New Releases by David Brooks

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.

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.

Nos últimos trinta anos aprendemos mais sobre o cérebro humano do que nos últimos três mil — houve uma revolução científica. A mente inconsciente, descobriu-se, é a maior parte da mente — o terreno das emoções, das intuições, dos desejos, das predisposições genéticas, dos traços de personalidade e das normas sociais, onde o caráter se forma e se tomam as decisões mais importantes da vida. Em O animal social: a história de como o sucesso acontece, David Brooks entrelaça, em uma narrativa reveladora, uma vasta coleção de novas pesquisas com as vidas de dois personagens ficcionais, Harold e Erica, acompanhando-os da infância à velhice. Ao fazer isso, revela uma nova e fundamental compreensão da natureza humana. Ele traça uma inovadora definição do sucesso ressaltando o que os economistas chamam de habilidades não cognitivas — aquelas qualidades ocultas que não podem ser facilmente contadas ou medidas, mas que levam, de fato, a uma vida de felicidade e realização. Uma aventura intelectual emocionante e cheia de nuances, a obra é um livro essencial para os nossos tempos — e que mudará a maneira como nos vemos no mundo.

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.

Ao longo dos séculos foram escritos milhões de livros sobre o sucesso e como ser bem sucedido. Porém, essas narrativas ocorrem normalmente à superfície dos hábitos sociais. David Brooks procurou através da história de um casal normal mostrar o lado mais íntimo e as explicações desconhecidas para o sucesso. Uma das descobertas centrais deste estudo é que somos mais do que fruto do nosso pensamento consciente. Somos, sobretudo, resultado do pensamento que decorre abaixo do nível da consciência.

Toute vie est un roman - mais quels sont les ressorts intimes de l''intrigue ? Selon David Brooks, trente ans de recherches scientifiques éclairent la question d''un jour nouveau : nous ne sommes ni des êtres rationnels, ni les jouets d''un inconscient de type freudien. Nous sommes avant tout des animaux sociaux, et cette réalité, inscrite au plus profond de nos êtres, dans nos cerveaux, explique notre façon d''évoluer dans l''existence. La science a enfin ouvert la boîte noire de notre esprit. Ses passionnantes découvertes, jusqu''ici confinées dans le cadre des publications savantes, bouleversent le champ de notre compréhension. Vulgarisateur de talent, David Brooks a su en tirer la trame d''une fiction : il nous livre, clés à l''appui, le récit de la vie de deux personnages, Erica et Harold, aussi différents qu''on peut l''être, qui finiront pourtant par bâtir ensemble leur vie et leur réussite. En décryptant leurs émotions, leurs intuitions, leurs désirs enfouis, ces lieux intimes où se forgent le caractère et la destinée, il brosse pour nous l''étonnant tableau de notre propre humanité.

N.°1 del New York Times. Una aventura intelectual conmovedora, un relato de logros y una defensa del progreso. Ésta es la historia de cómo se produce el éxito. Se cuenta a través de la vida de una pareja, Harold y Erica: cómo crecen, avanzan, retroceden, fracasan y triunfan. A partir de la gran cantidad de información que aporta sobre estos dos personajes, vívidamente descritos, Brooks ilustra un nuevo conocimiento fundamental de la naturaleza humana. Se ha producido una revolución científica, hemos aprendido más del cerebro humano en los últimos treinta años que en los trescientos anteriores. Resulta que la mente inconsciente es «la mayor parte» de la mente. Es el terreno de las emociones, las intuiciones, las tendencias, los deseos, las predisposiciones genéticas, los rasgos de la personalidad y las normas sociales, allí donde se forma el carácter y se toman las decisiones más importantes de la vida. Reseñas: «Provocador y fascinante... Brooks demuestra que lo que está más allá de nuestro control consciente es inmenso.» Philadelphia Enquirer « El animal social es autorizado, impresionantemente erudito y de gran alcance.» Newsweek

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.

Traditional Chinese edition of The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement by New York Times'' columnist David Brooks. In Traditional Chinese. Distributed by Tsai Fong Books, Inc.

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.

In his bestselling work of “comic sociology,” David Brooks coins a new word, Bobo, to describe today’s upper class—those who have wed the bourgeois world of capitalist enterprise to the hippie values of the bohemian counterculture. Their hybrid lifestyle is the atmosphere we breathe, and in this witty and serious look at the cultural consequences of the information age, Brooks has defined a new generation. Do you believe that spending $15,000 on a media center is vulgar, but that spending $15,000 on a slate shower stall is a sign that you are at one with the Zenlike rhythms of nature? Do you work for one of those visionary software companies where people come to work wearing hiking boots and glacier glasses, as if a wall of ice were about to come sliding through the parking lot? If so, you might be a Bobo.

"The Balcony is a stunning follow-up to David Brooks long-awaited second collection of poems, Walking to Point Clear. His spare, existential lyrics arresting, candid, perceptive focus on language, new love and his enduring love of the coastal rainforests of southern New South Wales."--Provided by publisher.

Animals at the lake are counted, from one sneaky snake to ten fireflies.

The author of the acclaimed bestseller Bobos in Paradise, which hilariously described the upscale American culture, takes a witty look at how being American shapes us, and how America''s suburban civilization will shape the world''s future. Take a look at Americans in their natural habitat. You see suburban guys at Home Depot doing that special manly, waddling walk that American men do in the presence of large amounts of lumber; super-efficient ubermoms who chair school auctions, organize the PTA, and weigh less than their children; workaholic corporate types boarding airplanes while talking on their cell phones in a sort of panic because they know that when the door closes they have to turn their precious phone off and it will be like somebody stepped on their trachea. Looking at all this, you might come to the conclusion that we Americans are not the most profound people on earth. Indeed, there are millions around the world who regard us as the great bimbos of the globe: hardworking and fun, but also materialistic and spiritually shallow. They''ve got a point. As you drive through the sprawling suburbs or eat in the suburban chain restaurants (which if they merged would be called Chili''s Olive Garden Hard Rock Outback Cantina), questions do occur. Are we really as shallow as we look? Is there anything that unites us across the divides of politics, race, class, and geography? What does it mean to be American? Well, mentality matters, and sometimes mentality is all that matters. As diverse as we are, as complacent as we sometimes seem, Americans are united by a common mentality, which we have inherited from our ancestors and pass on, sometimes unreflectingly, to our kids. We are united by future-mindedness. We see the present from the vantage point of the future. We are tantalized, at every second of every day, by the awareness of grand possibilities ahead of us, by the bounty we can realize just over the next ridge. This mentality leads us to work feverishly hard, move more than any other people on earth, switch jobs, switch religions. It makes us anxious and optimistic, manic and discombobulating. Even in the superficiality of modern suburban life, there is some deeper impulse still throbbing in the heart of average Americans. That impulse is the subject of this book.

Takes you on a journey through Alice Springs or Mparntwe as it is called by the Arrente people. Stories from the Dreamtime with skyline drawings.

A magical, dreamlike novel set in an apartment block in a French provincial town

Author''s first collection of short stories. The book of Sei and other stories received high critical acclaim.