This book explores how social change and changes to civil society are occurring in Russia, considering especially these changes in the education field. It shows how, although the right to lifelong learning is guaranteed by the Russian state, as it was by the Soviet Union, where formal education, based on communist ideology, emphasised the needs of the state over the needs of individuals; in practice at present the educational needs of adults – a wide range of needs, many of which are connected with coping with changing economic, social and technological circumstances - are being met by a range of non-governmental providers, including commercial companies, self-help groups, and community and neighbourhood clubs. This book discusses how this new popular education is both an example of developing civil society, and also helps the development of civil society further, although, as the book points out, new popular education is also part of a growing educational divide, where motivated, articulate people are taking advantage of new opportunities, whilst disadvantaged groups such as women, the unemployed and the rural poor continue excluded.

Baumeister discovered that willpower actually has a physical basis to it: it is like a muscle that can be strengthened with practice, and fatigued from overuse. That's why eating and sleeping—and especially failing to do either of those—have such dramatic effects on self-control. 

Yet, while self-control is biologically rooted, we have the capacity to manipulate our nature. Willpower features personal stories from entrepreneurs, executives, parents and children who have managed to do just that. The characters range from Victorian explorers to modern homemakers, from college students pulling all nighters to entertainers. The practical lessons in self-control conditioning they provide are nothing short of life changing.

Combining the best of modern social science with the practical wisdom of David Allen, Ben Franklin, and others, Baumeister and Tierney here share the definitive compendium of modern lessons in willpower.

Until the calamity of the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and recent catastrophic hurricanes, the American Gulf Coast-a dynamic region of marshes, swamps, bayous, beaches, and hardwood forests-largely evaded national consciousness. In Terra Incognita, photographer Richard Sexton explores this oft-overlooked but now extremely endangered landscape in a sequence of dramatic duotone photographs. Covering the Gulf Coast from the Mississippi River to the Florida panhandle, Sexton's images of woods and wetlands resonate with spare simplicity and quiet beauty. Panoramas of gnarled trees, vistas of sea and sky, and shorelines dissolving into a misty fog depict the haunting terrain of the gulf coastal plain. This book and these photographs represent a natural miracle now under fearsome assault.

Contrasting natural phenomena with found objects, and organic environments with constructed ones, Sexton's imagery plays upon subtle patterns of mutation and transfiguration. No less striking are alterations brought about by the devastation of natural forces, now hastened and possibly even eclipsed by manmade. With their focus on the passage of time, and the cycle of loss and renewal, these photographs remind us that this ancient terrain is fragile, under constant pressure and contending with both human intervention and the vagaries of nature.

• Uses their thinking as the basis for telling the story of the history and development of ethical thought more broadly
• Focuses specifically on their writings on virtue, will, duty, and consequence
• Concentrates on the theistic beliefs to highlight continuity of philosophical thought