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Atoms and ashes : a global history of nuclear disasters / by Plokhy, Serhii,1957-author.;
Includes bibliographical references and index."A chilling account of seventy years of nuclear catastrophes, by the author of the "definitive" (Economist) Cold War history, Nuclear Folly. Nuclear energy was embraced across the globe at the height of the nuclear industry in the 1960s and 1970s; today, there are 440 nuclear reactors operating throughout the world, with nuclear power providing 10 percent of world electricity. Yet as the world seeks to reduce carbon emissions to combat climate change, the question arises: Just how safe is nuclear energy? Atoms and Ashes recounts the dramatic history of nuclear accidents that have dogged the industry in its military and civil incarnations since the 1950s. Through the stories of six terrifying major incidents--Bikini Atoll, Kyshtym, Windscale, Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima--Cold War expert Serhii Plokhy explores the risks of nuclear power, both for military and peaceful purposes, while offering a vivid account of how individuals and governments make decisions under extraordinary circumstances. Atoms and Ashes provides a crucial perspective on the most dangerous nuclear disasters of the past, in order to safeguard our future"--
Subjects: Nuclear accidents; Nuclear engineering; Nuclear engineering; Nuclear weapons;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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The worth of water : our story of chasing solutions to the world's greatest challenge / by White, Gary(Founder of Water.org),author.; Damon, Matt,author.;
Includes bibliographical references and index."From the founders of nonprofits Water.org & WaterEquity Gary White and Matt Damon, the incredible true story of two unlikely allies on a mission to end the global water crisis for good When Oscar-winning actor Matt Damon visited rural Zambia in 2006, the last thing he expected was to become a life-long champion for the battle to end the global water and sanitation crisis. He quickly realized that to make a real impact, he'd need additional expertise. Enter civil and environmental engineer Gary White. After quitting his consulting job to launch a nonprofit in 1990, he'd become an internationally recognized water and sanitation expert. A chance encounter would set these two unlikely allies on a decades-long mission to bring safe water and sanitation to the world. Through first-hand accounts of setbacks and triumphs in projects spanning across the world, The Worth of Water illuminates the challenges of building and scaling market-based financial solutions to the global water crisis-and ultimately, empower communities and individuals to make long-lasting investments in their own wellbeing"--
Subjects: Right to water; Water-supply;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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Fracture [videorecording (DVD)] / by M; Relaxation and stres; Oa; N; c1995. viii, 2; ill. Includes bi; Relaxati; Eshelman, Elizabeth Robbins.1 ; Winemille;
Director of photography, Kramer Morgenthau ; editor, David Rosenbloom ; music, Jeff Danna, Mychael Danna; costume designers, Elisabetta Beraldo, Nava R. Sadan ; production designer, Paul Eads.Anthony Hopkins, Ryan Gosling, David Strathairn, Rosamund Pike, Embeth Davidtz, Billy Burke, Cliff Curtis.Ted Crawford is a wealthy, brilliant, and meticulous structural engineer who lives in Los Angeles. He shoots his wife and entraps her lover. After the police arrive, he signs a confession. At his arraignment, he asserts his rights to represent himself and asks the court to move immediately to trial. The prosecutor is Willy Beachum, a hotshot D.A. who is getting ready to leave for a civil-law firm. He is told by everyone the case is open and shut. Crawford, however, sees Beachum's weakness - the hairline fracture of his character.Canadian Home Video Rating: 14A.DVD, region 1, widescreen presentation; Dolby Digital.
Subjects: 1; 613.79 Dav 19951 Davis;
© c2007., New Line Home Entertainment ; Distributed by Alliance Atlantis,
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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Leadership in turbulent times / by Goodwin, Doris Kearns,author.;
Includes bibliographical references and index."In this culmination of five decades of acclaimed studies in presidential history, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Doris Kearns Goodwin offers an illuminating exploration into the early development, growth, and exercise of leadership. Are leaders born or made? Where does ambition come from? How does adversity affect the growth of leadership? Does the man make the times or do the times make the man? In Leadership in Turbulent Times, Goodwin draws upon four of the presidents she has studied most closely--Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Lyndon B. Johnson (in civil rights)--to show how they first recognized leadership qualities within themselves, and were recognized by others as leaders. No common pattern describes the trajectory of leadership. Although set apart in background, abilities, and temperament, these men shared a fierce ambition and a deep-seated resilience that enabled them to surmount uncommon adversity. At their best, all four were guided by a sense of moral purpose. At moments of great challenge, they were able to summon their talents to enlarge the opportunities and lives of others. This seminal work provides an accessible and essential road map for aspiring and established leaders in every field. In today's polarized world, these stories of authentic leadership in times of apprehension and fracture take on a singular urgency."--Provided by publisher.
Subjects: Johnson, Lyndon B. (Lyndon Baines), 1908-1973.; Lincoln, Abraham, 1809-1865.; Roosevelt, Franklin D. (Franklin Delano), 1882-1945.; Roosevelt, Theodore, 1858-1919.; Character; Crisis management; Political culture; Political leadership; Presidents;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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Hoover : an extraordinary life in extraordinary times / by Whyte, Kenneth,author.;
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Subjects: Biographies.; Hoover, Herbert, 1874-1964.; Presidents;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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The second : race and guns in a fatally unequal America / by Anderson, Carol,author.;
Includes bibliographical references and index."From the New York Times bestselling author of White Rage, an unflinching, critical new look at the Second Amendment--and how it has been engineered to deny the rights of African Americans since its inception. In The Second, historian and award-winning, bestselling author of White Rage Carol Anderson powerfully illuminates the history and impact of the Second Amendment, how it was designed, and how it has consistently been constructed to keep African Americans powerless and vulnerable. The Second is neither a "pro-gun" nor an "anti-gun" book; the lens is the citizenship rights and human rights of African Americans. From the eighteenth century, when it was encoded into law that the enslaved could not own, carry, or use a firearm whatsoever, until today, with measures to expand and curtail gun ownership aimed disproportionately at the African American population, the right to bear arms has been consistently used as a weapon to keep African Americans powerless--revealing that armed or unarmed, Blackness, it would seem, is the threat that must be neutralized and punished. Throughout American history to the twenty-first century, regardless of the laws, court decisions, and changing political environment, the Second has consistently meant this: That the second a Black person exercises this right, the second they pick up a gun to protect themselves (or the second that they don't), their life--as surely as Philando Castile's, Tamir Rice's, Alton Sterling's--may be snatched away in that single, fatal second. Through compelling historical narrative merging into the unfolding events of today, Anderson's penetrating investigation shows that the Second Amendment is not about guns but about anti-Blackness, shedding shocking new light on another dimension of racism in America"--
Subjects: United States.; Firearms; Firearms ownership; Gun control; African Americans;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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Under a white sky : the nature of the future / by Kolbert, Elizabeth,author.;
Includes bibliographical references and index."The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sixth Extinction returns to humanity's transformative impact on the environment, now asking: After doing so much damage, can we change nature, this time to save it? That man should have dominion "over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth" is a prophecy that has hardened into fact. So pervasive are human impacts on the planet that it's said we live in a new geological epoch: the Anthropocene. In Under a White Sky, Elizabeth Kolbert takes a hard look at the new world we are creating. She meets scientists who are trying to preserve the world's rarest fish, which lives in a single, tiny pool in the middle of the Mojave. She visits a lava field in Iceland, where engineers are turning carbon emissions to stone; an aquarium in Australia, where researchers are trying to develop "super coral" that can survive on a hotter globe; and a lab at Harvard, where physicists are contemplating shooting tiny diamonds into the stratosphere in order to reflect sunlight back to space and cool the earth. One way to look at human civilization, says Kolbert, is as a ten-thousand-year exercise in defying nature. In The Sixth Extinction, she explored the ways in which our capacity for destruction has reshaped the natural world. Now she examines how the very sorts of interventions that have imperiled our planet are increasingly seen as the only hope for its salvation. By turns inspiring, terrifying, and darkly comic, Under a White Sky is an utterly original examination of the challenges we face"--
Subjects: Ecological engineering.; Environmental protection.; Human ecology.; Nature; Sustainability.;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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The knowledge : how to rebuild our world from scratch / by Dartnell, Lewis.;
Includes bibliographical references and index."How would you go about rebuilding a technological society from scratch? If our technological society collapsed tomorrow, perhaps from a viral pandemic or catastrophic asteroid impact, what would be the one book you would want to press into the hands of the postapocalyptic survivors? What crucial knowledge would they need to survive in the immediate aftermath and to rebuild civilization as quickly as possible-a guide for rebooting the world? Human knowledge is collective, distributed across the population. It has built on itself for centuries, becoming vast and increasingly specialized. Most of us are ignorant about the fundamental principles of the civilization that supports us, happily utilizing the latest-or even the most basic-technology without having the slightest idea of why it works or how it came to be. If you had to go back to absolute basics, like some sort of postcataclysmic Robinson Crusoe, would you know how to re-create an internal combustion engine, put together a microscope, get metals out of rock, accurately tell time, weave fibers into clothing, or even how to produce food for yourself? Regarded as one of the brightest young scientists of his generation, Lewis Dartnell proposes that the key to preserving civilization in an apocalyptic scenario is to provide a quickstart guide, adapted to cataclysmic circumstances. The Knowledge describes many of the modern technologies we employ, but first it explains the fundamentals upon which they are built. Every piece of technology rests on an enormous support network of other technologies, all interlinked and mutually dependent. You can't hope to build a radio, for example, without understanding how to acquire the raw materials it requires, as well as generate the electricity needed to run it. But Dartnell doesn't just provide specific information for starting over; he also reveals the greatest invention of them all-the phenomenal knowledge-generating machine that is the scientific method itself. This would allow survivors to learn technological advances not explicitly explored in The Knowledge as well as things we have yet to discover. The Knowledge is a brilliantly original guide to the fundamentals of science and how it built our modern world as well as a thought experiment about the very idea of scientific knowledge itself"--Provided by publisher.
Subjects: Discoveries in science; Knowledge, Theory of; Survival; Technology;
Available copies: 0 / Total copies: 1
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The fifth risk / by Lewis, Michael(Michael M.),author.;
"The election happened," remembers Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall, then deputy secretary of the Department of Energy. "And then there was radio silence." Across all departments, similar stories were playing out: Trump appointees were few and far between; those that did show up were shockingly uninformed about the functions of their new workplace. Some even threw away the briefing books that had been prepared for them. Michael Lewis's brilliant narrative takes us into the engine rooms of a government under attack by its own leaders. In Agriculture the funding of vital programs like food stamps and school lunches is being slashed. The Commerce Department may not have enough staff to conduct the 2020 Census properly. Over at Energy, where international nuclear risk is managed, it's not clear there will be enough inspectors to track and locate black market uranium before terrorists do. Willful ignorance plays a role in these looming disasters. If your ambition is to maximize short-term gains without regard to the long-term cost, you are better off not knowing those costs. If you want to preserve your personal immunity to the hard problems, it's better never to really understand those problems. There is upside to ignorance, and downside to knowledge. Knowledge makes life messier. It makes it a bit more difficult for a person who wishes to shrink the world to a worldview. If there are dangerous fools in this book, there are also heroes, unsung, of course. They are the linchpins of the system-those public servants whose knowledge, dedication, and proactivity keep the machinery running. Michael Lewis finds them, and he asks them what keeps them up at night.
Subjects: Administrative agencies; Government executives; Public administration; Civil service;
Available copies: 2 / Total copies: 2
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Urban jungle : the history and future of nature in the city / by Wilson, Ben,1980-author.;
Includes bibliographical references and index."In this exhilarating look at cities, past and future, Ben Wilson proposes that, in our world of rising seas and threatening weather, the natural world may prove the city's savior. Since the beginning of civilization, humans have built cities to wall nature out, then glorified it in beloved but quite artificial parks. In Urban Jungle, Ben Wilson--the author of Metropolis, a seven-thousand-year history of cities that the Wall Street Journal called "a towering achievement"--looks to the fraught relationship between nature and the city for clues to how the planet can survive in an age of climate crisis. Whether it was the market farmers of Paris, Germans in medieval forest cities, or the Aztecs in the floating city of Tenochtitlan, pre-modern humans had an essential bond with nature. But when the day came that water was piped in and food flown from distant fields, that relationship was lost. Today, urban areas are the fastest-growing habitat on Earth and in Urban Jungle Ben Wilson finds that we are at last acknowledging that human engineering is not enough to protect us from extremes of weather. He takes us to places where efforts to rewild the city are under way: to Los Angeles, where the city's concrete river will run blue again, to New York City, where a bleak landfill will be a vast grassland preserve. The pinnacle of this strategy will be Amsterdam: a city that is its own ecosystem, that makes no waste and produces its own energy. In many cities, Wilson finds, nature is already thriving. Koalas are settling in Brisbane, wild boar may raid your picnic in Berlin. Green canopies, wildflowers, wildlife: the things that will help cities survive, he notes, also make people happy. Urban Jungle offers the pleasures of history--how backyard gardens spread exotic species all over the world, how war produces biodiversity--alongside a fantastic vision of the lush green cities of our future. Climate change, Ben Wilson believes, is only the latest chapter in the dramatic human story of nature and the city"--
Subjects: Climatic changes.; Urban ecology (Biology); Urban ecology (Sociology);
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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