Exploring Top Books of Shelfari

14.5 Million copies sold to date The classic, startling, and perennially bestselling portrait of human nature-now available as a Premium Edition with a stunning new cover and re-set, easy-to-read text.

Blindness

by Jose Saramago

A city is hit by an epidemic of "white blindness" which spares no one. Authorities confine the blind to an empty mental hospital, but there the criminal element holds everyone captive, stealing food rations and raping women. There is one eyewitness to this nightmare who guides seven strangers-among them a boy with no mother, a girl with dark glasses, a dog of tears-through the barren streets, and the procession... (more)

Heart of Darkness

by Joseph Conrad

Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness was first published in 1899 in serial form in London’s Blackwood’s Magazine. Loosely based on Conrad’s firsthand experience of rescuing a company agent from a remote station in the heart of the Congo, the novel is considered a literary bridge between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. With its modern literary approach to questions such as the ambiguous nature of good and... (more)

The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal

The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal

by Jared Diamond

The Development of an Extraordinary Species We human beings share 98 percent of our genes with chimpanzees. Yet humans are the dominant species on the planet -- having founded civilizations and religions, developed intricate and diverse forms of communication, learned science, built cities, and created breathtaking works of art -- while chimps remain animals concerned primarily with the basic necessities of... (more)

Is a loved one missing some body parts? Are blondes becoming extinct? Is everyone at your dinner table of the same species? Humans and chimpanzees differ in only 400 genes; is that why a chimp fetus resembles a human being? And should that worry us? There's a new genetic cure for drug addiction—is it worse than the disease? We live in a time of momentous scientific leaps, a time when it's possible to sell our... (more)

The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature

The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature

by Matt Ridley

Referring to Lewis Carroll's Red Queen from Through the Looking-Glass , a character who has to keep running to stay in the same place, Matt Ridley demonstrates why sex is humanity's best strategy for outwitting its constantly mutating internal predators. The Red Queen answers dozens of other riddles of human nature and culture -- including why men propose marriage, the method behind our maddening notions of... (more)

The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature

The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature

by Steven Pinker

In The Blank Slate , Steven Pinker, one of the world's leading experts on language and the mind, explores the idea of human nature and its moral, emotional, and political colorings. With characteristic wit, lucidity, and insight, Pinker argues that the dogma that the mind has no innate traits-a doctrine held by many intellectuals during the past century-denies our common humanity and our individual preferences,... (more)

Heart of Darkness and The Secret Sharer by Joseph Conrad

Heart of Darkness and The Secret Sharer by Joseph Conrad

by Joseph Conrad

Two of Conrad’s BEST-KNOWN works—in a single volume In this pair of literary voyages into the inner self, Joseph Conrad has written two of the most chilling, disturbing, and noteworthy pieces of fiction of the twentieth century.

Death With Interruptions

by Jose Saramago

On the first day of the new year, no one dies. This of course causes consternation among politicians, religious leaders, morticians, and doctors. Among the general public, on the other hand, there is initially celebration—flags are hung out on balconies, people dance in the streets. They have achieved the great goal of humanity: eternal life. Then reality hits home—families are left to care for the permanently... (more)

The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil

The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil

by Philip G. Zimbardo

What makes good people do bad things? How can moral people be seduced to act immorally? Where is the line separating good from evil, and who is in danger of crossing it? Renowned social psychologist Philip Zimbardo has the answers, and in The Lucifer Effect he explains how–and the myriad reasons why–we are all susceptible to the lure of “the dark side.” Drawing on examples from history as well as his own... (more)

Civilization and Its Discontents

by Sigmund Freud

During the summer of 1929, Freud worked on what became this seminal volume of twentieth-century thought. It stands as a brilliant summary of the views on culture from a psychoanalytic perspective that he had been developing since the turn of the century. It is both witness and tribute to the late theory of mind—the so-called structural theory, with its stress on aggression, indeed the death drive, as the... (more)

Leviathan

or, The Matter, Forme and Power of a Commonwealth, Ecclesiasticall and Civil

by Thomas Hobbes

A cornerstone of modern western philosophy, addressing the role of man in government, society and religion In 1651, Hobbes published his work about the relationship between the government and the individual. More than four centuries old, this brilliant yet ruthless book analyzes not only the bases of government but also physical nature and the roles of man. Comparable to Plato's Republic in depth and insight, ... (more)

A Clockwork Orange

by Anthony Burgess

"Anthony Burgess reads chapters of his novel A Clockwork Orange with hair-raising drive and energy. Although it is a fantasy set in an Orwellian future, this is anything but a bedtime story." -The New York Times Told by the central character, Alex, this brilliant, hilarious, and disturbing novel creates an alarming futuristic vision of violence, high technology, and authoritarianism.Anthony Burgess' 1963... (more)

Half Human

by Bruce Coville

A girl is born with the fire of dragon blood in her veins and another longs for the feel of water against her skin. A scarecrow wonders at the world around him and a fallen angel tries to reclaim her family's soul.These are the stories about the people who are not wholly human and the animals that are not purely animal--beings that stand between the two worlds feeling the emotions, thrills, and confusions of both.... (more)

A Leader Becomes a Leader: Inspirational Stories of Leadership for a New Generation

A Leader Becomes a Leader: Inspirational Stories of Leadership for a New Generation

by J. Kevin Sheehan

A Leader Becomes a Leader opens with a window on history: Henry David Thoreau riding a borrowed horse and wagon into the woods around Concord, Massachusetts to Walden Pond in 1845. There, he writes a classic work that has a powerful effect on the lives and philosophies of seminal leaders in the next century as diverse as Mohandas Gandhi, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Nelson Mandela. Thoreau believed that a... (more)

The Last Man

by Mary Shelley

A futuristic story of tragic love and of the gradual extermination of the human race by plague, The Last Man is Mary Shelley's most important novel after Frankenstein. With intriguing portraits of Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron, the novel offers a vision of the future that expresses a reaction against Romanticism, and demonstrates the failure of the imagination and of art to redeem the doomed characters.

Birdwing

by Rafe Martin

Once upon a time, a girl rescued her seven brothers from a spell that had turned them into swans. But one boy, Ardwin, was left with the scar of the spell's last gasp: one arm remained a wing. And while Ardwin yearned to find a place in his father's kingdom, the wing whispered to him of open sky and rushing wind. Marked by difference, Ardwin sets out to discover who he is: bird or boy, crippled or sound, ... (more)

Mahashweta

by Sudha Murty

Ensaio Sobre a CegueiraJose Saramago

Ensaio Sobre a Cegueira

by Jose Saramago

Passive Aggressive Notes: Painfully Polite and Hilariously Hostile Writings

Passive Aggressive Notes: Painfully Polite and Hilariously Hostile Writings

by Kerry Miller

Book Description Part voyeuristic entertainment, part group therapy, Passive Aggressive Notes offers a fascinating look at the all-too-familiar frustrations of embattled office drones, apartment dwellers, parents, and pet owners everywhere. This curated collection combines dozens of outrageous, never-before-seen notes as well as favorites from Passiveaggressivenotes.com a 2008 Webby Award Winner and the... (more)

Shelfari Book Activity

Tags: human nature

by William Golding

by Jose Saramago

by Joseph Conrad

by Jared Diamond

by Michael Crichton

by Matt Ridley

by Steven Pinker

by Joseph Conrad

by Jose Saramago

by Philip G. Zimbardo

by Sigmund Freud

or, The Matter, Forme and Power of a Commonwealth, Ecclesiasticall and Civil

by Thomas Hobbes

by Anthony Burgess

by Bruce Coville

by J. Kevin Sheehan

by Mary Shelley

by Rafe Martin

by Sudha Murty

by Jose Saramago

by Kerry Miller