Joseph Delaney used to be an English teacher, before becoming the best-selling author of the Spook's series, which has been published in 30 countries and sold over 4.5 million copies worldwide. The first book, The Spook's Apprentice, was adapted into a major motion picture starring Jeff Bridges and Julianne Moore.

Joseph Delaney

PublicationStatus

Brand

Format

AgeRange

Series

Imprint

CategoryLabel

Joseph Henrich

'A landmark in social thought. Henrich may go down as the most influential social scientist of the first half of the twenty-first century' MATTHEW SYED 
 
Do you identify yourself by your profession or achievements, rather than your family network? Do you cultivate your unique attributes and goals? If so, perhaps you are WEIRD: raised in a society that is Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic. 
 
Unlike most who have ever lived, WEIRD people are highly individualistic, nonconformist, analytical and control-oriented. How did WEIRD populations become so psychologically peculiar? What part did these differences play in our history, and what do they mean for our collective identity? 
 
Joseph Henrich, who developed the game-changing concept of WEIRD, uses leading-edge research in anthropology, psychology, economics and evolutionary biology to explore how changing family structures, marriage practices and religious beliefs in the Middle Ages shaped the Western mind, laying the foundations for the world we know today. Brilliant, provocative, engaging and surprising, this landmark study will revolutionize your understanding of who - and how - we are now. 
 
'Phenomenal ... The only theory I am aware of that attempts to explain broad patterns of human psychology on a global scale' Washington Post 
 
'You will never look again in the same way at your own seemingly universal values' Uta Frith, Professor of Cognitive Development, University College London

The Weirdest People in the World

How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous

Joe Moran

Failure is the small print in life's terms and conditions. 
 
Covering everything from examination dreams to fourth-placed Olympians, If You Should Fail is about how modern life, in a world of self-advertised success, makes us feel like failures, frauds and imposters. Widely acclaimed observer of daily life Joe Moran is here not to tell you that everything will be all right in the end, but to reassure you that failure is an occupational hazard of being human. 
 
As Moran shows, even the supremely gifted Leonardo da Vinci could be seen as a failure. Most artists, writers, sports stars and business people face failure. We all will, and can learn how to live with it. To echo Virginia Woolf, beauty "is only got by the failure to get it . . . by facing what must be humiliation - the things one can't do." 
 
Combining philosophy, psychology, history and literature, Moran's ultimately upbeat reflections on being human, and his critique of how we live now, offers comfort, hope - and solace. For we need to see that not every failure can be made into a success - and that's OK.

If You Should Fail

Why Success Eludes Us and Why It Doesn’t Matter

A Book of Solace

Joseph Jebelli

We are constantly told to make the most of our time. Stop procrastinating. Optimise. To be happy, creative and successful requires discipline and focus. The most important thing is to be efficient with every precious hour. But when we let our brains rest, and our minds wander, something magical happens: the brain’s ’default network’ switches on, and suddenly we are able to think in completely new ways. 
 
Blending science and personal stories with practical tips, Dr Joseph Jebelli reveals how neuroscience is solving the mystery of the brain at rest, with profound implications for intelligence, creativity and even life expectancy. 
 
If we dare to break the taboo surrounding rest, we will find that long baths, walks in nature, meditation and simple daydreaming are the key to a happier, healthier – and ironically, more productive – life.

The Brain at Rest

Why doing nothing can change your life

Daniel Bergner

Jacob is a man with an overwhelming attraction to female feet. The Baroness is a clothing designer and evangelical sadist. Roy is a wedding band singer entranced by his step daughter. Ron and Laura are simply in love - only Laura lost both her legs in a car accident, and Ron is beguiled by a beauty many would be blind to. 
 
How do we deal with desire? Our own, and the desires of others? How do we comprehend desires that are extreme, or unacceptable? And how do those who have them, live with them? 
 
In A Map of Desire Daniel Bergner takes us on a journey into human passion suffered, endured, and celebrated. Desire is a sometimes anarchic, sometimes ecstatic, sometimes destructive, sometimes redeeming, and always powerful force.Immersing himself in it through the people whose lives he follows and the scientists he spends time with who are trying to understand it, slowly he exposes and illuminates layers of our humanity.

The Other Side of Desire

Four Journeys into the Far Realms of Lust and Longing

Jonathan Rosen

When the Rosens moved to New Rochelle, New York in 1973, Jonathan Rosen and Michael Laudor became inseparable. Both children of professors, the boys were best friends and fierce rivals who soon followed each other to Yale University. 
 
Michael blazed through Yale in three years, graduating summa cum laude and landing a top-flight consulting job. Then one day, Jonathan received a devastating call: Michael had suffered a psychotic break and was in the locked ward of a psychiatric hospital. 
 
Diagnosed with schizophrenia, Michael was still in hospital when he learned he'd been accepted to Yale Law School, and living in a halfway house when he decided, against all odds, to enroll. Still battling delusions, he managed to graduate, and after his triumphant story was featured in The New York Times, sold a memoir for a vast sum. Ron Howard bought film rights, completing the dream for Michael and his tirelessly supportive girlfriend Carrie, and Brad Pitt was set to star. But then Michael, in the grip of psychosis, committed a horrific act that made him a front-page story of an entirely different sort. 
 
The Best Minds is Jonathan Rosen's powerful account of an American tragedy, set in the final decades of the American century, an era that coincided with the emptying out of state mental hospitals. It is a story about the bonds of friendship, the price of delusion and the mystery of identity. Tender, funny, and harrowing by turns, The Best Minds is both a beautifully rendered coming of age story and an indictment of the profound neglect of mental illness in our society.

The Best Minds

A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions

Adam Phillips

D.W. Winnicott's remarkable books, including The Piggle, Home Is Where We Start From and The Child, Family and the Outside World (all published by Penguin) are still read, valued and argued with over thirty years after his death. Adam Phillips's short book, now issued with a new preface, is an elegant, thoughtful attempt to get to grips with a writer, paediatrician and psychiatrist whose work with children and mothers (and the wider implications their relationship has for all of us) continues to be profoundly relevant and fascinating.

Winnicott

Chip Heath

Dan Heath

THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER 
 
'Beautifully written, brilliantly researched' Angela Duckworth, bestselling author of GRIT 
 
'The most interesting, immediately actionable book I&rsquo;ve read in quite a while... If life is a series of moments, the Heath brothers have transformed how I plan to spend mine' Adam Grant, bestselling author of ORIGINALS and OPTION B, with Sheryl Sandberg 
 
In this latest New York Times bestseller by the authors of Switch and Made to Stick, Chip and Dan Heath explore why certain brief experiences can jolt, elevate and change us - and how we can learn to create such extraordinary moments in our own life and work. 
 
What if a teacher could design a lesson that he knew his students would remember twenty years later? What if a doctor or nurse knew how to orchestrate moments that would bring more comfort to patients? What if you had a better sense of how to create memories that matter for your children? Many of the defining moments in our lives are the result of accident or luck - but why leave our most meaningful, memorable moments to chance when we can create them? 
 
In The Power of Moments, Chip and Dan Heath explore the stories of people who have created standout moments, from the owners who transformed an utterly mediocre hotel into one of the best-loved properties in Los Angeles by conjuring moments of magic for guests, to the scrappy team that turned around one of the worst elementary schools in the country by embracing an intervention that lasts less than an hour. 
 
Filled with remarkable tales and practical insights, The Power of Moments proves we all have the power to transform ordinary experiences into unforgettable ones.

The Power of Moments

Why Certain Experiences Have Extraordinary Impact

Matthew Jockers

Jodie Archer

'If you're someone who dreams of penning a bestseller, read this book' The Week 
 
'What if the success of E.L.James and Dan Brown was not so random? What if there were an algorithm that could pick out the bestseller DNA concealed within these books before they're published? This is the audacious claim made by Jodie Archer and Matthew Jockers ... Smart, savvy and full of ideas' Fiona Wilson, The Times 
 
Girl on the Train. Fifty Shades. The Goldfinch. Why do some books capture the whole world's attention? In The Bestseller Code, Archer and Jockers boldly claim that not only can mega-hits be explained and identified - but they've built the algorithm to prove it. Using cutting-edge text mining techniques, they have developed a model that analyses theme, plot, style and character to explain why some books resonate more than others with readers. Provocative, entertaining, and ground-breaking, The Bestseller Code explores the hidden patterns at work in the biggest hits and, more importantly, the real reasons we love to read. 
 
'Non-formulaic, eye-opening, deeply-researched - and really worth your time' GQ 
 
 'When a story captures the imagination of millions, that's magic. Can you qualify magic? Archer and Jockers just may have done so' Sylvia Day, no.1 bestselling author 
 
'The claims are eye-grabbing . . . and also highly plausible' Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, Spectator 
 
'Thought-provoking and interesting ... Here is a book worth reading' David Bond, Financial Times

The Bestseller Code

Wensley Clarkson

This is the compelling and disturbing true story of Vanessa George and the evil abuse she doled out upon th children of more than 300 families. 
 
As a nursery worker, wife and mother, she was a figure to place trust in. Yet her adulterous relationship and sick love triangle with Colin Blanchard and Angela Allen drew her into a dark world of violence and sexual abuse. To compete for Blanchard's attention she would do everything in her power to impress him, even if this meant committing unspeakable acts of sexual violence on children as young as two years old. 
 
What could have driven a mother to betray not only her daughters and loving husband but the very families who entrusted her with their children? How could a seemingly caring women become engaged in a sordid and vile love triangle with a man and woman she had never met? Were there events in her own childhood that pushed her to commit these acts? 
 
True crime expert Wensley Clarkson pieces together the events surrounding the case as well as new investigative research to compile a fascinating yet disturbing account of a case which shocked a nation. 
 
We may never know the full extent of Vanessa George's cruelty, but the horror of her story will remain as a chilling memory for generations.

Vanessa

A Portrait of Evil

Rosamund Stone Zander

Ben Zander

In this powerful and inspiring book, family systems therapist and executive coach Rosamund Stone Zander invites readers to shed the childhood stories that hold us back, and enter a realm of true maturity and fulfilment, where limitless growth becomes possible. 
 
As children, we develop stories about how the world works, most of which get improved upon and amended over time. But some do not, even as we mature in other ways. Opinionated, self-centered and fear-driven, these child stories are the source of the behavioural and emotional patterns that hold us back. When we learn to identify and rewrite these stories, limitless growth becomes possible. 
 
In her groundbreaking and inspiring new book, Rosamund Stone Zander shows us that life is a story we tell ourselves, and that we have the power to change that story. She illuminates how breaking old patterns and telling a new story can transform not just our own lives, but also our relationships with others whether in a marriage, a classroom, or a business. Finally, she demonstrates how, with this new understanding of ourselves and our place within an interconnected world, we can take powerful action in the collective interest, and gain a sense of deep connection to the universe. 
 
This galvanizing book expands our notions of how much we can grow and change, whether we can affect others or the world at large, and how much freedom and joy we can experience. Stimulating and profound, it is the perfect companion to her beloved first book, The Art of Possibility.

Pathways to Possibility

Transform your outlook on life with the bestselling author of The Art of Possibility

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

'Really made me think about how I think' - Mohsin Hamid, author of Exit West 
 
Tough times don't last. Tough people do. 
 
In The Black Swan, Taleb showed us that highly improbable and unpredictable events underlie almost everything about our world. Here Taleb stands uncer&shy;tainty on its head, making it desirable, even necessary. The antifragile is beyond the resilient or robust. The resil&shy;ient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better and better. 
 
Just as human bones get stronger when subjected to stress and tension, many things in life benefit from stress, disorder, volatility, and turmoil. What Taleb has identified and calls antifragile are things that not only gain from chaos but need it in order to survive and flourish. 
 
Antifragile is a blueprint for living in a Black Swan world. Erudite, witty, and iconoclastic, Taleb's message is revolutionary: the antifragile, and only the antifragile, will make it. 
 
'The hottest thinker in the world' Bryan Appleyard, Sunday Times

Antifragile

Things that Gain from Disorder

Duncan Harding

A likeable young girl burns her family home to the ground 
 
A man has no memory of the night he killed his wife 
 
A teenager’s visions have murderous effect 
 
One question binds the cases of Dr Duncan Harding, Britain’s top forensic psychiatrist: Why? 
 
Growing up in a violent home, Harding became a doctor to be good and kind. His journey brought him to psychopaths, to the limits of his compassion and to the darkest corners of his own troubled past. 
 
But he’s never turned away nor given up hope. Mesmerising, insightful and redemptive, The Criminal Mind is his unforgettable story.

The Criminal Mind

Paul Broks

A man's wife dies. What next? The next day is next, and the next, and so on. He smothers his sorrow and gets on with the days. He's a Stoic. Tranquillity is the goal, but his brain won't rest. As a neuropsychologist he has spent a career trying to fathom the human brain but now, he comes to realize, his brain is struggling to make sense of him - probing, doubting, reconstructing. 
 
Combining neurological case stories and memoir, and with excursions into speculative fiction and mythology, this is an audaciously original, deeply personal meditation on grief, time and selfhood.

The Darker the Night, the Brighter the Stars

A Neuropsychologist's Odyssey

Joe Keohane

In our cities, we barely acknowledge one another on public transport, even as rates of loneliness skyrocket. Online, we carefully curate who we interact with. In our politics, we are increasingly consumed by a fear of people we've never met. But what if strangers, long believed to be the cause of many of our problems, were actually the solution? 
 
In The Power of Strangers, Joe Keohane discovers the surprising benefits that come from talking to strangers, examining how even passing interactions can enhance empathy, happiness and cognitive development, ease loneliness and isolation, and root us in the world, deepening our sense of belonging. Warm, witty, erudite and profound, this deeply researched book will make you reconsider how you perceive and approach strangers, showing you how talking to strangers isn't just not a way to live, it's a way to survive.

The Power of Strangers

The Benefits of Connecting in a Suspicious World

Kehinde Andrews

Take a step through the looking-glass to a strange land, one where Piers Morgan is a voice worth listening to about race, where white people buy self-help books to help them cope with their whiteness, where Boris Johnson and Donald Trump are seen by the majority of the population as 'the right (white) man for the job'. Perhaps you know it. All the inhabitants seem to be afflicted by serious delusions, like that racism doesn't exist and if it does it can be cured with a one-hour inclusion seminar, and bizarre collective hallucinations, like the widely held idea that Britain's only role in slavery was to abolish it. 
 
But there is a serious side too. Black and brown people suffer from a greater number of mental health difficulties, caused in no small part by living in a racist society. But being Black and brown has itself been pathologized by the young field of psychology. Society cannot face up to the racism at its heart and in its history, so the delusions, irrationalities and hallucinations it conjures up to avoid doing so can only best be described as a psychosis, and the costs are being borne by the sons and daughters of that racist history. 
 
Kehinde Andrews is your piercing, wry and not a little funny guide back to sanity, unpicking the absurd and outrageous lies society tells to keep up the status quo and The Psychosis of Whiteness is your lifeboat out of this topsy-turvy world.

The Psychosis of Whiteness

Surviving the Insanity of a Racist World

D.W Winnicott

Clare Winnicott

This collection brings together some of psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott's most important work contributing to our understanding of the minds of children. The essays range in topic from &quot;The Concept of a Healthy Individual&quot; and &quot;The Value of Depression&quot; to &quot;Delinquancy as a sign of Hope&quot;. All reveal Winnicott's vision of the ways in which the developing self interacts with the family and the larger society.

Home is Where We Start from

Essays by a Psychoanalyst

Esmé Weijun Wang

'I've inherited a love of a writing and a talent for the visual arts from my mother, as well as her long and tapered fingers; I've also inherited a tendency for madness' 
 
Esmé Weijun Wang was officially diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder in 2013, although the hallucinations and psychotic episodes had started years before that. In the midst of a high functioning life at Yale, Stanford and the literary world, she would find herself floored by an overwhelming terror that 'spread like blood', or convinced that she was dead, or that her friends were robots, or spiders were eating holes in her brain. What happens when your whole conception of yourself is turned upside down? When you're aware of what is occurring to you, but unable to do anything about it? 
 
Written with immediacy and unflinching honesty, this visceral and moving book is Wang's story, as she steps both inside and outside of her condition to bring it to light. Following her own diagnosis and the many manifestations of schizophrenia in her life, she ranges over everything from how we label mental illness to her own use of fashion and make-up to present herself as high-functioning, from the failures of the higher education system to how factors such as PTSD and Lyme disease compounded her experiences. Wang's analytical, intelligent eye, honed as a former lab researcher at Stanford, allows her to balance research with haunting personal narrative. The Collected Schizophrenias cuts right to the core and provides unique insight into a condition long misdiagnosed and much misunderstood.

The Collected Schizophrenias

D. W. Winnicott

Between the age of two and five, a little girl nicknamed &lsquo;the Piggle&rsquo; &ndash; seriously disturbed by the birth of a younger sister &ndash; visited Dr Winnicott on sixteen occasions. A verbatim account of her visits is accompanied by illuminating excerpts from letters written to the analyst by the child&rsquo;s parents and an invaluable commentary by Dr Winnicott. This allows the reader to experience in detail the growth of a relationship between child and therapist and the gradual unfolding of the child&rsquo;s inner world. 
 
This classic piece of writing gives the reader the rare opportunity of being admitted to the intimacy of the consulting room and of studying the child and therapist at work. Of special value to professionals working with children, it will also fascinate anyone interested in how psychoanalysis works in practice.

The Piggle

An Account of the Psychoanalytic Treatment of a Little Girl

Flora Schreiber

'How are you today?' the doctor asked. 'I'm fine', was the reply. 'But Sybil isn't. She was so sick she couldn't come. So I came instead.' 
 
A collaboration between journalist Flora Rheta Schreiber and Sybil's psychiatrist, Dr. Cornelia Wilbur, Sybil is the story of a woman with sixteen separate personalities, and was instrumental in influencing the definition and diagnosis of multiple personality disorder. 
 
Sybil's diagnosis has since been called into question - but, forty years after it was first published, her story remains a gripping and disturbing account of one woman's struggle for mental stability and happiness.

Sybil

The True Story of a Woman Possessed by Sixteen Separate Personalities

Malcolm Gladwell

'Mesmerizing' Time 
 
An art expert instantly spots a fake. A cop decides whether to shoot. A psychologist accurately predicts a couple's future in minutes. This book is about those moments when we 'know' something without knowing why. It shows that honing your instincts could change the way you think about thinking forever. 
 
'Trust my snap judgement, buy this book: you'll be delighted' David Brooks, The New York Times 
 
'Fiendishly clever' Evening Standard 
 
'Provocative, fascinating, radical' Fergal Byrne, Financial Times

Blink

The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

Diarmaid MacCulloch

The Bible observes that God made humanity ‘for a while a little lower than the angels’. If humans are that close to angels, does the difference lie in human sexuality and what we do with it? In a single lifetime, Christianity or historically Christian societies have witnessed one of the most extraordinary about-turns in attitudes to sex and gender in human history, bringing liberation for some and fury and fear for others. 
 
This book by Oxford's Emeritus Professor of the History of the Church seeks to calm fears and encourage understanding through telling a 3000-year-long tale of Christians encountering sex, gender and the family, with noises off from their sacred texts. It beckons us to pay attention to the sheer glorious complexity and contradictions in the history of Christianity, an epic of ordinary and extraordinary Christians trying to make sense of themselves and of humanity’s deepest desires, fears and hopes.

Lower than the Angels

A History of Sex and Christianity

Richard Hogan

In our early years we lay down the blueprint for being a partner, parent, sibling, friend, colleague, neighbour and citizen. But even the best childhood is imperfect and leaves many of us struggling to manage our moods and emotions as adults. 
 
Experienced family therapist Richard Hogan has seen it all. And he has worked with countless people to help them overcome an uncertain start. 
 
In Home is Where the Start Is Richard reveals stories from the therapy room and from his own childhood. And he shares failsafe techniques to get over the legacy of early challenges. 
 
Home is Where the Start Is will help you become the best version of yourself you can be. And if you are a parent, it will support you in giving your child the best possible start.

Home is Where the Start Is

How Your Family Made You, and How You Can Make Yourself Even Better

Ben Platts-Mills

In Tell Me the Planets, Ben Platts-Mills shares stories about his remarkable work with survivors of brain injury, offering a rare glimpse into the world as seen through their eyes. We meet charismatic Danny, whose criminal past has left him paralysed down one side, but who now helps others worse off than himself; Sid, whose memory for the present lasts only moments; and Liah, who is caught in a battle with the care system threatening to make her homeless. But above all this is the story of the extraordinary friendship between Ben and Matthew, who suffered neurological damage during an operation to remove a cerebral cyst. It is a journey that takes them to the frontiers of science and to the limits of human resilience: when they discover that the cyst is growing again, Matthew is left with an impossible decision to make.

Tell Me the Planets

Stories of Brain Injury and What It Means to Survive

Henry Eliot

Quibe

As a rule, we take care not to get lost, so why should we willingly enter a maze? Illustrated with a single red line, Follow This Thread traces dozens of real and historical mazes, and their uses in literature, art and film, from Pac-Man and Picasso to Kubrick and Kafka. 
 
Henry Eliot reveals our abiding, ancient relationship with mazes and labyrinths, and unpicks the paradoxical psychology involved in walking them, combining the myth of the Minotaur with a quest for the legendary Maze King, who disappeared in 1979. The text coils around the pages, recreating the experience of walking a labyrinth, with its twists and turns, frights and fantasies.

Follow This Thread

A Maze Book to Get Lost In

Paris Lees

NOW A MAJOR BBC SERIES 
 
'Fresh, original, heartbreaking' Reni Eddo-Lodge 
 
'Devastating, hilarious, unlike anything I have ever read. Destined to be a classic' Pandora Sykes 
 
'A must-read ... as mesmerising as it is poignant' Stylist 
 
Thirteen-year-old Byron needs to get away, and doesn't care how. Sick of being beaten up by lads for "talkin' like a poof" after school. Sick of dad - the weightlifting, womanising Gaz - and Mam, who pissed off to Turkey like Shirley Valentine. Sick of all the people in Hucknall who shuffle about like the living dead, going on about kitchens they're too skint to do up and marriages they're too scared to leave. 
 
It's a new millennium, Madonna's 'Music' is top of the charts and there's a whole world to explore - and Byron's happy to beg, steal and skank onto a rollercoaster ride of hedonism. Life explodes like a rush of ecstasy when Byron escapes into Nottingham's kinetic underworld and discovers the East Midlands' premier podium-dancer-cum-hellraiser, the mesmerising Lady Die. But when the comedown finally kicks in, Byron arrives at a shocking encounter that will change life forever. 
 
 Bold, poignant and riotously funny, What It Feels Like For a Girl is the unique, hotly-anticipated and addictively-readable debut from one of Britain's most exciting young writers.

What It Feels Like for a Girl

Robert Plomin

The blueprint for our individuality lies in the 1% of DNA that differs between people. Our intellectual capacity, our introversion or extraversion, our vulnerability to mental illness, even whether we are a morning person - all of these aspects of our personality are profoundly shaped by our inherited DNA differences. 
 
In Blueprint, Robert Plomin, a pioneer in the field of behavioural genetics, draws on a lifetime's worth of research to make the case that DNA is the most important factor shaping who we are. Our families, schools and the environment around us are important, but they are not as influential as our genes. Even the environments we choose and the signal events that impact our lives, from divorce to addiction, are influenced by our genetic predispositions. Now, thanks to the DNA revolution, it is becoming possible to predict who we will become, at birth, from our DNA alone.

Blueprint

How DNA Makes Us Who We Are

Simon Baron-Cohen

'Celebrates human cognitive diversity, and is rich with empathy and psychological insight' Steven Pinker 
 
'Bold, intriguing, profound' Jay Elwes, Spectator 
 
Why can humans alone invent? In this book, psychologist and world renowned autism expert Simon Baron-Cohen puts forward a bold new theory: because we can identify patterns, specifically if-and-then patterns. Baron-Cohen argues that the genes for this unique ability overlap with the genes for autism and have driven human progress for 70,000 years. 
 
From the first musical instruments to the agricultural, industrial, and digital revolutions, Pattern Seekers links one of our greatest human strengths with a condition that is so often misunderstood and challenges us to think differently about those who think differently.

The Pattern Seekers

A New Theory of Human Invention

Walt Odets

Even in our modern progressive world, it's not easy to be a gay man. While young men often come out more readily, even those from the most liberal of backgrounds still struggle to accept themselves and experience stigma, shame and difficulties with intimate relationships. They also suffer from ongoing trauma wrought by the AIDS epidemic, something that is all too often relegated to history. 
 
Drawing on a lifetime's work as a clinical psychologist, Walt Odets uses the stories of his patients as well as those of his own deep relationships with other gay men to illuminate how these difficulties may be overcome. From a 74-year-old who only felt able to come out after his wife had died, to the boy raised in a strict religious family who worked his way to San Francisco, to the middle-aged defence lawyer who left everything behind to embrace a new life, the experiences here explore everything from grief to survival, childhood pain to the definition of gay itself. Out of the Shadows shows us how a new way forward is possible through learning to accept ourselves and others as they are, and independently inventing our own lives.

Out of the Shadows

The Psychology of Gay Men's Lives

Kevin Dutton

Our brains are hardwired to sort, categorize and draw lines. It's how we navigate the infinite kaleidoscope of everyday information. But imagine failing an exam by a mere 1 per cent. Or being caught speeding at just 1 mph over the speed limit. It doesn't seem fair. And yet we have to draw the line somewhere, we say, even though lines can be unhelpful or even dangerous when drawn where they aren't wanted, or in too thick a hand. By thinking in terms of ' 'them' or 'us' and 'this' or 'that' we isolate ourselves from ideas we don't agree with and people who are not the same as us. We fail to listen to the other side of the argument and beliefs become increasingly polarized. Intolerance and extremism flourish. While the human race has survived by thinking in black and white and making binary decisions, such thinking might also destroy us. We may not be programmed to think in shades of grey, but it's the colour of our cognitive future. In this ground-breaking exploration of how our brains work, psychologist Professor Kevin Dutton explains that by understanding the nature of our black and white thinking we are better equipped to negotiate life's grey zones. And that, by doing so, we will make subtler and far smarter decisions.

Black and White Thinking

How to outsmart the brain, celebrate nuance, and learn to think in technicolour

The burden of a binary brain in a complex world

The routine traffic stop that ends in tragedy. The spy who spends years undetected at the highest levels of the Pentagon. The false conviction of Amanda Knox. Why do we so often get other people wrong? Why is it so hard to detect a lie, read a face or judge a stranger's motives? 
 
Through a series of encounters and misunderstandings - from history, psychology and infamous legal cases - Malcolm Gladwell takes us on an intellectual adventure into the darker side of human nature, where strangers are never simple and misreading them can have disastrous consequences. 
 
No one challenges our shared assumptions like Malcolm Gladwell. Here he uses stories of deceit and fatal errors to cast doubt on our strategies for dealing with the unknown, inviting us to rethink our thinking in these troubled times.

Talking to Strangers

What We Should Know about the People We Don't Know

biblio.categories.code

biblio.publicationStatus

biblio.brand

biblio.workEditions.format

biblio.ageRange

biblio.series.seriesName

biblio.imprint.description

biblio.type

About us

About Us (Header 4)

Best-Jane-Austen-quotes_Online-Desktop_Penguin

James-Baldwin

Marian-Keyes

haruki-murakami-320×320-1

Richard-Osman

Malorie Blackman

Lisa-Jewell

Charlie-Mackesy

Authors (Header 3)

Children&#039;s

Company

Discover

Fiction

Non-fiction

Penguin Classics

Penguin Shop (Header 5)

Useful links

Work with us

Search Results

The Fall of the West

Hunt the Villain

Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Fight or Flight (Book 21)

The Mortons

Watch a trailer for The Spook's Blood

A photograph of Ben Barnes in character for Shadow and Bone Netflix series.

Interviews

Shadow and Bone’s Ben Barnes on tear-jerking books and what he’s reading

An image showing a selection of adventure stories for 9-12 year olds on a bright yellow background with orange doodles that include a hashtag, flag, danger sign and speech bubble

Children's reading lists

16 books for 9 to 12-year-olds that love adventures

An image of a selection of books for 9-12s on a blue background with a large splodge and striped print

24 must-read books for 9-12-year-olds

A picture of several different children's books on a pink to blue ombre background; each book has a bright yellow shadow

Reading lists

The 100 best children's books of all time, as chosen by our readers

stemming

Showing results for: ‘joseph delaney’

Filters

Category

Publication Date

Format

Imprint

Follow penguin

Follow ladybird

Follow puffin

Sign up to the Penguin newsletter