VSP Archives - Duckworth Books

A Book of Your Own

Drawing on the author’s decades of experience as a psychologist, trainer and advocate for women, this small but perfectly formed, pocket-sized book contains bite-sized snippets of insight and inspiration on communication, relationships, work, body image, overwhelm, emotional trials and more.

Pop it in your bag or nightstand and draw on it to boost your self-belief, awareness, energy and assertiveness each day – or gift it to friends and family to help them confront life’s everyday challenges.

The Man Who Wasn’t There

Reveals the mind boggling neuroscience connecting brain, body, mind, and society, by examining a range of brain disorders, in the tradition of Oliver Sacks.

Identifying what makes up the nature of the human mind has long been neuroscience’s greatest challenge – a mystery perhaps never to be fully understood. Award-winning author and master of science journalism Anil Ananthaswamy smartly explores the concept of self by way of several mental conditions that alter patients’ identities, showing how we learn a lot about being human from people with a fragmented or altered sense of self.

He travels the world to meet those who suffer from “maladies of the self” interviewing patients, psychiatrists, philosophers and neuroscientists along the way. He charts how the self is affected by Asperger’s, autism, Alzheimer’s, epilepsy, schizophrenia, among many other mental conditions, revealing how the brain constructs our sense of self. Each chapter is anchored with stories of people who experience themselves differently from the norm.

The Man Who Wasn’t There is a magical mystery tour of scientific analysis and philosophical pondering, now utterly transformed by recent advances in cutting-edge neuroscience.

The Importance of Living

A tremendous bestseller when it was first published in 1937, The Importance of Living has been a classic for over sixty years. Intended as an antidote to the dizzying pace of the modern world, Lin Yutang’s prescription is the classic distillation of ancient Chinese wisdom: revere inaction as much as action, invoke humour to maintain a healthy attitude, and never forget that there will always be plenty of fools around who are willing – indeed eager – to be busy, to make themselves useful, and to exercise power while you bask in the simple joy of existence.

Now, more than six decades later, with our lives accelerated to unbelievable levels, this wise and timeless book is more pertinent than ever before. In an era when we’re overwhelmed with wake-up calls, it’s an entertaining innovation to savour life’s beauty, its endless fascination and its slow, sure, simple pleasures.

Why Won’t You Apologize?

With her trademark wit, Harriet Lerner offers a joyful and sanity-saving guide to setting things right.

Renowned psychologist and bestselling author of The Dance of Anger sheds new light on the two most important words in the English language, "I’m sorry," and offers a unique perspective on the challenge of healing broken relationships and restoring trust.

Dr. Harriet Lerner has been studying apologies for more than two decades, namely, why some people won’t give them. Now she offers compelling stories and solid theory that demonstrates the transformative power of making amends and what is required for healing when the damage we’ve inflicted (or received) is far from simple. Readers will learn how to craft a meaningful apology and avoid signals of insincerity that only deepen suffering.

In Why Won’t You Apologize? Lerner challenges the popular notion that forgiveness is the only path to peace of mind and helps those who have been injured to resist pressure to forgive too easily. She explains what drives both the non-apologizer and the over-apologizer, and why the people who do the worst things are the least able to own their misdeeds.

The Friendship Cure

Our best friends, gal-pals, bromances, Twitter followers, Facebook friends, long- distance buddies and WhatsApp threads define us in ways we rarely acknowledge. There is so much about friendship we either don t know or don t articulate: why do some friendships last a lifetime, while others are only temporary? How do you break up with a toxic friend? And maybe the most important question: how can we live in the most interconnected age and still find ourselves stuck in the greatest loneliness epidemic of our time? It s killing us, making us miserable and causing a public health crisis. What if meaningful friendships are the solution, not a distraction

In The Friendship Cure, Kate Leaver’s much anticipated manifesto brings to light what modern friendship means, how it can survive, why we need it and what we can do to get the most from it. From behavioural scientists to best mates, Kate finds extraordinary stories and research, drawing on her own experiences to create a fascinating blend of accessible smart thinking, investigative journalism, pop culture and memoir.

A Very Short Tour of the Mind

Leading us through cognitive theory, neuroscience and Darwinian evolution with his trademark wit and wisdom, Michael Corballis explains what we know and don’t know about our minds. How do we know if we’re really the top dogs in brain power? Does our creativity stem solely from the right brain? From language to standing upright, composing music to lying, he uncovers our most common misconceptions and the fascinating habits and abilities that make us human.

High Definition

In recent years, microdosing has gone mainstream as burnt-out parents and workers navigate stress and fatigue. In an inversion of the hippie dream, psychedelics are increasingly being used to stabilise a consumerist system in crisis. Yet personal testimony and scientific research suggest that these apparent stabilisers could instead be a source of transformation, unlocking greater energy, creativity, wellbeing and connection to our surroundings. The tidal wave of antidepressants has failed to heal us – could psychedelics fill the gap and more?

Brilliantly marshalling original analysis and expert insights, High Definition explores practices and applications, the legislative and corporate picture, and the powerful emancipatory potential of these substances, probing how the psychedelic renaissance could be not merely a barometer of social change, but a catalyst for it.

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