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When a Chinese monk broke into a hidden cave in 1900, he uncovered one of the world’s great literary secrets: a time capsule from the ancient Silk Road. Inside, scrolls were piled from floor to ceiling, undisturbed for a thousand years. The gem within was the Diamond Sutra of AD 868. This key Buddhist teaching, made 500 years before Gutenberg inked his press, is the world’s oldest printed book. The Silk Road once linked China with the Mediterranean. It conveyed merchants, pilgrims and ideas. But its cultures and oases were swallowed by shifting sands. Central to the Silk Road’s rediscovery was a man named Aurel Stein, a Hungarian-born scholar and archaeologist employed by the British service. Undaunted by the vast Gobi Desert, Stein crossed thousands of desolate miles with his fox terrier Dash. Stein met the Chinese monk and secured the Diamond Sutra and much more. The scroll’s journey—by camel through arid desert, by boat to London’s curious scholars, by train to evade the bombs of World War II—merges an explorer’s adventures, political intrigue, and continued controversy. The Diamond Sutra has inspired Jack Kerouac and the Dalai Lama. Its journey has coincided with the growing appeal of Buddhism in the West. As the Gutenberg Age cedes to the Google Age, the survival of the Silk Road’s greatest treasure is testament to the endurance of the written word.
How our collective intelligence has helped us to evolve and prosper Humans are a puzzling species. On the one hand, we struggle to survive on our own in the wild, often failing to overcome even basic challenges, like obtaining food, building shelters, or avoiding predators. On the other hand, human groups have produced ingenious technologies, sophisticated languages, and complex institutions that have permitted us to successfully expand into a vast range of diverse environments. What has enabled us to dominate the globe, more than any other species, while remaining virtually helpless as lone individuals? This book shows that the secret of our success lies not in our innate intelligence, but in our collective brains—on the ability of human groups to socially interconnect and learn from one another over generations. Drawing insights from lost European explorers, clever chimpanzees, mobile hunter-gatherers, neuroscientific findings, ancient bones, and the human genome, Joseph Henrich demonstrates how our collective brains have propelled our species' genetic evolution and shaped our biology. Our early capacities for learning from others produced many cultural innovations, such as fire, cooking, water containers, plant knowledge, and projectile weapons, which in turn drove the expansion of our brains and altered our physiology, anatomy, and psychology in crucial ways. Later on, some collective brains generated and recombined powerful concepts, such as the lever, wheel, screw, and writing, while also creating the institutions that continue to alter our motivations and perceptions. Henrich shows how our genetics and biology are inextricably interwoven with cultural evolution, and how culture-gene interactions launched our species on an extraordinary evolutionary trajectory. Tracking clues from our ancient past to the present, The Secret of Our Success explores how the evolution of both our cultural and social natures produce a collective intelligence that explains both our species' immense success and the origins of human uniqueness.
Characterized by a simple technology and a complex socioreligious system, the Mardudjara have survived with much of their traditional culture intact. The Mardu culture challenges common assumptions about the relation between technology and progress. This edition describes changes as the Mardu adapt to social, economic, and political realities.
The chunk of land bordering Western Australia, South Australia, and Queensland is known as Namatjira. For most of us it is remote; geographically and metaphorically it is the heart of Australia. After a period of loss and much change, Saskia Beudel was inspired to begin long distance walking. Within 18 months, she had walked Australia's Snowy Mountains, twice along the South Coast of Tasmania, the MacDonnell Ranges west of Alice Springs, the Arnhem Land plateau in Kakadu, the Wollemi National Park in New South Wales, and in Ladakh in the Himalayas. Throughout the course of her journeys, she experienced passages of reverie, of forgetfulness, of absorption in her surroundings, of an immense but simple pleasure, and of rhythm. The book that emerged contrasts her internal landscape with the external landscape, considering her relationships with her family in the context of environmental and anthropological histories. It champions the history of Australia's Namatjira country and conveys social and environmental issues. A Country in Mind is a narrative memoir of one woman's reflections on home, family, and belonging, while traversing remote and ancient landscapes. *** "The Australian Outback is depicted with such gorgeous language in Beudel's book that it almost feels as though you're seeing it with your own eyes. There is, however, more to this book than just description. The history and spirituality of the region is the glue that binds this alluring memoir together and turns it into a journey through Australia unlike any other." - World Literature Today, Jan/Feb 2015Ã?Â?Ã?Â?Ã?Â?Ã?Â?
Named one of Vulture’s Top 10 Best Books of 2020! Leftist firebrand Fredrik deBoer exposes the lie at the heart of our educational system and demands top-to-bottom reform. Everyone agrees that education is the key to creating a more just and equal world, and that our schools are broken and failing. Proposed reforms variously target incompetent teachers, corrupt union practices, or outdated curricula, but no one acknowledges a scientifically-proven fact that we all understand intuitively: Academic potential varies between individuals, and cannot be dramatically improved. In The Cult of Smart, educator and outspoken leftist Fredrik deBoer exposes this omission as the central flaw of our entire society, which has created and perpetuated an unjust class structure based on intellectual ability. Since cognitive talent varies from person to person, our education system can never create equal opportunity for all. Instead, it teaches our children that hierarchy and competition are natural, and that human value should be based on intelligence. These ideas are counter to everything that the left believes, but until they acknowledge the existence of individual cognitive differences, progressives remain complicit in keeping the status quo in place. This passionate, voice-driven manifesto demands that we embrace a new goal for education: equality of outcomes. We must create a world that has a place for everyone, not just the academically talented. But we’ll never achieve this dream until the Cult of Smart is destroyed.
Nicholas Flamel appeared in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter—but did you know he really lived? And his secrets aren't safe! Discover the truth in book six of Michael Scott’s New York Times bestselling series the Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel. The Location: The home of the Elders. The Time: The last day of Nicholas and Perenelle Flamel's long existence. The two that are one must become the one that is all. One to save the world, one to destroy it. Sophie and Josh Newman traveled ten thousand years into the past following Dr. John Dee and Virginia Dare to the home of the Elders at Danu Talis. But this is no ordinary island--it is the legendary city of Atlantis, and Scathach, Prometheus, Palamedes, Shakespeare, Saint-Germain, and Joan of Arc are also there. Here, as the Flamels take their final breaths, the battle for the world begins and ends. Except no one is sure what--or who--the twins will be fighting for. “The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel has everything you loved about Harry Potter, including magic, mystery, and a constant battle of good versus evil.”—Bustle Read the whole series! The Alchemyst The Magician The Sorceress The Necromancer The Warlock The Enchantress