Secondhand Science, Psychology & Ideas Bargain Book Box SP2831

Secondhand Science, Psychology & Ideas Bargain Book Box SP2831

Twenty Pelican and Penguin books from the era when these spines defined what a serious general reader might be curious about. Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, James Watson's Double Helix, Stephen Jay Gould on geological time, B.F. Skinner's most controversial argument, Arthur Koestler's Act of Creation, Laurens van der Post in the Kalahari, and Margaret Mead on male and female — a box covering evolution, ecology, cosmology, psychology, and the shape of the future.

1. The Psychology of Interpersonal Behaviour — Michael Argyle — Argyle's survey of how people communicate, influence, and respond to each other: body language, social roles, friendship, and the invisible rules that govern every human interaction.
2. Freud and the Post-Freudians — J.A.C. Brown — A lucid guide to what psychoanalysis actually argues and how the movement divided after Freud: Adler, Jung, Klein, Horney, and the schools that developed from — and against — the original theory.
3. The Secret Life of Plants — Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird — The 1973 bestseller documenting experiments suggesting plants respond to human emotion and music: controversial in its conclusions, remarkable for the range of research it provoked.
4. Read Better, Read Faster — Manya and Eric De Leeuw — A Pelican guide to improving reading speed and comprehension: the practical skills for getting more from text in less time, based on the reading research of the 1960s.
5. The Creation of the Universe — George Gamow — Gamow was one of the physicists who developed the Big Bang theory; this is his own accessible account of how the universe began, written with the clarity that made him the great popular science writer of his generation.
6. The Act of Creation — Arthur Koestler — Koestler's ambitious theory of creativity: the "bisociation" of two previously unrelated frames of reference that produces laughter, scientific discovery, and art. One of the most provocative books about what the human mind does when it thinks.
7. Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time — Stephen Jay Gould — Gould examines how Burnet, Hutton, and Lyell constructed the concept of deep time, and how the tension between two metaphors — time as arrow and time as cycle — shaped the entire science of geology.
8. title see product photo — Edward Kynaston — An illustrated Penguin work on Australian natural history and landscape.
9. The Lost World of the Kalahari — Laurens van der Post — Van der Post's quest for the last surviving Bushmen deep in the Kalahari Desert: the journey, the encounters, and the haunting question of what it means to find a people whose entire world is ending.
10. Between the Tides — Philip Street — An introduction to the natural history of the shoreline: the creatures of rock pools, tidal flats, and the intertidal zone, from the George Cansdale Wild Life Series.
11. The Next Ten Thousand Years: A Vision of Man's Future in the Universe — Adrian Berry — Published in 1974 with an introduction by Patrick Moore, Berry's optimistic forecast of the next ten millennia: space colonisation, planetary engineering, and the long future of a species that learns to leave its home planet.
12. Beyond Freedom and Dignity — B.F. Skinner — Skinner's most controversial book: the argument that human freedom and dignity are illusions, and that a science of behaviour — applied systematically — offers the only realistic path to solving the problems of society. It provoked a storm of objection that hasn't entirely died down.
13. Male and Female — Margaret Mead — Mead's study of seven Pacific cultures and what they reveal about the relationship between biology and cultural shaping in producing male and female behaviour: a foundational text of twentieth-century anthropology.
14. Conservation — ed. A.B. Costin and H.J. Frith — The revised Pelican edition of the classic Australian conservation reader: the ecology of Australian landscapes, the threats to native species, and the case for active conservation policy before such a case was fashionable.
15. Silent Spring — Rachel Carson — The 1962 book that started the environmental movement: Carson's account of how DDT and other pesticides were destroying bird populations, accumulating in the food chain, and silencing the springs they moved through. It changed what governments and industries were allowed to do.
16. This Endangered Planet: Prospects and Proposals for Human Survival — Richard A. Falk — A 1971 argument for a new international framework to manage the environmental and population crises: an early and prescient call for the kind of global governance still being argued over.
17. The Double Helix — James D. Watson — Watson's personal account of the discovery of the structure of DNA — the race with Pauling, the use of Rosalind Franklin's X-ray data, and the moment of understanding. One of the most readable and most argued-about scientific memoirs.
18. Totem and Taboo — Sigmund Freud — Freud applies psychoanalytic theory to anthropology: the origins of religion, morality, and social organisation in the psychology of what he called the primal horde. Speculative, influential, and still generating argument.
19. Psychology — W.E. Sargent — A Teach Yourself introduction to the basic principles of psychology, covering perception, learning, memory, personality, and behaviour: the accessible primer for the general reader.
20. Only One Earth: The Care and Maintenance of a Small Planet — Barbara Ward and René Dubos — Written for the 1972 Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment, this is the book that put the phrase "Only One Earth" into global circulation: the case for treating the planet as a system that requires active stewardship rather than indefinite exploitation.