We are taught that the world is a top-down place. Acclaimed author, Matt Ridley, shows just how wrong this is in his compelling new book.

We are taught that the world is a top-down place. Generals win battles; politicians run countries; scientists discover truths; artists create genres; inventors make breakthroughs; teachers shape minds; philosophers change minds; priests teach morality; businessmen lead businesses; environmentalists save the planet. Not just individuals, but institutions too: Goldman Sachs, the Communist Party, the Catholic Church, Al Qaeda ¨C these are said to shape the world.

This is more often wrong than right. ¡®Tear Down the Sky Hooks¡¯ is about bottom-up order and its enemy, the top-down twitch, the endless fascination human beings have for design rather than evolution, for direction rather than emergence. Top downery is the source of most of our worst problems in the past ¨C why Hitler won an election, why the sub-prime bubble happened, why Africa lingered in poverty when Asia did not, why the euro is a disaster ¨C and will be the scourge of this century too.

And although we neglect, defy and ignore them, bottom-up trends still shape the world. The growth of technology, the sanitation-driven health revolution, the quadrupling of farm yields so that more land could be released for nature ¨C these were largely emergent phenomena. So was the internet, the mobile phone revolution and the rise of Asia.

In this wide-ranging, highly opinionated non-fiction narrative, Ridley draws on anecdotes from science, economics, history, politics and philosophy and examples drawn from the scientific literature, from historical narratives and from personal anecdotes.

Research shows that self-awareness is the meta-skill of the 21st century ¨C the foundation for high performance, smart choices, and lasting relationships. Unfortunately, we are remarkably poor judges of ourselves and how we come across, and it¡¯s rare to get candid, objective feedback from colleagues, employees, and even friends and family.

Integrating hundreds of studies with her own research and work in the Fortune 500 world, organizational psychologist Tasha Eurich shatters conventional assumptions about what it takes to truly know ourselves ¨C like why introspection isn¡¯t a bullet train to insight, how experience is the enemy of self-knowledge, and just how far others will go to avoid telling us the truth about ourselves. Through stories of people who¡¯ve made dramatic self-awareness gains, she offers surprising secrets, techniques and strategies to help readers do the same ¨C and therefore improve their work performance, career satisfaction, leadership potential, relationships, and more.

At a time when self-awareness matters more than ever, Insight is the essential playbook for surviving and thriving in an unaware world.

The Earth teems with life: in its oceans, forests, skies and cities. Yet there¡¯s a black hole at the heart of biology. We do not know why complex life is the way it is, or, for that matter, how life first began. In The Vital Question, award-winning author and biochemist Nick Lane radically reframes evolutionary history, putting forward a solution to conundrums that have puzzled generations of scientists.

For two and a half billion years, from the very origins of life, single-celled organisms such as bacteria evolved without changing their basic form. Then, on just one occasion in four billion years, they made the jump to complexity. All complex life, from mushrooms to man, shares puzzling features, such as sex, which are unknown in bacteria. How and why did this radical transformation happen?

The answer, Lane argues, lies in energy: all life on Earth lives off a voltage with the strength of a lightning bolt. Building on the pillars of evolutionary theory, Lane¡¯s hypothesis draws on cutting-edge research into the link between energy and cell biology, in order to deliver a compelling account of evolution from the very origins of life to the emergence of multicellular organisms, while offering deep insights into our own lives and deaths.

Both rigorous and enchanting, The Vital Question provides a solution to life¡¯s vital question: why are we as we are, and indeed, why are we here at all?

Learning how to interact and automate with Linux is essential for millions of professionals. Python makes it much easier. With this book, you¡¯ll learn how to develop software and solve problems using containers, as well as how to monitor, instrument, load-test, and operationalize your software. Looking for effective ways to "get stuff done" in Python? This is your guide.

The rise of Donald Trump may have shocked Americans, but it should not have surprised them. His anti-democratic movement is the culmination of a decades-long breakdown of U.S. institutions. The same blindness to U.S. decline ¨C particularly the loss of economic stability for the majority of the population and opportunity-hoarding by the few ¨C is reflected in an unwillingness to accept that authoritarianism can indeed thrive in the so-called ¡°home of the free¡±.

As Americans struggle to reconcile the gulf between a flagrant aspiring autocrat and the democratic precepts they had been told were sacred and immutable, the inherent fragility of American democracy has been revealed. Hiding in Plain Sight exposes this continual loss of freedom, the rise of consolidated corruption, and the secrets behind a burgeoning autocratic United States that have been hiding in plain sight for decades. In Kendzior¡¯s signature and celebrated style, she expertly outlines Trump¡¯s meteoric rise from the 1980s until today, interlinking key moments of his life with the degradation of the American political system and the continual erosion of our civil liberties by foreign powers.

Kendzior also offers a never-before-seen look at her personal life and her lifelong tendency to be in the wrong place at the wrong time ¨C living in New York through 9/11 and in St. Louis during the Ferguson uprising, and researching media and authoritarianism when Trump emerged using the same tactics as the post-Soviet dictatorships she had long studied.

Hiding in Plain Sight is about confronting injustice ¨C an often agonizing process, but an honest and necessary one ¨C as the only way that offers the possibility of ending it.