Michael Haynes

"Finding Your Way through the Gray: A Guide to Positive Choices that Harness Your Potential" presents the human condition as a series of pathways for living. The message that "life is too short to waste time heading in the wrong direction and too precious to follow the direction prescribed by others" guides the idea that "our reaction to the world is not prescribed," and the gray area is a source of potential. The book is written in a style that enables the reader to pick-up easy-to-use concepts and identifies the ingredients to a successful life in the gray. Following the principles suggested and approaching the choices, words, and actions we are faced in the appropriate context, we can harness our potential

Russia has one of the lowest rates of adult life expectancy in the world. Average life expectancy for a man in America is 74; in Russia, it is just 59. Birth rates and population levels have also plummeted. These excess levels of mortality affect all countries that formed the former Soviet bloc. Running into many millions, they raise comparisons with the earlier period of forced transition under Stalin. This book seeks to put the recent history of the transition into a longer term perspective by identifying, explaining and comparing the pattern of change in Russia in the last century. It offers a sharp challenge to the conventional wisdom and benign interpretations offered in the west of what has happened since 1991. Mike Haynes and Rumy Husan have produced the first and most complete and accurate account of Russian demographic crisis from the Revolution to the present.