edited and with an introduction by Sherry Turkle [as per Sherry]"This is a book about science, technology, and love," writes Sherry Turkle. In it, we... learn how a love for science can start with a love for an object--a microscope, a modem, a mud pie, a pair of dice, a fishing rod. Objects fire imagination and set young people on a path to a career in science. In this collection, distinguished scientists, engineers, and designers as well as twenty-five years of MIT students describe how objects encountered in childhood became part of the fabric of their scientific selves. In two major essays that frame the collection, Turkle tells a story of inspiration and connection through objects that is often neglected in standard science education and in our preoccupation with the virtual. The senior scientists' essays trace the arc of a life: the gears of a toy car introduce the chain of cause and effect to artificial intelligence pioneer Seymour Papert; microscopes disclose the mystery of how things work to MIT President and neuroanatomist Susan Hockfield; architect Moshe Safdie describes how his boyhood fascination with steps, terraces, and the wax hexagons of beehives lead him to a life immersed in the complexities of design. The student essays tell stories that echo these narratives: plastic eggs in an Easter basket reveal the power of centripetal force; experiments with baking illuminate the geology of planets; LEGO bricks model worlds, carefully engineered and colonized. All of these voices--students and mentors--testify to the power of objects to awaken and inform young scientific minds. This is a truth that is simple, intuitive, and easily overlooked.Sherry Turkle is Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology at MIT and Director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self. She is the author of The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit (Twentieth Anniversary Edition, MIT Press, 2005) and Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet and the editor of Evocative Objects: Things We Think With (MIT Press, 2007).

Over the last three decades, millions of people have slipped through a loophole in the American dream and become downwardly mobile as a result of... downsizing, plant closings, mergers, and divorce: the middle-aged computer executive laid off during an industry crisis, blue-collar workers phased out of the post-industrial economy, middle managers whose positions have been phased out, and once-affluent housewives stranded with children and a huge mortgage as the result of divorce. Anthropologist Katherine S. Newman interviewed a wide range of men, women, and children who experienced a precipitous fall from middle-class status, and her book documents their stories. For the 1999 edition, Newman has provided a new preface and updated the extensive data on job loss and downward mobility in the American middle class, documenting its persistence, even in times of prosperity.

Falling in Love is the first book to unlock the mysteries of how and why we fall in love. Renowned psychologist Ayala Pines shows us why we fall for the... people we do, and argues convincingly that we love neither by chance nor by accident. She offers sound advice for making the right choices when it comes to this complicated emotion. Packed with helpful suggestions for those seeking love and those already in it, this book is about love's many puzzles. The second edition furthers the work of the popular and successful first edition. With expanded research, theory, and practice, this book once again provides one of a kind understandings of the experience of love.  The new edition offers updated references to recent research, new chapter exercises, and "case examples" of romantic stories to begin each chapter.

David Lynn Hall's love of philosophy began with a fifty-cent paperback. Then an adolescent facing an 18-hour bus trip across the great Southwest,... desperate for anything to read, Hall bought Alfred North Whitehead's Adventures of Ideas at a rest stop in Pecos, Texas. He didn't have a clue who Whitehead was, but the book had a colorful, exotic cover, and nothing else on the revolving wire bookrack appealed to him. "I paid fifty cents, boarded the Trailways bus, nestled into my narrow seat and into the vastness of the desert spaces--and soon into the yet vaster spaces of humanity's great thoughts.... As I recall that first encounter with philosophic thinking, I seem to capture the exact emotion--a mixture of intrigue and perplexity, a congealed sense of awe--the apotheosis of which is the feeling philosophy now represents for me." That Mentor paperback still sits on his shelf, a treasured relic held together by rubberbands. Hall is just one of over sixty philosophers whose revealing memoirs appear in Falling in Love with Wisdom, a fascinating look at how some people became philosophers. Contributed by thinkers young and old, male and female, famous and obscure, these pieces reveal in very human terms both the rewards and hazards of a life dedicated to the pursuit of wisdom. Many recall a single memorable moment, an epiphany that changed forever the way they thought about themselves and the world around them. Huston Smith reveals how powerful these moments can be: "My excitement had been mounting all evening and around midnight it exploded, shattering mental stockades. It was as if a fourth dimension of space had opened, and ideas--now palpable--were unrolling like carpets before me." Others, such as Diane Michelfelder, find their gravitation to philosophy more subtle: "I sometimes think that one becomes a philosopher the same way one becomes many other things: a lover, a neighbor, a friend, an adult. You wake up one morning to discover that is what you have become." Still others speak of valued mentors (Angela Davis recounts her relationship with Herbert Marcuse), brushes with death, and the personal pain of social prejudice and ostracism. And throughout the book, there is much humor (Wallace Matson recounts his mother's horrified reaction to his precocious religious scepticism: "If you don't believe in God," she cried, "you can never be elected to public office!") and many surprises (Arthur C. Danto, for instance, admits he entered Columbia's graduate program in philosophy simply to keep getting the GI Bill while he pursued his true ambition, painting: "I had no great interest in philosophy, and certainly no intention of becoming a philosopher"). These sixty-four memoirs--almost all of which were written for this volume--reveal that the road to wisdom has many on-ramps. Yet all would ultimately agree with Henry Kyburg. "I imagine being asked," Kyburg writes, "'How did a healthy, ambitious, accomplished man like you, with all the advantages you have had, end up in such a useless dead end profession?' To which I would smugly reply, 'Just lucky, I guess.'"

This book shows how these same sex Indonesian couples negotiate transgressive identities and desires and how their experiences speak to the struggles... and desires of sexual and gender minorities everywhere.

Falling into Theory is a brief and inexpensive collection of essays that asks literature students to think about the fundamental questions of literary... studies today.

There is September 11 and then there are the days after, and finally the years. Falling Man is a magnificent, essential novel about the event that... defines turn-of-the-century America. It begins in the smoke and ash of the burning towers and tracks the aftermath of this global tremor in the intimate lives of a few people. First there is Keith, walking out of the rubble into a life that he’d always imagined belonged to everyone but him. Then Lianne, his estranged wife, memory-haunted, trying to reconcile two versions of the same shadowy man. And their small son Justin, standing at the window, scanning the sky for more planes. These are lives choreographed by loss, grief, and the enormous force of history. Brave and brilliant, Falling Man traces the way the events of September 11 have reconfigured our emotional landscape, our memory and our perception of the world. It is cathartic, beautiful, heartbreaking.

Bringing together both established and emerging scholars of the long nineteenth century, literary modernism, landscape and hemispheric studies, and... contemporary fiction, New Versions of Pastoral offers a historically wide-ranging account of the Bucolic tradition, tracing the formal diversity of pastoral writing up to the present day. Dividing its analytic focus between periods, the volume contextualizes a wide range of exemplary practitioners, genres, and movements: contributors attend to early modernism's vacillation between critiquing and aestheticizing the rise of primitivist nostalgia; the ambiguous mythologization of the English estate by the twentieth-century manor house novel; and the post-national revisiting of the countryside and its sovereign status in contemporary imaginings of regional life.

Psychodynamic theory and practice are often misunderstood as appropriate only for the worried well or for those whose problems are minimal or routine.... Nothing could be further from the truth. This book shows how psychodynamically informed, clinically based social care is essential to working with individuals whose problems are both psychological and social. Each chapter addresses populations struggling with structural inequities, such as racism, classism, and discrimination based on immigrant status, language differences, disability, and sexual orientation. The authors explain how to provide psychodynamically informed assessment and practice when working with those suffering from mental illness, addiction, homelessness, and cognitive, visual, or auditory impairments, as well as people in prisons, in orphanages, and on child welfare. The volume supports the idea that becoming aware of ourselves helps us understand ourselves: a key approach for helping clients contain and name their feelings, deal with desire and conflict, achieve self-regulation and self-esteem, and alter attachment styles toward greater agency and empowerment. Yet autonomy and empowerment are not birthrights; they are capacities that must be fostered under optimal clinical conditions.This collection uses concepts derived from drive theory, ego psychology, object relations, trauma theory, attachment theory, self psychology, relational theories, and intersubjectivity in clinical work with vulnerable and oppressed populations. Contributors are experienced practitioners whose work with vulnerable populations has enabled them to elicit and find common humanity with their clients. The authors consistently convey respect for the considerable strength and resilience of the populations with whom they work. Emphasizing both the inner and social structural lives of client and clinician and their interacting social identities, this anthology uniquely realizes the complexity of clinical practice with diverse populations.

 One of the New York Times Book Review's 10 Best Books of the Year From her charismatic father, Danielle Trussoni learned how to rock and roll, outrun... the police, and never shy away from a fight. Spending hour upon hour trailing him around the bars and honky-tonks of La Crosse, Wisconsin, young Danielle grew up fascinated by stories of her dad's adventures as a tunnel rat in Vietnam, where he'd risked his life crawling head first into narrow passageways to search for American POWs. A vivid and poignant portrait of a daughter's relationship with her father, this funny, heartbreaking, and beautifully written memoir "makes plain that the horror of war doesn't end in the trenches" (Vanity Fair).

Millie McDeevit screamed a scream
So loud it made her eyebrows steam.
She screamed so loud
Her jawbone broke,
Her tongue caught fire,
Her nostrils... smoked...
Poor Screamin' Millie is just one of the unforgettable characters in this wondrous new book of poems and drawings by the creator of Where the Sidewalk Ends and A Light in the Attic. Here you will also meet Allison Beals and her twenty-five eels; Danny O'Dare, the dancin' bear; the Human Balloon; and Headphone Harold. So come, wander through the Nose Garden, ride the Little Hoarse, eat in the Strange Restaurant, and let the magic of Shel Silverstein open your eyes and tickle your mind.

In Falling Upward, Fr. Richard Rohr seeks to help readers understand the tasks of the two halves of life and to show them that those who have fallen,... failed, or "gone down" are the only ones who understand "up." Most of us tend to think of the second half of life as largely about getting old, dealing with health issues, and letting go of life, but the whole thesis of this book is exactly the opposite. What looks like falling down can largely be experienced as "falling upward." In fact, it is not a loss but somehow actually a gain, as we have all seen with elders who have come to their fullness. Explains why the second half of life can and should be full of spiritual richness Offers a new view of how spiritual growth happens?loss is gain Richard. Rohr is a regular contributing writer for Sojourners and Tikkun magazines This important book explores the counterintuitive message that we grow spiritually much more by doing wrong than by doing right--a fresh way of thinking about spirituality that grows throughout life.

Fall is a tough time of year for a lot of us. Kids have to go back to school, teachers and football players have to go back to work, and parents have to... look for new places to hide holiday presents. But perhaps fall is hardest of all on trees. After all, they have to change their entire appearance every year! This book is the rhyming story of a tree's humorous struggles to change its colours for fall. And it's a perfect introduction to the seasons for young children.

December 1, 1955. Floodgates are poised to slam shut on a concrete dam straddling the Oogasula River, creating a lake that will submerge a forgotten... crossroads and thousands of acres of woodland in rural Georgia. Fall Line unfolds in one day's action, as viewed through the eyes of Elmer Blizzard, a troubled ex-deputy; Mrs. McNulty, a lonely widow who refuses to leave her doomed shack by the river; her loyal, aging dos, Percy; and a rapacious politician, State Senator Aubrey Terrell, for whom the new lake is named.A story of land grabs, wounded families, bitterness, hypocrisy, violence, and revenge in the changing South, Fall Line is populated by complex characters who want to do the right thing but don't know how. Starnes's novel is a memorable, beautiful, and heartbreaking tale of a backwater hamlet's damaged people and transformed landscape.