in which frontal functions can be strengthened. Goldberg describes 'cognitive fitness,' the use of 'cognitive exercise' and a 'cognitive gym.'

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Linguistics professor Deborah Tannen's insights into how and why women and men so often misunderstand each other demonstrate how intelligent analysis of conversation can reveal the extraordinary complexities of social relationships — including relationships between men and women — and the crucial yet often unnoticed role that language and gender play in our daily lives. Gender and Discourse examines language and gender through the lens of “sex-class-linked” patterns as well as “sex-linked” patterns. The six essays in the book address the controversies and misunderstandings of her work. She argues, for instance, that her cultural approach to gender differences does not deny that men dominate women in society, nor does it ascribe gender differences to women's “essential nature.” She analyzes a number of conversational strategies, such as interruption, topic raising, indirection, and silence showing that no strategy exclusively expresses dominance or submissiveness in conversation. For example, interruption can be supportive, silence and indirection can be used to control. It is the interactional context — the participants' individual styles and the interaction of their styles — that result in the balance of power.

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THE RIGHT MIND
Making Sense of the Hemispheres
Robert Ornstein

As the psychologist and writer who began the conversation about the differing roles of the right and left hemispheres in his best-selling The Psychology of Consciousness, Robert Ornstein revisits the field some 25 years later. “I began this book with a pretty firm prejudice,” says Ornstein. “I believed that after two decades of research we'd find ... that there might be little to distinguish the two sides.” Instead, he concluded that “the division of the mind is profound,” with deep roots in evolution, embryonic development, and society. It is profound, but not simplistic: Drawing on studies of patients with hemispheric damage, on new research on disorders such as autism and schizophrenia, and research on how the brain handles functions such as speech, sound, motion, emotion, language and vision, Ornstein shows how all human activity involves activity of both hemispheres. The right is neither a chimpanzee-like moron nor a mystical genius. It provides the context, the big picture, while the left keeps track of the details. He considers how understanding the complex process of specialization can help us in a variety of challenges: treating mental illness, in physical medicine and health care, in understanding and appreciating cultural differences and perspectives, and in addressing crises we face in education with new curriculum and techniques. For example, efforts can be made to improve students' ability to grasp context in their studies. He suggests that we might better understand the real aim of traditional spiritual techniques as developing context-forming skills, as a “deepened framework for the meaning of life,” and as developing the ability for more selective mental function and making more conscious choices.

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COEVOLUTION:
Genes, Culture, and Human Diversity
William H. Durham

The author suggests that a process of cultural selection, or preservation by preference, driven chiefly by choice or imposition depending on the circumstances, has been the main but not exclusive force of cultural change. He shows that this process gives rise to five major patterns or “modes” of relationship between genes and culture, including a mode in which cultural change is at odds with genetic change. Each of the five modes is discussed in some detail and its existence confirmed through one or more case studies chosen for their heuristic value, the robustness of their data, and their broader implications. But Coevolution predicts not simply the existence of the five modes of gene-culture relations; it also predicts their relative importance in the ongoing dynamics of cultural change in particular cases. The case studies themselves are lucid and innovative reexaminations of an array of oft-pondered anthropological topics—plural marriage, sickle-cell anemia, basic color terms, adult lactose absorption, incest taboos, headhunting, and cannibalism. In a general sense, the author’s goal is to demonstrate that an evolutionary analysis of both genes and culture has much to contribute to our understanding of human diversity, particularly behavioral diversity, and thus to the resolution of age-old questions about nature and nurture, genes and culture.

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