True fear is a gift. Unwarranted fear is a curse. Learn how to tell the difference. A date won't take "no" for an answer. The new nanny gives a mother an uneasy feeling. A stranger in a deserted parking lot offers unsolicited help. The threat of violence surrounds us every day. But we can protect ourselves, by learning to trust--and act on--our gut instincts. In this empowering book, Gavin de Becker, the man Oprah Winfrey calls the nation's leading expert on violent behavior, shows you how to spot even subtle signs of danger--before it's too late. Shattering the myth that most violent acts are unpredictable, de Becker, whose clients include top Hollywood stars and government agencies, offers specific ways to protect yourself and those you love, including...how to act when approached by a stranger...when you should fear someone close to you...what to do if you are being stalked...how to uncover the source of anonymous threats or phone calls...the biggest mistake you can make with a threatening person...and more. Learn to spot the danger signals others miss. It might just save your life.
A guide for learning how to follow your intuition and knowing the warning signs of impending danger. True fear is a gift. You’ve probably felt a gut instinct at some point in your life. Many people do. The girl who got a bad vibe from her date the first night they met, the mom who felt something just didn’t feel right about a potential babysitter, or even the woman in a parking lot who’s solicited by a stranger who wants to help carry her groceries. We’ve all been in an uncomfortable situation, luckily, if you’re reading this, your situation didn’t turn deadly. Unfortunately, not everyone is as lucky, but there are ways to pinpoint impending danger. Throughout The Gift of Fear, Gavin de Becker explains the warning signs of someone who wishes to do you harm. Perhaps they don’t take “no” for an answer or maybe they talk too much to hide their nerves and gain your trust. Keep reading to find out how criminals try to solicit their victims, discover how a person’s body language can uncover their true intentions, and lastly, learn how to follow your gut and stay safe. Do you want more free book summaries like this? Download our app for free at https://www.QuickRead.com/App and get access to hundreds of free book and audiobook summaries. DISCLAIMER: This book summary is meant as a preview and not a replacement for the original work. If you like this summary please consider purchasing the original book to get the full experience as the original author intended it to be. If you are the original author of any book on QuickRead and want us to remove it, please contact us at [email protected]
"I commit that by the end of this book, you'll know more and be uncertain less; see more and deny less, accept more and hesitate less; act more and worry less. How can I be so sure? Because if nature selected you for the job of protecting a child, odds are you're up to it."--Gavin de Becker In his groundbreaking bestseller The Gift of Fear, Gavin de Becker showed millions of readers that like every creature on earth, human beings can predict violent behavior. Now, in Protecting the Gift, de Becker empowers parents to trust fully their own intuition when it comes to their children's safety. In this indispensable resource, de Becker provides keen insights into the behavior and strategies of predators. He offers practical new steps to enhance children's safety at every age level: specific questions parents can ask to screen effectively and evaluate baby-sitters, day-care services, schools, and doctors; a "Test of Twelve" safety skills children need before being alone in public; warning signs to help parents protect children from sexual abuse; and how to keep teenage girls and boys from unsafe situations with peers and adults. De Becker also shatters the myth that rules like Never Talk to Strangers will keep your children safe. By showing what danger really looks like--as opposed to what we might imagine it looks like--de Becker gives parents freedom from many common worries and unwarranted fears. All parents face the same challenges when it comes to their children's safety: whom to trust, whom to distrust, what to believe, what to doubt, what to fear, and what not to fear. De Becker helps parents find some certainty about life's highest-stakes questions: How can I know ababy-sitter won't turn out to be someone who harms my child? What should I ask child-care professionals when I interview them? What's the best way to prepare my child for walking to school alone? How can my child be safer at school? How can I spot sexual predators? What should I do if my child is lost in public? How can I teach my child about risk without causing too much fear? What must my teenage daughter know in order to be safe? What must my teenage son know in order to be safe? And finally, in the face of all these questions, how can I reduce the worrying? A generation ago, in Baby and Child Care, Dr. Benjamin Spock told parents that they already possessed most of the important knowledge about their children's health. Similarly, when it comes to predicting violence and protecting children, de Becker demonstrates that you already know most of what you need to know-- parents have, he says, "the wisdom of the species."
Gavin de Becker's landmark book THE GIFT OF FEAR showed millions of readers how to better protect themselves from violence and unwarranted fear. Now, in FEAR LESS, de Becker answers the questions many Americans have been asking since September 11th: Can air travel be safe?What is the risk of biological or chemical attack? Can the government detect and prevent future acts? How can we best talk to our children about what has happened and what might happen? What can we do to reduce fear and worry?What specific steps can we take to reduce terrorism? What are terrorists likely to do next? Most simply, is everything going to be all right? De Becker says, "Just as your imagination has placed you in frightening situations, it is now time to place yourself in empowering situations, time to see that you have a role to play, and contrary to so many TV news stories, it isn't just victim-in-waiting." FEAR LESS offers specific recommendations that can enhance our national security and our individual safety and help put fear into perspective. Nobody in the world understands risk and safety better than Gavin de Becker. At a time of uncertainty, terrorism, and a whole new set of rules, it is hard to imagine a more important, more reassuring, and more necessary book than FEAR LESS.
Think of every assassination you've ever heard about. For most people, a few of these major ones come to mind: Caesar, Abraham Lincoln, John Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Mahatma Gandhi, Indira Gandhi, Anwar Sadat, John Lennon, Israel's Prime Minister Rabin, Pakistan's Benazir Bhutto. From start to finish, all of these attacks combined took place in less than one minute. And the hundreds of attacks studied for this book, all of them combined, took place in less than a half-hour. Those thirty minutes, surely the most influential in world history, offer important insights that can help today's protectors defeat tomorrow's attackers.This 650-Page Book Contains:An original work of new insights arising from ten years of research;The Five Essential Lessons for protectors;The Compendium - 400 pages of summarized attacks, near attacks, and incidents against at-risk persons all over the world from 1960-2007, more than 1400 entries;and the Appendices - More than 100 pages of additional material and resources.
Luke hates listening to the townspeople talk about his sister, Leah. They call her evil, and say she has unnatural powers. Leah does have the strange talent of being able to communicate with animals. But Luke is sure Leah would never use her gift for evil—until their parents’ horrible accident.
In the tradition of Malcolm Gladwell, Gardner explores a new way of thinking about the decisions we make. We are the safest and healthiest human beings who ever lived, and yet irrational fear is growing, with deadly consequences — such as the 1,595 Americans killed when they made the mistake of switching from planes to cars after September 11. In part, this irrationality is caused by those — politicians, activists, and the media — who promote fear for their own gain. Culture also matters. But a more fundamental cause is human psychology. Working with risk science pioneer Paul Slovic, author Dan Gardner sets out to explain in a compulsively readable fashion just what that statement above means as to how we make decisions and run our lives. We learn that the brain has not one but two systems to analyze risk. One is primitive, unconscious, and intuitive. The other is conscious and rational. The two systems often agree, but occasionally they come to very different conclusions. When that happens, we can find ourselves worrying about what the statistics tell us is a trivial threat — terrorism, child abduction, cancer caused by chemical pollution — or shrugging off serious risks like obesity and smoking. Gladwell told us about “the black box” of our brains; Gardner takes us inside, helping us to understand how to deconstruct the information we’re bombarded with and respond more logically and adaptively to our world. Risk is cutting-edge reading.
T.J., forced to make a perilous midnight ride with a dangerous criminal, relies on his ingenuity to attempt an escape so that he can rescue Alzheimer's-stricken Grandma Ruth. By the author of Nightmare Mountain.
In today's modern world, we are largely isolated from the kind of savagery our ancestors faced on a daily basis. Although violence was as natural to our evolutionary development as sex and food, it has become foreign to most of us: at once demonized and glamorized, but almost always deeply misunderstood. Our hard-earned and hard-wired instincts—our evolved and trained ability to survive and overcome violent encounters—have been compromised. Yet, as even a cursory look at news headlines or a police blotter will reveal, the threat of violent crime is ever-present, and those we've entrusted to protect us cannot always be relied upon. The Gift of Violence tells the story of this vulnerability and provides the average person with all the knowledge they need to reduce the likelihood of becoming a victim of violence and to increase their chances of surviving a violent encounter. Based both on the author's decades of experience teaching everyday people how to defend themselves and on a rational approach to the scientific data, The Gift of Violence offers clear, easy-to-remember lessons for people of all ages and abilities. It is designed to empower those who've been affected by violence or are concerned that they or their loved ones could be—in short, it was written to help good people become more dangerous to bad people. Every reader will be armed with the necessary knowledge to harness the power of violence for him- or herself—and, in the process, to be not just smarter and stronger but also safer.
