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Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
"A magisterial effort packed with insight and written with clarity and enthusiasm. It's also the deal of the year--the equivalent of a year's college course by an engaging, brilliant professor, all for the price of a book." --
Who Hasn't Gazed upon the abandoned temples of Angkor Wat or the jungle-choked cities of the Maya and wondered, could the same fate happen to us? In this riveting book, Jared Diamond--whose Guns, Germs, and Steel revolutionized...
Author
Series
Language
English
Appears on list
Description
Ideas, products, messages and behaviors "spread just like viruses do." Behavior can ripple outward until a critical mass or "tipping point" is reached, changing the world. Gladwell develops these and other concepts (such as the "stickiness" of ideas or the effect of population size on information dispersal) through simple, clear explanations and entertainingly illustrative anecdotes.
Author
Language
English
Description
The follow-up to Pinker's groundbreaking The Better Angels of Our Nature presents the big picture of human progress: people are living longer, healthier, freer, and happier lives, and while our problems are formidable, the solutions lie in the Enlightenment ideal of using reason and science. Far from being a naïve hope, the Enlightenment, we now know, has worked. But more than ever, it needs a vigorous defense. The Enlightenment project swims against...
Author
Series
Pub. Date
2015.
Language
English
Description
From the Pulitzer Prize-winner: the second installment, following Some Luck, of her widely acclaimed, best-selling American trilogy, which brings the journey of a remarkable family with roots in the Iowa heartland into mid-century America. Family patriarch Walter Langdon has died, and his children have fanned out across the country. The narrative moves year by year from 1953 to 1986, encompassing Cold War blinkeredness, Sixties rebellion, and escalating...
Author
Language
English
Appears on list
Description
How could two hardworking people do everything right in life, a woman asks, and end up destitute? Willa Knox and her husband followed all the rules as responsible parents and professionals, and have nothing to show for it but debts and an inherited brick house that is falling apart. The magazine where Willa worked has folded; the college where her husband had tenure has closed. Their dubious shelter is also the only option for a disabled father-in-law...
6) Some luck
Author
Series
Pub. Date
2014.
Language
English
Description
On their farm in Denby, Iowa, Rosanna and Walter Langdon abide by time-honored values that they pass on to their five wildly different children. Beginning in 1920, as American soldiers like Walter return from World War I, and going up through the early 1950s, with the country on the cusp of enormous social and economic change, the personal and the historical merge seamlessly in the Langdons' story.
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
An insider's groundbreaking investigation of how the global elite's efforts to "change the world" preserve the status quo and obscure their role in causing the problems they later seek to solve. Former New York Times columnist Anand Giridharadas takes us into the inner sanctums of a new gilded age, where the rich and powerful fight for equality and justice any way they can--except ways that threaten the social order and their position atop it. We...
Author
Publisher
Little Brown & Company
Pub. Date
2021.
Edition
First edition.
Physical Desc
ix, 254 pages ; 25 cm
Language
English
Description
"An A.I. learned to win chess by making moves human grand masters had never conceived. Another A.I. discovered a new antibiotic by analyzing molecular properties human scientists did not understand. Now, A.I.-powered jets are defeating experienced human pilots in simulated dogfights. A.I. is coming online in searching, streaming, medicine, education, and many other fields and, in so doing, transforming how humans are experiencing reality."--
Author
Publisher
North Atlantic Books
Pub. Date
2021.
Physical Desc
xxv, 276 pages : illustrations ; 23 cm.
Language
English
Description
"A discussion on how we must face the multiple crises of modernity, interrupt and retire damaging modern behavior patterns, and reimagine how we learn, unlearn, and respond to crisis"--
Author
Publisher
Philomel Books
Pub. Date
[2015]
Physical Desc
xiii, 402 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm.
Language
English
Appears on these lists
Description
Combining facts, charts, photographs, and stories, describes how readers can enact change in the world around them and find solutions for such global problems as climate change, poverty, gender inequality, and homelessness.
Author
Publisher
Soho Press
Pub. Date
[2018]
Physical Desc
348 pages ; 21 cm
Language
English
Description
"The time we've been thrown into is one of alarming and bewildering change--the breakup of the post-1945 global order, a multispecies mass extinction, and the beginning of the end of civilization as we know it. Not one of us is innocent, not one of us is safe. Now what? [This book] addresses the crisis that is our time through a series of brilliant, moving, and original essays on climate change, war, literature, and loss, from one of the most provocative...
Author
Publisher
Simon & Schuster
Pub. Date
c2000
Physical Desc
541 p. : ill. ; 25 cm.
Language
English
Description
Examines the ways in which social organizations such as the PTA, church, recreation clubs, political parties, and bowling leagues reflect life satisfaction, and suggests ways to rebuild the quality of American culture by a return to these types of activities.
Author
Publisher
Viking
Pub. Date
c2012
Physical Desc
xi, 499 p., [32] p. of plates : ill. (some col.), maps ; 25 cm.
Language
English
Description
Most of us take for granted the features of our modern society, from air travel and telecommunications to literacy and obesity. Yet for nearly all of its six million years of existence, human society had none of these things. While the gulf that divides us from our primitive ancestors may seem unbridgeably wide, we can glimpse much of our former lifestyle in those largely traditional societies still or recently in existence. Societies like those of...
Author
Publisher
Simon & Schuster
Pub. Date
2019.
Edition
First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition.
Physical Desc
xxx, 240 pages ; 23 cm
Language
English
Description
This book is a call to action for those seeking to live extraordinary lives and bring about transformational change. When National Geographic Chairman Jean Case set out to investigate the core qualities of great change makers, past and present, from inventors to revolutionaries, she found five surprising traits all had in common. They weren't wealth, privilege, or even genius. It was that all of these exceptional men and women chose to make a "big...
Author
Publisher
Random House
Pub. Date
2013
Edition
1st ed.
Physical Desc
xxxi, 558 p. ; 25 cm.
Language
English
Description
Al Gore peers into the future as he ponders a world in which we look back at this crucial turning point. Gore details what forces global change as he examines social, political, and economic factors that are changing today and creating tomorrow.
Author
Series
To kill a mockingbird volume 2
Language
English
Description
Twenty-six-year-old Jean Louise Finch, "Scout", returns home from New York City to visit her aging father, Atticus. Set against the backdrop of the civil rights tensions and political turmoil that were transforming the South, Jean Louise's homecoming becomes bittersweet when she learns disturbing truths about her close-knit family, the town and the people dearest to her.
Author
Series
Last hundred years trilogy volume 3
Pub. Date
2015.
Language
English
Formats
Description
"From the Pulitzer Prize-winner: the much-anticipated final volume of her magnificent, best-selling American trilogy, which brings the beloved Langdon family into our present times and beyond. A lot can happen in 100 years, as Jane Smiley has shown to dazzling effect in her astonishing, critically acclaimed Last Hundred Years Trilogy. When Golden Age, its last installment, opens in 1987, the next generation of the Langdon family is facing economic,...
19) Walkaway
Author
Publisher
Tor
Pub. Date
2017.
Edition
First edition.
Physical Desc
379 pages ; 25 cm
Language
English
Description
"Hubert, Seth, and their ultra-rich heiress friend Natalie are getting a little old to hang out at the "Communist parties," techno-raveups in abandoned industrial spaces, full of insta-printed drugs and toys. And Natalie was finished, years ago, with her overcontrolling zillionaire dad. And now that anyone can manufacture food, clothing, shelter with equipment comparable to a computer printer, there seems to be little reason to to stick with the world...
Author
Publisher
University of New Hampshire Press
Pub. Date
c2006
Physical Desc
256 p. ; 24 cm.
Language
English
Description
Examines the origins of Vermont's contemporary identity and some reasons why that identity ("Who is a Vermonter?") is so hotly contested. This book is poised to take its place as the standard work on Vermont in the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era.
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