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Midnight in Chernobyl by Adam Higginb...
Brief Summary
Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World's Greatest Nuclear Disaster.
The definitive, dramatic untold story of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant disaster, based on original reporting and new archival research.
April 25, 1986, in Chernobyl, was a turning point in world history. The disaster not only changed the world’s perception of nuclear power and the science that spawned it, but also our understanding of the planet’s delicate ecology. With the images of the abandoned homes and playgrounds beyond the barbed wire of the 30-kilometer Exclusion Zone, the rusting graveyards of contaminated trucks and helicopters, the farmland lashed with black rain, the event fixed for all time the notion of radiation as an invisible killer.
Chernobyl was also a key event in the destruction of the Soviet Union, and, with it, the United States’ victory in the Cold War. For Moscow, it was a political and financial catastrophe as much as an environmental and scientific one. With a total cost of 18 billion rubles—at the time equivalent to $18 billion—Chernobyl bankrupted an already teetering economy and revealed to its population a state built upon a pillar of lies.
The full story of the events that started that night in the control room of Reactor No.4 of the V.I. Lenin Nuclear Power Plant has never been told—until now. Through two decades of reporting, new archival information, and firsthand interviews with witnesses, journalist Adam Higginbotham tells the full dramatic story, including Alexander Akimov and Anatoli Dyatlov, who represented the best and worst of Soviet life; denizens of a vanished world of secret policemen, internal passports, food lines, and heroic self-sacrifice for the Motherland. Midnight in Chernobyl, award-worthy nonfiction that reads like sci-fi, shows not only the final epic struggle of a dying empire but also the story of individual heroism and desperate, ingenious technical improvisation joining forces against a new kind of enemy.
ISBN:9781501134616
Author:Adam Higginbotham
Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
Brief Summary
A postmodern visionary who is also a master of styles of genres, David Mitchell combines flat-out adventure, a Nabokovian lore of puzzles, a keen eye for character, and a taste for mind-bending philosophical and scientific speculation in the tradition of Umberto Eco, Haruki Murakami, and Philip K. Dick. The result is brilliantly original fiction as profund as it is playful. Now in his new novel, David Mitchell explores with daring artistry fundamental questions of reality and identity.
Cloud Atlas begins in 1850 with Adam Ewing, an American notary voyaging from the Chatham Isles to his home in California. Along the way, Ewing is befriended by a physician, Dr. Goose, who begins to treat him for a rare species of brain parasite. . . .
Abruptly, the action jumps to Belgium in 1931, where Robert Frobisher, a disinherited bisexual composer, contrives his way into the household of an infirm maestro who has a beguiling wife and a nubile daughter. . . . From there we jump to the West Coast in the 1970s and a troubled reporter named Luisa Rey, who stumbles upon a web of corporate greed and murder that threatens to claim her life. . . . And onward, with dazzling virtuosity, to an inglorious present-day England; to a Korean superstate of the near future where neocapitalism has run amok; and, finally, to a postapocalyptic Iron Age Hawaii in the last days of history.
But the story doesn’t end even there. The narrative then boomerangs back through centuries and space, returning by the same route, in reverse, to its starting point. Along the way, Mitchell reveals how his disparate characters connect, how their fates intertwine, and how their souls drift across time like clouds across the sky.
As wild as a videogame, as mysterious as a Zen koan, Cloud Atlas is an unforgettable tour de force that, like its incomparable author, has transcended its cult classic status to become a worldwide phenomenon.
ISBN:9780375507250
Author:David Mitchell
The Future of Capitalism Facing the N...
Brief Summary
From world-renowned economist Paul Collier, a candid diagnosis of the failures of capitalism and a pragmatic and realistic vision for how we can repair it.
Deep new rifts are tearing apart the fabric of the United States and other Western societies: thriving cities versus rural counties, the highly skilled elite versus the less educated, wealthy versus developing countries. As these divides deepen, we have lost the sense of ethical obligation to others that was crucial to the rise of post-war social democracy.
So far these rifts have been answered only by the revivalist ideologies of populism and socialism, leading to the seismic upheavals of Trump, Brexit, and the return of the far-right in Germany. We have heard many critiques of capitalism but no one has laid out a realistic way to fix it, until now.
In a passionate and polemical book, celebrated economist Paul Collier outlines brilliantly original and ethical ways of healing these rifts—economic, social and cultural—with the cool head of pragmatism, rather than the fervor of ideological revivalism. He reveals how he has personally lived across these three divides, moving from working-class Sheffield to hyper-competitive Oxford, and working between Britain and Africa, and acknowledges some of the failings of his profession.
Drawing on his own solutions as well as ideas from some of the world’s most distinguished social scientists, he shows us how to save capitalism from itself—and free ourselves from the intellectual baggage of the twentieth century.
ISBN:9780062748669
Author:Paul Collier
The Mafia The First 100 Years by Will...
Brief Summary
This book traces the Mafia's beginnings from an underground patriotic society which sprang up six hundred years ago in Sicily, through the group of Italian immigrants - the Black Hand - who savagely tore control of New York's waterfronts away from Irish racketeers, to the Mob which went on to run organised crime throughout Italy and America.
Drawing on previously unavailable information and nearly two decades of research, William Balsamo - great-nephew of the first godfather - and George Carpozi Jr. trace the Black Hand's coalescence into an organisation whose insidious influence reached across the Atlantic and into a presidential administration.
And they go behind the headlines to reveal with chilling clarity the true extent of the Mafia's influence today.
ISBN:9780753500941
Author:William Balsamo
Taty Went West by Nikhil Singh
Brief Summary
Taty is a troubled teen running away from home. She quickly finds herself kidnapped by a malicious imp in the dinosaur-infested Outzone. While confronting demons of her own, Taty finds herself in a chaotic world full of evangelizing robot nuns, Buddhist punks, and the ominous Dr. Dali. Nikhil Singh has created a truly unique universe with a bold, petulant heroine one can't help but cheer for.
Called "a hallucinogenic post-apocalyptic carnival ride” by Lauren Beukes, Taty Went West is told with bold swagger and otherworldly imagination by one of Africa's most promising new writers. As Billy Kahora, managing editor of Kenya's Kwani Trust, says, "Savvy, ultra-modern, Taty straddles the mediated realities of our own continent and the groundbreaking possibilities of our ongoing universal imaginaries.”
ISBN:9781495626906
Author:Nikhil Singh
A Million Little Pieces by James Frey
Brief Summary
Intense, unpredictable, and instantly engaging, this is a story of drug and alcohol abuse and rehabilitation as it has never been told before. It is also the introduction of a bold and talented literary voice.
Before considering reading this book, please see the BookBrowse note on the book jacket/review page.
BookBrowse Note: January 9th 2006: An article in the Smoking Gun claimed that James Frey (author of A Million Little Pieces and My Friend Leonard) fabricated key parts of his books. They cited police records, court documents and interviews with law enforcement agents which belie a number of Frey's claims regarding criminal charges against him, jail terms and his fugitive status.
In an interview with the Smoking Gun, Frey admitted that he had 'embellished central details' in A Million Little Pieces and backtracked on claims he made in the book.
January 26th 2006. Frey's publisher stated that while it initially stood by him, after further questioning of the author, the house has "sadly come to the realization that a number of facts have been altered and incidents embellished." It will be adding a a publisher's note and author's note to all future editions of A Million Little Pieces.
ISBN:9780307276902
Author:James Frey
Dear Sonali Letters to the Daughter I...
Dear Sonali, is a passion project from the TV's Divorce Court Host. Seeking to share her mother's wisdom with a daughter of her own, this mother of six boys has written letters for young women to help them grow, conquer and thrive.
From money to men, to passion and profession Judge Lynn gives her best advice from her particular point of view. At once, practical, methodical and motivational, Judge Lynn shares the best she has with all of the women that call her The Auntie in Their Head or Mom2.
Deadlier 100 of the Best Crime Storie...
Brief Summary
100 of the best crime stories written by women, selected and introduced by Sophie Hannah. From Agatha Christie and Daphne du Maurier, to Val McDermid and Margaret Atwood, women writers have long been drawn to criminal acts.
Here, award-winning author Sophie Hannah brings together 100 of her favourite examples.
Deadlier includes prize-winners, bestsellers and rising stars, so whether you take your crime cosy or hard-boiled, this big, beautiful anthology will keep you reading long into the night.
ISBN:9781784975463
Author:Sophie Hannah
The French Revolution and What Went W...
Brief Summary
Legend has it that, in a few busy weeks in July 1789, a despotic king, his freeloading wife, and a horde of over-privileged aristocrats, were displaced and then humanely dispatched.
In the ensuing years, we are told, France was heroically transformed into an idyll of Liberté, Egalité and Fraternité.
In fact, as Stephen Clarke argues in his informative and eye-opening account of the French Revolution, almost all of this is completely untrue.
In 1789 almost no one wanted to oust King Louis XVI, let alone guillotine him.
While the Bastille was being stormed by out-of-control Parisians, the true democrats were at work in Versailles creating a British-style constitutional monarchy.
The founding of the Republic in 1792 unleashed a reign of terror that caused about 300,000 violent deaths.
And people hailed today as revolutionary heroes were dangerous opportunists, whose espousal of Liberté, Egalité and Fraternité did not stop them massacring political opponents and guillotining women for demanding equal rights.
Going back to original French sources, Stephen Clarke has uncovered the little-known and rarely told story of what was really happening in revolutionary France, as well as what went so tragically and bloodily wrong.
ISBN:B074MC1Z46
Author:Stephen Clarke
Loyal Enemies by Jamie Gilham
Brief Summary
Loyal Enemies: British Converts to Islam 1850-1950
Loyal Enemies uncovers the history of the earliest British converts to Islam who lived their lives freely as Muslims on British soil, from the 1850s to the 1950s. Drawing on original archival research, it reveals that people from across the range of social classes defied convention by choosing Islam in this period.
Through a series of case studies of influential converts and pioneering Muslim communities, Loyal Enemies considers how the culture of Empire and imperialism influenced and affected their conversions and subsequent lives, before examining how they adapted and sustained their faith. Jamie Gilham shows that, although the overall number of converts was small, conversion to Islam aroused hostile reactions locally and nationally.
He therefore also probes the roots of antipathy towards Islam and Muslims, identifies their manifestations and explores what conversion entailed socially and culturally. He also considers whether there was any substance to persistent allegations that converts had "divided" loyalties between the British Crown and a Muslim ruler, country or community.
Loyal Enemies is a book about the past, but its core themes--about faith and belief, identity, Empire, loyalties and discrimination-- are still salient today.
ISBN:9780199377251
Author:Jamie Gilham
The Patterning Instinct by Jeremy Lent
Brief Summary
The Patterning Instinct: A Cultural History of Humanity's Search for Meaning.
This fresh perspective on crucial questions of history identifies the root metaphors that cultures have used to construct meaning in their world. It offers a glimpse into the minds of a vast range of different peoples: early hunter-gatherers and farmers, ancient Egyptians, traditional Chinese sages, the founders of Christianity, trail-blazers of the Scientific Revolution, and those who constructed our modern consumer society.
Taking the reader on an archaeological exploration of the mind, the author, an entrepreneur and sustainability leader, uses recent findings in cognitive science and systems theory to reveal the hidden layers of values that form today's cultural norms.
Uprooting the tired clichés of the science-religion debate, he shows how medieval Christian rationalism acted as an incubator for scientific thought, which in turn shaped our modern vision of the conquest of nature. The author probes our current crisis of unsustainability and argues that it is not an inevitable result of human nature, but is culturally driven: a product of particular mental patterns that could conceivably be reshaped.
By shining a light on our possible futures, the book foresees a coming struggle between two contrasting views of humanity: one driving to a technological endgame of artificially enhanced humans, the other enabling a sustainable future arising from our intrinsic connectedness with each other and the natural world. This struggle, it concludes, is one in which each of us will play a role through the meaning we choose to forge from the lives we lead.
ISBN:9781633882942
Author:Jeremy Lent
Mastering Modern World History by Nor...
Brief Summary
The fifth edition of this bestselling book is for school and college students taking courses in Modern World History and for undergraduates in History and International Relations. It is a complete, self-contained, lively and highly readable course, suitable for individual study or classroom use. The general reader who wishes to find out how the world got into its present state will also find the book useful.
Key features of the fifth edition:
• A new chapter on Latin America and its changing relationship with the USA
• New sections on the Arab Spring, the 2008 financial crash and its aftermath, and the European Union in crisis
• New material on the changing face of communism in China; USA: Bush to Obama; Russia under Putin and Medvedev; the continuing conflict between Palestinians and Israelis and the 'war against terrorism'
Content includes:
• A survey of international relations and war from 1900 to 2012
• Europe and its history - the rise and fall of fascism and communism
• International affairs of the major superpowers - USA, Russia/USSR and China
• International conflict -The Holocaust, 9/11 and the fall of Saddam Hussein
• Decolonization and subsequent events in Africa, and the rise of political Islam
• Global problems - climate change, economic crises, the population 'explosion'
• Mention of disagreements and controversies among historians, as well as new interpretations and discoveries
ISBN:9781137276940
Author:Norman Lowe
The Princess Saves Herself in This On...
Brief Summary
"Ah, life- the thing that happens to us while we're off somewhere else blowing on dandelions & wishing ourselves into the pages of our favorite fairy tales."
A poetry collection divided into four different parts: the princess, the damsel, the queen, & you. the princess, the damsel, & the queen piece together the life of the author in three stages, while you serves as a note to the reader & all of humankind.
Explores life & all of its love, loss, grief, healing, empowerment, & inspirations.
ISBN:9781532913686
Author:Amanda Lovelace
The New Girl by Daniel Silva
Brief Summary
At an exclusive private school in Switzerland, mystery surrounds the identity of the beautiful girl who arrives each morning and leaves each afternoon in a heavily protected motorcade fit for a head of state. She is said to be the daughter of a wealthy international businessman.
She is not. And when she is brutally kidnapped across the border in the Haute-Savoie region of France, Gabriel Allon, the legendary chief of Israeli intelligence, is thrust into a deadly secret war with an old enemy that will determine the future of the Middle East—and perhaps the world.
ISBN:B07F18LND4
Author:Daniel Silva
Flight Behavior by Barbara Kingsolver
Brief Summary
Flight Behavior takes on one of the most contentious subjects of our time: climate change. With a deft and versatile empathy Kingsolver dissects the motives that drive denial and belief in a precarious world.
Flight Behavior transfixes from its opening scene, when a young woman's narrow experience of life is thrown wide with the force of a raging fire. In the lyrical language of her native Appalachia, Barbara Kingsolver bares the rich, tarnished humanity of her novel's inhabitants and unearths the modern complexities of rural existence. Characters and reader alike are quickly carried beyond familiar territory here, into the unsettled ground of science, faith, and everyday truces between reason and conviction.
Dellarobia Turnbow is a restless farm wife who gave up her own plans when she accidentally became pregnant at seventeen. Now, after a decade of domestic disharmony on a failing farm, she has settled for permanent disappointment but seeks momentary escape through an obsessive flirtation with a younger man.
As she hikes up a mountain road behind her house to a secret tryst, she encounters a shocking sight: a silent, forested valley filled with what looks like a lake of fire. She can only understand it as a cautionary miracle, but it sparks a raft of other explanations from scientists, religious leaders, and the media. The bewildering emergency draws rural farmers into unexpected acquaintance with urbane journalists, opportunists, sightseers, and a striking biologist with his own stake in the outcome. As the community lines up to judge the woman and her miracle, Dellarobia confronts her family, her church, her town, and a larger world, in a flight toward truth that could undo all she has ever believed.
Flight Behavior takes on one of the most contentious subjects of our time: climate change. With a deft and versatile empathy Kingsolver dissects the motives that drive denial and belief in a precarious world.
ISBN:9780062124265
Author:Barbara Kingsolver
Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward
Brief Summary
A hurricane is building over the Gulf of Mexico, threatening the coastal town of Bois Sauvage, Mississippi, and Esch's father is growing concerned. A hard drinker, largely absent, he doesn't show concern for much else. Esch and her three brothers are stocking food, but there isn't much to save.
Lately, Esch can't keep down what food she gets; she's fourteen and pregnant. Her brother Skeetah is sneaking scraps for his prized pitbull's new litter, dying one by one in the dirt, while brothers Randall and Junior try to stake their claim in a family long on child's play and short on parenting. As the twelve days that comprise the novel's framework yield to the final day and Hurricane Katrina, the unforgettable family at the novel's heart—motherless children sacrificing for each other as they can, protecting and nurturing where love is scarce—pulls itself up to struggle for another day.
A wrenching look at the lonesome, brutal, and restrictive realities of rural poverty, "Salvage the Bones" is muscled with poetry, revelatory, and real.
ISBN:9781608195220
Author:Jesmyn Ward
Fixing Failed States A Framework for ...
Brief Summary
Today between forty and sixty nations, home to more than one billion people, have either collapsed or are teetering on the brink of failure. The world's worst problems-terrorism, drugs and human trafficking, absolute poverty, ethnic conflict, disease, genocide-originate in such states, and the international community has devoted billions of dollars to solving the problem. Yet by and large the effort has not succeeded.
Ashraf Ghani and Clare Lockhart have taken an active part in the effort to save failed states for many years, serving as World Bank officials, as advisers to the UN, and as high-level participants in the new government of Afghanistan. In Fixing Failed States, they describe the issue-vividly and convincingly-offering an on-the-ground picture of why past efforts have not worked and advancing a groundbreaking new solution to this most pressing of global crises. For the paperback edition, they have added a new preface that addresses the continuing crisis in light of ongoing governance problems in weak states like Afghanistan and the global financial recession.
As they explain, many of these countries already have the resources they need, if only we knew how to connect them to global knowledge and put them to work in the right way. Their state-building strategy, which assigns responsibility equally among the international community, national leaders, and citizens, maps out a clear path to political and economic stability. The authors provide a practical framework for achieving these ends, supporting their case with first-hand examples of struggling territories such as Afghanistan, Sudan, Kosovo and Nepal as well as the world's success stories-Singapore, Ireland, and even the American South.
ISBN:9780195398618
Author:Ashraf Ghani
Zone One by Colson Whitehead
Brief summary
In this wry take on the post-apocalyptic horror novel, a pandemic has devastated the planet. The plague has sorted humanity into two types: the uninfected and the infected, the living and the living dead.
Now the plague is receding, and Americans are busy rebuild¬ing civilization under orders from the provisional govern¬ment based in Buffalo. Their top mission: the resettlement of Manhattan. Armed forces have successfully reclaimed the island south of Canal Street—aka Zone One—but pockets of plague-ridden squatters remain.
While the army has eliminated the most dangerous of the infected, teams of civilian volunteers are tasked with clearing out a more innocuous variety—the "malfunctioning” stragglers, who exist in a catatonic state, transfixed by their former lives.
Mark Spitz is a member of one of the civilian teams work¬ing in lower Manhattan. Alternating between flashbacks of Spitz’s desperate fight for survival during the worst of the outbreak and his present narrative, the novel unfolds over three surreal days, as it depicts the mundane mission of straggler removal, the rigors of Post-Apocalyptic Stress Disorder, and the impossible job of coming to grips with the fallen world.
And then things start to go wrong.
Both spine chilling and playfully cerebral, Zone One bril¬liantly subverts the genre’s conventions and deconstructs the zombie myth for the twenty-first century.
ISBN:9780385528078
Author:Colson Whitehead
Eve Out of Her Ruins by Ananda Devi
Brief summary
With brutal honesty and poetic urgency, Ananda Devi relates the tale of four young Mauritians trapped in their country's endless cycle of fear and violence: Eve, whose body is her only weapon and source of power; Savita, Eve's best friend, the only one who loves Eve without self-interest, who has plans to leave but will not go alone; Saadiq, gifted would-be poet, inspired by Rimbaud, in love with Eve; Clélio, belligerent rebel, waiting without hope for his brother to send for him from France.
Eve out of Her Ruins is a heartbreaking look at the dark corners of the island nation of Mauritius that tourists never see, and a poignant exploration of the construction of personhood at the margins of society.
Awarded the prestigious Prix des cinq continents upon publication as the best book written in French outside of France, Eve Out of her Ruins is a harrowing account of the violent reality of life in her native country by the figurehead of Mauritian literature.
ISBN:9781941920404
Author:Ananda Devi
The Rose That Grew from Concrete by T...
Tupac Shakur's most intimate and honest thoughts were uncovered only after his death with the instant classic The Rose That Grew from Concrete. His talent was unbounded, a raw force that commanded attention and respect His death was tragic -- a violent homage to the power of his voice.
His legacy is indomitable -- remaining vibrant and alive. Here now, newly discovered, are Tupac's most honest and intimate thoughts conveyed through the pure art of poetry -- a mirror into his enigmatic life and its many contradictions.
Written in his own hand at the age of nineteen, they embrace his spirit, his energy...and his ultimate message of hope.
His talent was unbounded, a raw force that commanded attention and respect.
His death was tragic -- a violent homage to the power of his voice.
His legacy is indomitable -- remaining vibrant and alive.
Here now, newly discovered, are Tupac's most honest and intimate thoughts conveyed through the pure art of poetry -- a mirror into his enigmatic life and its many contradictions.
Written in his own hand at the age of nineteen, they embrace his spirit, his energy...and his ultimate message of hope.