Journalist Robbins explores the ways group identity theories play out among cliques--and the students they exclude. She reveals the new labels students stick onto each other today, the long-term effects of this marginalization, and the reasons students in these categories are often shunned. Then she celebrates them. The homogenization of the US education system has made outcasts more important than ever. In this conformist, creativity-stifling society,...

"Once upon a time in a castle high on a hill lived an inventor whose greatest creation was named Edward. Although Edward had an irresistible charm, he wasn't quite perfect. The inventor's sudden death left him unfinished, with sharp shears of metal for hands. Edward lived alone in the darkness until one day a kind Avon lady took him home to live with her family. So began Edward's fantastical adventures in a pastel paradise known as Suburbia"--Container....

"Keiko Furukura had always been considered a strange child, and her parents always worried how she would get on in the real world, so when she takes on a job in a convenience store while at university, they are delighted for her. For her part, in the convenience store she finds a predictable world mandated by the store manual, which dictates how the workers should act and what they should say, and she copies her coworkers' style of dress and speech...

The story centers on Jonas, young man who lives in a supposedly ideal world of conformity and contentment. Yet as he begins to spend time with the elder, who is the sole keeper of all the community's memories, Jonas quickly begins to discover the dark and deadly truths of his community's secret past. At extreme odds, Jonas knows that he must escape their world to protect them all; a challenge that no one has ever succeeded at before.

Why is it so hard to speak up, even when we know something’s wrong? This is the definitive book on defiance, a clear-eyed dissection of the forces that silence us, featuring groundbreaking research and legendary stories alongside everyday examples and strategies for how to unleash the power of a “True No.” Many of us comply much more than we realize. How many times have you wanted to object, disagree, or opt out of something but ended up swallowing...

"The rising star and face of the new field "science of the individual" draws from the latest psychological and sociological research to show that success is found in individual strengths and weaknesses that don't fit along any average curve--a powerful manifesto for change in the ranks of Emotional Intelligence and The Power of Habit. Modern science has proven that people behave and learn in distinctive ways. And yet these individual patterns get...

Fifty years after Hannah Arendt examined the dynamics of conformity in her seminal account of the Eichmann trial, "Beautiful Souls" explores the flipside of the banality of evil, mapping out what impels ordinary people to defy the sway of authority and convention.

When the lemmings encounter a bear, they are determined to help him be more "distinguished'--just like they are--but little do they realize this bear could be exactly what they need to save them from themselves.-- Provided by Publisher.

An oppressed laborer on the planet of Florina, Rik resigns himself to a life of hard work and the poor regard of people who believe him to be mentally impaired before he begins to recover memories of an imminent disaster.