Eva Hoffman

In the latest installment of the acclaimed School of Life series, learn how to make peace with your down time--and even benefit from it. Lethargic inactivity can be debilitating and depressing, but in the modern world the pendulum has swung far in the other direction. We live in a hyperactive, over-stimulated age. Uninterrupted activity can seem exciting, but it can also leave us emotionally disorientated and mentally depleted. How can we recover a sense of balance and a richness in our lives? In How to Be Bored, Eva Hoffman argues for the need to cultivate curiosity and self-knowledge and to relish moments of unplugged idleness and non-virtual contact with others. Drawing on psychoanalysis, neuroscience, and a wide range of literature, she emphasizes the need to understand our own preferences and purposes and to replenish our inner resources. This book aims to make readers more vigorously engaged in their lives and to restore a sense of depth and meaning to their experiences.

Lethargic inactivity can be debilitating and depressing; but for those living in the modern world, the pendulum has swung far in the other direction. We live in a hectic, hyperactive, over-stimulated age. Excessive busyness and overfilled schedules are the norm, as are their effects on our mental and emotional lives. How might we address and counter such problems, for the sake of experiencing our lives more fully?In How to Be Bored, Eva Hoffman explores the importance we place on success, high level function, effectiveness and alertness in today's competitive society. In a world where it is almost impossible to be idle, she draws upon lessons from history, literature and psychotherapy to help us embrace boredom and find meaning in doing nothing - to appreciate real reflection and enjoy the richness of our inner and external lives.

This is a must-have book to study, learn and revise using various innovative techniques, including mind mapping. Teaching is often delivered in a way that best suits the learning style of those teaching rather than the recipient. This book provides a first step to understanding your own unique and most effective learning strategies. It includes illustrations on how to use and PowerPoint training tools. Easy to understand, comprehensive and rigorously tested. Includes: how to discover how you learn best; the importance of mind mapping - a powerful learning tool; and How to boost memory. The author introduces a range of strategies to achieve the goal of becoming a more effective learner, for example steps: select strategies and tips that appeal to you; try out each one, ideally a few times; evaluate their effectiveness (see whether they work); practise the ones that work; and savour your success! Part one of the book deals with understanding that each person is unique and it is important therefore to understand that learner styles will differ, but all are valid. It provides methods to examine and understand personal and emotional strengths and then apply that to identifying study skill strengths. There are activities that identify learning preferences and how to maximise on this discovery. Clearly understanding yourself is the first step to working out the very best way to work. How to use the mind-mapping tool to good effect is explored in detail with many examples and clear illustrations. The second part of the book explores how to apply this new found knowledge and challenges the reader to really examine their attitude to themselves and to learning; how to use this knowledge in a positive way to improve and really enjoy the learning experience. Activities for motivation, attention, creating a suitable learning environment, avoiding distraction and removing stress. This unique book focuses exclusively on learners and their learning. It includes a range of activities especially designed to empower the learner with knowledge about the variety of ways in which people learn, taking the reader on a positive and rewarding journey of self-discovery.

Awakening intrinsic motivation in young people is the most important key to securing them a meaningful and successful life. No matter how much we know about how to learn, no lasting learning is likely to take place unless we want to learn; unless we are convinced of the reasons and have the confidence and resilience to achieve our goals.Motivating the Teenage Mind is a unique, comprehensive, practical, activity-based motivational programme for secondary students. It will give every student an opportunity to recognise their strengths, awaken their aspirations and become aware of the reasons for learning, and show them how to confidently create a vision for their future lives.The programme provides educators with seven key aspects of motivation: making and giving choices; awakening curiosity and interest; nurturing dreams and setting goals; making learning relevant; raising confidence; strengthening resilience; and rewarding achievement. Aimed primarily at 11-16 year old secondary pupils, this resource is also suitable for 16-18 year old college students.

Time has always been the great Given, a fact of existence which cannot be denied or wished away; but the character of lived time is changing dramatically. Medical advances extend our longevity, while digital devices compress time into ever briefer units. We can now exist in several time-zones simultaneously, but we suffer from endemic shortages of time. We are working longer hours and blurring the distinctions between labour and leisure. For many, in an inversion of the old adage, time has become more valuable than money. In this look at life's most ineffable element, spanning fields from biology and culture to psychoanalysis and neuroscience, Eva Hoffman asks: are we coming to the end of time as we know it?

'A book that takes you on an intimate journey through Eastern Europe at a time when the dust was still settling from the collapse of the Berlin Wall. Eva Hoffman travels from the Baltic to the Black Sea, building a compelling portrait of a region uncertain about its future.' IndependentShortly after the epochal events of 1989 Eva Hoffman spent several months in her native Poland and four other countries: the then-Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria. She visited capital cities, wayside villages and provincial towns; stopped at shipyards, museums, and the coffee-houses of the intelligentsia; and talked to a great variety of people about the tumult they had lived through. Exit into History was the result: a portrait of the mosaic of the new Eastern Europe, a reconstruction of the turbulent post-war decades, and a meditation on the uses and misuses of historical memory.

The sub-title is important: The History of a Small Town and an Extinguished World. The small town is Bransk, in eastern Poland. Before World War II, Bransk was a shtetl whose population was equally divided between Poles and Jews. Today there are no Jews.In Shtetl, Eva Hoffman reconstructs the lost world of East European Jewry She explores the rich culture and institutions of Polish Jews, and looks at the forms of multicultural coexistence during several centuries, the shades of prejudice and tolerance and the phases of conflict and comity. By probing the deep ambivalence that coloured relations between Poles and Jews on the eve of World War II, Shtetl throws new light on motives which influenced Christian villagers' decisions to rescue or betray their Jewish neighbours when the Nazis invaded.'Charting the ebbs and flows of repression and tolerance, uprisings and occupation, migration and assimilation of Poland's history, Shtetl provides a rare and valuable analysis of the troubled relationship between Poles and Jews over the centuries. For the Jews, Poland is the symbol of murder where the Nazis set up their killing fields and where the Polish post-war response was further brutality, followed by amnesia: for the Poles, there remains a feeling of unfairness that their own wartime sufferings are overlooked. Hoffman's interest lies in rescuing the past from the evasions, concealments and half-truths demanded by post-war politics and national pride - as well as from the additions of the imagination, which all memory to some extent invokes.' Caroline Moorehead, Daily Telegraph 'A luminous and deeply engrossing social history' Lisa Appignanesi, Independent'This is a subtle, fair, scrupuously even-handed piece of work. It begs moral questions of us all ... Hoffman gives no answers, but she asks the questions, and observes the moral hazards with a rare sensitivity.' Julia Neuberger, Irish Times

Novelist, cultural commentator, memoirist, and historian Eva Hoffman examines our ever-changing perception of time in this inspired addition to the BIG IDEAS/small books series Time has always been the great given, the element that establishes the governing facts of human fate that cannot be circumvented, deconstructed, or wished away. But these days we are tampering with time in ways that affect how we live, the textures of our experience, and our very sense of what it is to be human. What is the nature of time in our time? Why is it that even as we live longer than ever before, we feel that we have ever less of this basic good? What effects do the hyperfast technologies--computers, video games, instant communications--have on our inner lives and even our bodies? And as we examine biology and mind on evermore microscopic levels, what are we learning about the process and parameters of human time? Hoffman regards our relationship to time--from jet lag to aging, sleep to cryogenic freezing--in this broad, eye-opening meditation on life's essential medium and its contemporary challenges.

A memoir that evokes with deep feeling the sense of uprootendess and exile created by this disruption, something which has been the experience of tens of thousands of people this century. It tells the story of Jewish post-war experience and the tragedies and discoveries born of cultural displacement.

In Shtetl (Yiddish for "small town"), critically-acclaimed author Eva Hoffman brings the lost world of Eastern European Jews back to vivid life, depicting its complex institutions and vibrant culture, its beliefs, social distinctions, and customs. Through the small town of Braƒsk, she looks at the fascinating experiments in multicultural coexistence,still relevant to us today, attempted in the eight centuries of Polish-Jewish history, and describes the forces which influenced Christian villagers' decisions to conceal or betray their Jewish neighbours in the dark period of the Holocaust.

Looks at the impact of keeping alive the memory of the Holocaust on children of survivors and the impact the atrocity has had on their lives.

As she guides us through the poignant juncture at which living memory must be relinquished, she asks what insights can be carried from the past, and urges the need to transform potent family stories into a fully-informed understanding of a forbidding history.

Iris Surrey has a secret. Iris Surrey is a secret. An only child, Iris lives with her mother in a rambling house in a small midwestern town. Her mother is everything: provider, confidante, friend. But at seventeen, Iris begins to question their nearly symbiotic relationship--and the noticeable lack of others in their sheltered world. Where is Iris's father? Where are her grandparents? What is her mother keeping from her? When she stumbles upon the explosive truth, Iris begins a monumental journey of self-discovery--one that will throw everything she has ever known into turmoil.

Iris and her mother have a particularly strong bond - insular and self-sufficient - they live in harmony in almost total isolation. As she reaches adulthood, Iris begins to question the abnormality of this bond, believing that some event from her past is being deliberately kept from her. But what?

In this arresting, intimate narrative journey, award-winning Eva Hoffman returns to her Polish homeland and five other countries--Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and the two nations of the former Czechoslovakia--historically transformed by the demise of Communism. The result is the penetrating personal odyssey across the "other Europe" and a vivid portrayal of a landscape in the midst of change. Hoffman combines the wise perspective of an outsider and the passionate concern of a native daughter to illuminate the forces informing the region's complex politics as she captures the texture of everyday life in a world in flux. "Indispensable for anyone who wants to seriously come to grips with the experience of Eastern Europe."--The Cleveland Plain Dealer "Complex and full of the unexpected . . . Hoffman earns our trust as an observer."--Tina Rosenberg, New York Newsday "Written with incredible literary talent and intellectual soundness . . . An indispensable clue for anyone who is keen to understand how the new Europe is emerging from the debris of the Cold War period."--Ryszard Kapuscinski

The author describes her efforts to adjust to a new culture after her parents, Holocaust survivors from Poland, moved the family from war-ravaged Cracow to North America when she was thirteen years old