Neil Somerville is the author of the international bestseller Your Chinese Horoscope for Each and Every Year. He is a great advocate of positive thinking and he has a strong interest in Eastern beliefs and traditions. He lives in Berkshire with his wife, children and adopted cat, Lily.

At a small seaside hotel, a young lady on holiday was sunning herself on the flat roof, clad only in a tiny bikini. Deciding that she might as well get an all-over tan, she glanced round to make sure that the roof was not overlooked and then removed her bikini. As she lay there on her stomach, the hotel manager suddenly appeared and said, ‘We don’t allow nude sunbathing up here, miss!’

Sick as a parrot becasue the big match has been cancelled or the TV’s broken down? Then this brilliant collection of the very best football jokes ever will soon have you over the moon – and rolling in the aisles.A group of flies were playing football in a saucer, using a lump of sugar as a ball. One of them said, ‘We’ll have to do better than this, lads – we’re playing in the cup tomorrow!’Whether you are a football widow or a fanatical follower of the game, an aspiring World Cup star or a part-time referee, this book contains all you ever need to know about the trials, tribualations – and hilarities – of this great British sport.

What made the Renaissance tickWhy had it such a force that its thinking spread from a small group of scholars in Florence, working in their own brilliant ways but coming together in a small villa on the Florentine hillside where Marsilio Ficino (143399) lived, to affect the thinking of the whole of Europe, and eventually of America, for five hundred years and is continuing to do soCosimo de?Medici, the virtual ruler of Florence, had been attracted to the philosophy of Plato by Gemistos Plethon during the Council Florence in 1439 and had instructed his agents to gather together Plato?s works before Constantinople fell to the Turks in 1453. In 1462 he commissioned Marsilio Ficino to translate them from Greek into Latin for the benefit of the Latin speaking world, a task he completed in under five years according to his biographer Giovanni Corsi. This, the first volume in a four volume series, provides the first English translation of the 25 short commentaries on the dialogues and the 12 letters traditionally ascribed to Plato. Later volumes will provide translations of his longer commentaries on the Parmenides (2008), the Republic and Laws (2009) and Timaeus (2010). Though this book will be an essential buy for Renaissance scholars and historians, its freshness of thought and wisdom are as relevant today as they ever were to inspire a new generation seeking spiritual and philosophical direction in their lives.

With the publication of Arthur FWith the publication of Arthur Farndell’s Gardens of Philosophy (Shepheard Walwyn 2006), there remained only four of Ficino’s commentaries on Plato’s dialogues which had not yet been translated into English. With the publication of this volume there remain only three. Farndell’s translation of the commentaries on the Republic and the Laws will comprise the third volume under the title When Philosophers Rule (9780856832574 – due 2009) and the fourth, All Things Natural (9780856832581 – due 2010), will contain the Timaeus. As Carol Kaske of Cornell University wrote when reviewing Gardens of Philosophy in Renaissance Quarterly, these translations fill ‘a need. Even those Anglophone scholars who know Latin still need a translation in order to read quickly through a large body of material’ The central message of Parmenides, that everything depends on the One, resonates with the growing awareness around the world of the interrelatedness of all things, be it in the biosphere, the intellectual or spiritual realms. Philosophers in ancient Greece appreciated this unity and employed reason and dialectic to draw the mind away from its preoccupation with the material world and attract it towards contemplation of the soul, and ultimately of that Oneness which embraces, but is distinct from, the multifarious forms of creation. Thus Parmenides carefully instructed the young Socrates, and Plato recorded their dialogue in this work which he named after the elderly philosopher. Nearly 2000 years later, Marsilio Ficino made Parmenides available to the West by translating it into Latin, the language of scholars in his time. Ficino added a lengthy commentary to this translation, a commentary which Evermore Shall Be So puts into English for the first time, more than 500 years after its original composition. Ficino’s crucial influence upon the unfolding of the Renaissance and his presentation of Plato’s understanding of the One and the socalled Platonic Ideas or Forms make Evermore Shall Be So an important work in the history of thought. Though it will be an essential buy for Renaissance scholars and historians, its freshness of thought and wisdom are as relevant today as they ever were to inspire a new generation seeking spiritual and philosophical direction in their lives. ‘This is philosophy with a mystical dimension – one that is crucial to the original Socratic and Platonic teaching’ Tony Cross in Faith and Freedomarndell’s Gardens of Philosophy ( 2006), there remained only four of Ficino’s commentaries on Plato’s dialogues which had not yet been translated into English. With the publication of this volume there remain only three. Farndell’s translation of the commentaries on the Republic and the Laws will comprise the third volume under the title When Philosophers Rule (9780856832574 – due 2009) and the fourth, All Things Natural (9780856832581 – due 2010), will contain the Timaeus.As Carol Kaske of Cornell University wrote when reviewing Gardens of Philosophy in Renaissance Quarterly, these translations fill ‘a need. Even those Anglophone scholars who know Latin still need a translation in order to read quickly through a large body of material’ The central message of Parmenides, that everything depends on the One, resonates with the growing awareness around the world of the interrelatedness of all things, be it in the biosphere, the intellectual or spiritual realms. Philosophers in ancient Greece appreciated this unity and employed reason and dialectic to draw the mind away from its preoccupation with the material world and attract it towards contemplation of the soul, and ultimately of that Oneness which embraces, but is distinct from, the multifarious forms of creation.Thus Parmenides carefully instructed the young Socrates, and Plato recorded their dialogue in this work which he named after the elderly philosopher. Nearly 2000 years later, Marsilio Ficino made Parmenides available to the West by translating it into Latin, the language of scholars in his time. Ficino added a lengthy commentary to this translation, a commentary which Evermore Shall Be So puts into English for the first time, more than 500 years after its original composition. Ficino’s crucial influence upon the unfolding of the Renaissance and his presentation of Plato’s understanding of the One and the socalled Platonic Ideas or Forms make Evermore Shall Be So an important work in the history of thought. Though it will be an essential buy for Renaissance scholars and historians, its freshness of thought and wisdom are as relevant today as they ever were to inspire a new generation seeking spiritual and philosophical direction in their lives. ‘This is philosophy with a mystical dimension – one that is crucial to the original Socratic and Platonic teaching’ Tony Cross in Faith and Freedom

Born and raised in Algeria with an active political life in the 70’s leading to his eventual emigration as a political refugee Elias Adam is the father of a family deeply affected by the new reality for economic and political migrants in Western Europe, victims of the new face of politics and some would say of Fear. This is his Book Of natural Rebellion

After decades of service and years of watching her family's troubles splashed across the tabloids, Britain's Queen is beginning to feel her age. She needs some proper cheering up. An unexpected opportunity offers her relief: an impromptu visit to a place that holds happy memories—the former royal yacht, Britannia, now moored near Edinburgh. Hidden beneath a skull-emblazoned hoodie, the limber Elizabeth (thank goodness for yoga) walks out of Buckingham Palace into the freedom of a rainy London day and heads for King's Cross to catch a train to Scotland. But a characterful cast of royal attendants has discovered her missing. In uneasy alliance a lady-in-waiting, a butler, an equerry, a girl from the stables, a dresser, and a clerk from the shop that supplies Her Majesty's cheese set out to find her and bring her back before her absence becomes a national scandal.Mrs Queen Takes the Train is a clever novel, offering a fresh look at a woman who wonders if she, like Britannia herself, has, too, become a relic of the past. William Kuhn paints a charming yet biting portrait of British social, political, and generational rivalries—between upstairs and downstairs, the monarchy and the government, the old and the young. Comic and poignant, fast paced and clever, this delightful debut tweaks the pomp of the monarchy, going beneath its rigid formality to reveal the human heart of the woman at its center.

Life is short. This indisputable fact of existence has driven human ingenuity since antiquity, whether through efforts to lengthen our lives with medicine or shorten the amount of time we spend on work using technology. Alongside this struggle to manage the pressure of life's ultimate deadline, human perception of the passage and effects of time has also changed. In On Borrowed Time, Harald Weinrich examines an extraordinary range of materials-from Hippocrates to Run Lola Run-to put forth a new conception of time and its limits that, unlike older models, is firmly grounded in human experience. Weinrich's analysis of the roots of the word time connects it to the temples of the skull, demonstrating that humans first experienced time in the beating of their pulses. Tracing this corporeal perception of time across literary, religious, and philosophical works, Weinrich concludes that time functions as a kind of sixth sense-the crucial sense that enables the other five. Written with Weinrich's customary narrative elegance, On Borrowed Time is an absorbing-and, fittingly, succinct-meditation on life's inexorable brevity.

establishment of the modern synthesis in the 1940s and the pioneering work of George Gaylord Simpson, Ernst Mayr, and Theodosius Dobzhansky, as well as the subsequent efforts of Stephen Jay Gould, David Raup, and James Valentine, paleontology became embedded in biology and emerged as paleobiology, a first-rate discipline central to evolutionary studies. Pairing contributions from some of the leading actors of the transformation with overviews from historians and philosophers of science, the essays here capture the excitement of the seismic changes in the discipline. In so doing, David Sepkoski and Michael Ruse harness the energy of the past to call for further study of the conceptual development of modern paleobiology.

The quest to pinpoint the age of the Earth is nearly as old as humanity itself. For most of history, people trusted mythology or religion to provide the answer, even though nature abounds with clues to the past of the Earth and the stars. In A Natural History of Time, geophysicist Pascal Richet tells the fascinating story of how scientists and philosophers examined those clues and from them built a chronological scale that has made it possible to reconstruct the history of nature itself.Richet begins his story with mythological traditions, which were heavily influenced by the seasons and almost uniformly viewed time cyclically. The linear history promulgated by Judaism, with its story of creation, was an exception, and it was that tradition that drove early Christian attempts to date the Earth. For instance, in 169 CE, the bishop of Antioch, for instance declared that the world had been in existence for quote;5,698 years and the odd months and days quote;Until the mid-eighteenth century, such natural timescales derived from biblical chronologies prevailed, but, Richet demonstrates, with the Scientific Revolution geological and astronomical evidence for much longer timescales began to accumulate. Fossils and the developing science of geology provided compelling evidence for periods of millions and millions of years-a scale that even scientists had difficulty grasping. By the end of the twentieth century, new tools such as radiometric dating had demonstrated that the solar system is four and a half billion years old, and the universe itself about twice that, though controversial questions remain.The quest for time is a story of ingenuity and determination, and like a geologist, Pascal Richet carefully peels back the strata of that history, giving us a chance to marvel at each layer and truly appreciate how far our knowledge-and our planet-have come.

The first edition of Bearing Witness brought together for the first time 176 slave narratives from the state of Arkansas. Now, this new edition adds ten previously undiscovered accounts. No one knew the truths of slavery better than the slaves themselves, but no one consulted them until the 1930s. Then, recognizing that this generation of unique witnesses would soon be lost to history, the Works Progress Administration's Federal Writers' Project acted to interview as many former slaves as possible. In a continuation of the project's interest in the life histories of ordinary people, writers interviewed over two thousand former slaves, more than a third of them in Arkansas. These oral histories were first published in the 1970s in a thirty-nine-volume series organized by state, and they transformed America's understanding of slavery. They have offered crucial evidence on a variety of other topics as well: the Civil War, Reconstruction, agricultural practices, everyday life, and oral history itself. But some former Arkansas slaves were interviewed in Texas, Oklahoma, and other states, so their narratives were published in those other collections. And more than half of the testimonies in the Arkansas volume were interviews with people who had moved to Arkansas after freedom. Folklorist George Lankford combed all of the state collections for the testimonies properly belonging to Arkansas and deleted from this state's collection the testimony of later migrants

From the bestselling author of Seasons of Your Heart and A Tree Full of Angels, a lyric, loving, and inspiring approach to communion with God based on Benetictine spirituality.

"Christian musicians know of the obligation to make music as agents of God's grace. They make music graciously, whatever its kind or style, as ambassadors of Christ, showing love, humility, servanthood, meekness, victory, and good example . . . Music is freely made, by faith, as an act of worship, in direct response to the overflowing grace of God in Christ Jesus." Co-sponsored by the Christian College Coalition, this thought-provoking study of music-as-worship leads both students and experienced musicians to a better understanding of the connections between music making and Christian faith. "Christian music makers have to risk new ways of praising God. Their faith must convince them that however strange a new offering may be, it cannot out-reach, out-imagine, or overwhelm God. God remains God, ready to swoop down in the most wonderful way, amidst all of the flurry and mystery of newness and repetition, to touch souls and hearts, all because faith has been exercised and Christ's ways have been imitated. Meanwhile, a thousand tongues will never be enough." Best relates musical practice to a larger theology of creation and creativity, and explores new concepts of musical quality and excellence, musical unity, and the incorporation of music from other cultures into today's music.

Kennedy shares her own story of facing the loss of a parent and offers innovative strategies for healing and transformation.

The RulesPuhleeze! Any real black woman can tell you that when it comes to African-American men, The Rules is about as good as Monopoly money in Macy's. Waiting three days to return a brother's phone call will get a black woman nothing more than a warm spot on the couch by herself with an empty bag of corn chips and the remote.A sister needs her own special set of rules for finding a brother even when it seems that there just aren't that many good ones to go around. Millner says they are out there but sistahs need to drop their materialistic, brother-in-the white-Benz fantasies and pick up the right vibes for finding a genuine brother who's worth keeping around. The Sistahs' Rules gives black women commonsense guidelines for landing in a healthy relationship with a makes-your-toes-curl brother, including: Get to know his mama, get to know him Use what you got to get what you want Girlfriends are everything, but they don't know it all With warm stories and practical advice from black mamas and papas who've been there and done that, and sistahs and brothers in the mix, The Sistahs' Rules is a sassy, hip, step-by-step guide to finding Brother Mr. Rightand having fun in the process.

In this classic work by the renowned wit and pundit whom the New York Times has lauded as "one of America's foremost arbiters of taste and mores . . . an acclaimed expert on what was highbrow, what was lowbrow, and what was no brow at all," the inimitable Russell Lynes flaunts (rather snobbishly, perhaps) his unparalleled expertise on all things snobbish. Since the Social Snob with his raised nostrils and air of intolerable intolerance has long since gone underground, it falls to a true connoisseur to identify the myriad faces of snobbery. Whether it be the Regional, Political, or Moral Snob, the Sensual or Sex Snob, or that most virulent of genus, the Reverse or Anti-Snob Snob, Lynes shines an illuminating light that will enable us to more easily recognize the pervasive pretentiousness surrounding us . . . and perhaps within us as well.

Do you get depressed every time a date turns out to be a dud?Are you devastated when you don't get "the call" from a guy you likeDo you constantly check your dates out for marriage potentialChances are you're taking dating way too seriously. According to Myreah Moore -- "America's Dating Coach" -- women need to start dating to have fun, which is what men have been doing for ages! In fact, Moore says, dating is a lot like a science. And with any scientific experiment, it's trial and error. In Date Like a Man, she steals dating secrets from men (the masters of dating) and transforms them into a personal training program that will boost your dating prospects -- and increase your chances of finding a soul mate.Clear, candid, and empowering, Date Like a Man makes the manhunt fun -- the way it should be. Even if you think you're a dating expert, you'll devour this manual -- the new bible for surviving and thriving in today's world.

Psalm 93God acts within every momentand creates the world with each breath.He speaks from the center of the universe,in the silence beyond all though.Mighter than the crash of a thunderstorm,mighter than the roar of the sea,is God's voice silently speakingin the depths of the listening heart.

Here is a practical, compassionate book parents can turn to when they first recognize that their child has a "problem" but aren't sure what it is or where to seek help. At this very moment, millions of children across the U.S. are falling behind in school, acting out impulsively at home, having problems making friends, suffering dramatic mood swings, and more. Their parents are frustrated and afraid, aware that something's wrong, but not sure where to turn for help or how to cope with their child's behavior. "Is it a learning disorder, ADHD, anxiety disorder, or some combination?" they wonder. "Are these moods and behaviors normal or abnormalWill my child outgrow them?" This book by a noted neuropsychologist explains the different and overlapping symptoms of learning, mood, and behavior disorders and guides parents in getting the right diagnosis and treatment. Dr. Newby demystifies the process and empowers parents. Step by step, he explains: How to observe and chart your child's behavior a critical diagnostic tool What to expect during the evaluation and treatment process How to partner with medical and school professionals to assist your child and what to do when conflicts arise Clear and comprehensive, this supportive guide will be every parent's first line of defense in helping a troubled child.

Bestselling author Susan Forward looks at the devastating impact unloving mothers have on their daughters and provides effective techniques for overcoming that painful legacy. Over the course of thirty-five years as a therapist, Susan Forward has worked with a large number of women struggling to escape the emotional damage inflicted by the women who raised them. Subjected to years of criticism, competition, role reversal, smothering control, emotional neglect, and other forms of abuse, women raised by mothers who can't love are plagued by anxiety, depression, relationship problems, lack of confidence, and difficulties with trust.But as Forward explains in Mothers Who Can't Love, it is possible to heal the mother wound and find help and validation. The many different kinds of unloving mothers the narcissistic mother, the competitive mother, the overly enmeshed mother, the control freak, mothers who need mothering, and mothers who abuse or fail to protect their daughters from abuse are all described in these pages. They each bring unique issues to the mother-daughter dynamic and need to be understood in order for healing to begin.Filled with compelling case histories, Mothers Who Can't Love outlines the self-help techniques Forward has developed to transform the lives of her clients, showing women how to overcome the pain of their childhoods and act in their own best interests. Riveting and compassionate, this landmark book will give daughters the emotional support and tools they need to reclaim their confidence and self-respect so that the emotional destructiveness they grew up with does not constitute a legacy for future generations.

Fathers and Babies is the one and only baby care book written expressly for fathers. Fathers and Babies is a light and reassuring introduction into the world of fatherhood. Fathers today want to be, and are expected to be, involved parents who bond with their children and help them thrive. Yet, sadly, many new fathers feel excluded from the loop of child care. Because most fathers don't get to spend as much time with their babies as mothers do, men don't learn the everyday skills of baby care. When they attempt to help out during evenings and on weekends, they frustrate themselves and those they are trying to help. Instead of becoming closer to their children, many fathers withdraw, conceding the domain of parenting to mothers. This is unfair to mothers, fathers, and their children. What fathers desperately need is a special baby care training manual that will teach them how to fix a bottle, soothe a bay in the middle of the night, and help a child learn to talk. Fathers who are primary caregivers gain these skills easily. But most fathers are not primary caregivers; and because they can't spend more time with their children, they need help in order to become the great fathers they want to be. Fathers and Babies provides step-by-step instructions accompanied by humorous, real-life pictures that show fathers what to do. The book also explains the important perceptual abilities, language skills, muscular coordination, strength, and concepts of trust and self-esteem that babies need to develop during the first eighteen months of life. The more fathers know about these critical developments, the more fathers will be able to help their babies achieve and the more worthy they will feel as parents.