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Yuval Noah Harari's 21 Lessons for the 21st Century is a probing and visionary investigation into today's most urgent issues as we move into the uncharted territory of the future. As technology advances faster than our understanding of it, hacking becomes a tactic of war, and the world feels more polarized than ever, Harari addresses the challenge of navigating life in the face of constant and disorienting change and raises the important questions...
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"Over the past century, humankind has managed to do the impossible and rein in famine, plague, and war. For the first time ever, more people die from eating too much than from eating too little; more people die from old age than from infectious diseases; and more people commit suicide than are killed by soldiers, terrorists and criminals put together. The average American is a thousand times more likely to die from binging at McDonald's than from...
3) Newsweek
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Newsweek magazine has a long-standing tradition of providing readers with the most updated information on the most pressing issues affecting our nation and world today. Newsweek is able to fill the gaps when a story has passed and is able to come up with insight or synthesis that connects the cracking, confusing digitals dots in today's fast paced news cycle.
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"A magisterial history of the centuries-long conflict between "progress" and "tradition" in the world's largest international institution. The story of Roman Catholicism has never followed a singular path. In no time period has this been more true than over the last two centuries. Beginning with the French Revolution, extending to the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s, and concluding with present-day crises, John T. McGreevy chronicles the dramatic...
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In previous books, Holocaust historian Timothy Snyder dissected the events and values that enabled the rise of Hitler and Stalin and the execution of their catastrophic policies. With Twenty Lessons, Snyder draws from the darkest hours of the twentieth century to provide hope for the twenty-first. As he writes, "Americans are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism and communism. Our one advantage is that we might learn...
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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 naive hope, the Enlightenment, we now know, has worked. But more than ever, it needs a vigorous defense. The Enlightenment project swims against...
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Clint Smith's vibrant and compelling new collection traverses the vast emotional terrain of fatherhood, and explores how becoming a parent has recalibrated his sense of the world. There are poems that interrogate the ways our lives are shaped by both personal lineages and historical institutions. There are poems that revel in the wonder of discovering the world anew through the eyes of your children, as they discover it for the first time. There are...
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"A very modern biography of John Donne-the poet of love, sex, and death-by bestselling children's book author and superstar academic Katherine Rundell"--
Sometime religious outsider and social disaster, sometime celebrity preacher and establishment darling, John Donne was incapable of being just one thing. In his myriad lives he was a scholar of law, a sea adventurer, a priest, an MP - and perhaps the greatest love poet in the history of the English...
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The classic account of the lead-up to World War I, told with “a rare combination of impeccable scholarship and literary polish” (The New York Times)—from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Guns of August
During the fateful quarter century leading up to World War I, the climax of a century of rapid, unprecedented change, a privileged few enjoyed Olympian luxury as the underclass was...
During the fateful quarter century leading up to World War I, the climax of a century of rapid, unprecedented change, a privileged few enjoyed Olympian luxury as the underclass was...
12) Blindness
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A stunningly powerful novel of humanity's will to survive against all odds during an epidemic by a winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature.
An International Bestseller • "This is a shattering work by a literary master."—Boston Globe
A city is hit by an epidemic of "white blindness" which spares no one. Authorities confine the blind to an empty mental hospital, but there the criminal element holds everyone captive,...
An International Bestseller • "This is a shattering work by a literary master."—Boston Globe
A city is hit by an epidemic of "white blindness" which spares no one. Authorities confine the blind to an empty mental hospital, but there the criminal element holds everyone captive,...
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Shakespeare loved words. He picked up phrases; he made up new words-- and then he put them together in extraordinary ways and used them in his plays. We bump into his words all the time, four hundred years later, and we don't even know it! Discover the ways that his words changed the way we talk.
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Friedman discusses how the key to understanding the 21st century is understanding that the planet's three largest forces--Moore's law (technology), the market (globalization) and Mother Nature (climate change and biodiversity loss)--are accelerating all at once. And these accelerations are transforming the five key realms: the workplace, politics, geopolitics, ethics, and community. Friedman posits that we should purposely "be late"--We should pause...
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"One of the most stunning achievements of moral philosophy is something we take for granted: moral universalism, or the idea that every human has equal moral worth. In What We Owe the Future, Oxford philosopher William MacAskill demands that we go a step further, arguing that people not only have equal moral worth no matter where or how they live, but also no matter when they live. This idea has implications beyond the obvious (climate change) - including...
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William Shakespeare, the most celebrated poet in the English language, left behind nearly a million words of text, but his biography has long been a thicket of supposition arranged around scant facts. With his trademark wit, Bill Bryson sorts through this colorful muddle to reveal the man himself. Bryson documents the efforts of earlier scholars, and, emulating the style of his travelogues, records episodes in his own research. He celebrates Shakespeare...
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"This is the third New Cambridge edition of The Taming of the Shrew, one of Shakespeare's most popular yet controversial plays. Ann Thompson considers its reception in the light of the hostility and embarrassment that the play often arouses, taking account of both scholarly defences and modern feminist criticism. For this version the editor pays lively attention to the problematic nature of debates about the play and its reception in the twenty-first...
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"The New York Times bestselling author of The Rational Optimist and Genome returns with a fascinating, brilliant argument for evolution that definitively dispels a dangerous, widespread myth: that we can command and control our world.The Evolution of Everything is about bottom-up order and its enemy, the top-down twitch--the endless fascination human beings have for design rather than evolution, for direction rather than emergence. Drawing on anecdotes...