- An important and useful skill: In education, collaborative classroom learning is replacing head-to-head competition. In business, the best leaders are team-builders who can inspire great group efforts. Tharp uses her decades of experience to explain why teamwork is a superior way of working for some of us and inevitable for almost all of us. .

- The essential lessons of group effort: Tharp takes readers through the most common varieties of collaborations, including working with a partner, with institutions and middlemen, outside your expertise, in a virtual partnership, with a friend,...

A few years ago, just before Christmas, I started to read "A Christmas Carol" to our young daughter. "I'm bored," she cried, after five minutes, so I stopped. I wasn't mad at her. She was right --- "A Christmas Carol," which I loved all those years ago, wasn't fun for today's kids to listen to. The problem is time. Charles Dickens wrote the story in 1843, and viewed from the distance of almost two centuries, his language is dense and over-wrought. Do you need long descriptions of Victorian London? I don't think so --- you've seen it a zillion times on film and TV. Because I really wanted my...

When a husband convinces his wife to join him in a tryst with another woman, there are unintended consequences in this sharply observed erotic tale about the challenges of modern marriage

As a divorce lawyer for Manhattan's elite, David Greenfield is privy to the intimate, dirty details of failed marriages. He knows he's lucky to be married to Blair--a Barnard dean and the mother of their college-age daughter, she is a woman he loves more today than he did when they tied the knot.

Then seductive photographer Jean Coin asks David to be her lover for 6 weeks,...