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Author
Pub. Date
2023.
Language
English
Appears on list
Description
"From the Academy Award-winning actor and best-selling author: his debut novel. The story of the making of a colossal, star-studded, multimillion-dollar superhero action film...and the humble comic book that inspired it. PART ONE of this story takes placein 1947. A troubled soldier, returning from the war, meets his talented five-year-old nephew, leaves an indelible impression, and then disappears for 23 years. Cut to 1970: The nephew, now drawing...
Author
Series
Language
English
Description
"Ready Player One takes place in the not-so-distant future--the world has turned into a very bleak place, but luckily there is OASIS, a virtual reality world that is a vast online utopia. People can plug into OASIS to play, go to school, earn money, and even meet other people (or at least they can meet their avatars), and for protagonist Wade Watts it certainly beats passing the time in his grim, poverty-stricken real life. Along with millions of...
Author
Language
English
Appears on these lists
Description
"The Anthropocene is the current geological age, in which human activity has profoundly shaped the planet and its biodiversity. In this remarkable symphony of essays adapted and expanded from his groundbreaking podcast, John Green reviews different facetsof the human-centered planet - from the QWERTY keyboard and Staphylococcus aureus to the Taco Bell breakfast menu - on a five-star scale. John Green's gift for storytelling shines throughout this...
Author
Series
Pub. Date
2020.
Language
English
Description
Days after winning OASIS founder James Halliday's contest, Wade Watts makes a discovery that changes everything. Hidden within Halliday's vaults, waiting for his heir to find, lies a technological advancement that will once again change the world and make the OASIS 1,000 times more wondrous - and addictive - than even Wade dreamed possible. With it comes a new riddle, and a new quest - a last Easter egg from Halliday, hinting at a mysterious prize....
Author
Pub. Date
2022.
Language
English
Description
"Bringing his cosmic perspective to civilization on Earth, Neil deGrasse Tyson shines new light on the crucial fault lines of our time-war, politics, religion, truth, beauty, gender, and race-in a way that stimulates a deeper sense of unity for us all"--
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
"In this revolutionary book, renowned physician Gabor Maté eloquently dissects how in Western countries that pride themselves on their healthcare systems, chronic illness and general ill health are on the rise. Nearly 70 percent of Americans are on at least one prescription drug; more than half take two. In Canada, every fifth person has high blood pressure. In Europe, hypertension is diagnosed in more than 30 percent of the population. And everywhere,...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
Civilization and Its Discontents is one of the last of Freud's books, written in the decade before his death and first published in German in 1929. It is, considered his most brilliant work. In it, he states his views on the broad question of man's place in the world. It seeks to answer several questions fundamental to human society and its organization: What influences led to the creation of civilization? Why and how did it come to be? What determines...
Author
Language
English
Description
In the middle of a snowstorm in Brooklyn, 60-year-old human rights scholar Richard Bowmaster hits the car of Evelyn Ortega, a young, undocumented immigrant from Guatemala. What at first seems just a small inconvenience takes a far more serious turn when Evelyn turns up at the professor's house seeking help. At a loss, the professor asks his tenant Lucia Maraz, a 62-year-old lecturer from Chile, for her advice. These three very different people are...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
"The animating idea of The 1619 Project is that our national narrative is more accurately told if we begin not on July 4, 1776, but in late August of 1619, when a ship arrived in Jamestown bearing a cargo of twenty to thirty enslaved people from Africa. Their arrival inaugurated a barbaric and unprecedented system of chattel slavery that would last for the next 250 years. This is sometimes referred to as the country's original sin, but it is more...
Author
Language
English
Description
"The current climate of partisan fury is not new, and in The Soul of America, Meacham shows us how what Lincoln called the "better angels of our nature" have won the day. Painting surprising portraits of Presidents, including Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Ulysses S. Grant, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, Lyndon B. Johnson, and others, and illuminating the courage of such influential citizen activists...
13) Candide
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
The work describes the abrupt cessation of this lifestyle, followed by Candide's slow, painful disillusionment as he witnesses and experiences great hardships in the world. Voltaire concludes with Candide, if not rejecting optimism outright, advocating a deeply practical precept, "we must cultivate our garden", in lieu of the Leibnizian mantra of Pangloss, "all is for the best" in the "best of all possible worlds".
Candide is characterised by its...
Author
Pub. Date
2017.
Language
English
Description
"...From the start, our ultra-individualism was attached to epic dreams and epic fantasiesevery citizen was free to believe absolutely anything, or to pretend to be absolutely anybody. Little by little, and then more quickly in the last several decades, the American invent-your-own-reality legacy of the Enlightenment superseded its more sober, rational, and empirical parts. We gave ourselves over to all manner of crackpot ideas and make-believe lifestyles...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
In 1995, Iowa native Bill Bryson took a motoring trip around Britain to explore that green and pleasant land. The uproarious book that resulted, Notes from a Small Island, is one of the most acute portrayals of the United Kingdom ever written. Two decades later, Bryson?now a British citizen?set out again to rediscover his adopted country. In these pages, he follows a straight line through the island?from Bognor Regis to Cape Wrath?and shows us every...
Author
Language
English
Appears on these lists
Formats
Description
"Trick Mirror is an enlightening, unforgettable trip through the river of self-delusion that surges just beneath the surface of our lives. This is a book about the incentives that shape us, and about how hard it is to see ourselves clearly through a culture that revolves around the self. In each essay, Tolentino writes about a cultural prism: the rise of the nightmare social internet; the advent of scamming as the definitive millennial ethos; the...
Author
Pub. Date
2019.
Language
English
Description
"In this highly anticipated sequel to his international bestseller The Old Ways, Macfarlane takes us on an extraordinary journey into our relationship with darkness, burial, and what lies beneath the surface of both place and mind. Traveling through “deep time”?the dizzying expanses of geologic time that stretch away from the present?he moves from the birth of the universe to a post-human future, from the prehistoric art of Norwegian sea caves...
18) Ancient Rome
Author
Series
Language
English
Description
"Step into the world of ancient Rome and meet its emperors, gods, soldiers, and gladiators. Who were Rome's most famous emperors? What was everyday life like for a soldier in the Roman army? How did the citizens of ancient Rome live? Did gladiators really fight to the death in the mighty Colosseum? Find out the answers to all these questions, and many more, in Eyewitness Ancient Rome. Photographs of real artefacts and detailed illustrations will help...
19) The road
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
In a novel set in an indefinite, futuristic, post-apocalyptic world, a father and his young son make their way through the ruins of a devastated American landscape, struggling to survive and preserve the last remnants of their own humanity.
20) The darkness
Author
Series
Language
English
Description
"Spanning the icy streets of Reykjavik, the Icelandic highlands and cold, isolated fjords, The Darkness is an atmospheric thriller from Ragnar Jonasson, one of the most exciting names in Nordic Noir. The body of a young Russian woman washes up on an Icelandic shore. After a cursory investigation, the death is declared a suicide and the case is quietly closed. Over a year later Detective Inspector Hulda Hermannsdóttir of the Reykjavík police is forced...
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