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On Beauty by Zadie Smith
Brief Summary
Howard Belsey, a Rembrandt scholar who doesn't like Rembrandt, is an Englishman abroad and a long-suffering professor at Wellington, a liberal New England arts college. He has been married for thirty years to Kiki, an American woman who no longer resembles the sexy activist she once was.
Their three children passionately pursue their own paths: Levi quests after authentic blackness, Zora believes that intellectuals can redeem everybody, and Jerome struggles to be a believer in a family of strict atheists. Faced with the oppressive enthusiasms of his children, Howard feels that the first two acts of his life are over and he has no clear plans for the finale. Or the encore.
Then Jerome, Howard's older son, falls for Victoria, the stunning daughter of the right-wing icon Monty Kipps, and the two families find themselves thrown together in a beautiful corner of America, enacting a cultural and personal war against the background of real wars that they barely register. An infidelity, a death, and a legacy set in motion a chain of events that sees all parties forced to examine the unarticulated assumptions which underpin their lives.
How do you choose the work on which to spend your life? Why do you love the people you love? Do you really believe what you claim to? And what is the beautiful thing, and how far will you go to get it?
Set on both sides of the Atlantic, Zadie Smith's third novel is a brilliant analysis of family life, the institution of marriage, intersections of the personal and political, and an honest look at people's deceptions. It is also, as you might expect, very funny indeed.
ISBN:9780143037743
Author:Zadie Smith
Benjamin Franklin The Autobiography a...
Brief Summary
Benjamin Franklin’s account of his rise from poverty and obscurity to affluence and fame has charmed every generation of readers since it first appeared. Begun as a collection of anecdotes for his son, the memoir grew into a history of his remarkable achievements in the literary, scientific, and political realms.
A printer, inventor, scientist, diplomat, and statesman, Franklin was also a brilliant writer whose wit and wisdom shine on every page. His Autobiography has deservedly become the most widely read American autobiography of all time—the self-portrait of a quintessential American.
Franklin was a remarkably prolific writer, and is equally beloved for his humorous, philosophical, parodic, and satirical writings, parables, and maxims, which he published under an astonishing number of pen names, including Poor Richard, the Busy-Body, and Silence Dogood.
This hardcover edition of The Autobiography and Other Writings contains a varied selection of these, including "The Kite Experiment,” "A Parable Against Persecution,” "Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind,” "Rules for Making Oneself a Disagreeable Companion,” and "The Way to Wealth.”
ISBN:9780140390520
Author:Benjamin Franklin
Edge of Chaos Why Democracy Is Failin...
From an internationally acclaimed economist, a provocative call to jump-start economic growth by aggressively overhauling liberal democracy.
Edge of Chaos: Why Democracy Is Failing to Deliver Economic Growth and How to Fix It.
Around the world, people who are angry at stagnant wages and growing inequality have rebelled against established governments and turned to political extremes. Liberal democracy, history's greatest engine of growth, now struggles to overcome unprecedented economic headwinds--from aging populations to scarce resources to unsustainable debt burdens. Hobbled by short-term thinking and ideological dogma, democracies risk falling prey to nationalism and protectionism that will deliver declining living standards.
In Edge of Chaos, Dambisa Moyo shows why economic growth is essential to global stability, and why liberal democracies are failing to produce it today. Rather than turning away from democracy, she argues, we must fundamentally reform it. Edge of Chaos presents a radical blueprint for change in order to galvanize growth and ensure the survival of democracy in the twenty-first century.
Feminism is for Everybody Passionate ...
Brief Summary
Acclaimed cultural critic bell hooks offers an open-hearted and welcoming vision of gender, sexuality, and society in this inspiring and accessible volume. In engaging and provocative style, bell hooks introduces a popular theory of feminism rooted in common sense and the wisdom of experience.
Hers is a vision of a beloved community that appeals to all those committed to equality, mutual respect, and justice. hooks applies her critical analysis to the most contentious and challenging issues facing feminists today, including reproductive rights, violence, race, class, and work.
With her customary insight and unsparing honesty, hooks calls for a feminism free from barriers but rich with rigorous debate. In language both eye-opening and optimistic, hooks encourages us to demand alternatives to patriarchal, racist, and homophobic culture, and to imagine a different future.
ISBN:9780896086289
Author:bell hooks
Complications A Surgeons Notes on an ...
Brief Summary
In gripping accounts of true cases, surgeon Atul Gawande explores the power and the limits of medicine, offering an unflinching view from the scalpel's edge.
Complications lays bare a science not in its idealized form but as it actually is?uncertain, perplexing, and profoundly human.
ISBN:9780312421700
Author:Atul Gawande
The Ten Types of Human: A New Underst...
The Ten Types of Human: A New Understanding of Who We Are, and Who We Can Be.
This book will introduce you to ten people. In a way, you already know them. Only you don’t – not really. In a sense, they are you. Only they’re not entirely. They inform and shape the most important decisions in your life. But you’re almost certainly unaware of their intervention. They are the Ten Types of Human. Who are they? What are they for? How did they get into your head?
We want to believe that there are some things we would never do. We want to believe that there are others we always would. But how can we be sure? What are our limits? Do we have limits?
The answer lies with the Ten Types of Human: the people we become when we are faced with life's most difficult decisions. But who or what are these Types? Where do they come from? How did they get into our heads?
The Ten Types of Human is a pioneering examination of human nature. It looks at the best and worst that human beings are capable of, and asks why. It explores the frontiers of the human experience, excavating the forces that shape our thoughts and actions in extreme situations. It begins in a courtroom and journeys across four continents and through the lives of some exceptional people, in search of answers.
Mixing cutting-edge neuroscience, social psychology and visceral true stories, The Ten Types of Human is at once a provocation and a roadmap of the hidden parts of us. It is a book to inspire; to refashion our understanding of our many selves and semblances; and ultimately to find fresh ways to be free.
The Goldfinch: A Novel by Donna Tartt
It begins with a boy. Theo Decker, a thirteen-year-old New Yorker, miraculously survives an accident that kills his mother. Abandoned by his father, Theo is taken in by the family of a wealthy friend. Bewildered by his strange new home on Park Avenue, disturbed by schoolmates who don't know how to talk to him, and tormented above all by his unbearable longing for his mother, he clings to one thing that reminds him of her: a small, mysteriously captivating painting that ultimately draws Theo into the underworld of art.
As an adult, Theo moves silkily between the drawing rooms of the rich and the dusty labyrinth of an antiques store where he works. He is alienated and in love-and at the center of a narrowing, ever more dangerous circle.
The Goldfinch combines vivid characters, mesmerizing language, and suspense, while plumbing with a philosopher's calm the deepest mysteries of love, identity, and art. It is an old-fashioned story of loss and obsession, survival and self-invention, and the ruthless machinations of fate.
Magna Carta of Exponentiality by Vusi...
Management and leadership are facing serious headwinds. These headwinds are driven by the sea of change that is facing organizations today. This change, driven predominantly but not exclusively, by the rapid rate of technological advancement has resulted in major shifts in how organizations configure themselves.
The world has also become increasingly polarized. Whilst the nouveau-rich and the upper-middle classes of Tasha’s meetings continue blissfully to enjoy their lot, just fifteen minutes away, two of the fastest growing townships, Alexandra and Diepsloot have weekly service delivery protests, alarming crime rates and unsustainable social infrastructure backlogs. The social problems of South Africa are manifesting at an exponential rate, yet leaders continue to think, plan, manage, coordinate and deliver at a linear rate.
These leaders, and many others like them, don’t have the skills or framework to work differently.
For business leaders in pursuit of generating results better than their competitors and their market average, working through the quagmire of strategy, culture, context, leadership and many other latter-day management concepts seems to be their default. All this in the hope that they can discover the scripture that teaches them how they can generate better returns than their competition. How they can generate exponential results in linear markets.
In the book, we look at teams, leaders and organizations that have managed to deliver phenomenal market-beating results in the face of extreme uncertainty, severe resource constraints and socio-political instability. We study the foresight of managers who turned entrepreneurs who seized opportunities and built businesses to rival their old employers, seasoned managers who looked through the fog of marketplace war to see opportunity. We answer the questions: how did they do it, what they did and what you can learn from their ingenuity, luck and guts.
Over the past decade, my team and I have spent copious periods of time, effort and resources seeking to answer the ultimate management question of the new age, "how do we drive exponential results in linear markets?”
The old way is dead. Linear is the past. Leaders, managers and entrepreneurs today need to learn how to work differently. They need a new bible, - The Magna Carta of Exponentiality.
Slaughterhouse Five
Brief Summary
Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of all time, Slaughterhouse-Five, an American classic, is one of the world's great antiwar books.
Centering on the infamous firebombing of Dresden, Billy Pilgrim's odyssey through time reflects the mythic journey of our own fractured lives as we search for meaning in what we fear most.
ISBN:9780385333849
Author:Kurt Vonnegut
Dork Diaries Drama Queen
Brief Summary
TOTAL DISASTER!!! Mean girl MacKenzie has stolen Nikki's diary! What if she tells everyone Nikki's totally secret thoughts?!
But reading Nikki's diary isn't the only thing MacKenzie's interested in. Get ready for Dork Diaries with a twist as MacKenzie takes over and tells all about her GLAMFABULOUS life! What does the queen bee really think about Nikki and her dorky friends?
ISBN:9781471117701
Author:Rachel Renee Russell
Dork Diaries Frenemies Forever
Brief Summary
Nikki Maxwell, Queen of the Dorks, is back in the eleventh instalment of the NYT bestselling series! Nikki is spending a week at North Hampton Hills as part of the school transfer programme. The good news is that NHH is super-cool and preppy.
The bad news is that Nikki's nemesis MacKenzie started there two weeks ago! But, faced with NHH queen bee Tiffany, who takes meanness to a whole new level, Nikki might need to work WITH Mackenzie if she's going to survive the week! Can Nikki and MacKenzie overcome their differences and become BFFs ... Best Frenemies Forever?! Praise for DORK DIARIES: 'Dork Diaries is so laugh-out-loud funny and original I stayed up late reading it, just to see what would happen next - and to get that next laugh!' Kate Brian, author of the Private series 'Spot on for the tween market'
The Bookseller 'The Dork Diaries series is fast becoming my favourite for younger readers, and I really hope there are more dorky stories living in Rachel Renee Russell's head. I'm sure Nikki has many more embarrassing moments just waiting to happen, as well as lots of gossip to share about her crush on Brandon. More please!' Wondrous Reads Blog Perfect for fans of Wimpy Kid, Tom Gates, Jacqueline Wilson and James Patterson.â Now with over 30 million copies in print worldwide.
ISBN:9781471158018
Author:Rachel Renee Russell
Safe People by Henry Cloud and John T...
Brief Summary
Safe People: How to Find Relationships That Are Good for You and Avoid Those That Aren't
Drs. Henry Cloud and John Townsend offer solid guidance for making safe choices in relationships, from friendships to romance. They help identify the nurturing people we all need in our lives, as well as ones we need to learn to avoid. Safe People will help you to recognize 20 traits of relationally untrustworthy people.
Discover what makes some people relationally safe, and how to avoid unhealthy entanglements. You'll learn about things within yourself that jeopardize your relational security. And you'll find out what to do and what not to do to develop a balanced, healthy approach to relationships.
"
ISBN:9780310210849
Author:Henry Cloud and John Townsend
Kiraitu Murungi An Odyssey in Kenyan ...
In this painstakingly researched and insightful book, Professor Peter Kagwanja and co-author, Humphrey Ringera, offer a lucid panoramic view of contemporary Kenyan politics peered through the lenses of one of the iconic figures of the country's post-Mau Mau power elite — Kiraitu Murungi.
The authors of this buy-one-get-three narrative depart radically from the orthodox biographical writing, weaving the life story of Murungi together with the chronicles of the Mau Mau roots of freedom and the epic rise of a post-colonial power elite as the most significant development in the last half-century of Kenya's independence.
Arguably the best political portrait of a Kenyan politician since David Goldsworthy's Tom Mboya: The Man Kenya Wanted to Forget, the book succeeds in capturing the palpably tense political atmosphere, hustle and bustle and the risk-prone elbowing for power in the run-up to the 2013 elections.
The authors bring out the good, the bad and the ugly of the new Kenyan power elite in politics, academy, military and business as the generation with the historic mission to deliver the country to stable democracy and prosperity or push it down the cliff of anarchy, state failure and decay.
Kiraitu Murungi is a central actor in this unfolding national drama.
History of African Civilizations in t...
Brief Summary
This book attempts to correct, what the author calls a false history of African civilizations that has been taught by western educational establishment for over 100 years and that is still taught in our schools.
An in-depth examination of Nile Valley Civilization and its influences on the development of modern culture.
ISBN:9789966096722
Author:Bethwell A. Ogot
The Deals That Made the World by Jacq...
Brief Summary
The Deals That Made the World: Reckless Ambition, Backroom Negotiations, and the Hidden Truths of Business.
While the laws that guide our lives are written by the politicians we elect, much of the world around us - from the food we eat to the products we buy to the medications we take - is shaped by private negotiations and business deals few of us know about.
For twenty years, Peretti has interviewed the people behind the decisions that have altered our world, from CEOs of multinational corporations to politicians, economists, and scientists. In The Deals that Made the World, Peretti draws on his vast knowledge to reveal a host of fascinating and startling connections, from how Wall Street's actions on food commodities helped spark the Arab Spring to the link between the AIDS epidemic in 1980s San Francisco and the subprime mortgage crisis of 2008.
He proves a sure guide, combining both eye-opening on-the-ground reporting and a narrative flair that makes esoteric financial and business concepts clear and understandable.
Like Steven Levitt, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Brad Stone, Michael Lewis, and Malcolm Gladwell, Peretti takes the ordinary and turns it inside out to give us a compelling new perspective on our lives and our world.
Bringing Up Girls by James Dobson
Brief Summary
Bringing Up Girls: Practical Advice and Encouragement for Those Shaping the Next Generation of Women.
This is the ultimate guide to raising our daughter’s right--from parenting authority and trusted family counselor Dr. James Dobson.
Peer pressure. Eating disorders. Decisions about love, romance, and sex. Academic demands. Life goals and how to achieve them. These are just some of the challenges that girls face today--and the age at which they encounter them is getting younger and younger. As a parent, how are you guiding your daughter on her journey to womanhood? Are you equipping her to make wise choices?
Whether she's still playing with dolls or in the midst of the often-turbulent teen years, is she truly secure in her identity as your valued and loved daughter? In the New York Times bestseller Bringing Up Girls, Dr. James Dobson will help you face the challenges of raising your daughters to become strong, healthy, and confident women who excel in life.
My ABC of Kenya
Lords of Finance by Liaquat Ahamed
Brief Summary
With penetrating insights for today, this vital history of the world economic collapse of the late 1920s offers unforgettable portraits of the four men whose personal and professional actions as heads of their respective central banks changed the course of the twentieth century
It is commonly believed that the Great Depression that began in 1929 resulted from a confluence of events beyond any one person’s or government’s control. In fact, as Liaquat Ahamed reveals, it was the decisions taken by a small number of central bankers that were the primary cause of the economic meltdown, the effects of which set the stage for World War II and reverberated for decades.
In Lords of Finance, we meet the neurotic and enigmatic Montagu Norman of the Bank of England, the xenophobic and suspicious Émile Moreau of the Banque de France, the arrogant yet brilliant Hjalmar Schacht of the Reichsbank, and Benjamin Strong of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, whose façade of energy and drive masked a deeply wounded and overburdened man.
After the First World War, these central bankers attempted to reconstruct the world of international finance. Despite their differences, they were united by a common fear—that the greatest threat to capitalism was inflation— and by a common vision that the solution was to turn back the clock and return the world to the gold standard.
For a brief period in the mid-1920s they appeared to have succeeded. The world’s currencies were stabilized and capital began flowing freely across the globe. But beneath the veneer of boom-town prosperity, cracks started to appear in the financial system. The gold standard that all had believed would provide an umbrella of stability proved to be a straitjacket, and the world economy began that terrible downward spiral known as the Great Depression.
As yet another period of economic turmoil makes headlines today, the Great Depression and the year 1929 remain the benchmark for true financial mayhem. Offering a new understanding of the global nature of financial crises, Lords of Finance is a potent reminder of the enormous impact that the decisions of central bankers can have, of their fallibility, and of the terrible human consequences that can result when they are wrong.
ISBN:9781594201820
Author:Liaquat Ahamed
Exit West by Mohsin Hamid
In a country teetering on the brink of civil war, two young people meet—sensual, fiercely independent Nadia and gentle, restrained Saeed. They embark on a furtive love affair and are soon cloistered in a premature intimacy by the unrest roiling their city.
When it explodes, turning familiar streets into a patchwork of checkpoints and bomb blasts, they begin to hear whispers about doors—doors that can whisk people far away, if perilously and for a price. As the violence escalates, Nadia and Saeed decide that they no longer have a choice. Leaving their homeland and their old lives behind, they find a door and step through.
Exit West follows these characters as they emerge into an alien and uncertain future, struggling to hold on to each other, to their past, to the very sense of who they are. Profoundly intimate and powerfully inventive, it tells an unforgettable story of love, loyalty, and courage that is both completely of our time and for all time.
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
Awe and exhilaration--along with heartbreak and mordant wit--abound in Lolita, Nabokov's most famous and controversial novel, which tells the story of the aging Humbert Humbert's obsessive, devouring, and doomed passion for the nymphet Dolores Haze.
Lolita is also the story of a hyper civilized European colliding with the cheerful barbarism of postwar America.
Most of all, it is a meditation on love-- as outrage and hallucination, madness and transformation.