Behaviour is important. Whether this be the behaviour of those who saw it coming, or of those who constantly berated them. The behaviour of those who rode the boom and switched at the tipping point to ride the bust, or the behaviour of those who held on to their principled as the system collapsed around them. It was human behaviour after all, that led us to construct a bubble nobody suspected was dangerous, yet nonetheless would burst with disastrous consequences. Contrary to the views of many before the crash the cycle is inevitable - you cannot eliminate boom and bust. In a boom the bullish are promoted whilst the cautious are overlooked, reinforcing the cycle. This factor is generally ignored by the beautiful but flawed models of economic analysts. Since we cannot abolish the cycle, we must ensure that busts are not so dangerous in the future. The policy solutions are there if we're brave enough, from changing incentives, and creating fiscal and financial regulators with clout and discretion, through to changing corporate governance and shifting the power of executives.

This is a book about how we behave. Not how we think we behave, or how wed like to behave, but how we really do. Its a story of how a collective failure of perception helped cause one of the biggest crises in the history of capitalism; of the extraordinary extremes we witnessed from the so-called Masters of the Universe - their greed, recklessness, and irrationality; and of how the crisis will happen again unless we understand that economic conditions may change but human nature does not. Released to widespread acclaim in the UK in 2011 and now updated for the USA, Masters of Nothing is an important contribution to the ongoing debate about how we fix the relationship between big finance and the real economy.

The foolproof guide to damage control from the "masters of disaster" Whether you're a politician caught with his pants down, a publicly traded company accused of accounting improprieties, a family-owned restaurant with a lousy Yelp review or just the guy in the corner cubicle who inadvertently pushed "reply all," a crisis doesn't have to be the make-or-break moment of your career. For those of us that aren't natural spin doctors, it's hard to resist the impulse to cover your tracks, lie, or act like nothing happened. But resist you must! In Masters of Disaster, Christopher Lehane and Mark Fabiani, reveal the magic formula you need to take control when it's your turn to be sucked into the vortex of the modern spin cycle. Covering the ten commandments of damage control, and based on their work for clients like Bill Clinton, Goldman Sachs and Hollywood studios, the authors outline the strategies that can make real time news alerts, Twitter trend lines and viral videos work for you rather against you. Full of both lively personal anecdotes and hard-knuckled straight talk, this is a must-read for anyone who wants to emerge with their reputation intact.

Here is a provocative collection of essays by Philip Morrison, widely known for his work on the Manhattan project, and later for his involvement in quantum and nuclear physics and high energy astrophysics. Morrison offers a stimulating look at diverse subjects ranging from cosmology (particularly interstellar communication) to nuclear disarmament to creative ways of teaching science. He also offers his own perspective on his inspiring friendships with Niels Bohr, Richard Feynman, Bernard Peters, and other physics giants.

This frank account by a longtime Zen student looks back over a journey that began in Berkeley in the heady sixties when the author experimented with psychedelics and started to study with Suzuki Roshi, who encouraged his students to find a genuine way of practicing Zen.

Surrender to sinful pleasures and forbidden passions with Masters of Seduction, the sizzling new paranormal romance novella series from "New York Times" and internationally bestselling authors Lara Adrian, Donna Grant, Laura Wright and Alexandra Ivy. "In the realm of the Incubi Masters, pleasure is to die for and love is the deadliest game of all . . ." Merciless: House of Gravori by Lara Adrian Seeking vengeance for the murder of his brother, Incubus Master Devlin Gravori demands justice from the high court of the Nephilim. But fury and retribution are no match for the consuming desire he feels for Nahiri, the beautiful Nephilim warrior he claims as his hostage. Soulless: House of Romerac by Donna Grant Incubus Master Canaan Romerac is focused solely on revenge against those who betrayed him and put him in the Oubliette for five hundred years. That is until he sets eyes on Rayna. Can the beautiful Nephilim heal Canaan's wounded soul before it's too late? Shameless: House of Vipera by Laura Wright Sexy Incubus Master Scarus Vipera has grown weak, and the only thing that will strengthen him again is Rosamund, the power-rich female of the Harem. But the mysterious Nephilim is determined to leave the Harem untouched, her heart intact. Ruthless: House of Xanthe by Alexandra Ivy Jian, Master of the House Xanthe, has devoted his life to returning his family to their former prominence. When he's offered a contract to hunt down the missing Sovereign, he's eager to accept. The last thing he expects is to encounter a stunningly beautiful angel who stirs more than his lust.

Masters of Doom is the amazing true story of the Lennon and McCartney of video games: John Carmack and John Romero. Together, they ruled big business. They transformed popular culture. And they provoked a national controversy. More than anything, they lived a unique and rollicking American Dream, escaping the broken homes of their youth to co-create the most notoriously successful game franchises in history—Doom and Quake—until the games they made tore them apart. Americans spend more money on video games than on movie tickets. Masters of Doom is the first book to chronicle this industry’s greatest story, written by one of the medium’s leading observers. David Kushner takes readers inside the rags-to-riches adventure of two rebellious entrepreneurs who came of age to shape a generation. The vivid portrait reveals why their games are so violent and why their immersion in their brilliantly designed fantasy worlds offered them solace. And it shows how they channeled their fury and imagination into products that are a formative influence on our culture, from MTV to the Internet to Columbine. This is a story of friendship and betrayal, commerce and artistry—a powerful and compassionate account of what it’s like to be young, driven, and wildly creative. “To my taste, the greatest American myth of cosmogenesis features the maladjusted, antisocial, genius teenage boy who, in the insular laboratory of his own bedroom, invents the universe from scratch. Masters of Doom is a particularly inspired rendition. Dave Kushner chronicles the saga of video game virtuosi Carmack and Romero with terrific brio. This is a page-turning, mythopoeic cyber-soap opera about two glamorous geek geniuses—and it should be read while scarfing down pepperoni pizza and swilling Diet Coke, with Queens of the Stone Age cranked up all the way.”—Mark Leyner, author of I Smell Esther Williams

This is the definitive and complete book about a phenomenon which did not exist a hundred years ago, but is now growing rapidly and dramatically changing Western culture -- the rise of Western (mostly American) teachers, who fill the role of guru or master. A few books have appeared on some narrow aspects of this astounding phenomenon; this is the first book to survey the entire field. Encyclopedic in its scope, The Book of Enlightened Masters includes biographical essays on 140 spiritual teachers, giving their life stories and an account of their teachings. Yet it is also a user-friendly introduction, with a survey of the teachers and their teachings, a historical narrative of how and when the movement developed, and an evaluation of the issues raised by it. A century ago, there were no Western masters-no Westerners who were, for instance, Hindu swamis, Zen roshis, or Sufi sheikhs. Now there are many such teachers, with millions of followers. Starting from scratch, the West has produced its own spiritual teachers in traditions that until recently were utterly alien. And in the last quarter-century, a number of independent teachers have appeared, who belong to no single identifiable tradition. The Western masters have not merely transplanted the Eastern spiritual traditions to the West, they have transformed these traditions by their distinctively Western approach: innovative, entrepreneurial, and combining elements from previously unconnected Eastern traditions. The new teachers are changing Western culture by making available a view of the human condition which is new in the West but very attractive to large and growing numbers of Westerners, an approach Dr. Rawlinson calls"spiritual psychology". Spiritual psychology holds that human beings are best understood in terms of consciousness and its modifications, that consciousness can be changed by spiritual practice, and that there are enlightened masters who have done this and can teach others.

Starting with the premise that the history of a medieval subject cannot be properly written "without recourse to the materials it produced," Lesley Smith's Masters of the Sacred Page provides an illuminating study of theology in the Middle Ages. She focuses on the dramatic transformations of the discipline in the twelfth century and uses a collection of contemporary manuscripts as a guide to its changes and developments. Smith points out that the medieval masters of theology had a much wider view of their subject than the modern academic tendency for neatness and division can easily admit, and she places their discipline squarely within the rapidly evolving intellectual and educational context of the twelfth-century university. Her approach avoids two of the most common weaknesses of modern historical studies of medieval theology. In the first place, those histories have a tendency to be distorted by a reliance on easily available printed editions of medieval texts, the bulk of which are summae and other logical, systematic treatments. This preponderance, however, often reflects the concerns and interests of nineteenth- and twentieth-century editors more than it does the medieval masters. Biblical commentaries, sermons, and manuals for pastoral use have only recently begun to be edited and printed in numbers reflecting their importance and widespread use in the Middle Ages; Smith includes such material in her study. In the second place, traditional histories have a tendency to remove the study of theology from the actual environment of the medieval university and therefore fail to account for the complex relations between theology, the arts, and the burgeoning disciplines of medicine and law. By refusing to follow this trend, Smith has greatly improved our awareness of the situation of medieval theology. Using the manuscript books themselves as witnesses, Smith shows how theology competed with other disciplines for students (as well as teachers), how it attempted to define itself, and how it cooperated with other disciplines to foster new development in book technology--and new traditions in the social and intellectual culture of the medieval university.

Eliot Lamb has dreaded this moment for the past three years of his life: the final night of university. Gathered with his mates in the King's Arms, he begins the ultimate descent - Pub, Bar, Club. Staring into the foam of his first pint, he knows that before the night reaches its climactic conclusion on the sweaty dance-floor of Filth, he must solve the dilemma of his knotty love-life, risk his closest friendship, face up to a tragic secret, and deal with the fact that he hasn't a clue what to do with the rest of his life. And with the entire literary canon running wild in his imagination and a series of ominous text messages lighting up his mobile phone, things aren't going to be easy. Noughties is an inventive and lyrical comic novel about the highs and lows of modern university life. Eliot may know a lot about Renaissance poetry, the post-modern novel, French literary theory, and how to get hammered at a highly competitive rate, but he is fast realising that adulthood beckons, and it's going to be asking a lot more of him than that.