New Releases by David Brooks

Reprint of the original, first published in 1873.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A practical, heartfelt guide to the art of truly knowing another person in order to foster deeper connections at home, at work, and throughout our lives—from the author of The Road to Character and The Second Mountain As David Brooks observes, “There is one skill that lies at the heart of any healthy person, family, school, community organization, or society: the ability to see someone else deeply and make them feel seen—to accurately know another person, to let them feel valued, heard, and understood.” And yet we humans don’t do this well. All around us are people who feel invisible, unseen, misunderstood. In How to Know a Person, Brooks sets out to help us do better, posing questions that are essential for all of us: If you want to know a person, what kind of attention should you cast on them? What kind of conversations should you have? What parts of a person’s story should you pay attention to? Driven by his trademark sense of curiosity and his determination to grow as a person, Brooks draws from the fields of psychology and neuroscience and from the worlds of theater, philosophy, history, and education to present a welcoming, hopeful, integrated approach to human connection. How to Know a Person helps readers become more understanding and considerate toward others, and to find the joy that comes from being seen. Along the way it offers a possible remedy for a society that is riven by fragmentation, hostility, and misperception. The act of seeing another person, Brooks argues, is profoundly creative: How can we look somebody in the eye and see something large in them, and in turn, see something larger in ourselves? How to Know a Person is for anyone searching for connection, and yearning to be understood.

''Our lives with non-human animals are characterised by a kind of unremitting contempt. Habits of life, traditions of thought, and failures of imagination have rendered us blind to their invitations to companionship within a shared world. And philosophy, alas, has offered little to assuage our moral incomprehension, our soul blindness, preferring to make what appeal it can through the languid language of ‘rights’ or the calculus of sentient suffering. Over the last few decades, it has fallen increasingly to novelists, like J.M. Coetzee, and poets, like David Brooks – artists whose language has slipped the leash, if you will, of ‘pure reason’ – to awaken us to the possibility of moral encounter with non-human animals. Brooks’s essay Turin is truly a startling achievement. It startles us from an impoverished slumber, leaving us wondering how we could have been so blind to the gentle presence, the insistent voices, the sly wisdom, the subtle reproach, the offers of friendship held out by our non-human companions. The world cannot help but look different once Brooks rips way the veil of our all-too-human conceit.'' — Scott Stephens Scott Stephens is the religion and ethics editor of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, and the co-host (with Waleed Aly) of The Minefield on ABC Radio National. He is the author of On Contempt (forthcoming from Melbourne University Press).

Animal Dreams collects David Brooks’ thought-provoking essays about how humans think, dream and write about other species. Brooks examines how animals have featured in Australian and international literature and culture, from ‘The Man from Snowy River’ to Rainer Maria Rilke and The Turin Horse, to live-animal exports, veganism, and the culling of native and non-native species. In his piercing, elegant, widely celebrated style, he considers how private and public conversations about animals reflect older and deeper attitudes to our own and other species, and what questions we must ask to move these conversations forward, in what he calls ‘the immense work of undoing’. For readers interested in animal welfare, conservation, and the relationship between humans and other species, Animal Dreams will be an essential, richly rewarding companion. Praise for Animal Dreams ‘one of Australia’s most skilled, unusual and versatile writers’ – Peter Pierce, The Sydney Morning Herald. ‘No one writes about animals like David Brooks.’ – Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson (author of The Assault on Truth, When Elephants Weep and Lost Companions) ‘Beautifully written and emotionally and intellectually enthralling. The best book I have ever read on relations between humans and animals and the ‘redress’ we owe them. It makes you angry, it makes you weep; it makes you determined to rethink and to act.’ – Helen Tiffin, FAHA (co-author of The Empire Writes Back and Wild Man from Borneo: A Cultural History of the Orangutang)

''We need to organise politically to defend the weak, empower the many and prepare the ground for reversing the absurdities of capitalism.'' - Yanis Varoufakis ''Capitalism over the past twenty-five years has been an incredible moral good.'' - David Brooks The Munk debate on capitalism There is a growing belief that the capitalist system no longer works. Inequality is rampant. The environment is being destroyed for profits. In some western nations, life expectancy is even falling. Political power is wielded by wealthy elites and big business, not the people. But for proponents of capitalism, it is the engine of progress, not just making all of us materially better off, but helping to address everything from women''s rights to political freedoms. We seem to stand at a crossroads: do we need to fix the system as a matter of urgency, or would it be better to hold our nerve?

This book has been published to accompany the Mark Dion and David Brooks exhibition of the same title.

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Everybody tells you to live for a cause larger than yourself, but how exactly do you do it? The author of The Road to Character explores what it takes to lead a meaningful life in a self-centered world. “Deeply moving, frequently eloquent and extraordinarily incisive.”—The Washington Post Every so often, you meet people who radiate joy—who seem to know why they were put on this earth, who glow with a kind of inner light. Life, for these people, has often followed what we might think of as a two-mountain shape. They get out of school, they start a career, and they begin climbing the mountain they thought they were meant to climb. Their goals on this first mountain are the ones our culture endorses: to be a success, to make your mark, to experience personal happiness. But when they get to the top of that mountain, something happens. They look around and find the view . . . unsatisfying. They realize: This wasn’t my mountain after all. There’s another, bigger mountain out there that is actually my mountain. And so they embark on a new journey. On the second mountain, life moves from self-centered to other-centered. They want the things that are truly worth wanting, not the things other people tell them to want. They embrace a life of interdependence, not independence. They surrender to a life of commitment. In The Second Mountain, David Brooks explores the four commitments that define a life of meaning and purpose: to a spouse and family, to a vocation, to a philosophy or faith, and to a community. Our personal fulfillment depends on how well we choose and execute these commitments. Brooks looks at a range of people who have lived joyous, committed lives, and who have embraced the necessity and beauty of dependence. He gathers their wisdom on how to choose a partner, how to pick a vocation, how to live out a philosophy, and how we can begin to integrate our commitments into one overriding purpose. In short, this book is meant to help us all lead more meaningful lives. But it’s also a provocative social commentary. We live in a society, Brooks argues, that celebrates freedom, that tells us to be true to ourselves, at the expense of surrendering to a cause, rooting ourselves in a neighborhood, binding ourselves to others by social solidarity and love. We have taken individualism to the extreme—and in the process we have torn the social fabric in a thousand different ways. The path to repair is through making deeper commitments. In The Second Mountain, Brooks shows what can happen when we put commitment-making at the center of our lives.

Born 15 June 1902, Dr. D. M. Brooks was a psychologist and a New York Times columnist.

The Necessity of Atheism presents an overview of religious scepticism in the 1930s, and a look at on-going debate and like scepticism even today. Despite obvious conflict of its central topic coupled with the thorough deconstruction of all major religious figures and practices through time, I see this work as mainly offering a range of viewpoints on religious beliefs, systems and practices and not necessarily seeking to dissuade the reader from religious thought in anyway...I think this work is only for the open-minded or the free-thinker and even an opportunity for thought by those only previously exposed to religion, but it should not be employed as a tool for conflict.Plain speaking is necessary in any discussion of religion, for if the freethinker attacks the religious dogmas with hesitation, the orthodox believer assumes that it is with regret that the freethinker would remove the crutch that supports the orthodox. And all religious beliefs are "crutches" hindering the free locomotive efforts of an advancing humanity. There are no problems related to human progress and happiness in this age which any theology can solve, and which the teachings of freethought cannot do better and without the aid of encumbrances.

Milky and vine, a parody of milk and honey comprises of a collection of best vine quotes ever created and shared in the form of poetry. Its truly a delight for the sensation of true comedy at home and thought provoking ideas for happy leaving. Get a copy and be glad you did.

This is a primer written for computer architects in the new and rapidly evolving field of deep learning. It reviews how machine learning has evolved since its inception in the 1960s and tracks the key developments leading up to the emergence of the powerful deep learning techniques that emerged in the last decade. Machine learning, and specifically deep learning, has been hugely disruptive in many fields of computer science. The success of deep learning techniques in solving notoriously difficult classification and regression problems has resulted in their rapid adoption in solving real-world problems. The emergence of deep learning is widely attributed to a virtuous cycle whereby fundamental advancements in training deeper models were enabled by the availability of massive datasets and high-performance computer hardware. It also reviews representative workloads, including the most commonly used datasets and seminal networks across a variety of domains. In addition to discussing the workloads themselves, it also details the most popular deep learning tools and show how aspiring practitioners can use the tools with the workloads to characterize and optimize DNNs. The remainder of the book is dedicated to the design and optimization of hardware and architectures for machine learning. As high-performance hardware was so instrumental in the success of machine learning becoming a practical solution, this chapter recounts a variety of optimizations proposed recently to further improve future designs. Finally, it presents a review of recent research published in the area as well as a taxonomy to help readers understand how various contributions fall in context.

The Better Kept Secret is the story of Haley Stuart. As the novel opens, Haley is collapsed in exhaustion from the previous sleepless night, sleeping off the powerful all-night reading marathon in which Haley had been confronted with the alarming certainty that she was destined to somehow, someday, save the world. After sleeping all day long, Haley wakes abruptly to the realization that all day long she has experienced the wildest and most shattering dream of her life. Because she is unshakably convinced that the dream somehow prescribes exactly how she is supposed to go about culminating the prophesy, she sets an epic and supremely dangerous plan into motion. Utilizing all her persuasive charm and stretching her credibility dangerously thin, Haley convinces her godfather to secretly commandeer an experimental prototype space shuttle so she can carry out the mandate of her bizarre dream. To the disbelief of those around her, Haley instructs that the prototype craft drop, culture by culture, into every single country in world history in order to retrieve a part of an ancient puzzle that when completed may well usher in an entirely new age of man. This chronological romp through human history is the only way to escape their pursuers, to secure a treasure of enormous value, to locate all of Haley''s long-lost childhood friends, and to bring us all to a place where a new age of mankind may well be at hand. The Better Kept Secret is the second in the Secret Textbook Series.

A writer questions the architecture of words, struggling to capture his ideas before they are lost; a husband excavating beneath his house becomes mesmerised by silence and disappears in search of solitude; a lighthouse keeper dreams that he is a man dreaming that he is the keeper of a lighthouse. Magnificent in its scope and imagery, David Brooks’ mastery of the written word is eclipsed in this thought-provoking collection. Both evocative and experimental, Brooks’ stories conjure fragments of memory and time, capturing streetscapes and heartscapes in a mosaic-style splendour.Lyrical and perceptive, brave and illuminating, Napoleon’s Roads explores the richness of language and the possibilities of expression, while exemplifying some of the most sophisticated, polished and beautiful contemporary literature in Australia today.

Hardware acceleration in the form of customized datapath and control circuitry tuned to specific applications has gained popularity for its promise to utilize transistors more efficiently. Historically, the computer architecture community has focused on general-purpose processors, and extensive research infrastructure has been developed to support research efforts in this domain. Envisioning future computing systems with a diverse set of general-purpose cores and accelerators, computer architects must add accelerator-related research infrastructures to their toolboxes to explore future heterogeneous systems. This book serves as a primer for the field, as an overview of the vast literature on accelerator architectures and their design flows, and as a resource guidebook for researchers working in related areas.

Evidently she knew who I was, or thought she did, since I had apparently needed no introduction and certainly hadn’t received one... She told stories. One could almost say she rushed into them, on the merest of pretexts, as if the world was ending very shortly and they had to be got through before it happened.A century of family secrets starts to unravel when Benedict Waters is summoned to an audience with an old friend of his mother. He is seduced by her storytelling and it takes time and an astonishing revelation before he realises that it is his own family he has been hearing about, his own life that is being undone.From the Blue Mountains to the Hawkesbury and from Sydney to the south coast of New South Wales, The Fern Tattoo takes us on a kaleidoscopic journey through several generations of three families. We meet a range of extraordinary characters including a bigamist bishop, a librarian tattooed from neck to knee, a young girl who kills her best friend in a tragic shooting accident and a pair of lovers who live each other’s lives for years after they have separated. As with all families, there are lost loves, tragic passions and unspoken - sometimes unspeakable - histories. The Fern Tattoo is a beguiling novel about the certainty of fate and the randomness of love that announces David Brooks’ return as one of Australia’s most distinctive literary novelists.

No sooner had the EPA established the Superfund program in 1980 to clean up the nation’s toxic waste dumps and other abandoned hazardous waste sites, than a little Montana town found itself topping the new program’s National Priority List. Milltown, a place too small to warrant a listing in the U.S. Census, sat alongside a modest hydroelectric dam at the confluence of the Clark Fork and Blackfoot Rivers. For three-quarters of a century, arsenic-laced waste from some of the world’s largest copper-mining operations had accumulated behind the dam. Soon, Milltown became the site of Superfund’s first dam removal and watershed restoration, marking a turning point in U.S. environmental history. The story of this dramatic shift is the tale of individuals rallying to reclaim a place they valued beyond its utility. In Restoring the Shining Waters, David Brooks gives an intimate account of how local citizens—homeowners, university scientists, county health officials, grassroots environmentalists, business leaders, and thousands of engaged residents—brought about the removal of Milltown Dam. Interviews with townspeople, outside environmentalists, mining executives, and federal officials reveal how the everyday actions of individuals got the dam removed and, in the process, pushed Superfund to allow more public participation in decision making and to emphasize restoration over containment of polluted environments. A federal program designed to deal with the toxic legacies of industrialization thus became a starting point for restoring America’s most damaged environments, largely through the efforts of local communities. With curiosity, conviction, and a strong sense of place, the small town of Milltown helped restore an iconic western river valley—and in doing so, shaped the history of Superfund and modern environmentalism.

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • David Brooks challenges us to rebalance the scales between the focus on external success—“résumé virtues”—and our core principles. NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE ECONOMIST With the wisdom, humor, curiosity, and sharp insights that have brought millions of readers to his New York Times column and his previous bestsellers, David Brooks has consistently illuminated our daily lives in surprising and original ways. In The Social Animal, he explored the neuroscience of human connection and how we can flourish together. Now, in The Road to Character, he focuses on the deeper values that should inform our lives. Looking to some of the world’s greatest thinkers and inspiring leaders, Brooks explores how, through internal struggle and a sense of their own limitations, they have built a strong inner character. Labor activist Frances Perkins understood the need to suppress parts of herself so that she could be an instrument in a larger cause. Dwight Eisenhower organized his life not around impulsive self-expression but considered self-restraint. Dorothy Day, a devout Catholic convert and champion of the poor, learned as a young woman the vocabulary of simplicity and surrender. Civil rights pioneers A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin learned reticence and the logic of self-discipline, the need to distrust oneself even while waging a noble crusade. Blending psychology, politics, spirituality, and confessional, The Road to Character provides an opportunity for us to rethink our priorities, and strive to build rich inner lives marked by humility and moral depth. “Joy,” David Brooks writes, “is a byproduct experienced by people who are aiming for something else. But it comes.” Praise for The Road to Character “A hyper-readable, lucid, often richly detailed human story.”—The New York Times Book Review “This profound and eloquent book is written with moral urgency and philosophical elegance.”—Andrew Solomon, author of Far from the Tree and The Noonday Demon “A powerful, haunting book that works its way beneath your skin.”—The Guardian “Original and eye-opening . . . Brooks is a normative version of Malcolm Gladwell, culling from a wide array of scientists and thinkers to weave an idea bigger than the sum of its parts.”—USA Today

David Brooks is an anthropologist who has worked with the Ngaanyatjarra people, including the people at Wanarn, for over twenty-five years. He researched and wrote the connection reports through which they gained native title rights over the huge tract of the Australian Western Desert that is their home, and has worked with them on matters from negotiating with mining companies to facing the challenges of making education meaningful to the youth. He has written extensively on the rich desert Tjukurrpa and art, and on the layers of social and cultural interconnectedness of the people. Brooks is an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Western Australia. Darren Jorgensen lectures in art history in the Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Visual Arts at the University of Western Australia. He has written on Australian art, especially from the Kimberley and the Ngaanyatjarra Lands, for academic journals, art magazines and newspapers. He also writes on music and science fiction, enjoys surfing badly and drinking whisky well, and lives with his partner and two children in Perth.

Writing well, and persuasively, is not only a discipline that can be learned, it is one deeply rooted in the classical arts of rhetoric and polemic. This book introduces the essential skills, rules, and steps for producing effective political prose appropriate to many contexts, from the editorial, the op-ed, and the polemical essay to others both weighty and seemingly slight.

Best Lawyers in America 2015

Diasporic Identities and Empire: Cultural Contentions and Literary Landscapes explores traditional theories on hybridity, generated in consideration of multicultural infusions, and at times profusions, of colonial migrations. Arguments on defining Englishness and the insinuations of a ‘fixed centre’ for the marginalised are now considered on a global scale as postmodernity defies imperial homogeneity. Although postcolonial studies have largely been Anglocentric and Western in focus, developments elsewhere have opened up theoretical applications on cultural shifters such as that of the diaspora. The Arabian world, the Caribbean, North and Latin America, Australia, and more recently, countries such as Ireland and Scotland, have emerged as regions confronted with comparable power struggles. Mass migration, exile, refugee reshuffling and diasporic repositioning provide neo-hermeneutics on the predicament of the global, which is undergoing major geopolitical and cultural transformation. This volume addresses how writing from the peripheries is developing a new worldview through diasporic modes of thought. By moving beyond the facile search for an imperial ‘centre,’ these contributions provide an understanding of the rupture in identity since there is a feeling of ‘being held back from a place or state we wish to reach . . .’ (Brooks). This volume is a unique collaboration by academic scholars from four different continents, and a vast number of regions, critically converging on the contemporaneous debate that problematizes the diasporic identity.

Tantrums of Genius is a gritty,inspired collection of poetry and writings by American Author David Divine Brooks.The work spans The writers vivid years traveling the world falling in love with art,poetry,women and beer.

The story of David Boone, growing up in the mountains of North Carolina, being drafted to Vietnam for his tour of duty and on his return becoming a master woodcarver.

A woman and an older man meet by accident at a restaurant and find themselves dining together, during the course of which intimate stories, confessions, and questions arise.

Originally published as: Bobos in Paradise: the new upper class and how they got there, 2000; and: On Paradise Drive: how we live now (and always have) in the future tense, 2004.

The Sons of Clovis is a scholarly tour de force. It begins with the Ern Malley affair, establishing previously unrecognised connections between the Australian scene and French symboliste poetry, before embarking on a fascinating journey through literature, culture, and poetics.