The Kindness Of Strangers

"A memoir about showbiz in the early 20th century that travels from the theaters of Vienna, Prague, and Berlin, to Holly... (more)

"A memoir about showbiz in the early 20th century that travels from the theaters of Vienna, Prague, and Berlin, to Hollywood during the golden age, complete with encounters with Franz Kafka, Albert Einstein, and Greta Garbo along the way. Salka Viertel's autobiography tells of a brilliant, creative, and well-connected woman's pilgrimage through the darkest years of the twentieth century, a journey that would take her from a remote province of the Austro-Hungarian Empire to Hollywood. The Kindness of Strangers is, to quote the New Yorker writer S. N. Behrman, "a very rich book. It provides a panorama of the dissolving civilizations of the twentieth century. In all of them the author lived at the apex of their culture and artistic aristocracies. Her childhood. is an entrancing idyll. In Berlin, in Prague, in Vienna, there appears Karl Kraus, Kafka, Rilke, Robert Musil, Schoenberg, Einstein, Alban Berg. There is the suffering and disruption of the First World War and the suffering and agony after it, which is described with such intimacy and vividness that you endure these terrible years with the author. Then comes the migration to Hollywood, where Salka's house on Maybery Road becomes a kind of Pantheon for the gathered artists, musicians, and writers. It seems to me that no one has ever described Hollywood and the life of writers there with such verve.""-- (less)

Travel is the only thing you can buy that makes you richer Travel opens our minds to the world; it helps us to embrace ... (more)

Travel is the only thing you can buy that makes you richer Travel opens our minds to the world; it helps us to embrace risk and uncertainty, overcome challenges and understand the people we meet and the places we visit. But what happens when we arrive home? How do our experiences shape us? The Kindness of Strangers explores what it means to be vulnerable and to be helped by someone we've never met before. Someone who could have walked past, but chose not to. This is a collection of stories by accomplished travellers and adventurous souls like Sarah Outen, Benedict Allen, Ed Stafford and Al Humphreys, who have completed daring journeys through challenging terrain, adventuring from the Calais Jungle to the Amazon, from Land{u2019}s End to the Gobi Desert, from New Guinea to Iran and many other places in between. Each has a story to tell of a time when they were vulnerable, when they were in need and a kind stranger came to their rescue. These are stories that make our hearts grow, stories that will restore our faith in the world and remind us that, despite what the media says, the world isn't a scary place {u2013} rather, it is filled with Kind Strangers just like us. All royalties go directly to fund Oxfam{u2019}s work with refugees.n520. (less)

"This book is about one of the great zoological wonders of the world. No, it's not about the tears of the elephant, the ... (more)

"This book is about one of the great zoological wonders of the world. No, it's not about the tears of the elephant, the smile of the dolphin, or the politics of the chimpanzee. It is about a scrawny, brainy ape with the habit of helping strangers, at times even risking life and limb to do so. It's about you and me, and how we treat everybody else. In short, it answers one of the biggest questions science has ever faced: Why do we give a damn about the welfare of strangers? Ever since Darwin, a legion of social scientists, biologists, and other scholars have attempted to explain human morality in terms of evolutionary biology-in on our modern parlance, they have looked for altruism in our genes. And yet, whether they subscribe to kin selection or group selection or something in between, they have failed to explain where morality comes from or how it works. In The Kindness of Strangers, psychologist Michael McCullough offers a new answer: Looking for morality in our biology is a mistake, and morality, like any new technology, had to be discovered, refined, and adopted. Moving through a broad swath of both human history as well as evolutionary and psychology science, McCullough shows how from the days of hunter-gatherers to the first farming villages to today's "golden age of compassion," major milestones, including the Golden Rule, naturalistic explanations for disaster, or the impulse to charitable giving, are neither integral to our species nor inevitable outcomes of human development. Like all great human achievements-whether science, art, engineering, or literature-they were discoveries. Yes, they emerge from our psychological endowments and history, of course, but they required investigation, insight, and experimentation to be brought to fruition. A major new work from one of the leading lights of social psychology, The Kindness of Strangers upsets decades of fruitless consensus in the social sciences. Going far beyond Karen Armstrong's The Great Transformation or Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature, The Kindness of Strangers shows not just what happened in the history of human moral development, but the collision of evolutionary, psychological, and historical factors that drove it. And unlike Robert Wright's The Moral Animals, this book doesn't claim that we are good or inevitably getting better-and indeed, to the contrary, shows not just where our moral sense comes from, but how easy it would be to lose it. But like all of those, this book will prove a work to be read, debated, and read again, for years to come"-- (less)

A young widow raising two boys, Sarah Laden is struggling to keep her family together. But when a shocking revelation ri... (more)

A young widow raising two boys, Sarah Laden is struggling to keep her family together. But when a shocking revelation rips apart the family of her closest friend, Sarah finds herself welcoming yet another troubled young boy into her already tumultuous life. Jordan, a quiet, reclusive elementary school classmate of Sarah's son Danny, has survived a terrible ordeal. By agreeing to become Jordan's foster mother, Sarah will be forced to question the things she has long believed. And as the delicate threads that bind their family begin to unravel, all the Ladens will have to face difficult truths about themselves and one another ... (less)

"A memoir about showbiz in the early 20th century that travels from the theaters of Vienna, Prague, and Berlin, to Holly... (more)

"A memoir about showbiz in the early 20th century that travels from the theaters of Vienna, Prague, and Berlin, to Hollywood during the golden age, complete with encounters with Franz Kafka, Albert Einstein, and Greta Garbo along the way. Salka Viertel's autobiography tells of a brilliant, creative, and well-connected woman's pilgrimage through the darkest years of the twentieth century, a journey that would take her from a remote province of the Austro-Hungarian Empire to Hollywood. The Kindness of Strangers is, to quote the New Yorker writer S. N. Behrman, "a very rich book. It provides a panorama of the dissolving civilizations of the twentieth century. In all of them the author lived at the apex of their culture and artistic aristocracies. Her childhood. is an entrancing idyll. In Berlin, in Prague, in Vienna, there appears Karl Kraus, Kafka, Rilke, Robert Musil, Schoenberg, Einstein, Alban Berg. There is the suffering and disruption of the First World War and the suffering and agony after it, which is described with such intimacy and vividness that you endure these terrible years with the author. Then comes the migration to Hollywood, where Salka's house on Maybery Road becomes a kind of Pantheon for the gathered artists, musicians, and writers. It seems to me that no one has ever described Hollywood and the life of writers there with such verve.""-- (less)

"This book is about one of the great zoological wonders of the world. No, it's not about the tears of the elephant, the ... (more)

"This book is about one of the great zoological wonders of the world. No, it's not about the tears of the elephant, the smile of the dolphin, or the politics of the chimpanzee. It is about a scrawny, brainy ape with the habit of helping strangers, at times even risking life and limb to do so. It's about you and me, and how we treat everybody else. In short, it answers one of the biggest questions science has ever faced: Why do we give a damn about the welfare of strangers? Ever since Darwin, a legion of social scientists, biologists, and other scholars have attempted to explain human morality in terms of evolutionary biology-in on our modern parlance, they have looked for altruism in our genes. And yet, whether they subscribe to kin selection or group selection or something in between, they have failed to explain where morality comes from or how it works. In The Kindness of Strangers, psychologist Michael McCullough offers a new answer: Looking for morality in our biology is a mistake, and morality, like any new technology, had to be discovered, refined, and adopted. Moving through a broad swath of both human history as well as evolutionary and psychology science, McCullough shows how from the days of hunter-gatherers to the first farming villages to today's "golden age of compassion," major milestones, including the Golden Rule, naturalistic explanations for disaster, or the impulse to charitable giving, are neither integral to our species nor inevitable outcomes of human development. Like all great human achievements-whether science, art, engineering, or literature-they were discoveries. Yes, they emerge from our psychological endowments and history, of course, but they required investigation, insight, and experimentation to be brought to fruition. A major new work from one of the leading lights of social psychology, The Kindness of Strangers upsets decades of fruitless consensus in the social sciences. Going far beyond Karen Armstrong's The Great Transformation or Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature, The Kindness of Strangers shows not just what happened in the history of human moral development, but the collision of evolutionary, psychological, and historical factors that drove it. And unlike Robert Wright's The Moral Animals, this book doesn't claim that we are good or inevitably getting better-and indeed, to the contrary, shows not just where our moral sense comes from, but how easy it would be to lose it. But like all of those, this book will prove a work to be read, debated, and read again, for years to come"-- (less)

In NYC, six strangers' lives intersect while struggling to find help, hope and love. They soon discover that liberation ... (more)

In NYC, six strangers' lives intersect while struggling to find help, hope and love. They soon discover that liberation lies in each other's hands. (less)

In NYC, six strangers' lives intersect while struggling to find help, hope and love. They soon discover that liberation ... (more)

In NYC, six strangers' lives intersect while struggling to find help, hope and love. They soon discover that liberation lies in each other's hands. Official Selection at the **Berlin International Film Festival**. (less)