Amanda Ripley

Following three teenagers who chose to spend one school year living in Finland, South Korea, and Poland, a literary journalist recounts how attitudes, parenting, and rigorous teaching have revolutionized these countries' education results. In a handful of nations, virtually all children are learning to make complex arguments and solve problems they've never seen before. They are learning to think, in other words, and to thrive in the modern economy....

"In the tradition of bestselling explainers like The Tipping Point, the first popular book based on cutting edge science that breaks down the idea of extreme conflict, the kind that paralyzes people and places, and then shows how to escape it"-- High conflict is what happens when discord distills into a good-versus-evil kind of feud, the kind with an us and a them. The normal rules of engagement no longer apply: we feel increasingly certain of our...

Sociologists, neuroscientists, psychologists and survivors have found that the way that people behave in a crisis is very predictable. By combining the stories of survivors with research into how the brain works under extreme duress, it brings light into civilization's darkest moments.