This novel is along the lines of a whodunit, except the community recognizes an odor that, over the year, happens to drift in, and during the same time, livestock is apparently missing. The law enforcement, with reports taken, are at a loss of what it could be. Now doing a routine patrol some years later, a van that is running is found. The investigation begins. The employee is mysteriously missing from the community of Bremerton after a service check out for fiber-optic issues. Five years before, they opened up a rain forest theme park for the summer campers. While on the other side of the continent, a celebration is taking place as for the first time, the elder has lifted a lifetime ban to travel abroad.

The bestselling author of Collapse and Guns, Germs and Steel surveys the history of human societies to answer the question: What can we learn from traditional societies that can make the world a better place for all of us? “As he did in his Pulitzer Prize-winning Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond continues to make us think with his mesmerizing and absorbing new book." Bookpage Most of us take for granted the features of our modern society, from air travel and telecommunications to literacy and obesity. Yet for nearly all of its six million years of existence, human society had none of these things. While the gulf that divides us from our primitive ancestors may seem unbridgeably wide, we can glimpse much of our former lifestyle in those largely traditional societies still or recently in existence. Societies like those of the New Guinea Highlanders remind us that it was only yesterday—in evolutionary time—when everything changed and that we moderns still possess bodies and social practices often better adapted to traditional than to modern conditions.The World Until Yesterday provides a mesmerizing firsthand picture of the human past as it had been for millions of years—a past that has mostly vanished—and considers what the differences between that past and our present mean for our lives today. This is Jared Diamond’s most personal book to date, as he draws extensively from his decades of field work in the Pacific islands, as well as evidence from Inuit, Amazonian Indians, Kalahari San people, and others. Diamond doesn’t romanticize traditional societies—after all, we are shocked by some of their practices—but he finds that their solutions to universal human problems such as child rearing, elder care, dispute resolution, risk, and physical fitness have much to teach us. Provocative, enlightening, and entertaining, The World Until Yesterday is an essential and fascinating read.

Austrian writer Stefan Zweig's final work, posted to his publisher the day before his tragic death, brings the destruction of a war-torn Europe vividly to life. Written as both a recollection of the past and a warning for future generations, The World of Yesterday recalls the golden age of literary Vienna; its seeming permanence, its promise, and its devastating fall. A truthful and passionate acc[Bokinfo].

From the author of No.1 international bestseller Collapse, a mesmerizing portrait of the human past that offers profound lessons for how we can live today Visionary, prize-winning author Jared Diamond changed the way we think about the rise and fall of human civilizations with his previous international bestsellers Guns, Germs and Steel and Collapse. Now he returns with another epic - and groundbreaking - journey into our rapidly receding past. In The World Until Yesterday, Diamond reveals how traditional societies around the world offer an extraordinary window onto how our ancestors lived for the majority of human history - until virtually yesterday, in evolutionary terms - and provide unique, often overlooked insights into human nature. Drawing extensively on his decades working in the jungles of Papua New Guinea, Diamond explores how tribal societies approach essential human problems, from childrearing to conflict resolution to health, and discovers we have much to learn from traditional ways of life. He unearths remarkable findings - from the reason why modern afflictions like diabetes, obesity and Alzheimer's are virtually non-existent in tribal societies to the surprising benefits of multilingualism. Panoramic in scope and thrillingly original, The World Until Yesterday provides an enthralling first-hand picture of the human past that also suggests profound lessons for how to live well today. Jared Diamond is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of the seminal million-copy-bestseller Guns, Germs, and Steel, which was named one of TIME's best non-fiction books of all time, and Collapse, a #1 international bestseller. A professor of geography at UCLA and noted polymath, Diamond's work has been influential in the fields of anthropology, biology, ornithology, ecology and history, among others.

Fifty years ago, Stefan Zweig, who committed suicide in 1942, was the most widely read and translated living writer in the world. Zweig's Vienna was a world of bright, brittle superficialities, in which the bourgeoisie "gradually elevated the eternal business of seeing and being seen to the purpose of the existence." To break through the facades of this society, Zweig developed a remarkable literary and psychological method. In The World of Yesterday's Humanist Today, thirty scholars of history, literature, and music share their studies of Zweig and their insight into his works.

This book is a compilation of seventy weekly sermons that follow the Lutheran Church Calendar Year. Written by Reverend Eldore F. Messerschmidt over fifty to sixty years ago, the things he discussed in his sermons back then still pertain to what is happening in our world today. Thus the name Yesterday's Sermons for Today's World. This is a great book for the shut-ins who no longer can attend weekly worship services or for the average person who needs a weekly inspirational pick-me-up.

France (1837) was the third volume published in Cooper's Gleanings in Europe series, but first in the chronology of his European experience. Less sequential than his other travel narratives, France distills his impressions of French and European culture during his first two years abroad. Exhibiting many qualities of the familiar essay, it considers a wide range of topics of interest to Cooper, his friends, and potential readers in the United States. As a celebrity thoroughly at home in the brilliant society of Bourbon Paris, Cooper was able to provide fascinating glimpses of personalities, spectacles, institutions, and manners--from his distinctly American perspective. Indeed, as Professor Philbrick remarks, "No other of Cooper's works, perhaps, brings us closer to his speaking voice or puts us more directly in contact with the man himself, with all his idiosyncratic preoccupations, his quick resentments, his restless curiosity, his surprising humor, and his nobility of principle." The reader of this edition is brought even closer to Cooper in the draft of a hitherto unpublished letter, probably intended for this book, which illustrates Cooper's grasp of the still finer points of French customs and attitudes.

Over recent years seismic changes have taken place in the structure and direction of the media and entertainment industries. Since the launch of the first commercial web browser, to the advent of broadband, digital downloads and online virtual worlds, patterns of consumer behavior have adapted and evolved enormously, embracing new opportunities and having an indelible impact upon the commercial nature of media. Mike Walsh has been at the heart of this consumer revolution from its beginning and has been helping some of the world's leading companies and brands embrace new ideas for the past decade. The 23 insights in Futuretainment reveal how the rise of the Internet, mobile devices, social networking, audience networks, user generated content, ubiquitous networks and the ‘adaptive web’, amongst other advances, has affected the worlds of media and entertainment forever. Futuretainment is a dynamic visual handbook offering an accessible approach to this complex and evolving subject. It is a must-read for any individual or business that wants to understand how to maximize their position in this new era.

From language to culture to cultural collision: the story of how humans invented history, from the Stone Age to the Virtual Age Traveling across millennia, weaving the experiences and world views of cultures both extinct and extant, The Invention of Yesterday shows that the engine of history is not so much heroic (battles won), geographic (farmers thrive), or anthropogenic (humans change the planet) as it is narrative. Many thousands of years ago, when we existed only as countless small autonomous bands of hunter-gatherers widely distributed through the wilderness, we began inventing stories--to organize for survival, to find purpose and meaning, to explain the unfathomable. Ultimately these became the basis for empires, civilizations, and cultures. And when various narratives began to collide and overlap, the encounters produced everything from confusion, chaos, and war to cultural efflorescence, religious awakenings, and intellectual breakthroughs. Through vivid stories studded with insights, Tamim Ansary illuminates the world-historical consequences of the unique human capacity to invent and communicate abstract ideas. In doing so, he also explains our ever-more-intertwined present: the narratives now shaping us, the reasons we still battle one another, and the future we may yet create.