For over thirty years, Stephen Braude has studied the paranormal in everyday life, from extrasensory perception and psychokinesis to mediumship and materialization. The Gold Leaf Lady and Other Parapsychological Investigations is a highly readable and often amusing account of his most memorable encounters with such phenomena. Here Braude recounts in fascinating detail five particular cases?some that challenge our most fundamental scientific beliefs...

"Traveling with Sugar reframes the rising diabetes epidemic as part of a five-hundred-year-old global history of sweetness and power. Amid eerie injuries, changing bodies, amputated limbs, and untimely deaths, many people across the Caribbean and Central America simply call the affliction "sugar"--Or, as some in Garifuna Belize say, "traveling with sugar." A decade in the making, this book reveals a series of crónicas--a word meaning both slow-moving...

"Mining a broad cross-section of diverse folklore journals and books that demonstrates notable legendary monster research and encourages future scholarly monster pursuits. Focusing on ostensibly living creatures strongly tied to specific geographic areas, the volume offers nineteen folkloristic case studies from the last half-century of specific monsters in native habitats"--

Henry Petroski (1942–2023) was the Aleksandar S. Vesic Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Civil Engineering at Duke University. His many books include To Engineer Is Human, The Evolution of Useful Things, The Pencil, and The Toothpick. From the acclaimed author and engineer, an engaging and lively account of the surprising secret of great design Design pervades our lives. Everything from drafting a PowerPoint presentation to planning a state-of-the-art...

"Why do leaders sometimes get it so wrong when making major policy decisions despite all the resources in terms of expertise and experience they can call on? We debate debacles such as the American involvement in Vietnam, seeking to understand why leaders pursued disastrous policies. In Prisoners of their Premises George Edwards argues that the failure of leaders to examine their premises, the assumptions they make about the world and situation they...

"This study is the first to systematically assemble an original dataset of all American regime change operations during the Cold War. The United States attempted more than 10 times more covert than overt regime changes. The author asks three questions: What motivates states to attempt foreign regime changes? Why do states prefer to conduct these operations covertly, as opposed to overtly? How successful are these missions in achieving their foreign...

On February 25, 1938, in the early days of the welfare system, the reviled poormaster Harry Barck—wielding power over who would receive public aid—died from a paper spike thrust into his heart. Barck was murdered, the prosecution would assert, by an unemployed mason named Joe Scutellaro. In denying Scutellaro money, Barck had suggested the man's wife prostitute herself on the streets rather than ask the city of Hoboken, New Jersey, for aid.

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"An account of the unsolved murder of two women in Shenandoah National Park, by a journalist with unprecedented access to all key elements of the case, and a story that reveals the challenges of wilderness forensics and the failures of our justice system"--

It is comfortable to believe that incest and child sexual abuse need not concern us because we have institutions to deal with these problems. This book disallows that complacency and shows that the systems has failed, and worse - that it has generated a dangerous atmosphere of denial and cover-up. Focusing on five case studies, Rosen and Etlin expose a systemic breakdown so fundamental, so irrational, and so shocking that the necessity of radical...