Social Memory

In 1982, at the height of Guatemala’s civil war, 20 soldiers from the army’s commando unit, called the Kaibiles, invaded the farming village of Dos Erres. Masquerading as leftist guerillas, the squad members cut their way through the small town, killing more than 250 men, women, and children. Only a handful of people survived. One of them, a young boy, was adopted by Kaibil lieutenant Ramrez and raised by Ramrez’s family, who named him Oscar. Just three years old at the time of the massacre, Oscar grew up unaware of his true origins. It wasn’t until almost 30 years later, living in the suburbs of Boston with a family of his own, that Oscar would learn the truth.

Despite decades of research, remarkable imagery, and insights from a range of scientific and medical disciplines, the human brain remains largely unexplored. Consciousness has eluded explanation. Nineteen Ways of Looking at Consciousness offers a brilliant overview of the state of modern consciousness research in twenty brief, revealing chapters.

During the 19th and early 20th centuries, whaling vessels plied their trade in the waters off the Eastern Arctic of North America. This trade has, until now, been documented solely from the perspective of the whalers. Here, finally, is a rich view from from the perspective of the Inuit, who welcomed the whalers and served on their crews.

On March 11, 2003, in Brownsville, Texas - one of America's poorest cities - John Allen Rubio and Angela Camacho murdered their three young children. The apartment building in which the brutal crimes took place was already run down, and in their aftermath a consensus developed in the community that it should be destroyed. It was a place, neighbors felt, that was plagued by spiritual cancer.

Leah Carroll's mother, a gifted amateur photographer, was murdered by two drug dealers with Mafia connections when Leah was four years old. Her father, a charming alcoholic who hurtled between depression and mania, was dead by the time she was 18. Why did her mother have to die? Why did the man who killed her receive such a light sentence? What darkness did Leah inherit from her parents? Leah was left to put together her own future, and now in her memoir she explores the mystery of her parents' lives through interviews and police records.

Twelve-year-old Daniel, the new kid in town, soon learns the truth about his nice - but odd - new friends: one can fly, another can turn invisible, yet another controls electricity. Incredible. The superkids use their powers to secretly do good in the town, but they’re haunted by the fact that the moment they turn thirteen, their abilities will disappear - along with any memory that they ever had them. Is a memory-stealing supervillain sapping their powers?

Welcome to this game-changing guide: "Men with Adult ADHD" - your personal roadmap to unlocking hidden potential and achieving greatness. It provides practical, actionable strategies tailored specifically for men like you. Say goodbye to the days of feeling overwhelmed and hello to a world where your ADHD becomes your secret weapon. Soon you'll learn how to work with your unique brain wiring, not against it, channeling your boundless energy into remarkable achievements that will leave others in awe.

How is it possible to have vivid memories of something that never happened? How can siblings remember the same event from their childhoods so differently? Do the selections and distortions of memory reveal a truth about the self? Why are certain memories tied to specific places? Does your memory really get worse as you get older? A new consensus is emerging among cognitive scientists: Rather than possessing fixed, unchanging memories, we create recollections anew each time we are called upon to remember.

The Unreality of Memory collects provocative, searching essays on disaster culture, climate anxiety, and our mounting collective sense of doom. In this new collection, acclaimed poet and essayist Elisa Gabbert explores our obsessions with disasters past and future, from the sinking of the Titanic to Chernobyl, from witch hunts to the plague. These deeply researched, prophetic meditations question how the world will end - if indeed it will - and why we can't stop fantasizing about it.

Becoming Los Angeles, a new collection by the author of the acclaimed memoir Holy Land, blends history, memory, and critical analysis to illuminate how Angelenos have seen themselves and their city. Waldie’s particular concern is commonplace Los Angeles, whose rhythms of daily life are set against the gaudy backdrop of historical myth and Hollywood illusion. It’s through sacred ordinariness that Waldie experiences the city’s seasons.

The Key to Study Skills is a guide for simple strategies to double your reading, memory, and focus. Produced by the creators of the number-one best-selling course "Become a SuperLearner" and a book with the same name, it includes everything you need to read 1000 words per minute and retain almost everything. This speed would let you read Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone in just 77 minutes. The Bible would still take 13 hours....

Many believe that people are just born with the ability to think critically, but that's not true! Critical thinking is a skill that anyone can learn how to do and how to build upon in order to make themselves master critical thinkers. Those who are in college, in careers where they have to make decisions on a regular basis, or would just like to know how they can become better learners should take a listen to this book.

Richard J. Evans shows us how historians manage to extract meaning from the recalcitrant past. To materials that are frustratingly meager, or overwhelmingly profuse, they bring an array of tools that range from agreed-upon rules of documentation to the critical application of social and economic theory, all employed with the aim of reconstructing a verifiable, usable past. Evans defends this commitment to historical knowledge from the attacks of postmodernist critics who deny the possibility of achieving any kind of certain knowledge about the past.

In the wake of white nationalist attacks, the ongoing debate over reparations, and the controversy surrounding Confederate monuments and the contested memories they evoke, Susan Neiman's Learning from the Germans delivers an urgently needed perspective on how a country can come to terms with its historical wrongdoings. Neiman is a white woman who came of age in the civil rights-era South and a Jewish woman who has spent much of her adult life in Berlin.

Do you wish you could read faster? For decades, many people have turned to speed reading to become faster and more efficient readers. This is a new century and speed reading has progressed, assisted by technology and new ways of looking at how reading occurs and memory works.

Brain science and cognitive psychology is one of the most versatile psychological specialty areas today - and one of the most in demand. So whether it be for study and research purposes or for self development, this is the perfect book for you!

In the early 1990s, North America was the vibrant center of an increasingly democratic and revitalized western hemisphere. The United States and Canada were close allies working together to implement a bilateral free trade agreement and build an integrated manufacturing and export economy. By the late 2000s, the economic and diplomatic ties between the two countries were strained as policies stagnated or slipped backward and passports were needed to cross the border for the first time in history.

Upon becoming a new mother, Vanessa Angélica Villarreal was called to Mexico to reconnect with her ancestors and recover her grandmother’s story, only to return to the sudden loss of her marriage, home, and reality. In Magical/Realism, Villarreal crosses into the erasure of memory and self, fragmented by migration, borders, and colonial and intimate violence, reconstructing her story with pieces of American pop culture, and the music, video games, and fantasy that have helped her make sense of it all.

We live in a culture that prizes memory - how much we can store, the quality of what’s preserved, how we might better document and retain the moments of our life while fighting off the nightmare of losing all that we have experienced. But what if forgetfulness were seen not as something to fear - be it in the form of illness or simple absentmindedness - but rather as a blessing, a balm, a path to peace and forgiveness?

Think like Leonardo da Vinci, Albert Einstein, and Charles Darwin. Great geniuses before us have uncovered certain key principles on their path to greatness. You can learn those principles now, without all of the sweat, tears, and costly mistakes. Imagine that you could tap into the minds of many great geniuses. Think how they could help you solve challenging problems, broaden your mental horizons, and avoid common pitfalls. They actually can, if we study the principles that they lived by, and incorporate them into our lives.