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Size : how it explains the world / by Smil, Vaclav,author.;
Includes bibliographical references and index."To answer the most important questions of our age, we must understand size. Neither bacteria nor empires are immune to its laws. Measuring it is challenging, especially where complex systems like economies are concerned, yet mastering it offers rich rewards: the rise of the West, for example, was a direct result of ever more accurate and standardized measurements. Using the interdisciplinary approach that has won him a wide readership, Smil draws upon history, earth science, psychology, art, and more to offer fresh insight into some of our biggest challenges, including income inequality, the spread of infectious disease, and the uneven impacts of climate change. Size explains the regularities--and peculiarities--of the key processes shaping life (from microbes to whales), the Earth (from asteroids to volcanic eruptions), technical advances (from architecture to transportation), and societies and economies (from cities to wages). This book about the big and the small, and the relationship between them, answers the big and small questions of human existence: What makes a human society too big? What about a human being? Which alternative energy sources have the best chance of scaling and reducing our dependence on fossil fuels? Why do tall people make more money? What makes a face beautiful? How about a cathedral? How can changing the size of your plates help you lose weight? The latest masterwork of "an ambitious and astonishing polymath who swings for fences" (Wired) Size is a mind-bending journey that turns the modern world on its head."--
Subjects: Size perception.; Stature.;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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The border / by Winslow, Don,1953-author.;
"The explosive, highly anticipated conclusion to the epic Cartel trilogy from the New York Times bestselling author of The Force. What do you do when there are no borders? When the lines you thought existed simply vanish? How do you plant your feet to make a stand when you no longer know what side you're on? The war has come home. For over forty years, Art Keller has been on the front lines of America's longest conflict: The War On Drugs. His obsession to defeat the world's most powerful, wealthy, and lethal kingpin--the godfather of the Sinaloa Cartel, Adan Barrera--has left him bloody and scarred, cost him people his loves, even taken a piece of his soul. Now Keller is elevated to the highest ranks of the DEA, only to find that in destroying one monster he has created thirty more that are wreaking even more chaos and suffering in his beloved Mexico. But not just there. Barrera's final legacy is the heroin epidemic scourging America. Throwing himself into the gap to stem the deadly flow, Keller finds himself surrounded by enemies--men that want to kill him, politicians that want to destroy him, and worse, the unimaginable--an incoming administration that's in bed with the very drug traffickers that Keller is trying to bring down. Art Keller is at war with not only the cartels, but with his own government. And the long fight has taught him more than he ever imagined. Now, he learns the final lesson--there are no borders. In a story that moves from deserts south of the border to Wall Street, from the slums of Guatemala to the marbled corridors of Washington, D.C., Winslow follows a new generation of narcos, the cops that fight them, the street traffickers, the addicts, the politicians, money-launderers, real-estate moguls and mere children fleeing the violence for the chance of a life in a new country. A shattering tale of vengeance, violence, corruption and justice, this last novel in Don Winslow's magnificent, award-winning, internationally bestselling trilogy is packed with unforgettable, drawn-from-the-headlines scenes. Shocking in its brutality, raw in its humanity, Untitledis an unflinchingportrait of modern America, a story of--and for--our time"--
Subjects: Thrillers (Fiction); United States. Drug Enforcement Administration; Drug traffic; Drug enforcement agents;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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Tupac Shakur : the authorized biography / by Robinson, Staci,author.;
Includes bibliographical references and index."The first and only Estate-authorized biography of the legendary artist, Tupac Shakur, a moving exploration of his life and powerful legacy, fully illustrated with photos, mementos, handwritten poetry, musings, and more. Tupac Shakur is one of the greatest and most controversial artists of all time. More than a quarter of a century after his tragic death in 1996 at the age of just twenty-five, he continues to be one of the most misunderstood, complicated and prolific figures in modern history. Tupac's unapologetic lyrics, for which he was villainized by many at the time, read in these pages as prophecy. His cry of outrage in a country that repeatedly told Black men and women that their lives did not matter, continues to inspire his fans around the world. In Tupac Shakur, author and screenwriter Staci Robinson--who knew Tupac as a young man and who was entrusted by his mother, Afeni Shakur, to write his biography--peels back the myths and unpacks the complexities that have shadowed Tupac's existence. With exclusive access to his private notebooks, letters, unpublished lyrics and uncensored conversations with those who knew and loved him best, Robinson tells a powerful story of a life defined by politics and art, and a man driven by equal parts brilliance and impulsiveness. It is a story of a mother and son bound together by a love for each other and for their people, and the relationship that endured through their darkest times. It is a political story that begins in the whirlwind of the 60's Civil Rights Movement, and takes you through a young artist's awakening to rage and purpose in the nineties era of Rodney King. It is a story of dizzying success and its devastating consequences. And, of course, it is the story of his music, his timeless message that will never die as it continues to touch and inspire past, present and future generations"--
Subjects: Biographies.; Shakur, Tupac, 1971-1996.; Rap musicians;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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In the darkroom / by Faludi, Susan,author.;
"'In the summer of 2004 I set out to investigate someone I scarcely knew, my father. The project began with a grievance, the grievance of a daughter whose parent had absconded from her life. I was in pursuit of a scofflaw, an artful dodger who had skipped out on so many things--obligation, affection, culpability, contrition. I was preparing an indictment, amassing discovery for a trial. But somewhere along the line, the prosecutor became a witness.' So begins Susan Faludi's extraordinary inquiry into the meaning of identity in the modern world and in her own haunted family saga. When the feminist writer learned that her 76-year-old father--long estranged and living in Hungary--had undergone sex reassignment surgery, that investigation would turn personal and urgent. How was this new parent who claimed to be "a complete woman now" connected to the silent, explosive, and ultimately violent father she had known? Faludi chases that mystery into the recesses of her suburban childhood and her father's many previous incarnations: American dad, Alpine mountaineer, swashbuckling adventurer in the Amazon outback, Jewish fugitive in Holocaust Budapest. When the author travels to Hungary to reunite with her father, she drops into a labyrinth of dark histories and dangerous politics in a country hell-bent on repressing its past and constructing a fanciful--and virulent--nationhood. The search for identity that has transfixed our century was proving as treacherous for nations as for individuals. Faludi's struggle to come to grips with her father's reinvented self takes her across borders--historical, political, religious, sexual--to bring her face to face with the question of the age: Is identity something you "choose," or is it the very thing you can't escape?"--
Subjects: Biographies.; Faludi, Susan; Authors, American; Women journalists; Fathers and daughters.; Identity (Psychology); Sex change; Male-to-female transsexuals;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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Everything the light touches : a novel / by Pariat, Janice,author.;
Everything the Light Touches is Janice Pariat's magnificent epic of travelers, of discovery, of time, of science, of human connection, and of the impermanent nature of the universe and life itself--a bold and brilliant saga that unfolds through the adventures and experiences of four intriguing characters. Shai is a young woman in modern India. Lost and drifting, she travels to her country's Northeast and rediscovers, through her encounters with indigenous communities, ways of being that realign and renew her. Evelyn is a student of science in Edwardian England. Inspired by Goethe's botanical writings, she leaves Cambridge on a quest to wander the sacred forests of the Lower Himalayas. Linnaeus, a botanist and taxonomist who famously declared "God creates; Linnaeus organizes," sets off on an expedition to an unfamiliar world, the far reaches of Lapland in 1732. Goethe is a philosopher, writer, and one of the greatest minds of his age. While traveling through Italy in the 1780s, he formulates his ideas for "The Metamorphosis of Plants," a little-known, revelatory text that challenges humankind's propensity to reduce plants--and the world--into immutable parts. Drawn richly from scientific and botanical ideas, Everything the Light Touches is a swirl of ever-expanding themes: the contrasts between modern India and its colonial past, urban and rural life, capitalism and centuries-old traditions of generosity and gratitude, script and "song and stone." Pulsating at its center is the dichotomy between different ways of seeing, those that fix and categorize and those that free and unify. Pariat questions the imposition of fixity--of our obsession to place permanence on plants, people, stories, knowledge, land--where there is only movement, fluidity, and constant transformation. "To be still," says a character in the book, "is to be without life." Everything the Light Touches brings together, with startling and playful novelty, people and places that seem, at first, removed from each other in time and place. Yet as it artfully reveals, all is resonance; all is connection.
Subjects: Historical fiction.; Nature fiction.; Psychological fiction.; Novels.; Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 1749-1832; Linné, Carl von, 1707-1778; Botany; Women;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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Michel Gondry. by Nemeta, François,film director.; Beck,actor.; Gainsbourg, Charlotte,actor.; Black, Jack,actor.; White, Jack,actor.; Gondry, Michel,actor.; Jonze, Spike,actor.; Cargo Film & Releasing (Firm),dst; Kanopy (Firm),dst;
Beck, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Jack Black, Jack White, Michel Gondry, Spike JonzeOriginally produced by Cargo Film & Releasing in 2023.If Georges Méliès had a modern-day heir, it would be Michel Gondry. A brilliant, eccentric jack-of-all-trades, Gondry’s unique DIY talent drew the creative elite of global pop music—Björk, The Rolling Stones, Daft Punk, The White Stripes, Beck, Paul McCartney — who trusted his madcap visions to redefine the music video forever. He then blazed his own trail in Hollywood, all while maintaining his signature offbeat style and artistic integrity, earning him an Oscar for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. This film is a rare and personal window into the mind and career of a singular artist who celebrates wonder and imagination on his own terms. At its core, Gondry’s DIY artistry offers a deeply humanist ambition and stands as a political act.Mode of access: World Wide Web.
Subjects: Documentary films.; Arts.; Motion pictures.; Documentary films.; Artists.; Motion pictures--Production and direction.; Motion picture producers and directors.; Creative ability.;
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Chastise : the Dambusters story 1943 / by Hastings, Max,author.;
Includes bibliographical references and index.A brand new history of the Dambusters raid from best-selling and critically acclaimed military historian, Max Hastings. Operation Chastise, the destruction of the Mohne and Eder dams in northwest Germany by the RAF's 617 Squadron on the night of 16/17 May 1943, was an epic that has passed into Britain's national legend. Max Hastings grew up embracing the story, the classic 1955 movie and the memory of Guy Gibson, the 24-year-old wing-commander who led the raid. In the 21st Century, however, he urges that we should see the dambusters in much more complex shades. The aircrew's heroism was entirely real, as was the brilliance of Barnes Wallis, inventor of the ‘bouncing bombs'. But commanders who promised their young fliers that success could shorten the war fantasised as ruthlessly as they did about the entire bomber offensive. Some 1,400 civilians perished in the biblical floods that swept through the Mohne valley, more than half of them Russian and Polish women, slave labourers. Hastings vividly describes the evolution of Wallis' bomb, and of the squadron which broke the dams. But he also portrays in harrowing detail those swept away by the torrents. He argues that what modern Germans call the Mohnekatastrophe imposed on the Nazi war machine temporary disruption, rather than a crippling blow. Ironically, Air Marshal Sir Arthur ‘Bomber' Harris gained much of the public credit, though he bitterly opposed Chastise as a distraction from his city-burning blitz. Harris also made perhaps the operation's biggest mistake-- failure to launch a conventional attack on the huge post-raid repair operation which could have transformed the impact of the dam breaches on Ruhr industry. Here once again is a dramatic retake on familiar history by a master of the art. Hastings sets the Dams Raid in the big picture of the bomber offensive and of the Second World War, with moving portraits of the young airmen, so many of whom died; of Barnes Wallis; the monstrous Harris; the tragic Guy Gibson, together with superb narrative of the action of one of the most extraordinary episodes in British history.
Subjects: Great Britain. Royal Air Force. Squadron, 617; Dams; Operation Chastise, 1943.; World War, 1939-1945; World War, 1939-1945;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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Letters / by Sacks, Oliver,1933-2015,author.; Edgar, Kate(Editor),editor.;
Includes bibliographical references and index."The letters of one of the greatest observers of the human species, revealing his intimate thoughts on life and work, friendship and art, medicine and society, and the richness of his relationships with friends, family and scientists over the decades. A prolific correspondent, Dr. Oliver Sacks -- who describes himself variously in these pages as "a philosophical physician," "an astronomer of the inward," a "neuropathological Talmudist," and "a consummate observer" with "a pure love for phenomena" -- wrote letters throughout his life to his parents, his beloved Aunt Lennie, to friends and colleagues from London, Oxford, California, and around the world. The pages begin with his arrival in America as a young man, eager to establish himself away from the confines of postwar England, and carry us through his bumpy early career in medicine and the discovery of his writer's voice and métier; his weightlifting, motorcycle-riding years and his explosive seasons of discovery with the patients who populate his book Awakenings; his growing interest in matters of sight and the musical brain; his many friendships and exchanges with fellow writers, artists and scientists (to say nothing of astronauts, botanists, and mathematicians), and his deep gratitude for all these relationships at the end of his life. From Francis Crick and Jane Goodall to W. H. Auden and Susan Sontag, from lovers to patients, and ordinary folk who wrote to him with their odd symptoms and questions, all are treated equally to Sacks's lyrical, ferocious, penetrating and at times hilarious observations. His musings often contain the first detailed sketches of an essay forming in his mind. Sensitively introduced and edited by Kate Edgar, Sacks's longtime assistant (and one of his correspondents), the letters deliver a complete portrait of Sacks as he wrestles with the workings of the brain and mind. We see, through his eyes, the beginnings of modern neuroscience as it unlocks many secrets of how the human brain defines us. We experience the arc of a remarkable personal evolution, closely following the thought processes of one of the twentieth century's great intellectuals, whose life was long and productive and whose words, as evidenced in these pages, were unfailingly shaped with generosity and wonder toward other people"--
Subjects: Biographies.; Autobiographies.; Personal correspondence.; Personal narratives.; Sacks, Oliver, 1933-2015; Sacks, Oliver, 1933-2015; Neurologists;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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The great wave : the era of radical disruption and the rise of the outsider / by Kakutani, Michiko,author.;
Includes bibliographical references."An urgent examination of how disruptive politics, technology, and art are capsizing old assumptions in a great wave of change breaking over today's world, creating both opportunity and peril-from the Pulitzer Prize-winning critic and author of the New York Times bestseller The Death of Truth. The twenty-first century is experiencing a watershed moment defined by chaos and uncertainty, as one emergency cascades into another, underscoring the larger dynamics of change that are fueling instability across the world. Since the global financial crisis of 2008, people have increasingly lost trust in institutions and elites, while seizing upon new digital tools to sidestep traditional gatekeepers. As a result, powerful new voices-once regarded as radical, unorthodox or marginal-are disrupting the status quo in politics, business and culture. Meanwhile, social and economic inequalities are stoking populist rage across the world, toxic partisanship is undermining democratic ideals, and the internet and AI have become high-speed vectors for the spread of misinformation. Writing with a critic's understanding of cultural trends and a journalist's eye for historical detail, Michiko Kakutani looks at the consequences of these new asymmetries of power. She maps the migration of ideas from the margins to the mainstream and explores the growing influence of outsiders-those who have sown anger and fear (like Donald Trump), and those who have provided inspirational leadership (like Ukraine's president Volodymyr Zelensky). At the same time, she situates today's multiplying crises in context with those that defined earlier hinge moments in history, from the waning of the Middle Ages, to the transition between the Gilded Age and Progressive era at the end of the nineteenth century. Kakutani argues that today's crises are not only signs of an interconnected globe's profound vulnerabilities, but stress tests pointing to the essential changes needed to survive this tumultuous era and build a more sustainable future"--
Subjects: Civilization, Modern; Elite (Social sciences); Globalization.; Political culture.; Power (Social sciences); Uncertainty.;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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Ten birds that changed the world / by Moss, Stephen,1960-author.;
Includes bibliographical references and index."For the whole of human history, we have shared our world with birds. We have hunted and domesticated them for food, fuel and feathers; placed them at the heart of our rituals, religions, myths and legends; poisoned, persecuted and often demonized them; and celebrated them in our music, art and poetry. Even today, despite a growing disconnect between humanity and the rest of nature, birds continue to play an integral role in our lives. Ten Birds that Changed the World tells the story of this long and intricate relationship, spanning the whole of human history, and featuring birds from all seven of the world's continents. It does so through those species whose lives, and their interactions with us, have - in one way or another - changed the course of human history. From when Noah sent out the Raven from the Ark, birds have been central to our superstitions, mythology and folklore. Once humans switched from hunter-gathering to settled societies they began to domesticate wild birds: first the Rock Dove - now the domestic or feral Pigeon - used to communicate over long distances; and then the Wild Turkey and other species for food - later, they became the centerpiece of the annual family festivals of Thanksgiving and Christmas. The Dodo of the Indian Ocean is the icon of extinction, while Darwin's Finches changed the way we look at life on our planet, and the droppings of the Guanay Cormorant provided vast amounts of phosphates, kickstarting a global agricultural revolution. In North America, the Snowy Egret almost disappeared when its plumes were used for fashion; this led to the modern bird protection and conservation movement. The Bald Eagle is the proud symbol of the USA, but eagles have a checkered history, especially in Roman and Nazi propaganda. In China, Mao's 'Great Leap Forward' turned out to be the exact opposite. His call to kill millions of Tree Sparrows meant the insects they ate destroyed the grain harvest - leading to a famine in which thirty million people died. Finally, the Emperor Penguin of Antarctica stands as a potent symbol of how humanity's future is now in the balance, as it heads towards becoming the first global casualty of the Climate Emergency. It is an urgent sign, warning us about our own survival on the planet? Ten Birds that Changed the World is a 'big picture' view of global human history, seen through a unique and original viewpoint: our relationship with birds, as crucial to our lives today as is has ever been"--
Subjects: Birds; Human-animal relationships;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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