In Wisdom: From Philosophy to Neuroscience, Stephen S. Hall examines the way recent brain science is shedding light on these timeless human virtues. He refers to them as eight “neural pillars of wisdom.” Among the findings in each area are:

1. Emotion Regulation – Studies at Stanford University, including brain imaging experiments, have shown that older people process emotion differently than younger people on average. They are less likely to dwell on the negative, tend to value relationships more, and rebound from setbacks more quickly.

2. Compassion – Electrophysiological measurements of the brains of Buddhist monks in the midst of compassion meditation have identified a unique pattern of brain activation, known as a “gamma oscillation,” which may coordinate and synchronize mental activity in disparate parts of the brain during empathic understanding and acts of loving-kindness.

3. Moral Judgment – Cognitive neuroscientists, in a series of brain scanning experiments over the past decade, have identified a neural circuit involved in moral reasoning, and have shown that moral judgment can change depending on whether we are physically close to another person (“up close and personal” judgments) or are acting at a distance.

4. Humility – Business psychologists have shown that the combination of intense professional will and extreme personal humility are the essential traits in turning a good company into a great company; by contrast, CEOs who rank high in narcissism measures tend to be leaders—but bad ones. They put personal drama and egotism ahead of company performance.

5. Altruism – Scientists have used brain-scanning experiments to identify a tentative circuitry in the brain that monitors situations of social injustice, and seems to prompt a form of behavior known as altruistic punishment—decisions in which a person sacrifices personal gain to punish a rule-breaker.

6. Patience – A sense of imagination about the future, a capacity which resides in the brain’s prefrontal cortex, helps suppress the impulse for immediate gratification, according to brain scanning experiments, and helps people plan goals and remain optimistic about the future.

7. Sound Judgment – Building on a huge amount of neuroscience that has been investigating decision-making, scientists are now teasing apart the process of neural valuation—how the brain attaches value to various choices. This may turn out to be the neural answer to a question asked by philosophers for centuries about the central challenge of wisdom: how do we decide what is most important?

8. Dealing with Uncertainty – Scientists at Princeton University, UCLA and elsewhere have been investigating how the brain reacts when it encounters the unexpected. Animal experiments suggest that habit allows us to react more quickly when the world is unchanging, but that in an environment of great flux, habit slows down our neural ability to adapt to changing circumstances.

Ishawooa, Wyoming, is far from bucolic nowadays. The sheriff, Crane Carlson, needs no reminder of this but gets one anyway when he finds a kid not yet twenty murdered in a meth lab. His other troubles include a wife who’s going off the rails with bourbon and pot, and his own symptoms of the disease that killed his grandfather.

Einar Gilkyson, taking stock at eighty, counts among his dead a lifelong friend, a wife and—far too young—their only child; and his long-absent sister has lately returned home from Chicago after watching her soul mate die. His granddaughter, Griff, has dropped out of college to look after him, though Einar would rather she continue with her studies and her boyfriend, Paul. Completing this extended family are Barnum McEban and his ward, Kenneth, a ten-year-old whose mother—Paul’s sister—is off marketing spiritual enlightenment.

What these characters have to contend with on a daily basis is bracing enough, involving car accidents, runaway children, strokes and Lou Gehrig’s disease, not to mention the motorcycle rallies and rodeos that flood the tiny local jail. But as their lives become even more strained, hardship foments exceptional compassion and generosity, and those caught in their own sorrow alleviate the same in others, changing themselves as they do so. In this gripping story, along with harsh truths and difficult consolation come moments of hilarity and surprise and beauty. No one writes more compellingly about the modern West than Mark Spragg, and in Bone Fire he is at the very height of his powers.

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Mark Spragg is the author of Where Rivers Change Direction, a memoir that won the Mountains & Plains Independent Booksellers award, and the novels The Fruit of Stone and An Unfinished Life, which was chosen by the Rocky Mountain News as the Best Book of 2004. All three were top-ten Book Sense selections and have been translated into fifteen languages. He lives with his wife, Virginia, in Wyoming.

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We all recognize wisdom, but defining it is more elusive. In this fascinating journey from philosophy to science, Stephen S. Hall gives us a dramatic history of wisdom, from its sudden emergence in four different locations (Greece, China, Israel, and India) in the fifth century B.C. to its modern manifestations in education, politics, and the workplace. We learn how wisdom became the provenance of philosophy and religion through its embodiment in individuals such as Buddha, Confucius, and Jesus; how it has consistently been a catalyst for social change; and how revelatory work in the last fifty years by psychologists, economists, and neuroscientists has begun to shed light on the biology of cognitive traits long associated with wisdom—and, in doing so, begun to suggest how we might cultivate it.

Hall explores the neural mechanisms for wise decision making; the conflict between the emotional and cognitive parts of the brain; the development of compassion, humility, and empathy; the effect of adversity and the impact of early-life stress on the development of wisdom; and how we can learn to optimize our future choices and future selves.

Hall’s bracing exploration of the science of wisdom allows us to see this ancient virtue with fresh eyes, yet also makes clear that despite modern science’s most powerful efforts, wisdom continues to elude easy understanding.

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For twenty-five years, Stephen S. Hall has written about the intersection of science and society in books, magazine articles, and essays, primarily in The New York Times Magazine. He is the author of five previous critically acclaimed books, including Invisible Frontiers and Merchants of Immortality. He has received numerous awards, including in 2004 the Science in Society Journalism Award for book writing from the National Association of Science Writers and, in 1998, the William B. Coley Award from the Cancer Research Institute. In addition to science, Hall has written extensively about travel, baseball, and Italy. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his wife and two children.

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In 1977, Laura Bell, at loose ends after graduating from college, leaves her family home in Kentucky for a wild and unexpected adventure: herding sheep in Wyoming’s Big Horn Basin. Inexorably drawn to this life of solitude and physical toil, a young woman in a man’s world, she is perhaps the strangest member of this beguiling community of drunks and eccentrics. So begins her unabating search for a place to belong and for the raw materials with which to create a home and family of her own. Yet only through time and distance does she acquire the wisdom that allows her to see the love she lived through and sometimes left behind.

By turns cattle rancher, forest ranger, outfitter, masseuse, wife and mother, Bell vividly recounts her struggle to find solid earth in which to put down roots. Brimming with careful insight and written in a spare, radiant prose, her story is a heart-wrenching ode to the rough, enormous beauty of the Western landscape and the peculiar sweetness of hard labor, to finding oneself even in isolation, to a life formed by nature, and to the redemption of love, whether given or received.

Quietly profound and moving, astonishing in its honesty, in its deep familiarity with country rarely seen so clearly, and in beauties all its own, Claiming Ground is a truly singular memoir.

Laura Bell’s work has been published in several collections, and from the Wyoming Arts Council she has received two literature fellowships as well as the Neltje Blanchan Memorial Award and the Frank Nelson Doubleday Memorial Award. She lives in Cody, Wyoming, and since 2000 has worked there for the Nature Conservancy.

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From our Q&A with the author:

Q: You grew up in the American South.  What first drew you, when you were in your early twenties, to the high desert basin of northwest Wyoming? Was it the landscape or the people or the wildlife?  Has that changed over your many years living in the West?

A: It was the land, all the space and the ability to live my childhood dream, a life horseback.  In the thirty-plus years I’ve lived in Wyoming, I’ve come to love that it’s a state where cattle and people and wildlife can migrate hundreds of miles, irrespective of roads.  It’s a grand sweep of life and landscape.  And my work now with the Nature Conservancy helps to protect that.

Q: What was the most frightening or surprising thing you encountered as a young sheepherder in the Big Horn Basin?

A: That I had actually gotten what I said I wanted, which was to be alone.  It was very frightening to realize that I had that power, that as a grown up, no one was going to come and take me back home.  It was both thrilling and terrifying.

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The morning of the storm, Armanda asks her sister, Lidy, to take her place on a visit to her godchild in the town of Zierikzee. In turn, Armanda will care for Lidy’s two-year-old daughter and accompany Lidy’s husband to a party. The sisters, both of them young and beautiful, look so alike that no one may even notice. But what Armanda can’t know is that her little comedy is a provocation to fate: Lidy is headed for the center of the deadly storm.

Margriet de Moor interweaves the stories of these two sisters, deftly alternating between the cataclysm and the long years of its grief-strewn aftermath. While Lidy struggles to survive, surrounded by people she barely knows, Armanda must master the future, trying to live out the life of her missing sister as if it were her own.

A brilliant meshing of history and imagination, The Storm is a powerfully dramatic and psychologically gripping novel from one of Europe’s most compelling writers.

Born in the Netherlands in 1941, Margriet de Moor had a career as a classical singer before becoming a novelist. Her debut novel, First Gray, Then White, Then Blue, was a sensational success across Europe, winning her the AKO Literature Prize, for which her second novel, The Virtuoso, was also nominated. She has since published several other novels, including Duke of Egypt and The Kreutzer Sonata. Her books have been translated into twenty languages.

In poems chronicling insomnia (“the blue-rimmed edge / of outer dark, those crossroads / where we meet the dead”), art and culture (poems on Edward Hopper and Paul Celan, love poems in the voices of Baudelaire and Gertrude Stein, a meditation on two suitcases of children’s drawings that came out of the Terezin concentration camp), and his own experience, including the powerful, frank self-examinations in his more recent work, Edward Hirsch displays stunning range and quality. Repeatedly confronting the darkness, his own sense of godlessness (“Forgive me, faith, for never having any”), he also struggles with the unlikely presence of the divine, the power of art to redeem human transience, and the complexity of relationships. Throughout the collection, his own life trajectory enriches the poems; he is the “skinny, long-beaked boy / who perched in the branches of the old branch library,” as well as the passionate middle-aged man who tells his lover, “I wish I could paint you— / . . . / I need a brush for your hard angles / and ferocious blues and reds. / . . . / I wish I could paint you / from the waist down.”

Grieving for the losses occasioned by our mortality, Hirsch’s ultimate impulse as a poet is to praise—to wreathe himself, as he writes, in “the living fire” that burns with a ferocious intensity.

Edward Hirsch was born in Chicago in 1950 and educated at Grinnell College and the University of Pennsylvania. His first book of poems, For the Sleepwalkers (1981), received the Lavan Younger Poets Award from the Academy of American Poets and the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award from New York University. His second book of poems, Wild Gratitude (1986), received the National Book Critics Circle Award. His third, The Night Parade (1989), and his fourth, Earthly Measures (1994), were both listed as notable books of the year by the New York Times Book Review. He writes frequently for leading magazines and periodicals—among them American Poetry Review, DoubleTake, where he is editorial advisor in poetry, and The Paris Review—and he has received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, an Ingram Merrill Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Rome Prize from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. He teaches at the University of Houston. Edward Hirsch is represented by the Random House Speakers Bureau.

Edward Hirsch answers questions from readers like you. Read his answers.

Meet Edward Hirsch on his book tour.

In a White House ceremony on Thursday, February 25, President Obama honored leaders in the humanities with the National Humanities Medal, one of the nation's highest awards. The honorees included prize-winning author Robert A. Caro and Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel. The Washington Post reported that during the ceremony “the president gave his own big hug” to Wiesel and then singled out Caro by saying: “I think about Robert Caro and reading THE POWER BROKER back when I was 22 years old and just being mesmerized, and I’m sure it helped to shape how I think about politics.”

Books by Robert A. Caro
Books by Elie Wiesel

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In 1997, Tony Blair won the biggest Labour victory in history to sweep the party to power and end eighteen years of Conservative government. He has been one of the most dynamic leaders of modern times; few British prime ministers have shaped the nation’s course as profoundly as Tony Blair did, during his ten years in power. His achievements and his legacy will be debated for years to come. His memoirs reveal in intimate detail this unique political and personal journey and provide an insight into the man, the politician and the statesman, charting successes, controversies, and disappointments with an extraordinary candour. They will prove essential and compulsive reading for anyone who wants to understand the complexities of our global world.

“Tony Blair: The Journey will break new ground in prime ministerial memoirs just as Blair himself broke the mould of British politics,” said Rebuck. “His book is frank, open, revealing, and written in an intimate and accessible style. As an account of the nature and uses of power, it will have a readership that extends well beyond politics, to all those who want to understand the challenge of leadership in today’s world.”

Mr. Blair says: “I have really enjoyed the writing of the book. I have tried to write a book which describes the human as much as the political dimensions of life as Prime Minister. Though necessarily retrospective, it is an attempt to inform and shape current and future thinking as much as an historical account of the past. Most of all I want readers to have as much pleasure reading it as I had writing it.”

“Tony Blair is an extremely popular figure in North America,” said Sonny Mehta of Knopf. “His memoir is refreshing, both for its candour and vivid portrayal of political life. We all knew Blair was an extraordinary statesman and gifted thinker. We can now add exceptional writer to that list.”

Knopf will publish the hardcover edition as well as an eBook and audiobook. Rights have been sold in twelve territories worldwide, and Mr. Blair will embark on a national and international author tour immediately upon release of the book.

Tim Rutten doesn’t mince his words in the Los Angeles Times when he declares, “Banville is, without question, one of the great living masters of English-language prose. The Infinities is a dazzling example of that mastery, as well as of the formal daring and slyly erudite humor that makes his novels among the most rewarding available to readers today.”

My favorite review must be this one from the Boston Phoenix, wherein Ed Siegel sighs, “Admit it, fellow scribblers. You’d sell your soul to come up with an opening sentence like the one from The Infinities…The gods, they must be happy with Mr. Banville.”

For one of the best author interviews ever conducted (a great claim, but it’s deserved), click through to The Millions to read John Banville in conversation with Anne Yoder.

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The enthralling and often harrowing history of the adventurers who searched for the Northwest Passage, the holy grail of nineteenth-century British exploration.

After the triumphant end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, the British took it upon themselves to complete something they had been trying to do since the sixteenth century: find the fabled Northwest Passage, a shortcut to the Orient via a sea route over northern Canada. For the next thirty-five years the British Admiralty sent out expedition after expedition to probe the ice-bound waters of the Canadian Arctic in search of a route, and then, after 1845, to find Sir John Franklin, the Royal Navy hero who led the last of these Admiralty expeditions and vanished into the maze of channels, sounds, and icy seas with two ships and 128 officers and men.

In The Man Who Ate His Boots, Anthony Brandt tells the whole story of the search for the Northwest Passage, from its beginnings early in the age of exploration through its development into a British national obsession to the final sordid, terrible descent into scurvy, starvation, and cannibalism. Sir John Franklin is the focus of the book but it covers all the major expeditions and a number of fascinating characters, including Franklin’s extraordinary wife, Lady Jane, in vivid detail. The Man Who Ate His Boots is a rich and engaging work of narrative history that captures the glory and the folly of this ultimately tragic enterprise.

Anthony Brandt is the editor of the Adventure Classics series published by National Geographic Society Press, and the books editor at National Geographic Adventure magazine. Formerly the book critic at Men’s Journal, Brandt has written for The Atlantic, GQ, Esquire, and many other magazines, and is the author of two previous books. He lives in Sag Harbor, New York.

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From our Q&A with Anthony Brandt:

Q: In The Man Who Ate His Boots you tell the rousing and often horrifying story of the search for the Northwest Passage, the holy grail of nineteenth century British exploration.  Why did so many people invest such time, energy and effort in to this search?
A: There’s no simple answer. In part it had seemed since the sixteenth century—when the Spanish and the Portuguese were claiming all the easier routes to the Far East—like a peculiarly British mission to find this great unknown route to the East via the north; and after 1815, when the Napoleonic Wars ended with such a decisive British victory and the seas were theirs, the chance to use idle ships and idle seamen to find it became too attractive to resist. The British now thought they could do anything, no matter how difficult, especially at sea. But it was also to some degree the product of one man’s enthusiasm, and that was John Barrow, the powerful second secretary of the Admiralty, who believed in an open, i.e. unfrozen, polar sea; and he had an ally in the first lord of the Admiralty, the second Lord Melville, who supported the idea and was able to gather Parliamentary support. The British people were excited by the idea, too, and got behind it.

Q: Was the mission a fool’s errand?
A: It proved to be so, and there were skeptics from the beginning. But at the time the Arctic was completely unknown. The map was blank above 80 degrees north in all areas, and above 70 degrees north in most. Nobody knew what the Arctic Ocean was like, or whether there even was an Arctic Ocean for that matter. For all they knew Greenland might extend to Asia, and some mapmakers thought it did. Others firmly believed that salt water could not freeze. The Greenland whalers knew better, but they weren’t scientists, they were commercial fishermen, and men like Barrow paid no attention to them. They weren’t gentlemen. In retrospect, then, it certainly seems like a fool’s errand, but life does not happen in retrospect, and what seems foolish now seemed like a noble effort at the time.

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