Fearing for the safety of her young child's life, a young slave called Roxy swaps her light-skinned baby with that of her master. Her master's child grows up as a slave, while Roxy's child grows up as a white man called "Tom" who becomes cruel and ends up leading a life crime. The book is a cutting indictment of a society based on racial prejudice and slavery brimming with Twain's characteristic wit and irony. Samuel Langhorne Clemens (1835—1910),...

"James Orr--husband, father, reliable employee and all-around model citizen--awakes one morning to find half his face paralyzed. Waiting for the affliction to pass, he stops going to work and wanders his idyllic estate, with its woodland, uniform streets and perfectly manicured lawns. But there are cracks in the veneer. And as his orderly existence begins to unravel, it appears that James himself may not be the man he thought he was. A deeply unsettling...

Can we trust our senses to tell us the truth? Challenging leading scientific theories that claim that our senses report back objective reality, cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman argues that while we should take our perceptions seriously, we should not take them literally. How can it be possible that the world we see is not objective reality? And how can our senses be useful if they are not communicating the truth? Hoffman grapples with these questions...

"Introduces the concept of the tall and short, using repetition of words and short, simple phrases"--Provided by publisher.

"Mei plants a seed and watches it grow. Soon the little plant is up to her toes, then her knees, then her waist. How tall will it get? Engages young children in exploring informal measurement"--

What makes a human society too big? What about a human being? Which alternative energy sources have the best chance of scaling and reducing our dependence on fossil fuels? Why do tall people make more money? What makes a face beautiful? How about a cathedral? How can changing the size of your plates help you lose weight? To answer the most important questions of our age, we must understand size. Neither bacteria nor empires are immune to its laws....

"At once far flung and intimate, a fascinating look at how finding our way make us human. In this compelling narrative, O'Connor seeks out neuroscientists, anthropologists and master navigators to understand how navigation ultimately gave us our humanity. Biologists have been trying to solve the mystery of how organisms have the ability to migrate and orient with such precision--especially since our own adventurous ancestors spread across the world...

Includes stories of people who are able to navigate the world and communicate with others despite losing what many of us consider indispensable senses and faculties: the power of speech, the capacity to recognize faces, the sense of three-dimensional space, the ability to read, and the sense of sight. This book is a testament to the complexity of vision and the brain and to the power of creativity and adaptation, and it provides a whole new perspective...

"Being you is an unprecedented tour of consciousness thanks to new experimental evidence, much of which comes from Seth's own lab. His radical argument is that we do not perceive the world as it objectively is, but rather that we are prediction machines, constantly inventing our world and correcting our mistakes by the microsecond, and that we can now observe the biological mechanisms in the brain that accomplish this process of consciousness."--Provided...