From a leading expert, a groundbreaking book on the science of play, and its essential role in fueling our happiness and intelligence throughout our lives

We've all seen the happiness on the face of a child while playing in the school yard. Or the blissful abandon of a golden retriever racing across a lawn. This is the joy of play. By definition, play is purposeless, all-consuming, and fun. But as Dr. Stuart Brown illustrates, play is anything but trivial. It is a biological drive as integral...

It was Thomas Jefferson who envisioned the United States as a great 'empire of liberty.' In the first new one-volume history in two decades, David Reynolds takes Jefferson's phrase as a key to the saga of America - helping unlock both its grandeur and its paradoxes. He examines how the anti-empire of 1776 became the greatest superpower the world has seen, how the country that offered liberty and opportunity on a scale unmatched in Europe nevertheless founded its prosperity on the labour of bl...

***The phenomenal international bestseller that inspired the Oscar-nominated film***Enter a vanished and unjust world: Jackson, Mississippi, 1962. Where black maids raise white children, but aren't trusted not to steal the silver . .

. There's Aibileen, raising her seventeenth white child and nursing the hurt caused by her own son's tragic death; Minny, whose cooking is nearly as sassy as her tongue; and white Miss Skeeter, home from College, who wants to know why her beloved maid has disappe...

Is it always wrong to lie? Should there be limits to personal freedom? Can killing sometimes be justified? Is the free market fair? What is the right thing to do? This title invites readers of all ages and political persuasions on a journey of moral reflection, and shows how reasoned debate can illuminate our lives.

After her parents' bitter divorce, young Maisie Farange finds herself turned into a 'little feathered shuttlecock' to be swatted back and forth by her selfish mother, Ida, and her vain father, Beale, who value her only as a means of provoking one another.