Search:

Results 81 to 90 of 98 | « previous |

Joe Biden : the life, the run, and what matters now / by Osnos, Evan,1976-author.;
Includes bibliographic references.Former vice president Joseph R. Biden Jr. has been called both the luckiest man and the unluckiest--fortunate to have sustained a fifty-year political career that reached the White House, but also marked by deep personal losses and disappointments that he has suffered. Yet even as Biden's life has been shaped by drama, it has also been powered by a willingness, rare at the top ranks of politics, to confront his shortcomings, errors, and reversals of fortune. As he says, "Failure at some point in your life is inevitable, but giving up is unforgivable." His trials have forged in him a deep empathy for others in hardship--an essential quality as he addresses Americans in the nation's most dire hour in decades. Blending up-close journalism and broader context, Evan Osnos, who won the National Book Award in 2014, draws on his work for The New Yorker to capture the characters and meaning of an extraordinary presidential election. It is based on lengthy interviews with Biden and on revealing conversations with more than a hundred others, including President Barack Obama, Cory Booker, Amy Klobuchar, Pete Buttigieg, and a range of progressive activists, advisers, opponents, and Biden family members. This portrayal illuminates Biden's long and eventful career in the Senate, his eight years as Obama's vice president, his sojourn in the political wilderness after being passed over for Hillary Clinton in 2016, his decision to challenge Donald Trump for the presidency, and his choice of Senator Kamala Harris as his running mate. Osnos ponders the difficulties Biden will face if elected and weighs how political circumstances, and changes in the candidate's thinking, have altered his positions. In this nuanced portrait, Biden emerges as flawed, yet resolute, and tempered by the flame of tragedy-a man who just may be uncannily suited for his moment in history.
Subjects: Biographies.; Biden, Joseph R., Jr.; United States. Congress. Senate; Legislators; Vice-Presidents; Presidential candidates; Presidents;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
unAPI

Hidden Girl, The [electronic resource] : by Riley, Lucinda.aut; Whittaker, Harry.aut; Madeley, Anna.nrt; cloudLibrary;
Sweeping and evocative, The Hidden Girl is a lost treasure from the author of The Seven Sisters series, Lucinda Riley. Discover this reimagined novel from an author loved by millions of readers worldwide. You can’t alter destiny . . . Born and raised in a small village on the Yorkshire moors, Leah Thompson grows more beautiful with each passing day. When she catches the attention of the influential, troubled Delancey family, she knows her life will never be the same again. Years later, Leah takes the modelling world by storm, travelling from Milan to London and New York and living life in the lap of luxury. But her past follows her like a dark shadow, mysteriously intertwined with the tragic tale of two young siblings in Poland during the Second World War. As two generations of secrets threaten to explode, Leah is haunted by a fatal, forgotten prophecy from her past, and must fight to challenge the destiny that has been mapped out for her in the stars . . . Long before she became the bestselling author of The Seven Sisters series, Lucinda Riley wrote Hidden Beauty as Lucinda Edmonds. This standalone novel has been reworked and given new life as The Hidden Girl by Harry Whittaker, Lucinda’s son and co-author of Atlas: The Story of Pa Salt. Five-star reader reviews: 'All I can say is WOW . . . Lucinda Riley is a master storyteller, and this book is an epic lost masterpiece’ ‘There are so many aspects to this novel: a beautiful love story, a family saga, the modelling world, greed and revenge. I was totally engrossed’ ‘This sweeping, epic tale takes you from the wilds of the Yorkshire moors to New York. It’s moving, poignant and full of friendship, love, and loss with many twists along the way’ 'The historical elements were beautifully researched and added so much depth to the story. What I loved most was the emotional journey. The themes of love, loss, and redemption were handled with such sensitivity and grace'
Subjects: Audiobooks.; Historical; Family Life;
© 2024., Pan Macmillan,
unAPI

Disappointment River : finding and losing the Northwest Passage / by Castner, Brian,author.;
Includes bibliographical references and index."In 1789, Alexander Mackenzie travelled the 1,125 miles of the immense river in Canada that now bears his name, in search of the fabled Northwest Passage, only to confront impassable pack ice. In 2016, the acclaimed memoirist Brian Castner retraced Mackenzie's route by canoe in a grueling journey--and discovered the Passage he could not find. Disappointment River is a dual historical narrative and travel memoir that at once transports readers back to the heroic age of North American exploration and places them in a still rugged but increasingly fragile Arctic wilderness in the process of profound alteration by the dual forces of energy extraction and climate change. Eleven years before Lewis and Clark, the Scottish explorer Alexander Mackenzie actually crossed the North American continent with a team of voyageurs and Native guides. Before that he was the first to discover a route to the Arctic Ocean from the Great Lakes, along the river he named "Disappointment" because he believed he'd failed in his mission to find a trade route to the riches of the East. In fact he had--he was just two-plus centuries early. In this book, Brian Castner not only retells the story of Mackenzie's epic voyages in vivid prose, he personally retraces his travels in an 1,125-mile canoe voyage down the river that bears his name, battling exhaustion, exposure, mosquitoes, white water rapids and the threat of bears. He transports readers to a world rarely glimpsed in the media, of tar sands, thawing permafrost, remote Native villages and, at the end, a wide open Arctic Ocean that is quickly becoming a far-northern Mississippi of barges and pipelines and oil money."--
Subjects: Castner, Brian; Mackenzie, Alexander, Sir, 1764-1820; Canoes and canoeing;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
unAPI

Trippy : the peril and promise of medicinal psychedelics / by Londoño, Ernesto,author.;
Includes bibliographical references and index."When he signed up for a psychedelic retreat run by a mysterious Argentine woman deep in Brazil's rainforest in early 2018, Ernesto Londoño, a veteran New York Times journalist, was so depressed he had come close to jumping off his terrace weeks earlier. His nine-day visit to Spirit Vine Ayahuasca Retreat Center included four nighttime ceremonies during which participants imbibed a vomit-inducing plant-based brew that contained DMT, a powerful mind-altering compound. The ayahuasca trips provided Londoño an instant reprieve from his depression and became the genesis of his personal transformation that anchors this sweeping journalistic exploration of the booming field of medicinal psychedelics. Londoño introduces readers to a dazzling array of psychedelic enthusiasts who are upending our understanding of trauma and healing. They include Indigenous elders who regard psychedelics as portals to the spirit world; religious leaders who use mind-bending substances as sacraments; war veterans suffering from PTSD who credit psychedelics with changing their lives; and clinicians trying to resurrect a promising field of medicine hastily abandoned in the 1970s as the United States declared a War on Drugs. Londoño's riveting personal narrative pulls the reader through a deeply researched and brilliantly reported account of a game-changing industry on the rise. Trippy is the definitive book of psychedelics and mental health today and Londoño's in-depth and nuanced look at this shifting landscape will be pivotal in guiding policymakers and readers as they make sense of the perils, limitations and promise of turning to psychedelics in the pursuit of healing"--
Subjects: Ayahuasca; Hallucinogenic drugs and religious experience.; Hallucinogenic drugs.; Hallucinogenic plants;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
unAPI

Mastering AI : a survival guide to our superpowered future / by Kahn, Jeremy,author.;
Includes bibliographical references (pages 253-312) and index.A Fortune magazine journalist draws on his expertise and extensive contacts among the companies and scientists at the forefront of artificial intelligence to offer dramatic predictions of AI's impact over the next decade, from reshaping our economy and the way we work, learn, and create to unknitting our social fabric, jeopardizing our democracy, and fundamentally altering the way we think. Within the next five years, Jeremy Kahn predicts, AI will disrupt almost every industry and enterprise, with vastly increased efficiency and productivity. It will restructure the workforce, making AI copilots a must for every knowledge worker. It will revamp education, meaning children around the world can have personal, portable tutors. It will revolutionize health care, making individualized, targeted pharmaceuticals more affordable. It will compel us to reimagine how we make art, compose music, and write and publish books. The potential of generative AI to extend our skills, talents, and creativity as humans is undeniably exciting and promising. But while this new technology has a bright future, it also casts a dark and fearful shadow. AI will provoke pervasive, disruptive, potentially devastating knock-on effects. Leveraging his unrivaled access to the leaders, scientists, futurists, and others who are making AI a reality, Kahn will argue that if not carefully designed and vigilantly regulated AI will deepen income inequality, depressing wages while imposing winner-take-all markets across much of the economy. AI risks undermining democracy, as truth is overtaken by misinformation, racial bias, and harmful stereotypes. Continuing a process begun by the internet, AI will rewire our brains, likely inhibiting our ability to think critically, to remember, and even to get along with one another -- unless we all take decisive action to prevent this from happening.
Subjects: Artificial intelligence.; Artificial intelligence; Artificial intelligence; Artificial intelligence;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
unAPI

Dark calories : how vegetable oils destroy our health and how we can get it back / by Shanahan, Catherine,author.;
Includes bibliographical references and index."In recent years, on the heels of high-profile revelations about nutrition gatekeepers and new technologies that are capable of measuring how foods are metabolized in the body, Dr. Catherine Shanahan has been shouting something new from the rooftops. If you are looking for the most powerful driver of the obesity and nearly all disease epidemics afflicting both young and old, you need look no further than the vegetable oils listed as main ingredients on the packages you buy. If you've had trouble losing weight, or experience heartburn, hypoglycemia symptoms, seasonal allergies, asthma, eczema, frequent headaches, or palpitations, just to name a few symptoms, your body may be giving you early warning signs that it's struggling to control the inflammation induced by seed oils. And that vegetable oil's meteoric rise in our food supply more perfectly parallels the explosion of obesity, diabetes, and other metabolic diseases than any other single variable in the modern diet equation. And it's time to expunge it, for good. Dark Calories is the first book to definitively show that vegetable oil is the defining ingredient in not just junk food but all processed food, from frozen meals, canned soup, pizza, and even your vitamin gummies, and makes the case that eliminating it is the single best thing you can do for your health. Through a narrative account of the speedy rise of the vegetable oil industry, a walk through the science of how it fundamentally alters our cells, and an action plan to help you take your health back into your own hands today, Dr. Catherine Shanahan shows how three factors -- a combination of endless advertising sound bites, undisclosed conflicts of interest in research, and the failure of medicine to focus on prevention -- have destroyed human health and turned nutrition science into a farce"--
Subjects: Recipes.; Diet.; Vegetable oils in human nutrition.;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
unAPI

Make Me a Mixtape [electronic resource] : by Whiteford, Jennifer.aut; cloudLibrary;
A guarded punk-rocker-turned-barista meets a big-hearted sound tech who charms his way into her life and helps her revisit her musical past in this truly charming, cozy fall romance. Allie Andrews gave up on the music world ten years ago. No wild tours, no late nights, no career-ending inter-band blowouts. Just day after comfortable day of working in her aunt's café in Brooklyn and recording '80s cover songs in her tiny apartment. The last thing she wants, or expects, is to be recognized as former punk rocker Allie Jetski. But a last-minute coffee delivery lands her face-to-face with the big, handsome (and quite possibly number one fan of the Jetskis) Ryan Abernathy. Ryan isn't about to forget meeting the lead singer of one of his favorite bands. Undeterred by her prickly demeanor, he sets his mind to helping Allie find her way back to the Jetskis—so she can come to terms with what happened all those years ago. Allie finds Ryan hard to resist, and her quiet life is turned upside down as she is swept up in the hunt for her old bandmates. But when Aunt Mindy announces that she's decided to sell the café, Allie is faced with a life-altering choice: play it safe and take over the business, or risk opening herself up to a future in music . . . and maybe even love.
Subjects: Electronic books.; Contemporary;
© 2024., Doubleday Canada,
unAPI

Ducktails, drive-ins, and broken hearts : an unsweetened look at '50s music / by Davis, Hank,1941-author.;
Includes bibliographical references and index.They all tried, but few singers and musicians from the 1950s became stars. Yet many of them had stories to tell that were far more interesting than the ones you already know. Author Hank Davis was bitten by the music bug as a teenager. By the time he entered college in 1959, he was no stranger to New York's recording studios and had a few 45s of his own on the market. Spanning a 45 year career in music journalism, Davis has spent time backstage, in motel rooms, and on tour buses to uncover stories that rarely made the official annals of pop music history. Based on hundreds of hours of interviews and new research, 'Ducktails, Drive-Ins, and Broken Hearts' offers a fascinating, behind-the-scenes look at the winners and losers during rock 'n' roll's formative era. How did a decade as uptight and puritanical as the '50s produce so much cringe-worthy, politically incorrect music? What was it like to see a pale cover version of your latest record climb the charts while yours sat unplayed by mainstream radio stations? How did precious Elvis tapes end up in a Memphis landfill? And who was that thirteen-year-old girl who made a five-dollar vanity record at Sun just two years after Elvis had-and ended up singing backup on "Suspicious Minds" and "In the Ghetto?" This book is a must-read for all fans of '50s music.
Subjects: Biographies.; Personal narratives.; Musicians; Singers; Sound recording industry; Popular music;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
unAPI

The coming wave : technology, power, and the twenty-first century's greatest dilemma / by Suleyman, Mustafa,author.; Bhaskar, Michael,author.;
Includes bibliographical references and index."A stark and urgent warning on the unprecedented risks that a wave of fast-developing technologies poses to global order, and how we might contain them while we have the chance--from a cofounder of the pioneering AI company DeepMind. Imagine a world in which anyone with a $20,000 desktop DNA synthesizer could develop and unleash a deadly virus. Imagine an undetectable deepfake video of a U.S. president making a racial slur racing across the internet on the eve of an election. Imagine terrorists or paramilitaries stockpiling autonomous weapons designed to make their own decisions about when to engage. As cofounder of DeepMind, the pioneering AI company now owned by Google, Mustafa Suleyman has witnessed firsthand just how rapidly our technology is advancing--and how flawed our approaches to grappling with these changes are. The coming decades, he argues, will be defined by a burst of innovation, an inevitable wave of powerful, fast-proliferating new technologies across fields like synthetic biology, artificial intelligence, and quantum computing. Driven forward by immense strategic and financial incentives, these breakthroughs will solve huge challenges and create vast wealth--but upheaval, too, on a once unimaginable scale. Will humankind make it through the narrow corridor between dystopia and catastrophe? In The Coming Wave, Suleyman shows how this new technological super-wave fits a historical pattern of innovation and proliferation, while departing from it in key ways: namely, the speed of change, the breadth of risks, and the wave's potential to democratize access to dangerous, world-altering power. The cumulative risks threaten the very nation state, humanity's centuries' old "grand bargain" of living under centralized authority in exchange for security. As our fragile governments sleepwalk into catastrophe, humanity is left in an existential bind, with techno-authoritarianism on one side and even more catastrophic outcomes, like societal collapse, on the other. We are about to cross a critical threshold in the history of our species. In this groundbreaking book from the ultimate AI insider, Suleyman firmly establishes "the containment problem"--or the challenge of maintaining human control over dangerous technologies--as the essential dilemma of our age, showing that radical steps must be taken if we are to live alongside technology of once unimaginable power"--
Subjects: Artificial intelligence; Information technology;
Available copies: 0 / Total copies: 1
unAPI

Burn A novel [electronic resource] : by Heller, Peter.aut; cloudLibrary;
From the best-selling author of The Dog Stars, a novel about two men—friends since boyhood—who emerge from the woods of rural Maine to a dystopian country racked by bewildering violence Every year, Jess and Storey have made an annual pilgrimage to the most remote corners of the country, where they camp, hunt, and hike, leaving much from their long friendship unspoken. Although the state of Maine has convulsed all summer with secession mania—a mania that has simultaneously spread across other states—Jess and Storey figure it’s a fight reserved for legislators or, worst-case scenario, folks in the capital. But after weeks hunting off the grid, the men reach a small town and are shocked by what they find: a bridge blown apart, buildings burned to the ground, and bombed-out cars abandoned on the road. Trying to make sense of the sudden destruction all around them, they set their sights on finding their way home, dragging a wagon across bumpy dirt roads, scavenging from boats left in lakes, and dodging armed men—secessionists or U.S. military, they cannot tell—as they seek a path to safety. Then, a startling discovery drastically alters their path and the stakes of their escape. Drenched in the beauty of the natural world and attuned to the specific cadences of male friendship, even here at the edge of doom, Burn is both a blistering warning about a divided country’s political strife and an ode to the salvation found in our chosen families.
Subjects: Electronic books.; Dystopian; Action & Adventure; Suspense;
© 2024., Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group,
unAPI

Results 81 to 90 of 98 | « previous |