Books about Perspectives from Amazon.com

Consistently lauded for its lively, readable prose, this revised and updated edition of A People's History of the United States turns traditional textbook history on its head. Howard Zinn infuses the often-submerged voices of blacks, women, American Indians, war resisters, and poor laborers of all nationalities into this thorough narrative that spans American history from Christopher Columbus's arrival to an afterword on the Clinton presidency.

Addressing his trademark reversals of perspective, Zinn--a teacher, historian, and social activist for more than 20 years--explains, "My point is not that we must, in telling history, accuse, judge, condemn Columbus in absentia. It is too late for that; it would be a useless scholarly exercise in morality. But the easy acceptance of atrocities as a deplorable but necessary price to pay for progress (Hiroshima and Vietnam, to save Western civilization; Kronstadt and Hungary, to save socialism; nuclear proliferation, to save us all)--that is still with us. One reason these atrocities are still with us is that we have learned to bury them in a mass of other facts, as radioactive wastes are buried in containers in the earth."

If your last experience of American history was brought to you by junior high school textbooks--or even if you're a specialist--get ready for the other side of stories you may not even have heard. With its vivid descriptions of rarely noted events, A People's History of the United States is required reading for anyone who wants to take a fresh look at the rich, rocky history of America..
Price: $10.87 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Stephen Windwalker's latest book is the premier guide for Kindle owners -- written for serious readers rather than gadget heads, 51,000 words in length and newly packed with great tips. 192 "print" pages, including a detailed, link-enabled FAQ section (Originally published in beta editions as How to Use the Amazon Kindle for Email & Over 100 Pages of Other Cool Tips.)

If you’ve already purchased and downloaded it, you can get the latest iteration onto your Kindle at no additional charge with just a couple of clicks on your computer. Just go to "Your Media Library" under your personal Amazon account, pull down your “Kindle Books” list under the Downloads tab, find this book (clicking on the title will confirm your purchase and purchase date), and click on the right where there’s a “Send wirelessly to your Kindle” button. Also included, for Kindle owners who are considering giving another Kindle as a gift to a colleague, friend, or loved one: information on how to send this book **free** as the first book on the new gift Kindle, and a link to get the new Kindle for just $259!

TABLE OF CONTENTS:
I. How to Use this Book
II. What is a Kindle?
-What’s Inside the Kindle?
-Why Did Amazon Launch the Kindle, and Which is More Important, the Chicken or the Egg?
III. Kindle Basics
-Handling Your Kindle
-Choosing Among Six Font Sizes
-Kindle Keyboard and Menu Shortcuts
-The Care and Feeding of Your Kindle's Battery
-The Reset Button is Your First Tech Support Option
-Access Wikipedia Quickly and Smoothly
-Using "Locations" to Figure Out How Close You Are to the End of a Kindle Edition
-Buying and Sampling Content for Your Kindle From the Amazon Kindle Store
-Updating the Latest Version of Your Kindle’s Operating Software
-Adding an SD Card to Your Kindle
-Getting Help with Your Kindle
-Managing Your Kindle Content
IV. The Amazon Kindle Basic Web Wireless Service: Why It Is a Revolutionary Feature, and Why Amazon Should Keep It Free or Cheap
V. How to Use the Amazon Kindle for Email
VI. Using Google Reader to Read Your Favorite Blogs on the Amazon Kindle
VII. Traveling with Your Kindle
-Using the Kindle to Translate Foreign or Technical Words and Phrases
-Making the Most of Your Kindle Connections Overseas or in a Sprint Wireless Dead Zone
-Using the Kindle as a Travel Guide
-The Kindle and GPS - Intriguing but Frustrating
-Checking Sprint Wireless Coverage for the Kindle
-Downloading Kindle Editions Via USB Cable
VIII. The Kindle as a Writing, Editing, and Publishing Device
-Taking Notes on the Kindle - It's All in the Thumbs
-Annotation within a Kindle Document
-Google Notebook
-Annotating Your Working Documents
-Writing and Annotation to Email
-Saving, Printing, Editing and Working With Your Kindle Clippings, Annotations, and Highlighted Text
-20 Steps to Publishing a Kindle Edition of Your Book or Document: How to Use Kindle, Amazon and the Web to Market Your Book and Connect with Readers
-Other Links for Publishing Content for the Kindle
IX. Projecting a Kindle Future
-How Many Kindles? Estimating the Current and Future "Installed Base," and Why It Is Important
-The Golden Age of Kindle 2.0 and Beyond
-Kindle Reading Subscriptions
-Kindle Buffet
-Kindle Groups
-Kindle Owners as Kindle Sellers
-Kindle Content Affiliate Program
-Shop the Amazon Store Through a Kindle Gateway
A Big Tent for Kindle Content Availability On Other Devices
Shop and Play Amazon Music and Audio
Kindle Tribes
“Living Books” on the Kindle
Other Fixes for Kindle 2.0 and Beyond
Folders and/or Labels
Size, Location and Configuration of Bars, Buttons, and Switches
The Kindle Display Screen
Writeable Screen
Adjustable Fonts
Go Global
Open the Kindle Store to Accessories
Green Tax Credit
Screen and Keyboard Freezes
Gifts
Make the Kindle More Kid-Friendly
Real USB Port or Bluetooth for Hardware Connectivity with Memory Devices, Keyboards &c
X. 20 More Kindle Tips and Tricks
Link-Enabled Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ).
Price: $3.99 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Psychiatrist Viktor Frankl's memoir has riveted generations of readers with its descriptions of life in Nazi death camps and its lessons for spiritual survival. Between 1942 and 1945 Frankl labored in four different camps, including Auschwitz, while his parents, brother, and pregnant wife perished. Based on his own experience and the experiences of those he treated in his practice, Frankl argues that we cannot avoid suffering but we can choose how to cope with it, find meaning in it, and move forward with renewed purpose. Frankl's theory—known as logotherapy, from the Greek word logos ("meaning")—holds that our primary drive in life is not pleasure, as Freud maintained, but the discovery and pursuit of what we personally find meaningful.

At the time of Frankl's death in 1997, Man's Search for Meaning had sold more than 10 million copies in twenty-four languages. A 1991 reader survey by the Library of Congress and the Book-of-the-Month Club that asked readers to name a "book that made a difference in your life" found Man's Search for Meaning among the ten most influential books in America.

Born in Vienna in 1905 Viktor E. Frankl earned an M.D. and a Ph.D. from the University of Vienna. He published more than thirty books on theoretical and clinical psychology and served as a visiting professor and lecturer at Harvard, Stanford, and elsewhere. In 1977 a fellow survivor, Joseph Fabry, founded the Viktor Frankl Institute of Logotherapy. Frankl died in 1997.

Harold S. Kushner is rabbi emeritus at Temple Israel in Natick, Massachusetts, and the author of several best-selling books, including When Bad Things Happen to Good People.

William J. Winslade is a philosopher, lawyer, and psychoanalyst at the University of Texas Medical School in Galveston..
Price: $2.79 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Bestselling author Nassim Nicholas Taleb continues his exploration of randomness in his fascinating new book, The Black Swan, in which he examines the influence of highly improbable and unpredictable events that have massive impact. Engaging and enlightening, The Black Swan is a book that may change the way you think about the world, a book that Chris Anderson calls, "a delightful romp through history, economics, and the frailties of human nature." See Anderson's entire guest review below.

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Guest Reviewer: Chris Anderson

Chris Anderson is editor-in-chief of Wired magazine and the author of The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More.

Four hundred years ago, Francis Bacon warned that our minds are wired to deceive us. "Beware the fallacies into which undisciplined thinkers most easily fall--they are the real distorting prisms of human nature." Chief among them: "Assuming more order than exists in chaotic nature." Now consider the typical stock market report: "Today investors bid shares down out of concern over Iranian oil production." Sigh. We're still doing it.

Our brains are wired for narrative, not statistical uncertainty. And so we tell ourselves simple stories to explain complex thing we don't--and, most importantly, can't--know. The truth is that we have no idea why stock markets go up or down on any given day, and whatever reason we give is sure to be grossly simplified, if not flat out wrong.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb first made this argument in Fooled by Randomness, an engaging look at the history and reasons for our predilection for self-deception when it comes to statistics. Now, in The Black Swan: the Impact of the Highly Improbable, he focuses on that most dismal of sciences, predicting the future. Forecasting is not just at the heart of Wall Street, but it's something each of us does every time we make an insurance payment or strap on a seat belt.

The problem, Nassim explains, is that we place too much weight on the odds that past events will repeat (diligently trying to follow the path of the "millionaire next door," when unrepeatable chance is a better explanation). Instead, the really important events are rare and unpredictable. He calls them Black Swans, which is a reference to a 17th century philosophical thought experiment. In Europe all anyone had ever seen were white swans; indeed, "all swans are white" had long been used as the standard example of a scientific truth. So what was the chance of seeing a black one? Impossible to calculate, or at least they were until 1697, when explorers found Cygnus atratus in Australia.

Nassim argues that most of the really big events in our world are rare and unpredictable, and thus trying to extract generalizable stories to explain them may be emotionally satisfying, but it's practically useless. September 11th is one such example, and stock market crashes are another. Or, as he puts it, "History does not crawl, it jumps." Our assumptions grow out of the bell-curve predictability of what he calls "Mediocristan," while our world is really shaped by the wild powerlaw swings of "Extremistan."

In full disclosure, I'm a long admirer of Taleb's work and a few of my comments on drafts found their way into the book. I, too, look at the world through the powerlaw lens, and I too find that it reveals how many of our assumptions are wrong. But Taleb takes this to a new level with a delightful romp through history, economics, and the frailties of human nature. --Chris Anderson

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Price: $14.90 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Staring unflinchingly into the abyss of slavery, this spellbinding novel transforms history into a story as powerful as Exodus and as intimate as a lullaby Sethe, its protagonist, was born a slave and escaped to Ohio, but eighteen years later she is still not free. She has too many memories of Sweet Home, the beautiful farm where so many hideous things happened. And Sethe’s new home is haunted by the ghost of her baby, who died nameless and whose tombstone is engraved with a single word: Beloved. Filled with bitter poetry and suspense as taut as a rope, Belovedis a towering achievement..
Price: $8.19 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Explaining what William McNeill called The Rise of the West has become the central problem in the study of global history. In Guns, Germs, and Steel Jared Diamond presents the biologist's answer: geography, demography, and ecological happenstance. Diamond evenhandedly reviews human history on every continent since the Ice Age at a rate that emphasizes only the broadest movements of peoples and ideas. Yet his survey is binocular: one eye has the rather distant vision of the evolutionary biologist, while the other eye--and his heart--belongs to the people of New Guinea, where he has done field work for more than 30 years. .
Price: $15.65 [Notify me when price goes down.]

As the market-leading text for the art history survey course, GARDNER'S ART THROUGH THE AGES has served as a comprehensive and thoughtfully crafted guide to the defining phases of the world's artistic tradition. The story of art unfolds in its full historical, social, religious, economic, and cultural context, deepening students' understanding of art, architecture, painting, and sculpture. This version explores the history of art in the Western world in a concise 23-chapter format (also available in a two-volume split). GARDNER'S ART THROUGH THE AGES: THE WESTERN PERSPECTIVE features such enhancements as more color photographs, a stunning new design, and the most current research and scholarship. Unique to survey texts with a Western Art focus, the authors include a chapter on Islam, providing students with insightful coverage of the Islamic tradition's impact on Western culture and art history. Additionally, every copy of the text contains a free copy of the ArtStudy 2.1 CD-ROM-an interactive electronic study aid that fully integrates with the text and includes hundreds of high-quality digital images, plus maps, quizzes, and more..
Price: $110.61 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Master the unprecedented capabilities of Microsoft Office 2007 with the New Perspectives on Microsoft Office 2007, First Course, Windows XP Edition! With our critical thinking, problem-solving focus, users will gain a comprehensive understanding of the software and will learn how to capitalize on the flexibility it offers. The case-based tutorials challenge users to apply what they are learning to real-life tasks, preparing them to easily transfer skills to new situations. With the New Perspectives Series approach, users understand why they are learning what they are learning and are better prepared to retain these skills..
Price: $75.50 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Following the critical thinking, problem-solving approach of the New Perspectives Series learners will gain a comprehensive understanding of Microsoft Excel 2007, including the new features of the software. The case-based tutorials challenge learners to apply what they are learning to real-life tasks, preparing them to easily transfer skills to new situations. With the New Perspectives Series approach, learners understand why theyÂ’re learning what theyÂ’re learning, and are better situated to retain skills..
Price: $85.00 [Notify me when price goes down.]

This new book is the first to approach the subject from a comparative theory perspective, including coverage of contemporary knowledge theories as well as traditional theories. A consistent framework for analysis is provided for all of the theoretical systems that are covered. This book encourages readers to develop critical thinking skills in analyzing and comparing theories, and includes contemporary developments in traditional lifespan theory, theories of political economy, and a separate chapter on transpersonal theory (Chapter 12). The book includes explicit content on spirituality, oppression, and social justice. Each chapter includes coverage of the research that supports a particular theory, as well as an analysis of the validity of that research; each chapter also includes a discussion of "Contemporary Issues." The last chapter, Chapter 13, provides a case example demonstrating how the various theories can be applied to a single case. Social workers, therapists, and psychologists..
Price: $67.07 [Notify me when price goes down.]