Stone Age Spear and Arrow Points of California and the Great Basin:

Stone Age Spear and Arrow Points of California and the Great Basin: Review

Noel Justice adds another regional guide to his series of important reference works that survey, describe, and categorize the projectile point and cutting tools used in prehistory by Native American peoples. This volume addresses the region of California and the Great Basin. Written for archaeologists and amateur collectors alike, the book describes over 50 types of stone arrowhead and spear points according to period, culture, and region. With the knowledge of someone trained to fashion projectile points with techniques used by the Indians, Justice describes how the points were made, used, and re-sharpened. His detailed drawings illustrate the way the Indians shaped their tools, what styles were peculiar to which regions, and how the various types can best be identified. There are hundreds of drawings, organized by type cluster and other identifying characteristics. The book also includes distribution maps and color plates that will further aid the researcher or collector in identifying specific periods, cultures, and projectile types.

Great Big Book of Children's Games: Over 450 Indoor & Outdoor Games for Kids (Ages 3-12)

Great Big Book of Children's Games: Over 450 Indoor & Outdoor Games for Kids (Ages 3-12) Review

Games play a crucial role in a child's development, helping children to discover and understand the world around them. Parents are always on the lookout for new games and activities to play with their kids.

The Great Big Book of Children's Games features more than 450 indoor and outdoor games for kids.

Arranged according to appropriate agegroup, the games run the gamut in theme and mood. There are games designed for quiet times and intellectual stimulation as well as those that contribute to physical development, such as strength and wrestling games and races and relays. This book presents parents with a vast array of games for children of all ages, including:

• Card games
• Word games
• Sidewalk and blacktop games
• Tabletop games
• Party games, road games, and more

Finding Serenity in the Age of Anxiety

Finding Serenity in the Age of Anxiety Review

Are you among the millions affected by the stress and anxiety of modern life?

In this groundbreaking book, Robert Gerzon approaches the age-old problems of anxiety, stress, and fear from a new perspective, one that leads to personal and spiritual growth. He dispels the myth that all anxiety is bad and shows that it is a natural--even sacred--part of life. Gerzon brings the surprising message that "learning how to be anxious about the right things in the right way" may actually be our most direct route to serenity. In a brilliant analysis, he unravels three distinct strands from anxiety's tangled knot and demonstrates how to get them working for us instead of against us:

Transform Toxic Anxiety's exaggerated, self-destructive fears and worries into emotional healing and self-awareness.

Harness Natural Anxiety's arousal and excitement to surmount real dangers and take advantage of new opportunities.

Embrace Sacred Anxiety's sense of awe and wonder and its existential questions of meaning and purpose to discover your true self and the unique gift you have to give the world.

Destined to become a classic in the tradition of The Road Less Traveled, Finding Serenity in the Age of Anxiety offers inspiration and new insight into the most fundamental problem of human life. Weaving together psychology, spirituality, mindbody medicine, myth, case studies, and practical self-help techniques, Robert Gerzon's book can free you to live your life with greater passion and deeper serenity.

Personal Connections in the Digital Age (DMS - Digital Media and Society)

Personal Connections in the Digital Age (DMS - Digital Media and Society) Review

The internet and the mobile phone have disrupted many of our conventional understandings of our selves and our relationships, raising anxieties and hopes about their effects on our lives. This timely and vibrant book provides frameworks for thinking critically about the roles of digital media in personal relationships. Rather than providing exuberant accounts or cautionary tales, it offers a data-grounded primer on how to make sense of these important changes in relational life.

The book identifies the core relational issues these media disturb and shows how the ways we talk about them echo historical discussions about earlier communication technologies. Chapters explore how we use mediated language and nonverbal behavior to develop and maintain communities, social networks, new relationships, and to maintain relationships in our everyday lives. It combines research findings with lively examples to address questions such as whether mediated interaction can be warm and personal, whether people are honest about themselves online, whether relationships that start online can work, and whether using these media damages the other relationships in our lives. Throughout, the book argues for approaching these questions with firm understandings of the qualities of media as well as the social and personal contexts in which they are developed and used.

Personal Connections in the Digital Age will be required reading for all students and scholars of media, communication studies, and sociology, as well as all those who want a firmer understanding of digital media and everyday life.

The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World

The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World Review

Roughly half the world's population speaks languages derived from a shared linguistic source known as Proto-Indo-European. But who were the early speakers of this ancient mother tongue, and how did they manage to spread it around the globe? Until now their identity has remained a tantalizing mystery to linguists, archaeologists, and even Nazis seeking the roots of the Aryan race. The Horse, the Wheel, and Language lifts the veil that has long shrouded these original Indo-European speakers, and reveals how their domestication of horses and use of the wheel spread language and transformed civilization.

Linking prehistoric archaeological remains with the development of language, David Anthony identifies the prehistoric peoples of central Eurasia's steppe grasslands as the original speakers of Proto-Indo-European, and shows how their innovative use of the ox wagon, horseback riding, and the warrior's chariot turned the Eurasian steppes into a thriving transcontinental corridor of communication, commerce, and cultural exchange. He explains how they spread their traditions and gave rise to important advances in copper mining, warfare, and patron-client political institutions, thereby ushering in an era of vibrant social change. Anthony also describes his fascinating discovery of how the wear from bits on ancient horse teeth reveals the origins of horseback riding.

The Horse, the Wheel, and Language solves a puzzle that has vexed scholars for two centuries--the source of the Indo-European languages and English--and recovers a magnificent and influential civilization from the past.

A Fresh Map of Life: The Emergence of the Third Age

A Fresh Map of Life: The Emergence of the Third Age Review

Laslett argues that the Third Age - beyond the breadwinning and child-rearing years - is that of greatest personal fulfilment, the apogee of life. Combining social history, sociology and philosophy, this book provokes new thinking on one of the crucial changes in the modern world.

A Secular Age

A Secular Age Review

What does it mean to say that we live in a secular age? Almost everyone would agree that we--in the West, at least--largely do. And clearly the place of religion in our societies has changed profoundly in the last few centuries. In what will be a defining book for our time, Charles Taylor takes up the question of what these changes mean--of what, precisely, happens when a society in which it is virtually impossible not to believe in God becomes one in which faith, even for the staunchest believer, is only one human possibility among others.

Taylor, long one of our most insightful thinkers on such questions, offers a historical perspective. He examines the development in "Western Christendom" of those aspects of modernity which we call secular. What he describes is in fact not a single, continuous transformation, but a series of new departures, in which earlier forms of religious life have been dissolved or destabilized and new ones have been created. As we see here, today's secular world is characterized not by an absence of religion--although in some societies religious belief and practice have markedly declined--but rather by the continuing multiplication of new options, religious, spiritual, and anti-religious, which individuals and groups seize on in order to make sense of their lives and give shape to their spiritual aspirations.

What this means for the world--including the new forms of collective religious life it encourages, with their tendency to a mass mobilization that breeds violence--is what Charles Taylor grapples with, in a book as timely as it is timeless.

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