James M. Russell – författare

This very readable brief guide examines a wide range of spiritual writing that can be read for enjoyment or inspiration, including some books that come from beyond any religious tradition. While written from within the Christian tradition, and offering introductions to the writings of medieval mystics, Quakers and modern evangelists, both Protestant and Catholic, it also looks at classics of secular spirituality and writings from different religious traditions.Each book is explained to convey a brief idea of what each one has to offer the interested reader, while a ''Speed Read'' for each book delivers a quick sense of what each writer is like to read and a highly compressed summary of the main points of the book in question.This is an excellent reference to dip into, but within sections such as Early Christian Classics, Secular Texts, Lives of Inspiration and Alternative Approaches, the books are arranged chronologically, revealing some interesting juxtapositions and connections between them.

The world of business books is a curious place where one can find everyone from great businesspeople like Warren Buffett, Steve Jobs and Elon Musk, to the most spectacular business failures such as Enron and the sub-prime business market. There are geniuses, hard workers, academics and entrepreneurs as well a few charlatans and hucksters. There''s even room for Donald Trump. The 70 titles covered were chosen with various parameters in mind: to cover a range of areas of business, from sales and marketing to negotiation, entrepreneurship to investing, leadership to innovation, and from traditional and corporate models of business to start-up manuals and alternative angles on the subject. Obvious bestselling titles such as How to Make Friends and Influence People or 7 Habits of Highly Effective People have been included, but there are also those books of more questionable value often included on recommended lists of business classics, included here by way of warning. The chosen books also cover a wide span of time and acknowledge that some of the most powerful or entertaining insights into business can be found in texts that aren''t perceived as being ''business books'', for instance The Art of War, Microserfs, Thinking Fast and Slow and The Wealth of Nations. The selection includes a good range of the most recent successes in business publishing with which readers may be less familiar. The titles are arranged chronologically, allowing the reader to dip in, but also casting an intriguing light on how trends in business titles have changed over the years. Among these titles, you will find expert advice, based on solid research (for instance The Effective Executive or Getting to Yes), and inspirational guides to setting up businesses and running them on sound foundations (such as True North, Crucial Conversations, or We) alongside dubious management manuals that take a single flawed idea and stretch it out to the point of absurdity. The hope is that the reader will be inspired to read the best of these titles, ignore the worst of them, and will come away with at least a basic idea of what each has to teach us about business.

From Dale Carnegie''s How to Win Friends and Influence People, published in 1936, which has sold over 30 million copies to date, to the mind management programme of Professor Steve Peters'' The Chimp Paradox, a concise and insightful guide to seventy of the most influential self-help books ever published An entertaining, accessible companion, for readers of self-help books and sceptics alike. The titles include classics on achieving success, confidence and happiness, mindfulness, how to change your life, self-control, overcoming anxiety and self-esteem issues and stress relief. The chronological arrangement of the titles reveals the intriguing story of how early self-improvement titles were succeeded by increasingly personality-based, materialistic titles and shows how breakout classics often influenced other titles for decades to come. Each book is summarised to convey a brief idea of what it has to offer the interested reader, while a ''Speed Read'' for each book delivers a quick sense of what each writer is like to read and a highly compressed summary of the main points of the book in question. This is a work of reference to dip into, that acknowledges that some of the most powerful insights into ourselves can be found in texts that aren''t perceived as being ''self-help'' books, and that wisdom and consolation can be found in the strangest places.

Each book is summarised to convey a brief idea of what each one has to offer the interested reader, while a ''Speed Read'' for each book delivers a quick sense of what each book is like to read and a highly compressed summary of the main points of the book in question. The titles covered include thought-provoking classics on psychology, mindfulness, rationality, the brain, mathematical and economic thought and practical philosophy. The selection includes books about self-improvement as well as historically interesting accounts of how the mind works. Titles included go back as far as the Epictetus classic The Enchiridion and Bertrand Russell''s charming The ABC of Relativity, and proceed through classics such as Edward de Bono''s Lateral Thinking and into the digital era with titles such as The Shallows and Big Data. The books are arranged chronologically, which draws attention to some of the interesting juxtapositions and connections between them. Some of the titles included are: Freakonomics, by Steven D. Levitt; Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, by Malcolm Gladwell; Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, by Yuval Noah Harari; The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload, by Daniel J. Levitin; The Descent of Man, by Grayson Perry; How the Mind Works, by Steven Pinker; Black Box Thinking: Why Some People Never Learn from Their Mistakes - But Some Do, by Matthew Syed; We Should All Be Feminists, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie; Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, by Jared Diamond; The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb; Man''s Search for Meaning, by Viktor E. Frankl; The News: A User''s Manual, by Alain de Botton; Mindware: Tools for Smart Thinking, by Richard E. Nisbett; The ABC of Relativity, by Bertrand Russell; The Psychopath Test, by Jon Ronson; The Path: What Chinese Philosophers Can Teach Us About the Good Life, by Michael Puett; A Brief History of Time, by Stephen Hawking; Messy: The Power of Disorder to Transform Our Lives, by Tim Harford; Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think, by Viktor Mayer-Schönberger; Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, by Michael Lewis; The Survivors Club: The Secrets and Science That Could Save Your Life, by Ben Sherwood; Black Box Thinking, by Matthew Syed; Chaos: Making a New Science, by James Gleick; A Short History of Nearly Everything, by Bill Bryson; The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, by Nicholas Carr; Making Ideas Happen: Overcoming the Obstacles Between Vision and Reality, by Scott Belsky; The Enchiridion, by Epictetus; Gödel, Escher, Bach, by Douglas R. Hofstadter; What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, by Haruki Murakami; and Lateral Thinking, by Edward de Bono.

Big ideas sometimes come from the strangest places. In this wide ranging introduction, James M Russell takes the fear out of philosophy and selects seventy-six works - from Plato, Descartes and Wittgenstein to Philip K Dick and the Moomins as well as contemporary thinkers such as Peter Singer and John Rawls. Dividing into accessible sections - history, contemplation, happiness, and -isms, Russell gives us the lives as well as the lessons of the great thinkers, including a digest of their key ideas. A perfect antidote to the complex life.The topics and books covered include:Traditional Philosophy:The Republic, Plato; The Confessions, St Augustine; The Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes; On Liberty, John Stuart Mill; Philisophical Investigations, Ludwig Wittgenstein; Critique of Pure Reason, Immanuel Kant.Outsiders:Fear and Trembling, Soren Kierkegaard; Beyond Good and Evil, Frederick Nietzsche; The Outsider, Albert Camus; Doors of Perception, Aldous Huxley.Contemplation as Philosophy:The Prophet, Kahil Gibran; Jonathan Livingston Seagull, Richard Bach; Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig; The Tao of Pooh, Benjamin Hoff.The Continental Tradition:The Prison Notebooks, Antonio Gramsci; The History of Sexuality, Michel Foucault; Symbolic Exchange and Death, Jean Baudrillard.How to Live Your Life:The Art of War, Sun Tzu; Maxims, La Rouchefoucauld; Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Carl Jung; On Sexuality, Sigmund Freud; On Becoming a Person, Carl Rogers.Political and Personal Issues:Das Kapital, Karl Marx; Being and Nothingness, Jean Paul Sartre; Gaia, James Lovelock.Modern Philosophy:A Theory of Justice, John Rawls; Darwin''s Dangerous Idea, Daniel Dennett; After the Terror, Ted Honderich.