Social Conflict

Welcome to the relationship revolution! Making Marriage Simple is the accessible, essential road map to building a strong marriage in the modern world. Best-selling authors Harville Hendrix and Helen LaKelly Hunt distill into 10 essential truths what they've learned about how to create a successful and satisfying relationship - both from their decades of "R&D" in the marriage lab of their workshops, and from their own relationship journey.

In Enemies and Neighbors, Ian Black, who has spent over three decades covering events in the Middle East and is currently a fellow at the London School of Economics, offers a major new history of the Arab-Zionist conflict from 1917 to today. Laying the historical groundwork in the final decades of the Ottoman Era, when the first Zionist settlers arrived in the Holy Land, Black draws on a wide range of sources - from declassified documents to oral histories to his own vivid on-the-ground reporting - to recreate the major milestones in the most polarizing conflict of the modern age from both sides.

Jayson Gaddis is a personal trainer for relationships and one of the world’s leading authorities on interpersonal conflict. For almost two decades, Gaddis has helped individuals, couples, and teams get to the bottom of their deepest conflicts. He helps people see the wisdom in conflict and how to get to zero - how “clean and clear” we feel with others when we have successfully worked through a disagreement. In Getting to Zero, Gaddis shows the listener how to stop running away from uncomfortable conversations and instead learn how to work through them.

Traveling across millennia, weaving the experiences and world views of cultures both extinct and extant, The Invention of Yesterday shows that the engine of history is not so much heroic (battles won), geographic (farmers thrive), or anthropogenic (humans change the planet) as it is narrative. Many thousands of years ago, when we existed only as countless small autonomous bands of hunter-gatherers widely distributed through the wilderness, we began inventing stories - to organize for survival, to find purpose and meaning, to explain the unfathomable.

Why has war been such a consistent presence throughout the human past? A leading historian explains, drawing on rich examples and keen insight. Richard Overy is not the first scholar to take up the title question. In 1931, at the request of the League of Nations, Albert Einstein asked Sigmund Freud to collaborate on a short work examining whether there was "a way of delivering mankind from the menace of war." Published the next year as a pamphlet entitled Why War?, it conveyed Freud's conclusion that the "death drive" made any deliverance impossible.

Why do we fight most with those we love best? Australian relationship therapist Lissy Abrahams has spent years exploring this question, both in her treatment room helping clients and through extensive research. She knows that long-term conflict leaves us drained, anxious and worried for the emotional wellbeing of our families, but says it is neither intractable or inevitable. Conflict is caused by unconscious patterns of thinking and behaviour - unresolved feelings of fear, instability or pain - that can be consciously rewired for a healthier, happier relationship.

The conflict between Palestine and Israel is one of the most highly publicized and bitter struggles in history. In this accessible and stimulating Very Short Introduction, Martin Bunton clearly explains the history of the problem, reducing it to its very essence - a modern territorial contest between two nations and one geographical territory.Providing a clear and fair exploration of the main issues, Bunton explores not only the historical basis of the conflict, but also looks at how and why partition has been so difficult and how efforts to restore peace continue today.

Best-selling author and New York Times family columnist Bruce Feiler found himself squeezed between caring for aging parents and raising his children. So he set out on a three-year journey to find the smartest solutions and the most cutting-edge research about families. Instead of the usual family "experts", he sought out the most creative minds - from Silicon Valley to the set of Modern Family, from the country's top negotiators to the Green Berets - and asked them what team-building exercises and problem-solving techniques they use with their families.

Tsultrim Allione brings an 11th-century Tibetan woman's practice to the West for the first time with Feeding Your Demons, an accessible and effective approach for dealing with negative emotions, fears, illness, and self-defeating patterns. Allione - one of only a few female Buddhist leaders in this country and comparable in American religious life to Pema Chodron - bridges this ancient Eastern practice with today's Western psyche. She explains that if we fight our demons, they only grow stronger. But if we feed them, nurture them, we can free ourselves from the battle.

There is an ancient Chinese proverb that states, "Two tigers cannot share the same mountain." However, in East Asia, there are three tigers on that mountain: China, Japan, and Korea, and they have a long history of turmoil and tension with each other. In his latest entertaining and thought-provoking narrative travelogue, Michael Booth sets out to discover how deep, really, the enmity is between these three "tiger" nations and what prevents them from making peace.

In all the writing and reporting KJ Dell'Antonia has done on families over the years, one topic keeps coming up again and again: parents crave a greater sense of happiness in their daily lives. In this optimistic, solution-packed book, KJ asks: How can we change our family life so that it is full of the joy we'd always hoped for? Drawing from the latest research and interviews with families, KJ discovers that it's possible to do more by doing less, and make our family life a refuge and pleasure, rather than another stress point in a hectic day.

Many of us have a deep desire to make the world around us a better place. But often our good intentions are undermined by the fear that we are so insignificant in the big scheme of things that nothing we can do will actually help feed the world’s hungry, fix the damage of a Hurricane Katrina, or even get a healthy lunch program up and running in the local school. But extraordinary leaders such as Gandhi and even unlikely social activists such as Bob Geldof most often see themselves as harnessing the forces around them, rather than singlehandedly setting those forces in motion.

Harvard professor (and negotiation advisor to organizations around the world) Deepak Malhotra shows how to defuse even the most potentially explosive situations and to find success when things seem impossible. Malhotra illustrates key lessons using behind-the-scenes stories of fascinating real-life negotiations, including drafting the US Constitution, resolving the Cuban Missile Crisis, ending bitter disputes in the NFL and NHL, and beating the odds in complex business situations.

In Overcoming Passive-Aggression, Dr. Tim Murphy and Loriann Hoff Oberlin provide an in-depth look at a topic we've all faced but haven't always recognized: Hidden anger. When people don't express their views and feel compelled to conceal their true beliefs and emotions, behaving in ways that don't match what they honestly think, there can be serious physical and psychological results for everyone involved.

We’ve all had friendships that have gone bad. Whether it takes the form of a simple yet inexplicable estrangement or a devastating betrayal, a failed friendship can make your life miserable, threaten your success at work or school, and even undermine your romantic relationships. Finally there is help. In When Friendship Hurts, Jan Yager, recognized internationally as a leading expert on friendship, explores what causes friendships to falter and explains how to mend them - or end them.

In our default state, our brains constantly get in the way of effective communication. They are lazy, angry, immature, and distracted. They can make a difficult conversation impossible. But Andrew Newberg, M.D., and Mark Waldman have discovered a powerful strategy called Compassionate Communication that allows two brains to work together as one.

Why do some families thrive in adversity while others fragment? How can families weather difficult transitions together? Why do our families so often exasperate us? And how can even small changes greatly improve our relationships? In Every Family Has a Story, bestselling psychotherapist Julia Samuel turns from her acclaimed work with individuals to draw on her sessions with a wide variety of families, across multiple generations. Through eight beautifully told and insightful case studies, she analyzes a range of common issues—and how much can be healed when it is faced together.

Campbell Flynn, art historian, professor, and fêted fixture of the literati, always knew that when his life came crashing down, it would happen in public—yet he never imagined that a single year in London would expose so much. He’s never taken other people half as seriously as they take themselves, which is the first of his mistakes. The second is a new project: opportunistic and precisely calibrated to rake in a fortune.

Learn how to communicate with compassion and choose language that reflects your personal values and aims with this essential guide to Nonviolent Communication (NVC). Judith Hanson Lasater and Ike Lasater, longtime students of yoga and Buddhism, had studied the concepts of satya (truth) and the Buddhist principle of right speech for years, but it was not until they began practicing Marshall Rosenberg’s techniques of NVC that the concept of speech as a spiritual practice became real for them.

Anxiety in relationships can manifest itself in many ways, including social anxiety, panic attacks, depression, negative thinking, jealousy, and attachment issues. If these issues are left untreated, anxiety in relationships can lead to separation or divorce. Welcome to your roadmap to a better relationship!