Archives de catégorie : Nonfiction

YOUR BODY IS SMARTER THAN YOUR MIND de Janice Kaplan

In this new book, the author of the New York Times best-seller The Gratitude Diaries explores a new science-based mega-theme: the ineluctably profound mind-body connection, how the body, more often than not, provides our brain with key information, not the reverse and when the mind and body work as a seamless team, we feel a true sense of wellness and flow.

YOUR BODY IS SMARTER THAN YOUR MIND:
Discovering the New Science for Happiness, Gratitude, and Joy
by Janice Kaplan
Sourcebooks, 2024
(via The Martell Agency)

Photo: © Matt MercadoYOUR BODY IS SMARTER THAN YOUR MIND couldn’t be more relevant or important as we increasingly rely on technology to give our brains key information. Do we really need a smartwatch to tell us how we slept? Your body tells you that when you wake up, we’ve just stopped listening. Instead, we’ve come to see our bodies as something we need to take care of, so that our minds can function and manage life. But our feeling bodies are often smarter than our thinking minds. Of most importance, research across a wide range of fields in science, shows that when the body and mind work together, we experience a deep sense of pleasure and happiness.
In this new book, Janice will explore the myriad ways that our physical and psychological and spiritual beings are profoundly linked and collaborate in often surprising overlapping patterns in all human experience. YOUR BODY IS SMARTER THAN YOUR MIND will interweave intriguing new scientific research from experts around the globe in many disciplines — from psychologists to neuroscientists to environmentalists — with a powerful personal narrative, as Janice in her own life seeks hardcore scientific research which proves how much our minds rely on the actions and responses of our bodies. For example, the act of smiling can improve your mood. When you pass a dark alley and your body tenses and your heart starts pounding, your cardiovascular system is sending a message to your brain to be frightened, rather than the other way around.
The book will provide tips and strategies about how to rediscover this vital connection, so your mind and body can work, as they should, as a seamless team. A major strength of Janice’s approach is that, unlike an expert in a given field drilling down on one theory, one core premise, to the exclusion of all else, Janice will integrate the ground-breaking discoveries of multiple experts who study mind-body connectivity from many different angles. This makes the premise of the book far more powerful and wholly credible. And as is essential, Janice is expert at making complex research and information interesting, accessible, and relevant to a general reader.

Janice Kaplan has written more than a dozen popular books including the New York Times bestseller The Gratitude Diaries. She was editor-in-chief of Parade when it was the biggest magazine in America with 32 million copies circulating each week and began her career as a writer and producer at Good Morning America and went on to be the executive producer of more than 30 network television specials. She has appeared regularly on national TV shows including GMA, Today, and CBS This Morning and continues to be a frequent guest on podcasts and radio shows. Janice hosted the podcast “The Gratitude Diaries” for iHeartMedia, attracting a large audience for the 120 episodes. Since the publication of The Gratitude Diaries and her most recent book The Genius of Women, she gives dozens of talks each year and has become a popular keynote speaker at corporate and non-profit events. The Templeton Foundation is very enthusiastic about the concept and is prepared to get behind the book, as it did for The Gratitude Diaries.

WHY WE PLAY de Will Freeman

WHY WE PLAY investigates the transformative power of one of the most widespread artforms and businesses of our times. Perfect for readers of Tomorrow, And Tomorrow, And Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin and Life 3.0 by Max Tegmark.

WHY WE PLAY:
How Video Games Took Over the World
by Will Freeman
Neem Tree Press, September 2023
(via Randle Editorial & Literary)

Offering an accessible and balanced analysis, WHY WE PLAY explores how video games have permeated our daily lives. Their presence in our homes, culture, business, politics, sport, education, and healthcare has made them one of the most ubiquitous mediums of modern times. The role games play today – from influencing youth culture to informing the design of space craft –renders them remarkably powerful. But as games occupy an increasingly important place in our daily lives, it’s becoming harder to understand the opportunities they offer and the challenges they present.
For gamers and non-gamers alike, WHY WE PLAY provides the ultimate guide to questions you didn’t even know you had…

Will Freeman is a games journalist who has written for The Guardian and The Observer as well as gaming publications and game industry titles for over 17 years. Will also serves the game industry as a writer, editor, speaker, script editor, event curator, awards judge, consultant, and more. As an expert in the field, Will is fascinated by the wide-ranging impact of video games on our lives and our cultural landscape.

JOHNSON AT 10 d’Anthony Seldon

The definitive account of Boris Johnson’s turbulent time in office by one of Britain’s leading political and social commentators.

JOHNSON AT 10
by Anthony Seldon
Atlantic, Spring 2023
(via Northbank Talent Management)

After his sudden rise to power in the summer of 2019 amid the Brexit deadlock, Boris Johnson presided over the most dramatic period of British history in almost a century. From the controversial prorogation of Parliament in August 2019 to the Conservative party’s historic landslide victory later that year, the agonising upheaval of Brexit and the Covid-19 pandemic, the Afghanistan crisis, the conflict in Ukraine, and the series of devastating scandals that were ultimately Johnson’s undoing, his premiership has been more explosive than any other in living memory.
In this gripping work of contemporary history, Anthony Seldon, one of Britain’s leading political and social commentators, and co-author Raymond Newell give the first full account of Johnson’s seismic time in office from the summer of 2019 to the autumn of 2022. Based on major interviews with key aides and allies, and full of new revelations, Johnson at 10 is the definitive portrait of the most divisive prime minister since Margaret Thatcher and the latest instalment in Anthony’s bestselling ‘Prime Ministers at 10’ series.

Anthony Seldon is a British educator and historian. He is the author or editor of more than 35 books on contemporary history, politics and education, and is best known for his biographies of recent prime ministers from John Major to Theresa May. He was Vice-Chancellor of the University of Buckingham from 2015 to 2020. He is honorary historical adviser to 10 Downing Street, and chairs The Times Education Commission.

FOOD THERAPY de Pixie Turner

Diets don’t just fail to make us healthy. They take up unnecessary space in our minds and prevent us from living life to the fullest. By understanding why we eat, and bringing awareness to our food, we can rebuild the damage caused by diets and eat freely, without guilt, and set ourselves on a course to lifelong health. FOOD THERAPY will literally change your mind about eating well.

FOOD THERAPY:
Understand and Repair Your Relationship with What You Eat
by Pixie Turner
Piatkus/Little, Brown UK, January 2023
(via Northbank Talent Management)

In FOOD THERAPY, Pixie Turner presents a fresh new approach to rehabilitating our relationship with food. Instead of focusing on rules, reduction and restriction, this practical book will help you uncover the roots and psychology of your relationship with food – how your experiences and feelings affect what you eat – and introduce you to a lifelong practice that will free you from a destructive relationship with food and dieting.
Healthy eating begins in the mind. As a registered nutritionist and qualified ACT therapist, Pixie has a wealth of experience with clients who come to her for help with disordered eating and body image problems. This book will help you understand why diets don’t work, and will empower you to rebuild your relationship with food by using psychological tools to identify your unique problematic points, and counter those with healthy eating habits. Including:

– How to reset and understand your relationship with hunger and feeling full
– Overcoming shame and defence mechanisms
– Fostering self-compassion to help you recover from setbacks
– Guidance on making better choices and creating a more positive environment

Pixie Turner is a registered nutritionist (RNutr) and science communicator, and she also has qualifications in psychotherapy, which makes her uniquely positioned to write this book. Alongside her degrees in biochemistry and nutrition and her qualifications in psychotherapy, she has over 130,000 followers on her ‘Pixie Nutrition’ social media accounts. Her science communication work extends across mainstream media, social media, and her popular podcast In Bad Taste. Pixie has been featured as a nutrition expert on the BBC, Sky and Channel 5, and in publications such as Red magazine, the Evening Standard, Grazia, the Telegraph and more. She is the author of three books: The Wellness Rebel (2018), The No Need to Diet Book (2019) and The Insta-Food Diet (August 2020), all published by Head of Zeus.

CODIFIED d’Andrew Smith

From award-winning journalist Andrew Smith, contributing writer for the Sunday Times and the Guardian, CODIFIED is an immersive, sharp-eyed tour of the world of computer programming, told through Smith’s own journey to learn how to code.

CODIFIED
by Andrew Smith
‎ Atlantic Monthly Press/Grove Atlantic, Winter 2024

Andrew Smith’s first book, Moondust, was a #1 UK and international bestseller, nominated for two British Book Awards (including Read of the Year), and cited by the Times as one of its “100 Best Books of the Decade.” His follow-up Totally Wired—centered on the late 1990s dot-com bubble and its tumultuous crash—was published to rave reviews, hailed as “effervescent and vivid . . . a book whose time has come” (Sunday Times). Smith’s latest, CODIFIED, is a mesmerizing, up-to-the-minute account of the world of coders, as experienced through his own endeavor to become one.
Throughout history, technological revolutions have been driven by the invention of machines. But today, the power of the tech transforming our world lies in an intangible and impenetrable cosmos of software: algorithmic code. So symbiotic has our relationship with this code become that we barely notice it anymore. We can’t see it, are not even sure how to think about it, and yet we do almost nothing that doesn’t depend on it. In a world increasingly governed by technologies that so few can comprehend, who controls the future?
CODIFIED follows Andrew Smith on his immersive trip into the world of coding, taking us behind the scenes into the lives—and minds—of the new gatekeepers of the 21st century: those who write code. Smith embarks on a quest to understand this sect in what he believes to be the only way possible: by learning to code himself. Along the way, he becomes involved with a wild array of characters and takes part in several lively rituals of initiation into the coding world: he visits a global coding conference in Ohio, where he meets the creator of the Python programming language; and he takes part in a 24-hour “hackathon” in Silicon Valley, a Darwinian race to see who can build the best app overnight. At the start of his odyssey he travels to Magdeburg, Germany to have his brain scanned by a team of scientists studying the effects of coding on the human brain and will share the results of the final comparison scan. Smith delivers a vivid, effervescent portrait of a culture working in an office or coworking space near you—all while wrestling with everything that’s at stake in this stage of technological evolution. How do we control a technology that most people can’t understand? And are we programming ourselves out of existence? By-turns illuminating, alarming, and amusing, CODIFIED is an essential book for our times.

“Smith is an ideal narrator: sharp-eyed yet increasingly affectionate about his subjects; expert enough to dissect Apollo minutiae clearly but not so obsessed as to leave a general reader trailing in the jetwash.”
—Financial Times on Moondust

“A brilliant exploration of madness and genius in the early days of the web. Fascinatingly weird . . . terrific.”
—Guardian on Totally Wired

“A rich mix of cultural history, reportage and personal reflection.” —Evening Standard on Moondust

“Highly entertaining . . . [Smith’s] superb book is a fitting tribute to a unique band of 20th-century heroes.”
—GQ on Moondust

Andrew Smith has worked as a critic and feature writer for the Sunday Times, the Guardian, the Observer, and The Face, and has penned documentaries for the BBC. He is the author of the internationally bestselling book Moondust, about the nine remaining men who walked on the moon between 1969 and 1972, and Totally Wired. He was raised in the UK and currently lives in California.