Books about Vaillant from Amazon.com

Now in paperback, the acclaimed bestseller that reveals the scientific secrets to ensuring that our golden years are truly golden. Based on the longest and most complete study of adult development in the world, AGING WELL draws from the individual histories of 824 men and women from a variety of backgrounds to illustrate the most important factors involved in reaching and enjoying a happy, healthy old age..
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A tale of obsession so fierce that a man kills the thing he loves most: the only giant golden spruce on earth. "Absolutely spellbinding "—William Grimes, New York Times

As vividly as Jon Krakauer put readers on Everest, John Vaillant takes us into the heart of North America's last great forest, where trees grow to eighteen feet in diameter, sunlight never touches the ground, and the chainsaws are always at work.

When a shattered kayak and camping gear are found on an uninhabited island, they reignite a mystery surrounding a shocking act of protest. Five months earlier, logger-turned-activist Grant Hadwin had plunged naked into a river in British Columbia's Queen Charlotte Islands, towing a chainsaw. When his night's work was done, a unique Sitka spruce, 165 feet tall and covered with luminous golden needles, teetered on its stump. Two days later it fell.

The tree, a fascinating puzzle to scientists, was sacred to the Haida, a fierce seafaring tribe based in the Queen Charlottes. Vaillant recounts the bloody history of the Haida and the early fur trade, and provides harrowing details of the logging industry, whose omnivorous violence would claim both Hadwin and the golden spruce. 16 pages of illustrations..
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In our current era of holy terror, passionate faith has come to seem like a present danger. Writers such as Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens have been happy to throw the baby out with the bathwater and declare that the danger is in religion itself. God, Hitchens writes, is not great.

But man, according to George E. Vaillant, M.D., is great. In Spiritual Evolution, Dr. Vaillant lays out a brilliant defense not of organized religion but of man’s inherent spirituality. Our spirituality, he shows, resides in our uniquely human brain design and in our innate capacity for emotions like love, hope, joy, forgiveness, and compassion, which are selected for by evolution and located in a different part of the brain than dogmatic religious belief. Evolution has made us spiritual creatures over time, he argues, and we are destined to become even more so. Spiritual Evolution makes the scientific case for spirituality as a positive force in human evolution, and he predicts for our species an even more loving future.

Vaillant traces this positive force in three different kinds of “evolution”: the natural selection of genes over millennia, of course, but also the cultural evolution within recorded history of ideas about the value of human life, and the development of spirituality within the lifetime of each individual. For thirty-five years, Dr. Vaillant directed Harvard’s famous longitudinal study of adult development, which has followed hundreds of men over seven decades of life. The study has yielded important insights into human spirituality, and Dr. Vaillant has drawn on these and on a range of psychological research, behavioral studies, and neuroscience, and on history, anecdote, and quotation to produce a book that is at once a work of scientific argument and a lyrical meditation on what it means to be human.

Spiritual Evolution is a life’s work, and it will restore our belief in faith as an essential human striving.

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One of America's preeminent psychiatrists gives us an exhilarating look at how the mind's defenses work, how they evolve and change, and so, change us. In compelling portraits of obscure and famous lives, Vaillant charts the evolution of the ego's defenses, from the psychopathic to the sublime and from the mundane to the most ingenious..
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Now in paperback, the acclaimed bestseller that reveals the scientific secrets to ensuring that our golden years are truly golden. Based on the longest and most complete study of adult development in the world, AGING WELL draws from the individual histories of 824 men and women from a variety of backgrounds to illustrate the most important factors involved in reaching and enjoying a happy, healthy old age..
Price: $6.29 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Between 1939 and 1942, one of America's leading universities recruited 268 of its healthiest and most promising undergraduates to participate in a revolutionary new study of the human life cycle. The originators of the program, which came to be known as the Grant Study, felt that medical research was too heavily weighted in the direction of disease, and their intent was to chart the ways in which a group of promising individuals coped with their lives over the course of many years.

Nearly forty years later, George E. Vaillant, director of the Study, took the measure of the Grant Study men. The result was the compelling, provocative classic, Adaptation to Life, which poses fundamental questions about the individual differences in confronting life's stresses. Why do some of us cope so well with the portion life offers us, while others, who have had similar advantages (or disadvantages), cope badly or not at all? Are there ways we can effectively alter those patterns of behavior that make us unhappy, unhealthy, and unwise?

George Vaillant discusses these and other questions in terms of a clearly defined scheme of "adaptive mechanisms" that are rated mature, neurotic, immature, or psychotic, and illustrates, with case histories, each method of coping.

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When The Natural History of Alcoholism was first published in 1983, it was acclaimed in the press as the single most important contribution to the literature on alcoholism since the first edition of Alcoholic Anonymous's Big Book. George Vaillant took on the crucial questions of whether alcoholism is a symptom or a disease, whether it is progressive, whether alcoholics differ from others before the onset of their alcoholism, and whether alcoholics can safely drink. Based on an evaluation of more than 600 individuals followed for over forty years, Vaillant's monumental study offered new and authoritative answers to all of these questions.

In this updated version of his classic book Vaillant returns to the same subjects with the perspective gained from fifteen years of further follow-up. Alcoholics who had been studied to age 50 in the earlier book have now reached age 65 and beyond, and Vaillant reassesses what we know about alcoholism in light of both their experiences and the many new studies of the disease by other researchers. The result is a sharper focus on the nature and course of this devastating disorder as well as a sounder foundation for the assessment of various treatments.

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Golden green, deep green, jade, limpid yellow or sun yellow in color; bitter, sweet, spicy, harmonious, soft, sweet, fruity, delicate or fiery in character; tasting of almond, apple, artichoke, mown hay or citrus fruits-- there are innumerable olive oils and each has its own personality Like wines, the flavors of olive oil reflect the soils and climate in which the olives are grown. And like wine, olive oils have their grands crus and their exceptional years.

In the first part of this book, Olivier Baussan, one of the great olive oil connoisseurs, takes you on a wonderful journey through the olive groves, presses and mills of the Mediterranean region. This is an invitation not only to discover the finest oils, but also to savor the conviviality of Provence, Corsica, Italy, Spain, Greece and Galilee.

In the second part, the celebrated chef Jacques Chibois presents fifty recipes ranging from traditional baked sea bream prepared with Sicilian olive oil, to astonishing madeleines made with olive oil from Haute-Provence and pumpkin fritters made with Catalan olive oil.

The final section, the Connoisseur's Guide, provides information on selecting, appreciating and buying fine olive oils.

Illustrated with more than 150 color photographs, this is a book to be enjoyed again and again, both for its superb images and its extraordinary recipes.

Thanks to the growing interest in healthy eating and the popularity of Mediterranean cuisine, olive oil has become fashionable. In some restaurants, olive oil rather than butter is served with the bread, while in others you are given a choice of oils for seasoning salads, pasta and vegetables.

Until recently, the concept of the cru-- the term for a high-quality vineyard-- was restricted to wine, but it is now spreading to olive oil. As with wine, the flavor of an olive oil is determined by a range of factors, including olive variety, location, production methods and vintage.

This book is an invitation to discover the world of fine olive oils through a gourmet's tour of Mediterranean groves. A selection of recipes perfected by the celebrated chef Jacques Chibois demonstrates how different oils can be used to great effect in a range of dishes.

A Connoisseur's Guide provides information on olive production around the world, the different varieties and their characteristics, and the classification system for olive oils, as well as the names and addresses of producers, shops and museums.
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