Index
Preview:
Brain Thief by Alexander Jablokov. (Tor, $24.99, Hardcover.)
Bernal Haydon-Rumi, executive assistant to a funder of eccentric projects, drops by his boss’s house on the way home from a business trip. By the next morning, he’s been knocked out, his boss has stolen a car and vanished, and the AI designed for planetary exploration that she’s been funding turns out to be odder than it should be. In figuring out what’s going on, Bernal has to deal with an anti-AI activist toting a handmade electronic arsenal, a local serial killer, a drug dealer with a business problem, a cryonic therapist stalked by past mistakes, and someone who specifically wants Bernal dead.
Brain Thief is a fun, literate, speculative fiction adventure, a sort of New England cyberpunk noir, set a year or ten from now somewhere between the Berkshires and Boston, and
includes, at no extra charge, a thirty foot fiberglass cowgirl. (Read excerpt.)
My Mind is Not Always My Friend: A Guide for How to Not Get in Your Own Way by Steven J. Fogel with Mark Bruce Rosin. (Peppertree Press, $14.95, Paperback.)
Steve Fogel reached his goal of becoming a millionaire by the age of thirty. He had a talent for both making and keeping money. But the happiness wealth gave him was fleeting. He found that the saying, “Money can’t buy happiness” was true, and the joke was on him.
That’s when his journey of self-discovery began. With constant self-exploration, he learned that we can experience joy only when we learn how to interrupt the unconscious patterns of thinking and behaving—those patterns that prevent us from being in the present. When our mind is on autopilot, our machinery is running us, and our approach to every situation depends on our past experiences and interpretations. If left operating on its own, our machinery will keep us in our prison cell. We can choose to free ourselves.
Changing our experience of life happens when we recognize that we are operating our own life, that no one is doing it to us, or for us, and that our future experience doesn’t have to be the same as our past. This means interrupting our machinery and not allowing old programming to control our actions and interpretations. Fogel gives us advice on how to get out of our own way so we can live every day to the fullest and in the present. (Read excerpt.)
Secrets of Great Marriages: Real Truth from Real Couples about Lasting Love by Charlie and Linda Bloom, foreword by John Robbins. (New World Library, $14.95, Paperback.)
Without criticizing or judging, therapists (and couple) Charlie and Linda Bloom offer more than one hundred tips and observations about establishing and maintaining lasting love. They don’t promise that long term relationships will be easy or that they will always be smooth, but they do promise that the advice in Secrets of Great Marriages is based on real couples facing real challenges who have come through those challenges with better, happier marriages.
