Sex is the most intimately human experience there is. It is can also be the most confusing. Our desire to be together conflicts with our desire to avoid vulnerability and appear 'normal', leaving us detached, desensitised or embarrassed.
Covering topics including adultery, lust, pornography and impotence, Alain de Botton argues that 21st Century sex will always be a balancing act of trust versus risk, and of primal desire versus studied civility. By examining sex from a subjective - rather than scientific - perspective, he uncovers new ideas on how we can achieve that balance.
Pulling back the sheets on modern sexuality, How To Think About Sex offers important and surprising wisdom that proves that being good in bed is really all in your head.
Our relationship with money is one that lasts a lifetime. It can be as important as family life, as competitive as work, and as exciting and secretive as love. Yet books about money tend to take one of two routes: a) how to get more, or b) how to deal with less.
This book turns these questions upside down, and looks not at money itself, but at the way we view it. How does money drive us? How does it frighten us? And how can it help us make sense of who we are?
Money is too important a part of life for us not to worry about, but by approaching it differently, we can change the way we perceive its worth. With surprising and enlightening new insights, How to Worry Less About Money will help you realise what material wealth really means.
There is no simple set of instructions that can guarantee sanity, but if you want to overcome emotional difficulties and become happier, psychotherapist Philippa Perry argues that there are four cornerstones to sanity you can influence to bring about change. By developing your self-observation skills, examining how you relate to others, breaking out of your comfort zone and exploring new ways of defining yourself, she suggests ways of finding emotional equilibrium.
Through case studies, practical exercises and stories of individual experience, this insightful and inspirational book reaches out to anyone in need of a little emotional support from time to time.
This is a book about how to take working life in new directions - how to negotiate the labyrinth of choices, how to think about personal ambitions and motivations, and ultimately how to take concrete steps to finding a fulfilling career. It is a self-help book with a difference. Standard career guides are filled with pop psychology and bullet-point advice for writing CVs and making action plans, but How to Find Fulfilling Work casts its net wider. While not ignoring the insights of psychology or the need for practical planning, it reveals wisdom about work found in sociology, history, literature, film and philosophy.
It may be a false illusion that there is some perfect dream job out there for us, an ideal calling or vocation. But this book is premised on the idea that it is possible to find work that is life-enhancing. This is a book that inspires as much as it instructs and will aid self-reflection about the wider quest of how to live a good life.
Over the last decade, through digital media, we have crossed a number of significant thresholds: the interconnection of over half of the world's adult population through mobile telephony and the internet and the devotion of more than half the waking hours of a western generation to mediated experience.
Yet little mainstream thought has been given to what these transitions signify for the business of daily living; and what thought there has been too often focuses on grand claims of loss or gain.
This book asks what it means not simply to live within a digital century, but to live well with it and within it. Unlike most other contemporary accounts, it is neither a tale of technology doom nor glory, but a pragmatic guide to what questions we need to ask of the world around us; what it might mean to answer these; and what practical steps might allow us all both to choose and to use the tools at our disposal, and to live within a digital century in as fully human a sense as possible.
How To Change The World combines insights from Tolstoy, Gandhi and Sartre and outlines a refreshing theory of political power, giving examples of successful non-violent action from across the world, from the start of recorded history to the present day. The book shows how careful planning by non-violent activists overthrew the feared dictator Slobodan Milosevic and reveals that, contrary to widespread belief, a great deal was done in Germany to curb Hitler's regime. If more people had done more - the book argues - perhaps the regime's worst excesses might have been prevented altogether.
Of course, we don't all need to topple dictators, but any attempt to change the status quo requires us to overcome inertia, indifference and perhaps active hostility from people who feel threatened. How To Change The World shows that we can break down our goals into small pieces, and that there will never be a better time to start.
