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Self-esteem, intimacy, family, faith, health, love - issues that challenge us all, no matter what our background. Susan L. Taylor, Editor in Chief of Essence, explores the themes we all face in life, and she challenges us to see life's obstacles as opportunities to grow. For years, readers have called her column a powerful source of encouragement and self-affirmation. Through this collection of inspirational essays, she offers us all methods for working toward emotional and spiritual health.

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Two devastatingly funny essays, closely related in theme and substance, both dealing with political stances and social styles in our status-minded world. "Radical Chic" focuses on one symbolic event: a gathering of the politically correct at Leonard Bernstein's duplex apartment on Park Avenue to meet spokesmen of the Blank Panther Party. Tom Wolfe recreates the incongruous scene and its astonishing repercussions with high fidelity. In the companion essay, Wolfe travels west to San Francisco to survey another meeting-ground between militant minorities and the liberal white establishment. "Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers" deals with the newly emerging art of confrontation, as practiced by San Francisco's militant minorities in response to a highly bureaucratized poverty program. Listen to a conversation with Tom Wolfe.

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A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere, wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson in Love and Friendship, a collection of essays on relationships. "Before him, I may think aloud. I do then with my friends as I do with my books. I would have them where I can find them, but I seldom use them."…

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In "A Modest Proposal, " first published in 1729, Jonathan Swift heaps scorn on then-current political theory and reveals the appalling suffering taking place in Ireland - not through direct reporting, but through mock suggestions on what to do with the poor; they should sell their children for food. "The chief end I propose to myself in all my labors is to vex the world rather than divert it, " wrote Jonathan Swift in a letter to his friend Alexander Pope. Other vexing works collected here are "Directions to Servants, " "The Art of Political Lying, " "A Digression Concerning the Critics, " and "Sweetness and Light."…

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From paleontology, dinosaurs, and fossils to the fascinating and strange phenomena of life on Earth today, come the inspiration for Dinosaur in a Haystack, a collection of Stephen Jay Gould's best essays. Fads to fungus, baseball to beeswax, Gould always circles back to the great themes of time, change, and history. Alternating between amusement and awe, he digs deep into the particulars of people's lives and nature's ways. Gould's inimitable style makes history and science accessible and relevant to everyone.

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In 1773, 63-year-old literary giant Samuel Johnson joined James Boswell, a 32-year-old Scottish lawyer, on an historic horseback expedition across the Scottish Highlands to the Western Islands. The unlikely duo's travelogue records their fascinating conversations and encounters with great wit and incredible detail. Johnson, one of the 18th century's most celebrated writers, provided an elegant and stately account of everything from Loch Ness's medicinal waters to Scotland's puzzling lack of trees. The younger Boswell focused instead on his famed companion, offering a perceptive, highly entertaining, deeply intimate glimpse into Johnson's personality. Taken together, Johnson and Boswell's very different styles perfectly complement each other, resulting in a deeply satisfying, truly original narrative.

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To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men - that is genius. Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members. Whosoever would be a man must be a nonconformist. Ralph Waldo Emerson explores the themes of individuality and self-fulfillment in his most popular essay, "Self-Reliance." In it, he celebrates America's free society, one which places value on the individual, and attacks the institution of religion as one that stifles the soul. Emerson's essays, considered among the best in the English language, have exerted much influence and enjoyed tremendous longevity.

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In 1849, 5 years before Henry David Thoreau published Walden, he wrote what has come to be recognized as the philosophic textbook for nonviolent revolution. "I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward, " Thoreau wrote. "It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right." Taking as his major premise the idea that "...government is best which governs least, " Thoreau asserts that one's first loyalty is to one's own nature, and that only then, when one is true to oneself, can one be true to a government. This remarkable essay has inspired leaders from Gandhi to Martin Luther King, Jr.

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Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn are just 2 of the authors of the groundbreaking collection of essays entitled The Cold War and the University: Toward an Intellectual History of the Postwar Years, which also features Ira Katznelson, Ray Siever, and others. In this program, recorded live at Boston University, Chomsky and Zinn discuss the ideas in the book, which explores the changing nature of dissent and academic freedom during and since the Cold War.

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Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections was the best-loved and most-written-about novel of 2001. Now in How to Be Alone, discover the personal narratives and dead-on reportage that earned Franzen a wide readership before the success of The Correction…