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Millions of people have a queasy feeling that something is not right in the global economy - but they struggle to put their fingers on what exactly the problem is. Treasure Islands at last tells the real story of where it all went wrong. This is the great untold story of globalisation. Tax havens are not exotic, murky sideshows at the fringes of the world economy: they lie at its centre. Half of world trade flows, at least on paper, through tax havens. Every multinational corporation uses them routinely. The biggest users of tax havens by far are not terrorists, spivs, celebrities or Mafiosi - but banks. Tax havens are the ultimate source of strength for our global elites. Just as European nobles once consolidated their unaccountable powers in fortified castles, to better subjugate and extract tribute from the surrounding peasantry, so financial capital has coalesced in their modern equivalent today: the tax havens. In these fortified nodes of secret, unaccountable political and economic power, financial and criminal interests have come together to capture local political systems and turn the havens into their own private law-making factories, protected against outside interference by the world's most powerful countries - most especially Britain. Treasure Islands will, for the first time, show the blood and guts of just how they do it. Tax havens aren't just about tax. They are about escape - escape from criminal laws, escape from creditors, escape from tax, escape from prudent financial regulation - above all, escape from democratic scrutiny and accountability. Tax havens get rich by taking fees for providing these escape routes. This is their core line of business. It is what they do. These escape routes transform the merely powerful into the untouchable. "Don't tax or regulate us or we will flee offshore!" the financiers cry, and elected politicians around the world crawl on their bellies and capitulate. And so tax havens lead a global race to

* Explores the lifestyle of indigenous peoples of the world who exist in complete harmony with the natural world and with each other.* Reveals a model of a society built on trust, patience, and joy rather than anxiety, hurry, and acquisition.* Shows how we can reconnect with the ancient intuitive awareness of the world's original people. Deep in the mountainous jungle of Malaysia the aboriginal Sng'oi exist on the edge of extinction, though their way of living may ultimately be the kind of existence that will allow us all to survive. The Sng'oi - pre-industrial, pre-agricultural, semi-nomadic - live without cars or cell phones, without clocks or schedules in a lush green place where worry and hurry, competition and suspicion are not known. Yet these indigenous people - as do many other aboriginal groups - possess an acute and uncanny sense of the energies, emotions, and intentions of their place and the living beings who populate it, and trustingly follow this intuition, using it to make decisions about their actions each day. Psychologist Robert Wolff  lived with the Sng'oi, learned their language, shared their food, slept in their huts, and came to love and admire these people who respect silence, trust time to reveal and heal, and live entirely in the present with a sense of  joy. Even more, he came to recognize the depth of our alienation from these basic qualities of life. Much more than a document of a disappearing people, Original Wisdom: Stories of an Ancient Way of Knowing holds a mirror to our own existence, allowing us to see how far we have wandered from the ways of the intuitive and trusting Sng'oi, and challenges us, in our fragmented world, to rediscover this humanity within ourselves.

Tamarisk Row is the story of a young boy growing up in Australia. He is a solitary-type and prefers to immerse himself in an imaginary world rather than mingle with kids his own age. His father is a compulsive gambler and because of this the world of horse racing becomes central to the boy's fantasies which feature a complex web of images involving calendars, colours, grasslands, creeks and rivers, Catholic rituals, priests' houses, horse races and racking skills, marbles, stones, freckles, books and libraries, and tunnels and secret places, that have all been used repeatedly and with remarkable consistency by Murnane in his subsequent fiction. It has been called "one of the very best books about childhood and the world as the child finds it."

Short of money, the inventor Thomas Edison is captivated by the charismatic figure of J.P. Morgan, the world's greatest banker. Accepting Morgan's glittering offer of almost unlimited cash in return for helping the man change the way the world does business, Edison sees himself descend from being the godlike inventor of electric light to being complicit in the invention of the electric chair. Ever more enmeshed in Morgan's personal life, he becomes infatuated by a world of privilege and power, where duty and desire, faith and immorality are thrown into conflict, ultimately threatening his own spiritual and creative survival.

So the Wind Won't Blow it All Away is hugely underrated in the Brautigan canon. The narrative is laced with a sense of sadness for a lost way of life, the loss of childhood and the death of the American gothic, something Brautigan blames on television for the way it "crippled the imagination of America and turned people indoors and away from living out their fantasies with dignity". Whereas in earlier works, Brautigan's characters viewed the world with child-like fascination, in this last book he reverses the process by examining a child's world through an adult's sad and diminishing gaze. It's a summation of all that Brautigan had previously achieved but in the harsher, colder climate of the late 20th century.

Women are dying in their millions. Some blame scientists, some see the hand of God, some see human arrogance reaping the punishment it deserves. Jessie Lamb is an ordinary girl living in extraordinary times: as her world collapses, her idealism and courage drive her towards the ultimate act of heroism. If the human race is to survive, it s up to her. But is Jessie heroic? Or is she, as her father fears, impressionable, innocent, incapable of understanding where her actions will lead? Set just a month or two in the future, in a world irreparably altered by an act of biological terrorism, The Testament of Jessie Lamb explores a young woman s determination to make her life count for something, as the certainties of her childhood are ripped apart.

Evoking adventure made possible by the railroad, steamship, and automobile, and before adventure was accelerated beyond recognition by the jet airliner, these 50 National Geographic articles hail from the 1890s to the 1950s. Simon Winchester's introduction rues the haste travel has acquired, while the commentary of editor Jenkins ( Off the Map: Bicycling across Siberia, 1992) introduces the author and the genesis of his or her odyssey. Theodore Roosevelt's postpresidency safari kicks off the geographical organization--Africa, South America, and so forth--and also typifies Jenkins' editorial preferences for the lost worlds of imperialism, still-unexplored regions of earth and sea, and peoples untouched by modernity. Some of Jenkins' selections may be oft-anthologized classics by Roy Chapman Andrews, Richard Byrd, and Edmund Hillary, but most are not frequently reprinted. Collectively, Jenkins' grouping captures imagination-firing details in non-Western settings, such as capture by Mongolian bandits. Suiting the armchair as well as they did as long as a century ago, these articles will be popular indeed. Gilbert Taylor Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

"Rock the Casbah: Rage and Rebellion Across the Islamic World"A book by Robin Wright

Imagine, Michael Chorost proposes, that four police officers on a drug raid are connected mentally in a way that allows them to sense what their colleagues are seeing and feeling. Tony Vittorio, the captain, is in the center room of the three-room drug den. He can sense that his partner Wilson, in the room on his left, is not feeling danger or arousal and thus has encountered no one. But suddenly Vittorio feels a distant thump on his chest. Sarsen, in the room on the right, has been hit with something, possibly a bullet fired from a gun with a silencer. Vittorio glimpses a flickering image of a metallic barrel pointed at Sarsen, who is projecting overwhelming shock and alarm. By deducing how far Sarsen might have gone into the room and where the gunman is likely to be standing, Vittorio fires shots into the wall that will, at the very least, distract the gunman and allow Sarsen to shoot back. Sarsen is saved; the gunman is dead. That scene, from his new book, "World Wide Mind," is an example of what Mr. Chorost sees as "the coming integration of humanity, machines, and the Internet." The prediction is conceptually feasible, he tells us, something that technology does not yet permit but that breaks no known physical laws.

According to Thomas Metzinger, no such things as selves exist in the world: nobody ever had or was a self. All that exists are phenomenal selves, as they appear in conscious experience. The phenomenal self, however, is not a thing but an ongoing process; it is the content of a "transparent self-model." In Being No One, Metzinger, a German philosopher, draws strongly on neuroscientific research to present a representationalist and functional analysis of what a consciously experienced first-person perspective actually is. Building a bridge between the humanities and the empirical sciences of the mind, he develops new conceptual toolkits and metaphors; uses case studies of unusual states of mind such as agnosia, neglect, blindsight, and hallucinations; and offers new sets of multilevel constraints for the concept of consciousness. Metzinger's central question is: How exactly does strong, consciously experienced subjectivity emerge out of objective events in the natural world? His epistemic goal is to determine whether conscious experience, in particular the experience of being someone that results from the emergence of a phenomenal self, can be analyzed on subpersonal levels of description. He also asks if and how our Cartesian intuitions that subjective experiences as such can never be reductively explained are themselves ultimately rooted in the deeper representational structure of our conscious minds.

"Digital Photography - Understanding The Unique World Of Digital Photography by Renee B. Williams", book is now available in eBook and paperback versions: eBook: http://goo.gl/iKD7sS Paperback: http://goo.gl/WkTmSU

The Day We Rode the Rainbow is the first book of an interactive and fun series called The Book Series with a Purpose. Step into this beautifully illustrated story, introducing a world of imagination and immerse yourself into a day … Continue reading →

The Day We Rode the Rainbow is the first book of an interactive and fun series called The Book Series with a Purpose. Step into this beautifully illustrated story, introducing a world of imagination and immerse yourself into a day … Continue reading →

A story about a girl lost in an alternate world or is she in her dream?

A story about a girl lost in an alternate world or is she in her dream?

Reading is alive and well. People around the world responded to our reading survey, and they shared the details of the books they read and how they read them. Here are some of the key findings of the global survey results.

Many people have missed key opportunities in their life because they failed to see the power of now. Many people in the world fail to live in the now because they prefer to be fear of what they do...

Drove House has always loomed large over village life. Boarded-up for years, it is reputed to be brimming with ghosts, and is shunned by the locals - all except Billy, for whom it has been the site of childhood dens and secret adolescent adventures. When the captivating Muriel moves in with her bohemian mother, they sweep out the ghosts and breathe new life into both the house and Billy's quiet rural existence. After an idyllic summer, though, Muriel returns to her life in London, and the newly empty Drove House becomes the backdrop for Billy's struggle to reconcile the vanishing agricultural lifestyle he has inherited with the glimpses of a baffling new way of life Muriel seemed to offer. Charting the conflict between these two competing worlds, Peter Benson's award-winning first novel is at once a lyrical portrait of the landscape of the Somerset Levels and a touching evocation of first love.

WW2 is about to start but life for a young boy in a small town in Albania is still a game. Yet, as the town falls to the Italians, the Greeks, then the Nazis, the boy grows up. Falling in love with unattainable women, seduced by magic and literature and finally forced to flee, his existence changes from marvellous, terrifying and extraordinary into a primitive world where the severed arm of a British airman becomes a talisman and girls vanish-possibly killed by their own fathers. Forging the unexpected and terrible link between childish playfulness and a horrifying political future, Kadare has created a story with a depth and brilliance characteristic of the master story-teller.

There are no reasons for unreasonable things. Following in the footsteps of Samuel Beckett's tramps from 'Waiting for Godot' Milligan and Murphy finally cut the ties to their ma's apron strings and head out into the big bad world. But they are not alone. Someone is looking after then. Someone else is cycling after them. Will they get to see the sea and once they have what then? Scottish author Jim Murdoch's new novel is an existentialist delight.

A collection of fantastic tales by the French writer Marcel Aymé including his most famous story which has been filmed several times. Reminiscent of Borges in many ways he tells tales of men who can pass through solid objects, women who can replicate themselves, about governments who legislate leaps in time or who ration life all presented, in the best magic realism tradition, as the most ordinary things in the world.

In some respects this is just another book about growing up. We all have to do it and none of find it easy. Growing up in a small town in America is bad enough but growing up in one of the most beautiful spots in America probably accentuates how ugly the rest of life can get. In these interlinked short stories we get to see one boy's struggles as he tries to understand the world about him and why he isn't always attracted to the beautiful things in his life.