"Just remember Beth, you're doing the right thing," Oprah said to me after my sit down interview with her in Chicago. I was star struck that this powerful giant of a woman granted me an interview. Afterwards, she looked squarely at me and asked, "How about you, Beth? What's going on with you?" "Oh my gosh, did she pick up on something?" I asked myself. Again I was going through another personal crisis. But I know how to hide everything. Don't we all? After many years of hiding behind my illusions of trying to be perfect, I found out that there is no such thing: body, career, family, home...it's all a fa�ade

HONORED AS A NOTABLE 100 BOOK IN THE 2021 SHELF UNBOUND BEST INDIE BOOK COMPETITION Mort Crim has reported on major conflicts around the world for more than four decades and was a major inspiration for Will Ferrell's performance in the movie Anchorman. Crim's memoir takes readers behind the camera to show what life was like when the local anchorman was as revered as the professional athlete, and just as overpaid. It was a glamorous life, working alongside some of journalism's legends, like Walter Cronkite, David Brinkley, Dan Rather, and Ted Koppel. The son of an evangelical minister in a conservative church, Crim suffered his first crisis of faith at the age of 15. Despite nagging questions, Crim eventually followed his father's path into ministry. But the more he delved into the Bible, the more his faith was shaken. Unable to defend things he wasn't sure of from the pulpit, Crim left the ministry for a career in journalism, determined to pursue truth. After a four-year stint in the Air Force, he earned his master's degree in journalism from Northwestern University, and by the age of 30, had made it to New York—the epicenter of his profession. As a national correspondent for ABC, Crim anchored the network's top-rated morning radio show and covered America's newly-developing manned space program. When Neil Armstrong took that first step on the moon, it was Crim's voice that described the historic event for millions around the world. At the urging of Walter Cronkite, Crim moved from network radio into the heady world of television news. At KYW in Philadelphia, Mort Crim was paired with the late Jessica Savitch, and their anchor team spawned the idea for Will Ferrell's Anchorman movies. Crim's journey for truth will resonate with anyone raised in a cocoon of certainty that they felt compelled to question.

“The uncanny beauty of Van Booy’s prose, and his ability to knife straight to the depths of a character’s heart, fill a reader with wonder.” — San Francisco Chronicle Award-winning author Simon Van Booy tells a harrowing and enchanting story of how one man’s act of mercy during World War II changed the lives of strangers, and how they each discover the astonishing truth of their connection. The characters in Van Booy's The Illusion of Separateness discover at their darkest moments of fear and isolation that they are not alone, that they were never alone, that every human being is a link in a chain we cannot see. This gripping novel—inspired by true events—tells the interwoven stories of a deformed German infantryman; a lonely British film director; a young, blind museum curator; two Jewish American newlyweds separated by war; and a caretaker at a retirement home for actors in Santa Monica. They move through the same world but fail to perceive their connections until, through seemingly random acts of selflessness, a veil is lifted to reveal the vital parts they have played in one another's lives, and the illusion of their separateness.

"Parker hasn't spoken since he watched his father die five years ago. He communicates through writing on slips of paper and keeps track of his thoughts by journaling. A loner, Parker has little interest in school, his classmates, or his future. But everything changes when he meets Zelda, a mysterious young woman with an unusual request: 'treat me like a teenager'"--

Opponents rarely go to war without thinking they can win--and clearly, one side must be wrong. This conundrum lies at the heart of the so-called "war puzzle": rational states should agree on their differences in power and thus not fight. But as Dominic Johnson argues in Overconfidence and War, states are no more rational than people, who are susceptible to exaggerated ideas of their own virtue, of their ability to control events, and of the future. By looking at this bias--called "positive illusions"--as it figures in evolutionary biology, psychology, and the politics of international conflict, this book offers compelling insights into why states wage war. Johnson traces the effects of positive illusions on four turning points in twentieth-century history: two that erupted into war (World War I and Vietnam); and two that did not (the Munich crisis and the Cuban missile crisis). Examining the two wars, he shows how positive illusions have filtered into politics, causing leaders to overestimate themselves and underestimate their adversaries--and to resort to violence to settle a conflict against unreasonable odds. In the Munich and Cuban missile crises, he shows how lessening positive illusions may allow leaders to pursue peaceful solutions. The human tendency toward overconfidence may have been favored by natural selection throughout our evolutionary history because of the advantages it conferred--heightening combat performance or improving one's ability to bluff an opponent. And yet, as this book suggests--and as the recent conflict in Iraq bears out--in the modern world the consequences of this evolutionary legacy are potentially deadly.

The Grand Illusion synthesizes the best consciousness research with decades of cutting-edge discovery and hard science, empowering you with an intelligent new paradigm and new direction for humanity. This acclaimed book destroys the materialist notion of humans as "meat computers" and lays the foundation for a scientifically-based metaphysics.

Enter the world of Jillian Barrister and those who orbit around her-Clay, David, Norma and Dr. Allison-players in a riveting drama of love and loss, happiness and anguish, innocence and guilt. It is Dr. Allison's task to study and understand his patients through the process of analysis, and Jillian is no exception-or is she? The more deeply he probes, the closer he comes to unearthing the childhood tragedy that has isolated her from herself and others, and could topple the precarious defenses of her internal world-a fragile but guarded state of consciousness in which the past is always just beneath the surface.

What will the next generation of Russian leaders be like? No Illusions provides an engaging, intimate, and unprecedented window into the mindsets of the next generation of leaders in Russian politics, business, and economics.

A landmark book in the debate over free will that makes the case for compatibilism. In this landmark 1984 work on free will, Daniel Dennett makes a case for compatibilism. His aim, as he writes in the preface to this new edition, was a cleanup job, “saving everything that mattered about the everyday concept of free will, while jettisoning the impediments.” In Elbow Room, Dennett argues that the varieties of free will worth wanting—those that underwrite moral and artistic responsibility—are not threatened by advances in science but distinguished, explained, and justified in detail. Dennett tackles the question of free will in a highly original and witty manner, drawing on the theories and concepts of fields that range from physics and evolutionary biology to engineering, automata theory, and artificial intelligence. He shows how the classical formulations of the problem in philosophy depend on misuses of imagination, and he disentangles the philosophical problems of real interest from the “family of anxieties” in which they are often enmeshed—imaginary agents and bogeymen, including the Peremptory Puppeteer, the Nefarious Neurosurgeon, and the Cosmic Child Whose Dolls We Are. Putting sociobiology in its rightful place, he concludes that we can have free will and science too. He explores reason, control and self-control, the meaning of “can” and “could have done otherwise,” responsibility and punishment, and why we would want free will in the first place. A fresh reading of Dennett's book shows how much it can still contribute to current discussions of free will. This edition includes as its afterword Dennett's 2012 Erasmus Prize essay.