In Lieu of Flowers: A Conversation for the Living

Thomas Gilovich

How We Know What Isn't So

Thomas Gilovich offers a wise and readable guide to the fallacy of the obvious in everyday life. When can we trust what we believe--that "teams and players have winning streaks," that "flattery works," or that "the more people who agree, the more likely they are to be right"--and when are such beliefs suspect? Thomas Gilovich offers a guide to the fallacy of the obvious in everyday life. Illustrating his points with examples, and supporting them with the latest research findings, he documents the cognitive, social, and motivational processes that distort our thoughts, beliefs, judgments and decisions. In a rapidly changing world, the biases and stereotypes that help us process an overload of complex information inevitably distort what we would like to believe is reality. Awareness of our propensity to make these systematic errors, Gilovich argues, is the first step to more effective analysis and action.

Judy Collins, Julia Cameron

Walking in This World

In this long-awaited sequel to the international bestseller The Artist's Way , Julia Cameron presents the next step in her course of discovering and recovering the creative self. Walking in This World picks up where Julia Cameron's bestselling book on the creative process, The Artist's Way , left off to present readers with a second course--Part Two in an amazing journey toward discovering our human potential. Full of valuable new strategies and techniques for breaking through difficult creative ground, this is the "intermediate level" of the Artist's Way program. A profoundly inspired work by the leading authority on the subject of creativity, Walking in This World is an invaluable tool for artists. This second book is followed by Finding Water , the third book in The Artist's Way trilogy.

Jessie Sholl

Dirty Secret: A Daughter Comes Clean about Her Mother's Compulsive Hoarding

A fascinating look at compulsive hoarding by a woman whose mother suffers from the disease. To be the child of a compulsive hoarder is to live in a permanent state of unease. Because if my mother is one of those crazy junk-house people, then what does that make me? When her divorced mother was diagnosed with cancer, New York City writer Jessie Sholl returned to her hometown of Minneapolis to help her prepare for her upcoming surgery and get her affairs in order. While a daunting task for any adult dealing with an aging parent, it's compounded for Sholl by one lifelong, complex, and confounding truth: her mother is a compulsive hoarder. Dirty Secret is a daughter's powerful memoir of confronting her mother's disorder, of searching for the normalcy that was never hers as a child, and, finally, cleaning out the clutter of her mother's home in the hopes of salvaging the true heart of their relationship--before it's too late. Growing up, young Jessie knew her mother wasn't like other mothers: chronically disorganized, she might forgo picking Jessie up from kindergarten to spend the afternoon thrift store shopping. Now, tracing the downward spiral in her mother's hoarding behavior to the ...