Arguably the best book ever on what is increasingly becoming the science of persuasion. Whether you're a mere consumer or someone weaving the web of persuasion to urge others to buy or vote for your product, this is an essential book for understanding the psychological foundations of marketing. Recommended.

Back in print for the first time in decades! The Unidentified and Creatures of the Outer Edge, the classic early works of Jerome Clark and Loren Coleman, now in a special double edition with a new introduction by the authors.
The Unidentified finds the links that connect supernatural folklore, religious visions, cryptozoology, and modern-day UFO stories. It documents episodes from the fringes of human experience and exposes what they may tell us about ourselves and the strange world we live in, where things – whether fairies, ghosts, divine apparitions, or ostensible extraterrestrials – may be even more mysterious than they seem.
Creatures of the Outer Edge surveys the cryptozoologically bountiful decade of the 1970s (and more) with accounts of Mothman, Owlmen, Thunderbirds, Phantom Panthers, Devil Dogs, Texas Big Birds, and, yes, of course, Bigfoot. Some of the individually "named" local Bigfoot creatures first appeared in this book, including Momo (Missouri Monster), Lake Worth Monster, Murphysboro Mud Monster, the Enfield Thing, El Reno Chicken Man, Noxie Monster, Navajo's Skinwalkers, and Yukon's Bushman. The book also introduced the now-iconic Dover Demon for the first time to the general public.

"Flavors of Tuscany" is an authoritative and beautifully illustrated celebration of the culture of Tuscan food and cooking that incorporates a wonderful selection of authentic regional recipes. Starting with Antipasti (appetizers and nibbles), try Anchovies Marinated in Lemon, Olive Oil, and Chile or Fresh Broad Beans with Pecorino and Panzarotti. Minestre (soups) includes the classic Minestrone and Cacciucco (mixed fish stew). Pasta e Pane (pasta and bread) offers tempting recipes for risotto, gnocchi, and sauces. Secondi (entrees) covers fish, meat, poultry, and game dishes. Enjoy Tuna Steaks Baked with Rosemary; Meatballs with Pecorino and Mushrooms; or Pollo alla Diavola - flattened chicken with chile and lemon. Contorni (vegetable sides) includes the delicate Ricotta Stuffed Zucchini Flowers. To finish, Dolci e Postpasti (sweet things) treats you to Castagnaccio made from chestnut flour, pine nuts, and walnuts, or Cenci, ribbons of deep-fried pastry served at festive celebrations.

English magicians were once the wonder of the known world, with fairy servants at their beck and call; they could command winds, mountains, and woods. But by the early 1800s they have long since lost the ability to perform magic. They can only write long, dull papers about it, while fairy servants are nothing but a fading memory.  
But at Hurtfew Abbey in Yorkshire, the rich, reclusive Mr Norrell has assembled a wonderful library of lost and forgotten books from England's magical past and regained some of the powers of England's magicians. He goes to London and raises a beautiful young woman from the dead. Soon he is lending his help to the government in the war against Napoleon Bonaparte, creating ghostly fleets of rain-ships to confuse and alarm the French.
All goes well until a rival magician appears. Jonathan Strange is handsome, charming, and talkative-the very opposite of Mr Norrell. Strange thinks nothing of enduring the rigors of campaigning with Wellington's army and doing magic on battlefields. Astonished to find another practicing magician, Mr Norrell accepts Strange as a pupil. But it soon becomes clear that their ideas of what English magic ought to be are very different. For Mr Norrell, their power is something to be cautiously controlled, while Jonathan Strange will always be attracted to the wildest, most perilous forms of magic. He becomes fascinated by the ancient, shadowy figure of the Raven King, a child taken by fairies who became king of both England and Faerie, and the most legendary magician of all. Eventually Strange's heedless pursuit of long-forgotten magic threatens to destroy not only his partnership with Norrell, but everything that he holds dear.
Sophisticated, witty, and ingeniously convincing, Susanna Clarke's magisterial novel weaves magic into a flawlessly detailed vision of historical England. She has created a world so thoroughly enchanting that eight hundred pages leave readers longing for more.

Java Swing, long regarded as the authoritative book on using the Swing classes, is available in a new edition that builds on a solid foundation in exploring the Java 2 Swing additions and modifications. This is a big, tremendously detailed, exhaustively researched, and ultimately authoritative reference that pushes the limits of what a book can do toward eliminating the necessity of writing experimental programs to see how Swing classes work in practice. You'll find in these pages bits of software that show how most of Swing works: all of the major features get lavish attention, while most of the minor classes are demonstrated adequately, as well.

You could probably find demonstrations free of charge on the Internet, however. The true value of this work is in the comments its five authors have attached to their copious examples. They can be quite specific: at least one such segment warns that default Swing behavior violates Mac OS X user interface guidelines and explains how to work around the problem. Another section explains how the methods of the UndoableEdit class can be used in various ways, to implement different user interface behavior options. Some readers will head straight to the O'Reilly Web site, where they can grab the code and examine it in an editor rather than in print—code listings take up a lot of space here—but everyone will appreciate the concise hierarchy, method, and property documentation, as well as the wisdom contained in the prose. —David Wall

Topics covered:The Swing classes for creating graphical user interfaces in the Java programming language. It covers all the windowing stuff—dialogs, buttons, containers, layouts, lists, and that kind of thing—as well as tables, trees, text-manipulation classes, formatted text, drag and drop, and accessibility support.