Chemistry's most significant chart, the Periodic Table, and its 118 elements, is laid bare in this lively, accessible and compelling expose. The periodic table, created in the early 1860s by Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev, marked one of the most extraordinary advances in modern chemistry. This basic visual aid helped scientists to gain a deeper understanding of what chemical elements really were and the role they played in everyday life. Here, in the authoritative Elementary, James Russell uses his engaging narrative to explain the elements we now know about. From learning about the creation of the first three elements, hydrogen, lithium and helium, in the big bang, through to oxygen and carbon, which sustain life on earth - along with the many weird and wonderful uses of elements as varied as fluorine, arsenic, krypton and einsteinium - even the most unscientifically minded will be enthralled by this fascinating subject. This is the story of the building blocks of the universe, and the people who identified, isolated and even created them.

Our memories are mysterious things. One moment we might remember a lengthy poem or the exact street address of a restaurant from our childhood. But the next moment we can struggle to recall where we've put our keys down or the name of the person we have just been introduced to. The human mind is not terribly good at remembering abstract data - but we can do it much more successfully if we create associations with more relatable bits of information, such as familiar people, places, colours, poems or jokes. The mnemonics that many of us learned as children are simply a shortcut to help locate information within your memory. For instance, rather than remember that the clockwise order of the points of the compass is North, East, South, West, we remember the mnemonic 'Never Eat Shredded Wheat', and the combination of humour and a visual reference provides an instant cue for our brains. This book is a cornucopia of mnemonics. Amusing as well as informative, it includes well-known examples that you might remember from school, some of which have been in use for centuries, as well as more recent ones and alternatives to the traditional versions. Ranging across history, science, language, numbers, business, art and much, much more, the mnemonics included here provide quick easy access to a vast amount of fascinating and useful information. In addition, there are sections on working out your own methods and systems to augment the existing mnemonics with your own aides-memoire, which can help you with everyday tasks such as avoiding common misspellings, or remembering names, faces and numbers.

From Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People, published in 1936, which has sold over 30 million copies to date, to the mind management programme of Professor Steve Peters' The Chimp Paradox, a concise and insightful guide to seventy of the most influential self-help books ever published An entertaining, accessible companion, for readers of self-help books and sceptics alike. The titles include classics on achieving success, confidence and happiness, mindfulness, how to change your life, self-control, overcoming anxiety and self-esteem issues and stress relief. The chronological arrangement of the titles reveals the intriguing story of how early self-improvement titles were succeeded by increasingly personality-based, materialistic titles and shows how breakout classics often influenced other titles for decades to come. Each book is summarised to convey a brief idea of what it has to offer the interested reader, while a 'Speed Read' for each book delivers a quick sense of what each writer is like to read and a highly compressed summary of the main points of the book in question. This is a work of reference to dip into, that acknowledges that some of the most powerful insights into ourselves can be found in texts that aren't perceived as being 'self-help' books, and that wisdom and consolation can be found in the strangest places.

We all like to think we are pretty smart. New medical advances seem to come along every day; space travel suddenly doesn't seem so difficult; self-driving cars are no longer a thing of the future . but if we were stranded on a desert island tomorrow, most of us wouldn't know how to catch a fish or start a fire, let alone rebuild all that extraordinary technology we now rely on.

The truth is that we're not necessarily more clever than our ancestors, we just have an accumulation of centuries of technological progress on which we can rely. As this book shows, many of the ancients were much more advanced that we realize - indeed there are recent inventions that had actually been discovered centuries earlier and then forgotten. And what about all those modern day devices and machines that rely on ancient inventions such as paper, levers and gears?

From brain surgery in the Stone Age to Chinese whisky from the 7th century BC, to Damascus steel - once the hardest metal in the world, which we no longer know how to make - this insightful book collects together the stories of hundreds of ancient devices, inventions and breakthroughs from around the world and across the centuries, giving us a fascinating glimpse into past eras that were far more technologically advanced than we sometimes realize.

This very readable brief guide examines a wide range of spiritual writing that can be read for enjoyment or inspiration, including some books that come from beyond any religious tradition. While written from within the Christian tradition, and offering introductions to the writings of medieval mystics, Quakers and modern evangelists, both Protestant and Catholic, it also looks at classics of secular spirituality and writings from different religious traditions. Each book is explained to convey a brief idea of what each one has to offer the interested reader, while a 'Speed Read' for each book delivers a quick sense of what each writer is like to read and a highly compressed summary of the main points of the book in question. This is an excellent reference to dip into, but within sections such as Early Christian Classics, Secular Texts, Lives of Inspiration and Alternative Approaches, the books are arranged chronologically, revealing some interesting juxtapositions and connections between them.

The world of business books is a curious place where one can find everyone from great businesspeople like Warren Buffett, Steve Jobs and Elon Musk, to the most spectacular business failures such as Enron and the sub-prime business market. There are geniuses, hard workers, academics and entrepreneurs as well a few charlatans and hucksters. There's even room for Donald Trump. The 70 titles covered were chosen with various parameters in mind: to cover a range of areas of business, from sales and marketing to negotiation, entrepreneurship to investing, leadership to innovation, and from traditional and corporate models of business to start-up manuals and alternative angles on the subject. Obvious bestselling titles such as How to Make Friends and Influence People or 7 Habits of Highly Effective People have been included, but there are also those books of more questionable value often included on recommended lists of business classics, included here by way of warning. The chosen books also cover a wide span of time and acknowledge that some of the most powerful or entertaining insights into business can be found in texts that aren't perceived as being 'business books', for instance The Art of War, Microserfs, Thinking Fast and Slow and The Wealth of Nations. The selection includes a good range of the most recent successes in business publishing with which readers may be less familiar. The titles are arranged chronologically, allowing the reader to dip in, but also casting an intriguing light on how trends in business titles have changed over the years. Among these titles, you will find expert advice, based on solid research (for instance The Effective Executive or Getting to Yes), and inspirational guides to setting up businesses and running them on sound foundations (such as True North, Crucial Conversations, or We) alongside dubious management manuals that take a single flawed idea and stretch it out to the point of absurdity. The hope is that the reader will be inspired to read the best of these titles, ignore the worst of them, and will come away with at least a basic idea of what each has to teach us about business.

Big ideas sometimes come from the strangest places. In this wide ranging introduction, James M Russell takes the fear out of philosophy and selects seventy-six works - from Plato, Descartes and Wittgenstein to Philip K Dick and the Moomins as well as contemporary thinkers such as Peter Singer and John Rawls. Dividing into accessible sections - history, contemplation, happiness, and -isms, Russell gives us the lives as well as the lessons of the great thinkers, including a digest of their key ideas. A perfect antidote to the complex life. The topics and books covered include: Traditional Philosophy: The Republic, Plato; The Confessions, St Augustine; The Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes; On Liberty, John Stuart Mill; Philisophical Investigations, Ludwig Wittgenstein; Critique of Pure Reason, Immanuel Kant. Outsiders: Fear and Trembling, Soren Kierkegaard; Beyond Good and Evil, Frederick Nietzsche; The Outsider, Albert Camus; Doors of Perception, Aldous Huxley. Contemplation as Philosophy: The Prophet, Kahil Gibran; Jonathan Livingston Seagull, Richard Bach; Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig; The Tao of Pooh, Benjamin Hoff. The Continental Tradition: The Prison Notebooks, Antonio Gramsci; The History of Sexuality, Michel Foucault; Symbolic Exchange and Death, Jean Baudrillard. How to Live Your Life: The Art of War, Sun Tzu; Maxims, La Rouchefoucauld; Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Carl Jung; On Sexuality, Sigmund Freud; On Becoming a Person, Carl Rogers. Political and Personal Issues: Das Kapital, Karl Marx; Being and Nothingness, Jean Paul Sartre; Gaia, James Lovelock. Modern Philosophy: A Theory of Justice, John Rawls; Darwin's Dangerous Idea, Daniel Dennett; After the Terror, Ted Honderich.

Each book is summarised to convey a brief idea of what each one has to offer the interested reader, while a 'Speed Read' for each book delivers a quick sense of what each book is like to read and a highly compressed summary of the main points of the book in question. The titles covered include thought-provoking classics on psychology, mindfulness, rationality, the brain, mathematical and economic thought and practical philosophy. The selection includes books about self-improvement as well as historically interesting accounts of how the mind works. Titles included go back as far as the Epictetus classic The Enchiridion and Bertrand Russell's charming The ABC of Relativity, and proceed through classics such as Edward de Bono's Lateral Thinking and into the digital era with titles such as The Shallows and Big Data. The books are arranged chronologically, which draws attention to some of the interesting juxtapositions and connections between them. Some of the titles included are: Freakonomics, by Steven D. Levitt; Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, by Malcolm Gladwell; Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, by Yuval Noah Harari; The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload, by Daniel J. Levitin; The Descent of Man, by Grayson Perry; How the Mind Works, by Steven Pinker; Black Box Thinking: Why Some People Never Learn from Their Mistakes - But Some Do, by Matthew Syed; We Should All Be Feminists, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie; Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, by Jared Diamond; The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb; Man's Search for Meaning, by Viktor E. Frankl; The News: A User's Manual, by Alain de Botton; Mindware: Tools for Smart Thinking, by Richard E. Nisbett; The ABC of Relativity, by Bertrand Russell; The Psychopath Test, by Jon Ronson; The Path: What Chinese Philosophers Can Teach Us About the Good Life, by Michael Puett; A Brief History of Time, by Stephen Hawking; Messy: The Power of Disorder to Transform Our Lives, by Tim Harford; Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think, by Viktor Mayer-Schoenberger; Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, by Michael Lewis; The Survivors Club: The Secrets and Science That Could Save Your Life, by Ben Sherwood; Black Box Thinking, by Matthew Syed; Chaos: Making a New Science, by James Gleick; A Short History of Nearly Everything, by Bill Bryson; The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, by Nicholas Carr; Making Ideas Happen: Overcoming the Obstacles Between Vision and Reality, by Scott Belsky; The Enchiridion, by Epictetus; Goedel, Escher, Bach, by Douglas R. Hofstadter; What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, by Haruki Murakami; and Lateral Thinking, by Edward de Bono.

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