What personal qualities are required to acknowledge and confront the deep uncertainty and 'the inevitable fact of our ignorance' in a complex, fast-changing world? With this collection of five extraordinary and challenging essays, Graham Leicester introduces us to the astonishing intellect of Don Michael (1923 - 2000) whose wisdom, humanity, integrity, and commitment to confronting the most vexing and complex problems continue to inspire everyone who encounters his work. The touchstone of Don Michael's work is a commitment to individual, organisational and social learning. He writes in these essays with prophetic insight about the psychological temptations of denial in the face of such deep uncertainty, the consequential resistance to learning, and the resulting dangers of collapse, conflict and despair. The subject of the last essay, and the title of the book, concerns the Sufi story of blind people reaching a different conclusion about the 'elephant'. Don Michael proposes that, in the context of society today, the story-teller is blind and does not know what he is talking about, and that there is no elephant - because the human race, for the most part, is 'too complex, too interconnected, and too dynamic to comprehend... that there is no agreed-on interpretation that provides an enduring basis for coherent action based on an understanding of the enfolding context'.

In the tales that make up The Elephant Vanishes, the imaginative genius that has made Haruki Murakami an international superstar is on full display. In these stories, a man sees his favorite elephant vanish into thin air; a newlywed couple suffers attacks of hunger that drive them to hold up a McDonald’s in the middle of the night; and a young woman discovers that she has become irresistible to a little green monster who burrows up through her backyard. By turns haunting and hilarious, in The Elephant Vanishes Murakami crosses the border between separate realities—and comes back bearing remarkable treasures. Includes the story "Barn Burning," which is the basis for the major motion picture Burning.

An award-winning science journalist details the quest to isolate and understand dark matter--and shows how that search has helped us to understand the universe we inhabit. When you train a telescope on outer space, you can see luminous galaxies, nebulae, stars, and planets. But if you add all that together, it constitutes only 15 percent of the matter in the universe. Despite decades of research, the nature of the remaining 85 percent is unknown. We call it dark matter. In The Elephant in the Universe, Govert Schilling explores the fascinating history of the search for dark matter. Evidence for its existence comes from a wealth of astronomical observations. Theories and computer simulations of the evolution of the universe are also suggestive: they can be reconciled with astronomical measurements only if dark matter is a dominant component of nature. Physicists have devised huge, sensitive instruments to search for dark matter, which may be unlike anything else in the cosmos--some unknown elementary particle. Yet so far dark matter has escaped every experiment. Indeed, dark matter is so elusive that some scientists are beginning to suspect there might be something wrong with our theories about gravity or with the current paradigms of cosmology. Schilling interviews both believers and heretics and paints a colorful picture of the history and current status of dark matter research, with astronomers and physicists alike trying to make sense of theory and observation. Taking a holistic view of dark matter as a problem, an opportunity, and an example of science in action, The Elephant in the Universe is a vivid tale of scientists puzzling their way toward the true nature of the universe.

Elephant finds a book and then sneezes, mixing up all the letters.

When two baby elephants escaped from the circus in 1975, it took eighteen days to find them. The authorities searched all over, but they were always one step behind this sneaky pair of fugitives. This colorful picture book follows these giant hide-and-seekers throughout Oklahoma as they evade capture for as long as they can.

One night, all of a sudden, the world split in two. Faced with this unexpected event - and with half of his considerable body missing - an elephant begins a journey to find his missing half. Along the way, he discovers the many different ways there are of rebuilding and reinventing oneself.At once quietly poetic and (not-so-quietly) humorous, Half of an Elephant is an adventure of a lifetime, not just for our hero, but for every reader who has ever struggled to find himself.

A boy provides instructions as he searches high and low for an elephant, which the reader can find in the illustrations.