Fiction and Non Fiction

Brief Summary Convinced that Captain Haddock’s ancestor, Sir Francis Haddock, used a series of clever clues to describe the precise location of a priceless treasure, Tintin, Snowy and Captain Haddock rent a boat — the Sirius — and set sail on a treasure hunt. Without knowing it at first, the team is accompanied by an eccentric scientist called Professor Calculus. Although it is difficult to hold a meaningful conversation with the professor due to his hearing problems, Calculus more than proves his worth as an extra passenger. His ingenious mini-submarine certainly comes in very handy when searching for shipwrecks! While the intrepid explorers search for the treasure, Tintin can’t help wondering if there’s an important clue they might have overlooked. But in the end, the big question concerns Marlinspike Hall and its place within the saga of Sir Francis Haddock! ISBN:9781405206235 Author:Herge

Brief Summary World on Fire: How Exporting Free-Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability Amy Chua's remarkable and provocative book explores the tensions of the post-Cold War globalizing world. As global markets open, ethnic conflict worsens and democracy in developing nations can turn ugly and violent. Chua shows how free markets have concentrated disproportionate, often spectacular wealth in the hands of resented ethnic minorities - 'market-dominant minorities'. Adding democracy to this volatile mix can unleash suppressed ethnic hatred and bring to power 'ethno-nationalist' governments that pursue aggressive policies of confiscation and revenge. Chua also shows how individual countries may be viewed as market-dominant minorities, a fact that could help to explain the rising tide of anti-American sentiment around the world and the visceral hatred of Americans expressed in recent acts of terrorism. Chua is not an anti-globalist. But in this must-read bestselling book she presciently warns that, far from making the world a better and safer place, democracy and capitalism - at least in the raw, unrestrained form in which they are currently being exported - are intensifying ethnic resentment and global violence, with potentially catastrophic results. ISBN:9780099455042 Author:Amy Chua

Brief Summary A magnificent and ambitiously conceived portrait of contemporary life, by a genius of realism. Nine men. Each of them at a different stage in life, each of them away from home, and each of them striving--in the suburbs of Prague, in an overdeveloped Alpine village, beside a Belgian motorway, in a dingy Cyprus hotel--to understand what it means to be alive, here and now. Tracing a dramatic arc from the spring of youth to the winter of old age, the ostensibly separate narratives of All That Man Is aggregate into a picture of a single shared existence, a picture that interrogates the state of modern manhood while bringing to life, unforgettably, the physical and emotional terrain of an increasingly globalized Europe. And so these nine lives form an ingenious and new kind of novel, in which David Szalay expertly plots a dark predicament for the twenty-first-century man. Dark and disturbing, but also often wickedly and uproariously comic, All That Man Is is notable for the acute psychological penetration Szalay brings to bear on his characters, from the working-class ex-grunt to the pompous college student, the middle-aged loser to the Russian oligarch. Steadily and mercilessly, as this brilliantly conceived book progresses, the protagonist at the center of each chapter is older than the last one, it gets colder out, and All That Man Is gathers exquisite power. Szalay is a writer of supreme gifts--a master of a new kind of realism that vibrates with detail, intelligence, relevance, and devastating pathos. ISBN:9780224099776 Author:David Szalay