This book offers solutions to anyone who has felt victimized, ostracized or left behind by life. Surprising as it may sound, many people take comfort in their own misery. Feeling too good for too long (or even feeling good at all) can be scary for people, explains Anne Katherine. "Achievement creates anxiety. Intimacy leads to fear. Happiness produces uneasiness. Pleasure causes pain. The solution to this dilemma: what feels good has to be stopped. I call this an addiction to misery." Katherine's fascination and perspective book provides immediate assistance to those people who think they might be making choices that keep them at a "carefully calibrated level of existence--beneath bliss and above despair."

Don’t tell me it’s terrifying. Terrify me. Filled with grief, Jules Belleno rarely leaves the house since her husband’s death while on duty as a police officer. Other than the reviews Jules writes on her blog, she has little contact with the outside world. But one day when she ventures out to the local grocery store, Jules bumps into a fellow customer . . . and recognizes him as her favorite author, Patrick Reagan. Jules gushes and thoroughly embarrasses herself before Regan graciously talks with her. And that’s the last thing she remembers—until she wakes up in a strange room with a splitting headache. She’s been kidnapped. And what she discovers will change everything she believed about her husband’s death . . . her career . . . and her faith.

In a kind of social tour of sympathy, Candace Clark reveals that the emotional experience we call sympathy has a history, logic, and life of its own. Although sympathy may seem to be a natural, reflexive reaction, people are not born knowing when, for whom, and in what circumstances sympathy is appropriate. Rather, they learn elaborate, highly specific rules—different rules for men than for women—that guide when to feel or display sympathy, when to claim it, and how to accept it. Using extensive interviews, cultural artifacts, and "intensive eavesdropping" in public places, such as hospitals and funeral parlors, as well as analyzing charity appeals, blues lyrics, greeting cards, novels, and media reports, Clark shows that we learn culturally prescribed rules that govern our expression of sympathy. "Clark's . . . research methods [are] inventive and her glimpses of U.S. life revealing. . . . And you have to love a social scientist so respectful of Miss Manners."—Clifford Orwin, Toronto Globe and Mail "Clark offers a thought-provoking and quite interesting etiquette of sympathy according to which we ought to act in order to preserve the sympathy credits we can call on in time of need."—Virginia Quarterly Review

This book takes a fun-filled look at the foibles, follies, pratfalls, and unpredictable world of the duck hunter, from the time his alarm rings at 3:00 a.m. until he stumbles into freezing marsh water two hours later, swamping his waders but not dampening his enthusiasm for the sport. Why do duck hunters do it? Sit in driving rain for hours awaiting ducks that may never come? Shiver in freezing boats and blinds in the most inaccessible, not to mention inhospitable, environs imaginable? Author-photographer Bill Buckley writes about these magic moments with humor and verve, but it is his brilliant color photographs that steal the show. The hapless hunter who watches helplessly as his partner's Suburban backs out of the driveway-and over the gun case that holds his favorite shotgun. Click! The faithful retriever that elegantly lifts its leg and makes a sop of the hunter's blind bag. Click! And the pained expressions on the faces of duck hunters caught in the act of enjoying their favorite sport. Click. Waterfowlers who sometimes question their own sanity can now take heart. It's all right, Buckley writes, if you like standing in swamp muck for hours on end. It's okay if your family thinks you're weird. Who cares if your girlfriend diagnoses you as obsessive-compulsive or sadomasochistic? The important thing is, you're not alone.

The only daughter of a prominent Chicago minister, Ruth Wilcox, struggling to deal with her mounting marital problems, must finally face the truth when her husband has an affair with a young woman and decide whether to forgive and forget, or move on. Original.

A psychiatric case study masquerading a fancy-pants graphic novel, Misery Loves Comedy collects Ivan Brunetti's early issues (no pun intended) wait, let's rephrase that. Misery Loves Comedy collects the first three issues of the legendary comic book series Schizo in their entirety, as well as a host of miscellaneous flotsam and jetsam from various anthologies, c. 1992-2005. Readers will find the author's unwitting self-caricature as a paranoid, deluded young man intriguingly repugnant and often chuckle-inducing. Besides Brunetti's trademark nihilism, self-loathing, relentless depression, and inchoate, spittle-soaked misanthropy, these earlier comics offer a dollop of scatology and blasphemy for that extra puerile, lowbrow tang. These are comics for those who enjoy witnessing one man's sanity in its final death rattle, swinging its tail from anhedonia to schadenfreude and back again. Also: lots and lots of filthy jokes. p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 13.9px Arial; color: #424242}

A bestselling author and business guru tells how to improve your job satisfaction and performance. In his sixth fable, bestselling author Patrick Lencioni takes on a topic that almost everyone can relate to: the causes of a miserable job. Millions of workers, even those who have carefully chosen careers based on true passions and interests, dread going to work, suffering each day as they trudge to jobs that make them cynical, weary, and frustrated. It is a simple fact of business life that any job, from investment banker to dishwasher, can become miserable. Through the story of a CEO turned pizzeria manager, Lencioni reveals the three elements that make work miserable -- irrelevance, immeasurability, and anonymity -- and gives managers and their employees the keys to make any job more fulfilling. As with all of Lencioni?s books, this one is filled with actionable advice you can put into effect immediately. In addition to the fable, the book includes a detailed model examining the three signs of job misery and how they can be remedied. It covers the benefits of managing for job fulfillment within organizations -- increased productivity, greater retention, and competitive advantage -- and offers examples of how managers can use the applications in the book to deal with specific jobs and situations. Patrick Lencioni (San Francisco, CA) is President of The Table Group, a management consulting firm specializing in executive team development and organizational health. As a consultant and keynote speaker, he has worked with thousands of senior executives and executive teams in organizations ranging from Fortune 500 companies to high-tech startups to universities and nonprofits. His clients include AT&T, Bechtel, Boeing, Cisco, Sam?s Club, Microsoft, Mitsubishi, Allstate, Visa, FedEx, New York Life, Sprint, Novell, Sybase, The Make-A-Wish Foundation, and the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. Lencioni is the author of six bestselling books, including The Five Dysfunctions of a Team. He previously worked for Oracle, Sybase, and the management consulting firm Bain & Company.