Social Power

Now from Peter Funk, the Reader's Digest word columnist and the best-selling author of Word Power, comes Upsize Your Word Power, teaching you the fastest and easiest way to expand your vocabulary: The use of synonyms. Synonyms are a sound and often overlooked way to build vocabulary. With synonyms, you can express almost any shade of feeling or describe almost anything in minute detail. Through the powerful and underutilized vocabulary tool of synonyms, you too can upsize your word power.

A leading authority on sheriffs in America investigates the impunity with which sheriffs police their communities, alongside the troubling role they play in American life, law enforcement, and, increasingly, national politics.

Aria Blue seems like an ordinary 12-year-old. She loves music, and colorful shoelaces, and taste-testing various types of cookies. But there is much more to Aria than meets the eye. She can use her shadow like a door to travel from place to place. She can dream things into existence. And she can see when certain people need help. Because Aria is a guardian angel. Her mission? To find and guide three different girls - Gabby, Caroline, and Mikayla - through their different problems. If she succeeds, Aria will earn her wings.

American life today is consumed by politics. Even our churches are tearing themselves apart over political candidates, cultural flashpoints, and debates about whether certain pastors are vessels for the Holy Spirit or an unholy political agenda. So how should Christians approach our lives in this time of strife and division? How should we engage in politics and respond when we find that our beliefs are at odds with the culture? And how do we keep our focus on eternity when the present attractions of the world are there in front of us at every turn?

For thousands of years, women have been taught to be “good” instead of powerful. But when we embody the good girl, we hold back their voices and gifts in a world that desperately needs female perspectives. Drawing on countless coaching sessions and conversations with female leaders, Majo identifies five self-sabotaging tendencies (“the five Good Girl Myths”) every woman must overcome to unleash her power and design a more purposeful life.

In the 16th century, control of colonies and gold bullion gave Spain the edge; 17th-century Netherlands profited from trade and finance; 18th-century France gained from its larger population, while 19th-century British power rested on its primacy in the Industrial Revolution and its navy. In the era of Kennedy and Khrushchev, power resources were measured in terms of nuclear missiles, industrial capacity, and numbers of men under arms and tanks lined up ready to cross the plains of Eastern Europe. But the global information age of the 21st century is quickly rendering these traditional markers of power obsolete, remapping power relationships

As Jamie Holmes shows in Nonsense, being confused is unpleasant, so we tend to shutter our minds as we grasp for meaning and stability, especially in stressful circumstances. We’re hard-wired to resolve contradictions quickly and extinguish anomalies. This can be useful, of course. When a tiger is chasing you, you can’t be indecisive. But as Nonsense reveals, our need for closure has its own dangers. It makes us stick to our first answer, which is not always the best, and it makes us search for meaning in the wrong places.

The Princess in Black is in a very stinky situation. A foul cloud is plaguing the goat pasture, and it smells worse than a pile of dirty diapers or a trash can on a hot summer day. But every time the Princess in Black and her friend, the Goat Avenger, manage to get rid of the odor, they accidentally blow it to another kingdom! Other masked heroes and their trusty companions show up to help, but how do you battle a stench when your ninja moves fail? Fans with a nose for slapstick will be tickled to see the six stalwart friends join their wits to take on an impossibly beastly stink.

Since the 1970s, an important new figure has appeared on the center stage of American evangelicalism - the celebrity preacher's wife. Although most evangelical traditions bar women from ordained ministry, many women have carved out unofficial positions of power in their husbands' spiritual empires or their own ministries. The biggest stars - such as Beth Moore, Joyce Meyer, and Victoria Osteen - write best-selling books, grab high ratings on Christian television, and even preach.

Want to know how to read the personality of anyone in 60 seconds or less to create pain free communication? You will now have the power to do just that! Anything from getting that promotion at work to creating harmony at home is all within your reach! Learn the easy tips and tricks to having it all by understanding how we are each different and what pushes the "action" buttons in other people. Success can be yours and it isn't even hard. Take control of your relationships now and for good. Unleash the power of personality profiling using the DISC Personality Assessment System.

In Spying on Democracy, National Lawyers Guild executive director Heidi Boghosian documents the disturbing increase in surveillance of ordinary citizens and the danger it poses to our privacy, our civil liberties, and the future of democracy itself. Boghosian reveals how technology is being used to categorize and monitor people based on their associations, their movements, their purchases, and their perceived political beliefs.

It’s not your imagination: We’re living in a time of moral decline. Publicly, we’re bombarded with reports of government leaders acting against the welfare of their constituents; companies prioritizing profits over health, safety, and our best interests; and technology posing risks to society with few or no repercussions for those responsible. Personally, we may be conflicted about how much privacy to afford our children on the internet; how to make informed choices about our purchases and the companies we buy from; or how to handle misconduct we witness at home and at work.

The unprecedented access to other humans that technology provides has ironically freed us from engaging with them. According to social psychologist Adam Waytz, our increasingly human-free lives come with a serious cost that we’ve already begun to pay: the loss of our humanity. Humans have superpowers. More than any other psychological stimulus, our presence can make experiences feel significant, inspire moral behavior, and encourage action. The Power of Human shows us how to rehumanize and harness these unique abilities to improve our lives, beginning with our jobs.

Trump Revealed offers the most thorough and wide-ranging examination of Donald Trump's public and private lives to date, from his upbringing in Queens and formative years at the New York Military Academy to his turbulent careers in real estate and entertainment to his astonishing rise as the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination. The book is based on the investigative reporting of more than two dozen Washington Post reporters and researchers.

The sacred word and its power to illuminate and transform our lives lie at the core of the Judeo-Christian, Buddhist, Sufi, and Islamic traditions. By drawing on stories from his own experience and from the lives of the sages, Pandit Tigunait makes this esoteric science accessible to a 21st century audience. He explains what a mantra is, why various classes of mantras bring different results, and how to use the power inherent in a meditative mantra to awaken inner peace and fuel spiritual enfoldment.

In America, we teach that strength means holding back tears and shaming your own feelings. In the Black community, these pressures are especially poignant. Poor mental health outcomes-- including diagnoses of depression and anxiety, reliance on prescription drugs, and suicide–have skyrocketed in the past decade. In this book, actor Courtney B. Vance seeks to change this trajectory. Along with professional expertise from famed psychologist Dr. Robin L. Smith, Courtney B. Vance explores issues of grief, relationships, identity, and race through the telling of his own most formative experiences

How do we find fulfillment in a world that’s obsessed with fast results and immediate gratification? How do we find fulfillment in a cultural ethos that seems to be on a constant hunt for a form of happiness that seldom contributes to the lasting life-satisfaction? But wait a sec - isn’t happiness the goal? Isn’t happiness what all of us are after? As it turns out, the answer is no. And in this FlashBooks summary on The Power of Meaning by Emily Esfahani Smith, you’ll find out why that is and what to do about it.

Since Obama took office, conservative pundits have been mainstays on the best-seller list. And now, the best-selling author and political legend Pat Buchanan weighs in with a warning against not only the dangers that the country faces under Obama, but the risk of sliding into irrelevancy that the Republican party faces if it chooses to forget its core values. As he shows in this incisive book, liberal policy-making and unhindered globalization have eroded America’s economic strength.

American society has always been fertile ground for conspiracy theories, but with the election of Donald Trump, previously outlandish ideas suddenly attained legitimacy. Trump himself is a conspiracy enthusiast: from his claim that global warming is a Chinese hoax to the accusations of “fake news”, he has fanned the flames of suspicion. But it was not by the power of one man alone that these ideas gained new power. Republic of Lies looks beyond the caricatures of conspiracy theorists to explain their tenacity.

In this exciting new audio, Peter L. Bernstein tells the story of history's most coveted, celebrated, and inglorious asset: gold.