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DKfindout! Ancient Egypt
$4.49 Add to cartThis fun, fact-filled book for kids ages 6-9 is the ultimate guide to Ancient Egypt, from pharaohs to mummies. Entertaining and educating young readers through a combination of close-up images, quirky trivia facts, quiz questions, and fascinating tidbits, it’s the perfect book for any kid who can’t get enough of this remarkable civilization.How big was the Egyptian Empire? Why was the Nile so important? How were mummies made? Find out the answers to these questions and more in DKfindout! Ancient Egypt, which features photographs of artifacts and relics, as well as maps and illustrations depicting the structure of Egyptian society, from famous pharaohs to common farmers, and the extent of their civilization. This book explores every facet of Ancient Egypt’s iconic culture, including its many gods and goddesses, its hieroglyphic writing system, and its most well-known landmarks, like pyramids, obelisks, and sphinxes. From papyrus to pottery, DKfindout! Ancient Egypt details this civilization’s lasting impact in a unique and fun way.Vetted by educational consultants, the DKfindout! series drives kids ages 6-9 to become experts on more than 30 of their favorite STEM- and history-related subjects, whether Vikings, volcanoes, or robots. This series covers the subjects that kids really want to learn about-ones that have a direct impact on the world around them, like climate change, space exploration, and rapidly evolving technology-making learning fun through amazing images, stimulating quizzes, and cutting-edge information. The DKfindout! series is one that kids will want to turn to again and again.
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Einstein in Time and Space: A Life in 99 Particles
$14.99 Add to cartWalter Isaacson’s Einstein meets Craig Brown’s 99 Glimpses of Princess Margaret, in this innovative biography of the famous physicist told in ninety-nine dazzling vignettes.
Most of us would agree that Albert Einstein’s name is synonymous with “genius” and that his likeness is often used as a shorthand for all scientists, appearing everywhere from cartoons to textbooks. He has become more myth than man. That being the case, how best to capture his essence?
In Einstein in Time and Space, talented young science journalist Samuel Graydon answers that question with an illuminating mosaic—99 intriguingly different particles that cumulatively reveal Einstein’s contradictory and multitudinous nature. Glimpsed among these shards: a slacker who failed every subject but math, a job seeker who couldn’t get hired, a lothario who courted many women, and a charmer who was the life of the party. As brilliant as he was inconsistent, Einstein was simultaneously an avid supporter of the NAACP and the fight for civil rights and someone capable of great prejudice. He was loved by many, known by few, and inspirational to a generation of young physicists. Graydon reveals every corner of Einstein’s world: the false reporting that rocketed Einstein to fame nearly overnight, his effect on people he met merely in passing, even the remarkable posthumous journey of the famed physicist’s brain.
Entertaining, comforting, bolstering, and shocking, Einstein in Time and Space is the unique story of a man who redefined how we view our universe and our place within it.
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Cross & Crescent in the Balkans: The Ottoman Conquest of Southeastern Europe
$8.99 Add to cartThis is NOT just another retelling of the Fall of Constantinople, though it does include a very fine account of that momentous event. It is the history of a quite extraordinary century, one which began when a tiny of force of Ottoman Turkish warriors was invited by the Christian Byzantine Emperor to cross the Dardanelles from Asia into Europe to assist him in one of the civil wars which were tearing the fast-declining Byzantine Empire apart.One hundred and eight years later the Byzantine capital of Constantinople fell to what was by then a hugely powerful and expanding empire of the Islamic Ottoman Turks, whose rulers came to see themselves as the natural and legitimate heirs of their Byzantine and indeed Roman predecessors. The book sets the scene, explains the background and tells the story, both military, political, cultural and personal, of the winners and the losers, plus those ‘outsiders’ who were increasingly being drawn into the dramatic story of the rise of the Ottoman Empire.
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The Black Douglases: War and Lordship in Late Medieval Scotland, 1300-1455
$30.49 Add to cartDuring the century and a half of their power the Black Douglases earned fame as Scotland’s champions in the front line of war against England. On their shields they bore the bloody heart of Robert Bruce, the symbol of their claim to be the physical protectors of the hero-king’s legacy. But others saw the power of these lords and earls of Douglas in a different light. To their critics the Douglases were a force for disorder in the kingdom, lawless, arrogant and violent, whose power rested on coercion and whose defiance of kings and guardians ultimately provoked James II into slaying the Douglas earl with his own hand.
Michael Brown analyses the rise and fall of this family as the dominant magnates of the south, from the deeds of the Good Sir James Douglas in the service of Bruce to the violent destruction of the Douglas earls in the 1450s. Alongside this study of the accumulation and loss of power by one of the great noble houses, The Black Douglases includes a series of thematic examinations of the nature of aristocratic power. In particular these emphasise the link between warfare and political power in southern Scotland during the fourteenth century. For the Black Douglases, war was not just a patriotic duty but the means to power and fame in Scotland and across Europe.
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The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy: And the Path to a Shared American Future
$14.99 Add to cartA New York Times Bestseller
Taking the story of white supremacy in America back to 1493, and examining contemporary communities in Mississippi, Minnesota, and Oklahoma for models of racial repair, The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy helps chart a new course toward a genuinely pluralistic democracy.
Beginning with contemporary efforts to reckon with the legacy of white supremacy in America, Jones returns to the fateful year when a little-known church doctrine emerged that shaped the way five centuries of European Christians would understand the “discovered” world and the people who populated it. Along the way, he shows us the connections between Emmett Till and the Spanish conquistador Hernando De Soto in the Mississippi Delta, between the lynching of three Black circus workers in Duluth and the mass execution of thirty-eight Dakota men in Mankato, and between the murder of 300 African Americans during the burning of Black Wall Street in Tulsa and the Trail of Tears.
From this vantage point, Jones shows how the enslavement of Africans was not America’s original sin but, rather, the continuation of acts of genocide and dispossession flowing from the first European contact with Native Americans. These deeds were justified by people who embraced the 15th century Doctrine of Discovery: the belief that God had designated all territory not inhabited or controlled by Christians as their new promised land.
This reframing of American origins explains how the founders of the United States could build the philosophical framework for a democratic society on a foundation of mass racial violence—and why this paradox survives today in the form of white Christian nationalism. Through stories of people navigating these contradictions in three communities, Jones illuminates the possibility of a new American future in which we finally fulfill the promise of a pluralistic democracy.
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Inheritance: Poisoned Fruit of JFK’s Assassination
$11.49 Add to cartChristopher Fulton’s journey began with the death of Evelyn Lincoln, late secretary to President John F. Kennedy. Through Lincoln, crucial evidence ended up in Christopher’s hands—evidence that was going to be used to facilitate a new future for America. But the U.S. government’s position was clear: that evidence had to be confiscated and classified, and the truth hidden away from the public. Christopher was sent to federal prison for years under a sealed warrant and indictment. The Inheritance, Christopher’s personal narrative, shares insider information from his encounters with the Russian Government, President Ronald Reagan, Donald Trump, the Clinton White House, the U.S. Justice Department, the Secret Service, and the Kennedy family themselves. It reveals the true intentions of Evelyn Lincoln and her secret promise to Robert Kennedy—and Christopher’s secret promise to John F. Kennedy Jr. The Inheritance explodes with history-changing information and answers the questions Americans are still asking, while pulling them through a gauntlet of some of the worst prisons this country has to offer. This book thrillingly exposes the reality of American power, and sheds light on the dark corners of current corruption within the executive branch and the justice and prison systems.
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Songs That Explain the 90s
$16.99 Add to cartA companion to the #1 music podcast on Spotify, this book takes readers through the greatest hits that define a weirdly undefinable decade.
The 1990s were a chaotic and gritty and utterly magical time for music, a confounding barrage of genres and lifestyles and superstars, from grunge to hip-hop, from sumptuous R&B to rambunctious ska-punk, from Axl to Kurt to Missy to Santana to Tupac to Britney. In 60 SONGS THAT EXPLAIN THE ’90s, Ringer music critic Rob Harvilla reimagines all the earwormy, iconic hits Gen Xers pine for with vivid historical storytelling, sharp critical analysis, rampant loopiness, and wryly personal ruminations on the most bizarre, joyous, and inescapable songs from a decade we both regret entirely and miss desperately.
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Idiot’s Guides: Buddhism, 3rd Edition
$10.99 Add to cartReach Your Zen Moment!
The latest edition of The Complete Idiot’s Guide(r) to Buddhism updates one of Alpha Books’s most successful books in the religion/spirituality category, providing extensive information on both understanding the teachings and schools of Buddhism and incorporating the tenets of Buddhism into everyday life. It also includes additional information on Buddhism’s effect on popular arts and sciences, the continuing relevance of the Dalai Lama, and an annotated bibliography.
• With Buddhism as one of America’s fastest growing religions, the audience continues to renew itself
• Covers all four schools of Buddhism: Zen, Tibetan, Pure Land, and Insight Meditation, which are not in competitors’ books
• For thousands of years, Buddhism has been a source of inner peace and security for millions -
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Dissent: The Radicalization of the Republican Party and Its Capture of the Court
$3.99 Add to cartFeaturing new interviews with his accusers and overlooked evidence of his deceptions, a deeply reported account of the life and confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh, set against the conservative movement’s capture of the courts.
In DISSENT, award-winning investigative journalist Jackie Calmes brings readers closer to the truth of who Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh is, where he came from, and how he and the Republican party at large managed to secure one of the highest seats of power in the land.
Kavanaugh’s rise to the justice who solidified conservative control of the supreme court is a story of personal achievement, but also a larger, political tale: of the Republican Party’s movement over four decades toward the far right, and its parallel campaign to dominate the government’s judicial branch as well as the other two.
And Kavanaugh uniquely personifies this history. Fourteen years before reaching the Supreme Court, during a three-year fight for a seat on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, Democratic Senator Dick Durbin would say to Kavanaugh, “It seems that you are the Zelig or Forrest Gump of Republican politics. You show up at every scene of the crime.”
Featuring revelatory new reporting and exclusive interviews, DISSENT is a harrowing look into the highest echelons of political power in the United States, and a captivating survey of the people who will do anything to have it.
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Rome and Parthia: Empires at War: Ventidius, Antony and the Second Romano-Parthian War, 40-20 BC
$13.49 Add to cartRome and Parthia explains the motives behind Marc Antony’s invasion of Parthia and all the reasons it ultimately failed.
In the mid-first century BC, despite its military victories elsewhere, the Roman Empire faced a rival power in the east; the Parthian Empire. The first war between two superpowers of the ancient world had resulted in the total defeat of Rome and the death of Marcus Crassus. When Rome collapsed into Civil War in the 40s BC, the Parthians took the opportunity to invade and conquer the Middle East and drive Rome back into Europe. What followed was two decades of war which saw victories and defeats on both sides. The Romans were finally able to gain a victory over the Parthians thanks to the great, but now neglected, general Publius Ventidius. These victories acted as a springboard for Marc Antony’s plans to conquer the Parthian Empire, which ended in ignominious defeat. Gareth Sampson analyses the military campaigns and the various battles between the two superpowers of the ancient world and the war which defined the shape and division of the Middle East for the next 650 years.
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There Plant Eyes: A Personal and Cultural History of Blindness
$9.99 Add to cartFrom Homer to Helen Keller, from Dune to Stevie Wonder, from the invention of braille to the science of echolocation, M. Leona Godin explores the fascinating history of blindness, interweaving it with her own story of gradually losing her sight.
“[A] thought-provoking mixture of criticism, memoir, and advocacy.” —The New Yorker
There Plant Eyes probes the ways in which blindness has shaped our ocularcentric culture, challenging deeply ingrained ideas about what it means to be “blind.” For millennia, blindness has been used to signify such things as thoughtlessness (“blind faith”), irrationality (“blind rage”), and unconsciousness (“blind evolution”). But at the same time, blind people have been othered as the recipients of special powers as compensation for lost sight (from the poetic gifts of John Milton to the heightened senses of the comic book hero Daredevil).
Godin—who began losing her vision at age ten—illuminates the often-surprising history of both the condition of blindness and the myths and ideas that have grown up around it over the course of generations. She combines an analysis of blindness in art and culture (from King Lear to Star Wars) with a study of the science of blindness and key developments in accessibility (the white cane, embossed printing, digital technology) to paint a vivid personal and cultural history.
A genre-defying work, There Plant Eyes reveals just how essential blindness and vision are to humanity’s understanding of itself and the world.
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Agincourt: Battle of the Scarred King
$15.99 Add to cartAgincourt is one of the most famous battles in English history, a defining part of the national myth. This groundbreaking study by Mike Livingston, author of Never Greater Slaughter, presents a new interpretation of Henry V’s great victory.
‘It’s quite a feat to write an account of England’s most famous battle that makes the reader feel like they’re experiencing history that is fresh, new and exhilarating.’ Dan Snow
King Henry V’s victory over the French armies at Agincourt on 25 October 1415 is unquestionably one of the most famous battles in history. From Shakespeare’s ‘band of brothers’ speech to its appearances in numerous films, Agincourt rightfully has a place among a handful of conflicts whose names are immediately recognized around the world.
The English invasion of France in 1415 saw them take the French port of Harfleur after a long siege, following which Henry was left with a sick and weakened army, which he chose to march across Normandy to the port of Calais against the wishes of his senior commanders. The French had assembled a superior force and shadowed the English Army before finally blocking its route. The battle that followed was an overwhelming victory for the English, with the French suffering horrific casualties. Agincourt opened the door for Henry V’s further conquests in France.
Agincourt provides a new look at this famous battle. Mike Livingston goes back to the original sources, including the French battle plan that still survives today, to give a new interpretation, one that challenges the traditional site of the battlefield itself. It is a thrilling new history that not only rewrites the battle as we know it, but also provides fresh insights into the men who fought and died there.
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Kissinger
$18.99 Add to cartThe definitive biography of Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and how his ideas still resonate in the world today from the bestselling author of Leonardo da Vinci and Steve Jobs.
By the time Henry Kissinger was made secretary of state in 1973, he had become, according to the Gallup Poll, the most admired person in America and one of the most unlikely celebrities ever to capture the world’s imagination. Yet Kissinger was also reviled by large segments of the American public, ranging from liberal intellectuals to conservative activists. Kissinger explores the relationship between this complex man’s personality and the foreign policy he pursued. Drawing on extensive interviews with Kissinger as well as 150 other sources, including US presidents and his business clients, this first full-length biography makes use of many of Kissinger’s private papers and classified memos to tell his uniquely American story. The result is an intimate narrative, filled with surprising revelations, that takes this grandly colorful statesman from his childhood as a persecuted Jew in Nazi Germany, through his tortured relationship with Richard Nixon, to his later years as a globe-trotting business consultant.
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Ghosts of Honolulu: A Japanese Spy, a Japanese American Spy Hunter, and the Untold Story of Pearl Harbor
$14.99 Add to cart“A fast-paced debut…Espionage buffs will savor this vibrant account.” — Publishers Weekly
A U.S. naval counterintelligence officer working to safeguard Pearl Harbor; a Japanese spy ordered to Hawaii to gather information on the American fleet. On December 7, 1941, their hidden stories are exposed by a morning of bloodshed that would change the world forever. Scrutinizing long-buried historical documents, NCIS star Mark Harmon and co-author Leon Carroll, a former NCIS Special Agent, have brought forth a true-life NCIS story of deception, discovery, and danger.
Hawaii, 1941. War clouds with Japan are gathering and the islands of Hawaii have become battlegrounds of spies, intelligence agents, and military officials – with the island’s residents caught between them. Toiling in the shadows are Douglas Wada, the only Japanese American agent in naval intelligence, and Takeo Yoshikawa, a Japanese spy sent to Pearl Harbor to gather information on the U.S. fleet.
Douglas Wada’s experiences in his native Honolulu include posing undercover as a newspaper reporter, translating wiretaps on the Japanese Consulate, and interrogating America’s first captured POW of World War II, a submarine officer found on the beach. Takeo Yoshikawa is a Japanese spy operating as a junior diplomat with the consulate who is collecting vital information that goes straight to Admiral Yamamoto. Their dueling stories anchor Ghosts of Honolulu’s gripping depiction of the world-changing cat and mouse games played between Japanese and US military intelligence agents (and a mercenary Nazi) in Hawaii before the outbreak of the second world war.
Also caught in the upheaval are Honolulu’s innocent residents – including Douglas Wada’s father – who endure the war’s anti-Japanese fervor and a cadre of intelligence professionals who must prevent Hawaii from adopting the same destructive mass internments as California.
Ghosts of Honolulu depicts the incredible high stakes game of naval intelligence and the need to define what is real and what only appears to be real.
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A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East
$13.99 Add to cartPublished with a new afterword from the author—the classic, bestselling account of how the modern Middle East was created
The Middle East has long been a region of rival religions, ideologies, nationalisms, and ambitions. All of these conflicts—including the hostilities between Arabs and Israelis, and the violent challenges posed by Iraq’s competing sects—are rooted in the region’s political inheritance: the arrangements, unities, and divisions imposed by the Allies after the First World War.
In A Peace to End All Peace, David Fromkin reveals how and why the Allies drew lines on an empty map that remade the geography and politics of the Middle East. Focusing on the formative years of 1914 to 1922, when all seemed possible, he delivers in this sweeping and magisterial book the definitive account of this defining time, showing how the choices narrowed and the Middle East began along a road that led to the conflicts and confusion that continue to this day.
A new afterword from Fromkin, written for this edition of the book, includes his invaluable, updated assessment of this region of the world today, and on what this history has to teach us.
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Confidential Confidential: The Inside Story of Hollywood’s Notorious Scandal Magazine
$14.49 Add to cartIn the 1950s, Confidential magazine, America’s first celebrity scandal magazine, revealed Hollywood stars’ secrets, misdeeds, and transgressions in gritty, unvarnished detail. Deploying a vast network of tipsters to root out scandalous facts about the stars, including sexual affairs, drug use, and sexual orientation, publisher Robert Harrison destroyed celebrities’ carefully constructed images and built a media empire. Confidential became the bestselling magazine on American newsstands in the 1950s, surpassing Time, Life, and the Saturday Evening Post. Eventually the stars fought back, filing multimillion-dollar libel suits against the magazine. The state of California, prodded by the film studios, prosecuted Harrison for obscenity and criminal libel, culminating in a famous, star-studded Los Angeles trial. This is Confidential’s story, detailing how the magazine revolutionized celebrity culture and American society in the 1950s and beyond. With its bold red-yellow-and-blue covers, screaming headlines, and tawdry stories, Confidential exploded the candy-coated image of movie stars that Hollywood and the press had sold to the public. It transformed Americas from innocents to more sophisticated, worldly people, wise to the phony and constructed nature of celebrity. It shifted reporting on celebrities from an enterprise of concealment and make-believe to one that was more frank, bawdy, and true. Confidential’s success marked the end of an era of hush-hush—of secrets, closets, and sexual taboos—and the beginning of our age of tell-all exposure.
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The Meth Lunches: Food and Longing in an American City
$14.99 Add to cartJames Beard Award–winning author Kim Foster reveals a new portrait of hunger and humanity in America.
Food is a conduit for connection; we envision smiling families gathered around a table—eating, happy, content. But what happens when poverty, mental illness, homelessness, and addiction claim a seat at that table? In The Meth Lunches, Kim Foster peers behind the polished visions of perfectly curated dinners and charming families to reveal the complex reality when poverty and food intersect.
Whether it’s heirloom vegetables or a block of neon-yellow government cheese, food is both a basic necessity and a nuanced litmus test: what and how we eat reflects our communities, our cultures, and our place in the world. The Meth Lunches gives a glimpse into the lives of people living in Foster’s Las Vegas community—the grocery store cashier who feels safer surrounded by food after surviving a childhood of hunger; the inmate baking a birthday cake with coffee creamer and Sprite; the unhoused woman growing scallions in the slice of sunlight on her passenger seat. This is what food looks like in the lives of real people.
The Meth Lunches reveals stories of dysfunction intertwined with hope, of the insurmountable obstacles and fierce determination all playing out on the plates of ordinary Americans. It’s a bold invitation to pull up a chair and reconsider our responsibilities to the most vulnerable among us. Welcome to the table.
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The Ottoman Empire and the World Around It
$29.49 Add to cartIn Islamic law the world was made up of the ‘House of Islam’ and the ‘House of War’ with the Ottoman Sultan – successor to the early Caliphs – as supreme ruler of the Islamic world. However, in this ground-breaking study of the Ottoman Empire in the early modern period, Suraiya Faroqhi demonstrates that there was no ‘iron curtain’ between the Ottoman and ‘other’ worlds but rather a long-established network of connections – diplomatic, trading and financial., cultural and religious. These extended beyond regional contacts to the empires of Asia and the burgeoning ‘modern’ states of Europe – England, France, the Netherlands and Venice. Of course, military conflict was a constant factor in these relationships, but the overriding reality was ‘one world’ and contact between cultured and pragmatic elites – even ‘gentlemen travelling for pleasure’ – as well as pilgrimage and close artistic contact with the European Renaissance.
Faroqhi’s book is based on a huge study of original and early modern sources, including diplomatic records, travel and geographical writing, as well as personal accounts. Its breadth and originality will make it essential reading for historians of Europe and the Middle East.
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Geniuses at War: Bletchley Park, Colossus, and the Dawn of the Digital Age
$12.99 Add to cartThe dramatic, untold story of the brilliant team whose feats of innovation and engineering created the world’s first digital electronic computer—decrypting the Nazis’ toughest code, helping bring an end to WWII, and ushering in the information age.
• Winner, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Middleton Award for “a book … that both exemplifies exceptional scholarship and reaches beyond academic communities toward a broad public audience.” • A Kirkus Best Book of 2022 •
Planning the invasion of Normandy, the Allies knew that decoding the communications of the Nazi high command was imperative for its success. But standing in their way was an encryption machine they called Tunny (British English for “tuna”), which was vastly more difficult to crack than the infamous Enigma cipher.
To surmount this seemingly impossible challenge, Alan Turing, the Enigma codebreaker, brought in a maverick English working-class engineer named Tommy Flowers who devised the ingenious, daring, and controversial plan to build a machine that would calculate at breathtaking speed and break the code in nearly real time. Together with the pioneering mathematician Max Newman, Flowers and his team produced—against the odds, the clock, and a resistant leadership—Colossus, the world’s first digital electronic computer, the machine that would help bring the war to an end.
Drawing upon recently declassified sources, David A. Price’s Geniuses at War tells, for the first time, the full mesmerizing story of the great minds behind Colossus and chronicles the remarkable feats of engineering genius that marked the dawn of the digital age.
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Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes
$15.99 Add to cartAN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
“Want to understand the changing world? Start with what stays the same. That’s the amazing conclusion of Morgan Housel’s fascinating, useful, and highly-entertaining book.”
— Arthur C. Brooks, Professor, Harvard Kennedy School and Harvard Business School, and #1 New York Times bestselling author
From the author of the international blockbuster, THE PSYCHOLOGY OF MONEY, a powerful new tool to unlock one of life’s most challenging puzzles.
Every investment plan under the sun is, at best, an informed speculation of what may happen in the future, based on a systematic extrapolation from the known past.
Same as Ever reverses the process, inviting us to identify the many things that never, ever change.
With his usual elan, Morgan Housel presents a master class on optimizing risk, seizing opportunity, and living your best life. Through a sequence of engaging stories and pithy examples, he shows how we can use our newfound grasp of the unchanging to see around corners, not by squinting harder through the uncertain landscape of the future, but by looking backwards, being more broad-sighted, and focusing instead on what is permanently true.
By doing so, we may better anticipate the big stuff, and achieve the greatest success, not merely financial comforts, but most importantly, a life well lived.