Siachen. The world s highest battlefield. An obscure, unwinable war fought in the mountains far beyond the reach of ordinary men. A parable of India and Pakistan. At the end of 2003, foreign correspondent Myra MacDonald set out to uncover the secrets of this war, on a journey which began in the monkey-infested military headquarters in Delhi, led through the villages of superstitious Indian foot soldiers to the villas of retired generals in Islamabad, and to the war zone itself on both the Indian and Pakistani sides. Heights of Madness is the first account of the Siachen war to be told from both the Indian and the Pakistani points of view. But it is also about the journey itself, of a lone foreign woman travelling through India and Pakistan, meeting larger-than-life characters the Buddhist hillman, the Sikh hero, the Pathan commander, the Hindu jawan and stumbling into improbable settings, fighting off altitude sickness in a yak tent, huddling around a bukhari stove in a makeshift officers mess, suffering from sunburn on the world s highest road. And perhaps most of all, it is about the mountains. For the Siachen war is fought over a land so beautiful that you come to believe, as do many of the soldiers who serve there, that this is indeed the home of the gods.

Swapping the nine-to-five grind for the freedom of the great outdoors, Jonny Muir set off on a 5,000-mile cycling and walking odyssey. His mission? To visit the summit of the United Kingdom's 92 countries - in 92 days. Never mind unexploded shells in Yorkshire, biting bugs in the Cairngorms of the gruelling task of climbing the equivalent of 14 Everests, The Heights of Madness is a celebration of our homeland's high places. If you've ever wondered what the highest point in Norfolk is, or why 500,000 people climb Snowdon every year, this is the book for you.

Introduction by China Miéville Long acknowledged as a master of nightmarish visions, H. P. Lovecraft established the genuineness and dignity of his own pioneering fiction in 1931 with his quintessential work of supernatural horror, At the Mountains of Madness. The deliberately told and increasingly chilling recollection of an Antarctic expedition’s uncanny discoveries–and their encounter with untold menace in the ruins of a lost civilization–is a milestone of macabre literature. This exclusive new edition, presents Lovecraft’s masterpiece in fully restored form, and includes his acclaimed scholarly essay “Supernatural Horror in Literature.” This is essential reading for every devotee of classic terror.

The New York Times bestseller “A glistening psychological history, faceted largely by the biographies of eight famous leaders . . .” —The Boston Globe “A provocative thesis . . . Ghaemi’s book deserves high marks for original thinking.” —The Washington Post “Provocative, fascinating.” —Salon.com Historians have long puzzled over the apparent mental instability of great and terrible leaders alike: Napoleon, Lincoln, Churchill, Hitler, and others. In A First-Rate Madness, Nassir Ghaemi, director of the Mood Disorders Program at Tufts Medical Center, offers a myth-shattering exploration of the powerful connections between mental illness and leadership and sets forth a controversial, compelling thesis: The very qualities that mark those with mood disorders also make for the best leaders in times of crisis. From the importance of Lincoln's "depressive realism" to the lackluster leadership of exceedingly sane men as Neville Chamberlain, A First-Rate Madness overturns many of our most cherished perceptions about greatness and the mind.

Help Nancy and her friends find a prop that’s gone missing from a superhero movie set in the fifth book in an interactive Nancy Drew chapter book mystery series. Grab a piece of paper and get ready to jot down your own ideas and solutions to the case! School is out for summer and the timing is great because a movie is filming in River Heights, and Nancy, Bess, and George—along with a bunch of their classmates—get to be extras in a scene shot at the playground! The movie features Glam Girl, a fashion-forward superhero who gets her powers through her clothes. When the girls arrive on set, they catch a glimpse of the super shoes that give Glam Girl the ability to run, jump, and kick with super-speed. An assistant explains to them that there is only one pair in existence and that they were custom-made for the actress Shasta’s feet. Everyone goes wild as Glam Girl runs into the playground, blue shoes glimmering. But when Shasta’s on a between-scenes break, the shoes go missing! The director says that if the shoes aren’t found, they’ll be leaving River Heights and their scene won’t make it into the movie! Good thing Nancy happens to have her most important prop right in her pocket—her clue book. Who took the blue super shoes? Was it Paloma Garva, who needs a pair of blue shoes for her Junior Fashion Show? Was it Rosie the stunt-woman, who seems to envy Shasta’s spotlight? Or was it the Popcorn Peeps, their classmates’ film club, who need movie relics for their new museum?

The philosophy of psychosis and the psychosis of philosophy: a philosopher draws on his experience of madness. In this book, philosopher and linguist Wouter Kusters examines the philosophy of psychosis—and the psychosis of philosophy. By analyzing the experience of psychosis in philosophical terms, Kusters not only emancipates the experience of the psychotic from medical classification, he also emancipates the philosopher from the narrowness of textbooks and academia, allowing philosophers to engage in real-life praxis, philosophy in vivo. Philosophy and madness—Kusters's preferred, non-medicalized term—coexist, one mirroring the other. Kusters draws on his own experience of madness—two episodes of psychosis, twenty years apart—as well as other first-person narratives of psychosis. Speculating about the maddening effect of certain words and thought, he argues, and demonstrates, that the steady flow of philosophical deliberation may sweep one into a full-blown acute psychotic episode. Indeed, a certain kind of philosophizing may result in confusion, paradoxes, unworldly insights, and circular frozenness reminiscent of madness. Psychosis presents itself to the psychotic as an inescapable truth and reality. Kusters evokes the mad person's philosophical or existential amazement at reality, thinking, time, and space, drawing on classic autobiographical accounts of psychoses by Antonin Artaud, Daniel Schreber, and others, as well as the work of phenomenological psychiatrists and psychologists and such phenomenologists as Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. He considers the philosophical mystic and the mystical philosopher, tracing the mad undercurrent in the Husserlian philosophy of time; visits the cloud castles of mystical madness, encountering LSD devotees, philosophers, theologians, and nihilists; and, falling to earth, finds anxiety, emptiness, delusions, and hallucinations. Madness and philosophy proceed and converge toward a single vanishing point.

Driving down the Long Island Expressway in November of 1992, Sol Wachtler was New York’s chief judge and heir apparent to the New York governorship. Suddenly, three van loads of FBI agents swerved in front of him—bringing his car and his legal career to a halt. Wachtler's subsequent arrest, conviction, and incarceration for harassing his longtime lover precipitated a media feeding frenzy, revealing to the world his struggles with romantic attachment, manic depression, and drug abuse. In this, his prison diary, Wachtler reveals the stark reality behind his vertiginous fall from the heights of the legal establishment to the underbelly of the criminal justice system. Sentenced to a medium security prison in Butner, North Carolina, Wachtler is stabbed by an unseen assailant, berated by prison guards, and repeatedly placed in solitary confinement with no explanation. Moreover, as a prisoner he confronts firsthand the inequities of a system his judicial rulings helped to construct and befriends the type of people he once sentenced. With unflinching honesty, Wachtler draws on his unique experience of living life on both sides of the bench to paint a chilling portrait of prison life interwoven with a no‐holds‐barred analysis of the shortcomings of the American legal justice system.