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The most comprehensive guide to the botany, history, distribution, and cultivation of all known psychoactive plants

• Examines 414 psychoactive plants and related substances

• Explores how using psychoactive plants in a culturally sanctioned context can produce important insights into the nature of reality

• Contains 797 color photographs and 645 black-and-white illustrations

In the traditions of every culture, plants have been highly valued for their nourishing, healing, and transformative properties. The most powerful plants--those known to transport the human mind into other dimensions of consciousness--have traditionally been regarded as sacred. In The Encyclopedia of Psychoactive Plants Christian Rätsch details the botany, history, distribution, cultivation, and preparation and dosage of more than 400 psychoactive plants. He discusses their ritual and medicinal usage, cultural artifacts made from these plants, and works of art that either represent or have been inspired by them. The author begins with 168 of the most well-known psychoactives--such as cannabis, datura, and papaver--then presents 133 lesser known substances as well as additional plants known as “legal highs,” plants known only from mythological contexts and literature, and plant products that include substances such as ayahuasca, incense, and soma. The text is lavishly illustrated with 797 color photographs--many of which are from the author’s extensive fieldwork around the world--showing the people, ceremonies, and art related to the ritual use of the world’s sacred psychoactives..
Price: $78.75 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Chernobyl and Katrina Challenger and Columbia. BP and Vioxx. The Iraq War. Were these unavoidable misfortunes that no one could possibly have imagined? Hardly. All of them were disasters that could have been prevented, or whose damaging repercussions could have been mitigated

Despite warnings of impending disaster, preemptive action is rarely taken by those who have the ability to do so. How do smart, high-powered people, leaders of global corporations, national institutions, even nations, often get it so wrong? While most investigations focus on the technical causes of disaster, Flirting With Disaster examines the psychological, social, and cultural impediments to whistle-blowing, showing what we can do to reduce the possibility of disasters happening at all.

Analyzing such phenomena as bystander behavior and the butterfly effect, amid a series of instructive case studies--not only the aforementioned shuttle crashes, natural disasters, and industrial accidents, but also Arthur Andersen's shady accounting at Enron; the 1994 Mexican peso crisis that nearly caused an international monetary meltdown; and the American sub-prime lending crisis that emerged in August 2007, revealing the country's unhealthy dependence on consumer credit--Marc Gerstein, an organizational psychologist, urges a re-evaluation of the timidity, distorted thinking, errors of judgment and self-serving conduct that result in disasters from the boardroom to the halls of academe to the Oval Office. Daniel Ellsberg, renowned and respected for releasing the Pentagon Papers, offers a foreword and a powerful afterword addressing what happens "When Leaders are the Problem."

Flirting With Disaster is a must-read for those who want to foster truth-telling in their organizations, and head off-disasters in the making. At once alarming, entertaining and hopeful, this is a book that offers very real and practical lessons for everyday life..
Price: $12.47 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Shows in simple terms what it takes to be a successful husband and father and to bless those closest to you--your wife and children .
Price: $4.14 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Talent has little to do with who becomes successful in the business of acting. What can impact your chances for success more than anything else is learning how to be a smart, empowered actor.

The Business of Acting: Learn the Skills You Need to Build the Career You Want will teach you the four critical, pro-active skills every actor needs to know and to implement them to begin or to jump-start your career journey.

In The Business of Acting, you will learn how to generate professional opportunities; how to survive and thrive through the transition from student to professional performing artist; how to choose the right representation; how to partner with casting directors; how to have a head shot that really works for you; how the unions work for and against actors; how to conquer emotional, physical and fiscal fitness; how the laws of perception and behavior can impact a career; how to use publicity, marketing and PR in support of your career; how to create a personal business plan; and how to set realistic, achievable goals.

With a foreword by Emmy Award-winning actress Isabel Sanford, star of the long-running series "The Jeffersons," The Business of Acting has been called a "must-read" by Back Stage West..
Price: $10.50 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Definitive study of how to deal with relationships, lead a balanced life, and explore spiritual issues.
Price: $12.95 [Notify me when price goes down.]

The writing life has long captured our collective imagination. What is it about writers, we wonder, that empowers them to work words into shapes and patterns that move us? The most affecting photographs possess that same power -- to reach out upon first sight, to capture our hearts and minds, to leave us smitten.

Such is the feeling that comes from gazing at the work of Marion Ettlinger, a photographer celebrated for her "literary portrait power" (The Wall Street Journal). Author Photo collects, for the first time in book form, more than two hundred of Ettlinger's most famous photographs. Immortalized in these pages are many of America's greatest writers, including Raymond Carver, Francine Prose, Walter Mosley, Mary Karr, John Irving, Joyce Carol Oates, Truman Capote, Cormac McCarthy, Patricia Highsmith, Ken Kesey, Edwidge Danticat, and Jeffrey Eugenides.

According to one of Ettlinger's Pulitzer Prize-winning subjects, "starkness and a sense of shadows" are at the core of her artistic allure. Shot exclusively in natural light and in black-and-white film, each of these images is an intimate artwork, putting the reader closer than ever before to the writers they revere and admire. A photographic paean to the literary spirit, Author Photo opens a rare and revealing window onto the timelessness of creativity.

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Price: $21.35 [Notify me when price goes down.]