Books about Michaels from Amazon.com

A national bestseller that has changed the way readers view the ecology of eating, this revolutionary book by award winner Michael Pollan asks the seemingly simple question: What should we have for dinner? Tracing from source to table each of the food chains that sustain us— whether industrial or organic, alternative or processed—he develops a portrait of the American way of eating. The result is a sweeping, surprising exploration of the hungers that have shaped our evolution, and of the profound implications our food choices have for the health of our species and the future of our planet..
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The body is the most fascinating machine ever created, and nobody talks about it in ways that are as illuminating and compelling as Dr. Michael Roizen and Dr. Mehmet Oz. Most people think of the aging of our bodies the same way we think of the aging of our cars: the older we get, the more inevitable it is that we're going to break down. Most of us believe that at age 40 or so, we begin the slow and steady decline of our minds, our eyes, our ears, our joints, our arteries, our libido, and every other system that affects the quality of life (and how long we live it). But according to Dr. Roizen and Dr. Oz, that's a mistake.

Aging isn't a decline in our systems. It's actually very purposeful. The very systems and biological processes that age us are designed to help us when we're a little bit younger. So what's our role as part of the aging population? To learn how those systems work so we can reprogram them to work the way they did when we were younger. Your goal should be: die young at any age. That means you live a high quality of life (with everything from working joints to working genitals) until the day you die.

At the core of this landmark book are the Major Agers--14 biological processes that control your rate of aging. Some you've heard of, some you haven't, and some you never knew contributed to the aging process. Some speed decline, others inhibit your repair mechanisms. These Major Agers are everything from short telomeres and inefficient mitochondria to stem cells and wacky hormones. The doctors explain the principles of longevity and many of the causes of aging and how to fight the effects. The climax of the book is a 14-day plan to help you along your path to staying young. The doctors want you to be able to integrate important processes into your daily life in order to make staying young routine, but first you'll need to measure your real age and health right now. Staying young encompasses your emotions and mental health as well as your exercise habits, eating habits, personal hygiene, and genes, among other things.

Wouldn't you like to know how to prevent your body from aging badly? The original YOU book showed how bodies work in general, and YOU: On a Diet explained how bodies lose weight and stay fit. Now in YOU: Staying Young, Drs. Michael Roizen and Mehmet Oz illuminate the mysterious mechanisms with a lively metaphor -- the modern city. What differentiates a vibrant and thriving city that ages gracefully from one that is worn down and rusted out? Despite genetic differences, which are like the geography upon which the city is built, cities age differently because of the way residents treat their education system (stem cells), power plants (mitochondria), electrical grids (brains), transportation routes (blood vessels), and landfills (fat). You -- as mayor, resident, and street cleaner -- have the power to balance your biological budget to ensure a life that's both long and strong. Thankfully, just as cities can invest in renewal and improving their repair processes, so can you.

YOU: Staying Young is filled with signature YOU Tools, including YOU Tests, YOU Tips, and visual and verbal metaphors to bring the science to life.

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A Letter from Michael Roizen and Mehmet Oz

Dear Amazon Shoppers:

Our books, YOU: The Owner's Manual and YOU: On a Diet, have become #1 Amazon and New York Times bestsellers, and we thank you. Many people have asked us questions about aging. We want you to know that the science in the last very few years has challenged the very perceptions of aging.

Most of us tend to have the same view of the way people age: As we grow older, we start losing things. We lose some hair, lose our minds, lose our balance, lose our eyesight, lose a little of this and a lot of that until we eventually wither away into a hunched-over senior who takes 3-inch steps and eats dinner at 4:00 pm. But to think that a life of frailty is an inevitable outcome of aging is a mistake. And the fact that we don't take control of it is because we have excuses. We live in a society where making excuses is as easy as making a sandwich. Nowhere is that more apparent than when it comes to your own health. The reason why we are frazzled with stress? Blame the boss. The reason why we are sick? Blame the sniffling kids. The reason why our society's waistbands are stretching and snapping at alarming rates? Blame Auntie's alfredo sauce. The top health excuse, however, revolves around the biggest four-letter word of them all, the GENE. We blame our genes for just about everything--for baldness, for fatness, for illness and for every other health-related problem we can think of. In our minds, that means that our mom, pop, and the rest of the family tree are all on the hook for the ultimate health question of them all--how long and how well we will live?

But that is exactly where more of us have it wrong. While we are certainly born with genes that help determine everything from our height to our risk of heart disease, we are making a monumental mistake by assuming that we can't control our genes--especially when it comes to aging.

Perhaps the best way to explain the dynamics of aging is to take a look at another complex system that is subjected to the same forces as your body: a city. Some cities remain beautiful and elegant in their old age, while younger ones may look worn down and beat-up. Now, every city has its own genetic code, just as you do. For a city, genes are geography; whether it's built on a river or whether it's located in a hot or cold climate, or whether it lies directly in a prevalent hurricane path. A city's geography can't change. But the city can adapt to the environment with earthquake-proof construction, with underground tunnels for walking in wintertime, or with strong levies. The adaptation the city makes to survive and to thrive is what is crucial to its vitality.

The same goes for you.

Just because you have been dealt a genetic hand that predisposes you to heart disease or diabetes or the wearing of pants as large as a parachute doesn't mean you can't mitigate the effects of those genes. One of the major things we will teach you is that while you can't change your genes, you can change whether they are turned on or off or how you express them. Just like a city, you can compensate elegantly if you understand your options.

For the first time in history, the medical world has uncovered many of the miraculous biologic processes that control how and why we age. Truth is, much of aging is actually in our control; with the power to nudge our biologic systems so that our unwanted genes can work in our favor--as long as you know what to do and how you are doing it. In YOU: Staying Young, we translate the latest science (much of which wasn't available even three years ago) to help slow your rate of aging. You will learn 14 Major Agers, and dozens of action steps so that you can take control of those agers and your aging processes.

We hope you enjoy the cartoons, analogies, and jokes. But ultimately we hope you soak in the message: Your health is largely in your control. We dedicate the book to all who desire longer life so they can serve more.

Thanks very much,

Mike and Mehmet

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A Look Inside You: Staying Young

Take a look inside You: Staying Young with these three excerpted charts, full of crucial, easy-to-digest information that you can start using today:

• Fuel Your Fighters: One of the best ways to pump up your immune system is by eating the foods and getting the nutrients that have been shown to improve your natural defenses.
• Your Vital Supplements: The doctors' recommendations of pills and supplements that will make your body and mind stronger, healthier, and younger. It's best to get them from your diet, so consider these an insurance policy for an imperfect diet.
• Move Your Body: Most of your body parts become stronger when you use them. Take a glimpse at what you can and should do to make sure you're doing enough to prime your pumps.

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Questions for the Doctors

Q: What is the single most important thing someone can do to combat aging?

A: To understand that you get to control your rate of aging if you want to. It isn't that hard and doesn't take that long. In fact, even if you have had burgers for breakfast or fried your brain cells with stress by noon, you're not necessarily destined to wear husky pants, forget birthdays, and spiral into a state of complete upheaval. That's right: You get a do-over in life if you want it. Repeat after us: not hard, not long.

Q: Is there one food, vitamin, mineral, exercise, or lifestyle change that does more to combat aging than any other?

A: Our top choices in terms of ease and impact:

• Walk 30 minutes a day and call someone after you do it. No excuses, walk every day. If you do it, you'll have the courage, health, and attitude to adopt other changes too.
• Take 2 grams of omega-3 fats every day in form of either walnuts, fish oil, or DHA supplements.

Q: What is one of the most surprising contributors to aging that we can easily remove from our lifestyles?

A: Inflammation of our teeth. Remove it with daily flossing and brushing and seeing a dental professional regularly. You won't just save your teeth; you'll also go a long way in saving your heart and arteries. Another? Our lack of turmeric--curry and mustard (mustard on stadium hot dogs does not qualify). Both of those ingredients make your memory better.

Q: What are some of the immediate benefits you will notice from following the tips in the book?

A: You will feel younger. You might get hit upon by strangers or be mistaken for someone 20 years younger. In addition to the waist size you'll lose, your new attitude and vitality for life may give your reading choice away.

Q: How early should most people start to focus on slowing the aging process?

A: The aging process starts in your teens or even before, but any time you start is better than later. (Repeat: not hard, not long.) Your cells basically have a memory of three years. So by changing your habits now, within three years, it's as if you have done your healthy habit all your life.

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Getting to Know YOU

YOU: Staying Young [Audio CD]

YOU: Staying Young Workout DVD

YOU: On a Diet

YOU: The Smart Patient

YOU: The Owner's Manual

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Amazon Significant Seven, January 2008: Food is the one thing that Americans hate to love and, as it turns out, love to hate. What we want to eat has been ousted by the notion of what we should eat, and it's at this nexus of hunger and hang-up that Michael Pollan poses his most salient question: where is the food in our food? What follows in In Defense of Food is a series of wonderfully clear and thoughtful answers that help us omnivores navigate the nutritional minefield that's come to typify our food culture. Many processed foods vie for a spot in our grocery baskets, claiming to lower cholesterol, weight, glucose levels, you name it. Yet Pollan shows that these convenient "healthy" alternatives to whole foods are appallingly inconvenient: our health has a nation has only deteriorated since we started exiling carbs, fats--even fruits--from our daily meals. His razor-sharp analysis of the American diet (as well as its architects and its detractors) offers an inspiring glimpse of what it would be like if we could (a la Humpty Dumpty) put our food back together again and reconsider what it means to eat well. In a season filled with rallying cries to lose weight and be healthy, Pollan's call to action—"Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."--is a program I actually want to follow. --Anne Bartholomew

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Amazon Guest Review: Stephen Hawking
Published in 1988, Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time became perhaps one of the unlikeliest bestsellers in history: a not-so-dumbed-down exploration of physics and the universe that occupied the London Sunday Times bestseller list for 237 weeks. Later successes include 1995's A Briefer History of Time, The Universe in a Nutshell, and God Created the Integers: The Mathematical Breakthroughs that Changed History. Stephen Hawking is Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge.

In The Drunkard's Walk Leonard Mlodinow provides readers with a wonderfully readable guide to how the mathematical laws of randomness affect our lives. With insight he shows how the hallmarks of chance are apparent in the course of events all around us. The understanding of randomness has brought about profound changes in the way we view our surroundings, and our universe. I am pleased that Leonard has skillfully explained this important branch of mathematics. --Stephen Hawking

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In October 1962, at the height of the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union appeared to be sliding inexorably toward a nuclear conflict over the placement of missiles in Cuba. Veteran Washington Post reporter Michael Dobbs has pored over previously untapped American, Soviet, and Cuban sources to produce the most authoritative book yet on the Cuban missile crisis. In his hour-by-hour chronicle of those near-fatal days, Dobbs reveals some startling new incidents that illustrate how close we came to Armageddon.

Here, for the first time, are gripping accounts of Khrushchev’s plan to destroy the U.S. naval base at Guantánamo; the accidental overflight of the Soviet Union by an American spy plane; the movement of Soviet nuclear warheads around Cuba during the tensest days of the crisis; the activities of CIA agents inside Cuba; and the crash landing of an American F-106 jet with a live nuclear weapon on board.

Dobbs takes us inside the White House and the Kremlin as Kennedy and Khrushchev—rational, intelligent men separated by an ocean of ideological suspicion—agonize over the possibility of war. He shows how these two leaders recognized the terrifying realities of the nuclear age while Castro—never swayed by conventional political considerations—demonstrated the messianic ambition of a man selected by history for a unique mission. As the story unfolds, Dobbs brings us onto the decks of American ships patrolling Cuba; inside sweltering Soviet submarines and missile units as they ready their warheads; and onto the streets of Miami, where anti-Castro exiles plot the dictator’s overthrow.

Based on exhaustive new research and told in breathtaking prose, here is a riveting account of history’s most dangerous hours, full of lessons for our time.

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Alcohol Can Be a Gas! is the only comprehensive book ever written on alcohol fuel production and use for home and farm. Until now, it has been very difficult for farmers, contractors, alternative energy aficionados, those concerned about Peak Oil, and small-scale entrepreneurs to obtain good, accurate information on producing alcohol, or on converting vehicles to run on alcohol fuel. And with all the conflicting news stories about ethanol, the public finds it difficult to sort fact from fiction. This text, which has been reviewed by scientists around the world, is the definitive reference work on alcohol fuel.

Alcohol Can Be A Gas! contains 640 8-1/2 by 11 pages, with 514 charts, photos, and illustrations to reinforce the information-dense text. The book is geared for the nonscientific reader, but its 473 endnotes provide the technical foundation behind the accessible prose. A 700-word glossary and a 6300-entry index extend the book's usefulness.

This book is the distilled essence of the most pertinent information ever assembled in one place on alcohol fuel, the technology that can help us finally become producers of almost limitless energy, instead of extractors of finite resources. How we produce our energy from here on out will determine how we govern ourselves and how we relate to nature and the environment; it will also create a sea change in where wealth concentrates. It will determine if the future is ruled by a small number of armed dictatorships backed by military and industrial interests (a cabal author David Blume likes to refer to as MegaOilron or the Oilygarchy), or if energy, and therefore power, is held by a diffusion of democratic entities, based on their ingenuity and ability to gather a portion of their daily solar income.

As Blume writes in the Introduction to Alcohol Can Be a Gas!: "Various prospective publishers argued that putting all of this material into one large volume might scare off readers who just want a recipe book of how to make alcohol. They said, 'All this history and politics is fascinating, but aren't you afraid that including it in your how-to book would scare away some buyers?' 'Put it in a separate publication,' their marketing experts said. But in the final analysis, I decided that this book should be a complete tool kit to revolutionize our transportation energy system, combining a broad, sweeping vision with intricate detail.

"I spent four years working on this book with a small team of researchers. I traveled all over the United States in search of the most up-to-date information. In frozen South Dakota, I talked to Orrie Swayze and his farmer and VFW buddies who are taking on the oil companies, and to alcohol combustion engineer and alcohol aviation expert, Jim Behnken. I went to Decatur, Illinois, to see the largest alcohol plant in the U.S., Archer Daniels Midland's 200-million-gallon-per-year plant. My travels also took me to Brazil to document the world's largest alcohol fuel program.

"It took over 25 years to finally get this book to you. It represents the confidence of almost 30 people who collectively loaned more than $250,000 to see this project through. It's the most comprehensive book ever written about alcohol fuel. Its production has been a massive effort that has depended on the cooperation of hundreds of people who contributed both their knowledge and, more importantly, their experiences.".
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Between your full-length mirror and high-school biology class, you probably think you know a lot about the human body. While it's true that we live in an age when we're as obsessed with our bodies as we are with celebrity hairstyles, the reality is that most of us know very little about what chugs, churns, and thumps throughout this miraculous, scientific, and artistic system of anatomy. Yes, you've owned your skin-covered shell for decades, but you probably know more about your cell-phone plan than you do about your own body. When it comes to your longevity and quality of life, understanding your internal systems gives you the power, authority, and ability to live a healthier, younger, and better life.

The flagship book of the YOU series, which spawned three subsequent New York Times bestsellers, has now been expanded and updated to make you understand your body even better—perhaps too well.

YOU: The Owner's Manual, Updated and Expanded Edition challenges your preconceived notions about how the human body works and ages, then takes you on a tour through all of the highways, back roads, and landmarks inside of you. In this update, the doctors have included a new chapter on the liver and pancreas, which will finally demystify the most exotic parts of our bodies; a new workout chapter that will finally get you moving; and nearly one hundred Q&As asked by you, the reader. It has also been updated throughout to give you up-to-the-minute know-how to not just understand what to do to keep fit, but also why and how.

The book opens with a quiz, "How Well Do You Know Your Body?," which sets the stage for the following chapters. After taking the quiz, you'll learn about all of your blood-pumping, food-digesting, and keys-remembering systems and organs, including the heart, brain, lungs, immune system, bones, and sensory organs. Each chapter also contains common myths of the particular body part that the authors will debunk.

Just as important, you'll get the facts and advice you need to keep your body running long and strong. You'll find out how diseases start and how they affect your body—as well as advice on how to prevent and beat conditions that threaten your quality of life. Complete with exercise tips, nutritional guidelines, simple lifestyle changes, and alternative approaches, YOU: The Owner's Manual, Updated and Expanded Edition gives you an easy, comprehensive, and life-changing how-to plan for fending off the gremlins of aging. To top it off, this new edition includes even more great-tasting and calorie-saving recipes as part of the Owner's Manual Diet—an eating plan that is designed with only one goal in mind: to help you live a younger life.

Welcome to your body. Why don't you come on in and take a look around?

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For sixty years Jewish refugees and their descendants have prospered in the Federal District of Sitka, a "temporary" safe haven created in the wake of the Holocaust and the shocking 1948 collapse of the fledgling state of Israel. The Jews of the Sitka District have created their own little world in the Alaskan panhandle, a vibrant and complex frontier city that moves to the music of Yiddish. But now the District is set to revert to Alaskan control, and their dream is coming to an end.

Homicide detective Meyer Landsman of the District Police has enough problems without worrying about the upcoming Reversion. His life is a shambles, his marriage a wreck, his career a disaster. And in the cheap hotel where Landsman has washed up, someone has just committed a murder—right under his nose. When he begins to investigate the killing of his neighbor, a former chess prodigy, word comes down from on high that the case is to be dropped immediately, and Landsman finds himself contending with all the powerful forces of faith, obsession, evil, and salvation that are his heritage.

At once a gripping whodunit, a love story, and an exploration of the mysteries of exile and redemption, The Yiddish Policemen's Union is a novel only Michael Chabon could have written.

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