An indictment of the American educational system criticizes the fact that the system has discarded the traditional goals of transmitting knowledge and fostering cognitive skills in favor of building self-esteem and promoting social harmony.

Many Americans dream of financial freedom, but they're stuck in dead-end jobs and don't know how to get there. You don't need to be one of them. If you invested $35,000 in the stock market today, it could take 52 years for that investment to grow to $1 million. But if you invested that same amount into one single-family $140,000 rental property, it would only take 19 years. With just two rental properties, you could generate $417,000 in profit in just 10 years. Skeptical?

For the last 20 years, George Saunders has been teaching a class on the Russian short story to his MFA students at Syracuse University. In A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, he shares a version of that class with us, offering some of what he and his students have discovered together over the years. Paired with iconic short stories by Chekhov, Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Gogol, the seven essays in this book are intended for anyone interested in how fiction works and why it’s more relevant than ever in these turbulent times.

Safe People will help you discover why good people can get tangled in bad relationships, how to avoid repeating your own mistakes, and how to pick safe, healthy people for the friends you make and the company you keep. In Safe People, Drs. Henry Cloud and John Townsend teach you that being with an unsafe person can be damaging to your confidence, your trust in others, and even your health. You'll learn that you have the power to surround yourself with accepting, honest, and safe people who draw you closer to being the person God intended you to be.

In the first-ever biography of Thomas Sowell, one of America's most influential conservative social theorists, Jason L. Riley gives this iconic thinker his due and responds to the detractors. Maverick showcases Sowell's most significant writings and traces the life events that shaped his ideas and resulted in a Black orphan from the Jim Crow South becoming one of our foremost public intellectuals.

Having a high score in your IQ is something you can be proud of, however, without a good level of emotional balance then you are only half-way in your life-satisfaction journey. As you will learn in this short book, emotional balance can be accomplished through emotional intelligence and emotional agility. Improving your emotions can help you to become a better communicator whether at the workplace, home or with your friends.

For men, love is a high-stakes gamble. The right woman can be the best part of a man's life, and the wrong one can lead to personal and financial ruin. In today's climate, no man should venture into romance without a reliable risk-management strategy. The Tactical Guide to Women delivers a solid plan for allowing the right women into your life, and keeping the wrong ones at a safe distance. This is not another book about getting laid. This book is about not getting screwed.

Written by a practicing emergency physician, The White Coat Investor is a high-yield manual that specifically deals with the financial issues facing medical students, residents, physicians, dentists, and similar high-income professionals. Doctors are highly-educated and extensively trained at making difficult diagnoses and performing life-saving procedures. However, they receive little to no training in business, personal finance, investing, insurance, taxes, estate planning, and asset protection.

For the past 35 years, John Gottman’s research has been internationally recognized for its unprecedented ability to precisely measure interactive processes in couples and to predict the long-term success or failure of relationships. In this groundbreaking book, he presents a new approach to understanding and changing couples: a fundamental social skill called “emotional attunement,” which describes a couple’s ability to fully process and move on from negative emotional events, ultimately creating a stronger relationship.

The Element shows the vital need to enhance creativity and innovation by thinking differently about human resources and imagination. It is an essential strategy for transforming education, business, and communities to meet the challenges of living and succeeding in the 21st century.

What if the ability to look, feel, and perform at peak capacity wasn’t the stuff of lore but instead was within easy reach? In Boundless, the New York Times best-selling author of Beyond Training and health and fitness leader Ben Greenfield offers a first-of-its-kind blueprint for total human optimization. Boundless guides you every step of the way to becoming an expert in what makes your brain tick, your body work, and your spirit happy.

Based on years of research on marital and premarital happiness, How to Avoid Falling in Love with a Jerk will help you break destructive dating patterns that have kept you from finding the love you deserve.

Beekeeping is an old practice that even the ancient Egyptians liked to do. In essence, beekeeping really means nurturing and supporting adult bee populations that produce honey and other bee products such as beeswax or royal jelly. Beekeeping can be extremely rewarding as a hobby, and there’s nothing quite so delicious as homegrown honey. But you should also keep in mind that beekeeping is no walk in the park - you need all the help you can get.

From the author of the national best seller Chaos comes an outstanding biography of one of the most dazzling and flamboyant scientists of the 20th century that "not only paints a highly attractive portrait of Feynman but also . . . makes for a stimulating adventure in the annals of science." ( The New York Times).

Ready for college? Take a confident approach to college admissions with this definitive guide – all without stressing yourself out. Getting into college is a magnificent stepping stone that can definitely give you an edge in your professional career and in your life. Unfortunately, the part that comes before all this is not so easy.

Using an international framework, Sowell analyzes how much a racial group’s economic fate is determined by the surrounding society and how much by internal patterns that follow that same group around the world.

In Wealth, Poverty, and Politics, Thomas Sowell, one of the foremost conservative public intellectuals in the country, argues that political and ideological struggles have led to dangerous confusion about income inequality in America. Pundits and politically motivated economists trumpet ambiguous statistics and sensational theories while ignoring the true determinant of income inequality: the production of wealth.

This is a study of how intellectuals as a class affect modern societies by shaping the climate of opinion in which official policies develop, on issues ranging from economics to law to war and peace. You will hear a withering and clear-eyed critique about (but not for) intellectuals that explores their impact on public opinion, policy, and society at large.

Sociologist-economist Sowell, a noted conservative, offers opinions on social and foreign policy, law, education, and race, criticizing the trend of American politics since Reagan and reserving his sharpest criticism for special-interest groups.

There was no single, dramatic event that set the current financial crisis off. A whole series of very questionable decisions by many people, in many places, over a period of years, built up the pressures that led to a sudden collapse of the housing market and of financial institutions that began to fall like dominoes as a result of investing in securities based on housing prices. This book is designed to unravel the tangled threads of that story.

Here is the gritty, powerful story of Thomas Sowell's life-long education in the school of hard knocks, a journey that took him from Harlem to the Marines, the Ivy League, and a career as a controversial writer, teacher, and economist in government and private industry. It is also the story of the dramatically changing times in which this personal odyssey took place.

Marxism is a term that many people freely use, but few seem to grasp its implications. Sowell's book is the antidote to this problem. He writes in a fluid and easy-to-follow manner, leading the listener through the Marxian scheme of ideas. Along the way, he shatters some existing interpretations of Marx-interpretations that have developed through repetition rather than through scholarship.

These wide-ranging essays - on many individual political, economic, cultural, and legal issues - have as a recurring, underlying theme the decline of the values and institutions that have sustained and advanced American society for more than two centuries. This decline has been more than erosion. It has, in many cases, been a deliberate dismantling of American values and institutions by people convinced that their superior wisdom and virtue must override both the traditions of the country and the will of the people.

Intellectuals and Race is a radical book in the original sense - one that goes to the root of the problem. The role of intellectuals in racial strife is explored in an international context that puts the American experience in a wholly new light. The book explores the incentives, the visions, and the rationales that drive intellectuals at the highest levels to conclusions that have often turned out to be counterproductive and even disastrous, not only for particular racial or ethnic groups but for societies as a whole.

This book is geared to the average citizen with little or no economics background who would like the tools to think critically about economic issues. Many of today's economic issues are obscured by their inherent complexity and the often confusing and conflicting views coming from political talking heads. Sowell, a leading conservative economist and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, seeks to alleviate this confusion.

In this important book, an eminent authority presents a new perspective on affirmative action, investigating its actual consequences in the United States and in other countries where it has been in effect. Evaluating his empirical data, Thomas Sowell concludes that race preference programs worldwide have not met expectations and have often produced the opposite of what was originally intended.

This book is about the great moral issues underlying many of the headline-making political controversies of our times. It is not a comforting book but a book about disturbing and dangerous trends. The Quest for Cosmic Justice shows how confused conceptions of justice end up promoting injustice, how confused conceptions of equality end up promoting inequality, and how the tyranny of social visions prevents many people from confronting the actual consequences of their own beliefs and policies.

These selections from the many writings of Thomas Sowell over a period of half a century cover social, economic, cultural, legal, educational, and political issues. The sources range from Dr. Sowell’s letters, books, newspaper columns, and articles in both scholarly journals and popular magazines. The topics range from latetalking children to tax cuts for the rich, baseball, race, war, the role of judges, medical care, and the rhetoric of politicians.

Economic Facts and Fallacies is designed for people who want to understand economic issues without getting bogged down in economic jargon, graphs, or political rhetoric. Writing in a lively manner that does not require any prior knowledge of economics, Thomas Sowell exposes some of the most popular fallacies about economic issues, including many that are widely disseminated in the media and by politicians.

Thomas Sowell takes a tough, factual look at whether the civil rights movement has lived up to its hopes or its rhetoric. In the decades since the historic Supreme Court decision on desegregation, who has gained and who has lost? Which of the assumptions behind the civil rights revolution have stood the test of time, and which have proven to be mistaken or even catastrophic to those who were supposed to be helped?