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Money : a story of humanity / by McWilliams, David,author.; Lewis, Michael(Michael M.),writer of foreword.;
Includes bibliographical references and index."The story of money is the story of our desires, our genius, and our downfalls. Money is power -- and power beguiles. Nothing we've invented as a species has defined our own evolution so thoroughly and changed the direction of our planet's history so dramatically. Money has shaped the very essence of what it means to be human. We can't hope to understand ourselves without it. And yet despite money's primacy, most of us don't truly understand it. As economist David McWilliams states, money is everything. "Money defines the relationship between worker and employer, buyer and seller, merchant and producer. But not only that: it also defines the bond between the governed and the governor, the state and the citizen. Money unlocks pleasure, puts a price on desire, art and creativity. It motivates us to strive, achieve, invent and take risks. Money also brings out humanity's darker side, invoking greed, envy, hatred, violence and, of course, colonialism." Money isn't just paper or coins or virtual currency. Money is humanity. Leading economics expert, David McWilliams answers these questions and more in Money, an epic, breathlessly entertaining journey across the world through the present and the past, from the birthplace of money in ancient Babylon to the beginning of trade along the silk road to China, from Marrakech markets to Wall Street and the dawn of cryptocurrency. By tracking its history, McWilliams uncovers our relationship with money, transforming our perspective on its impact on the world right now. McWilliams is no dusty economist; he is a communicator at the highest level, a highly telegenic and marketable expert who is as comfortable in front of a large audience talking about his favourite subject as he is appearing on podcasts, social media, and even in stand-up comedy. He's been called Ireland's most important economist and is ranked among the leading economists working today. The story of money is the story of earth's most inventive, destructive, and dangerous animal: Homo sapiens. It is our story."--
Subjects: Money;

Pathogenesis : a history of the world in eight plagues / by Kennedy, Jonathan,author.;
Includes bibliographical references and index."A sweeping look at how the major transformations in history--from the rise of Homo sapiens to the birth of capitalism--have been shaped not by humans but by germs. According to the accepted narrative of progress, humans have thrived thanks to their brains and brawn, collectively bending the arc of history. But in this revelatory book, professor Jonathan Kennedy argues that the myth of human exceptionalism overstates the role that we play in social and political change. Instead, it is the humble microbe that wins wars and topples empires. Drawing on the latest research in fields ranging from genetics and anthropology to archaeology and economics, Pathogenesis takes us through 60,000 years of history, exploring eight major outbreaks of infectious disease that have made the modern world. Bacteria and viruses were protagonists in the demise of the Neanderthals, the growth of Islam, the transition from feudalism to capitalism, the devastation wrought by European colonialism, and the evolution of the United States from an imperial backwater to a global superpower. Even Christianity rose to prominence in the wake of a series of deadly pandemics that swept through the Roman Empire in the second and third centuries: Caring for the sick turned what was a tiny sect into one of the world's major religions. By placing disease at the center of his wide-ranging history of humankind, Kennedy challenges some of the most fundamental assumptions about our collective past--and urges us to view this moment as another disease-driven inflection point that will change the course of history. Provocative and brimming with insight, Pathogenesis transforms our understanding of the human story"--
Subjects: Diseases and history.; Epidemics; Plague;

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;

In ascension / by MacInnes, Martin,author.;
"An astonishing novel about a young microbiologist investigating an unfathomable deep vent in the ocean floor, leading her on a journey that will encompass the full trajectory of the cosmos and the passage of a single human life. Leigh grew up in Rotterdam, drawn to the waterfront as an escape from her unhappy home life and volatile father. Enchanted by the undersea world of her childhood, she excels in marine biology, traveling the globe to study ancient organisms. When a trench is discovered in the Atlantic Ocean, Leigh joins the exploration team, hoping to find evidence of Earth's first life forms--what she instead finds calls into question everything we know about our own beginnings. Her discovery leads Leigh to the Mojave Desert and an ambitious new space agency. Drawn deeper into the agency's work, she learns that the Atlantic trench is only one of several related phenomena from across the world, each piece linking up to suggest a pattern beyond human understanding. Leigh knows that to continue working with the agency will mean leaving behind her declining mother and her younger sister, and faces an impossible choice: to remain with her family, or to embark on a journey across the breadth of the cosmos. Exploring and celebrating the natural world with wonder and reverence, In Ascension is a compassionate, deeply inquisitive epic that reaches outward to confront the greatest questions of existence, looks inward to illuminate the smallest details of the human heart, and shows how--no matter how far away we might be and how much we have lost hope--we will always attempt to return to the people and places we call home"--
Subjects: Science fiction.; Novels.; Discoveries in science; Evolution (Biology); Life on other planets; Marine biologists; Women scientists;

Milk! : a 10,000-year food fracas / by Kurlansky, Mark,author.;
Includes bibliographical references and index.According to the Greek creation myth, we are so much spilt milk: a splatter of the goddess Hera's breast milk became our galaxy, the Milky Way. But while mother's milk may be the essence of nourishment, it is the milk of other mammals that humans have cultivated ever since the domestication of animals more than ten thousand years ago, originally as a source of cheese, yogurt, kefir, and all manner of edible innovations that rendered lactose digestible, and then, when genetic mutation made some of us lactose-tolerant, milk itself. Before the industrial revolution, it was common for families to keep dairy cows and produce their own milk. But during the nineteenth century mass production and urbanization made milk safety a leading issue of the day, with milk-borne illnesses a common cause of death. Pasteurization slowly became a legislative matter. And today milk is a test case in the most pressing issues in food politics, from industrial farming and animal rights to GMOs, the locavore movement, and advocates for raw milk, who controversially reject pasteurization. Profoundly intertwined with human civilization, milk has a compelling and a surprisingly global story to tell, and historian Mark Kurlansky is the perfect person to tell it. Tracing the liquid's diverse history from antiquity to the present, he details its curious and crucial role in cultural evolution, religion, nutrition, politics, and economics.
Subjects: Dairy products; Dairy products industry; Milk;

Big meg : the story of the largest and most mysterious predator that ever lived / by Flannery, Tim F.(Tim Fridtjof),1956-author.; Flannery, Emma,author.;
Includes bibliographical references and index."Internationally bestselling author and renowned scientist Tim Flannery and his daughter, scientist Emma Flannery, deliver an informative-yet-intimate portrait of the megalodon, an extinct shark and the largest predator of all time. When Tim Flannery was a boy he found a fossilized tooth of the giant shark megalodon at a beach near his home in Australia. This remarkable find-the tooth was large enough to cover his palm-sparked an interest in paleontology that was to inform his life's work and a lifelong quest to uncover the secrets of the great shark Otodus megalodon. Tim passed on his love of the natural world and interest in the fossil record to his daughter, Emma, a scientist and writer. And now, together, they have written a fascinating account of this ancient marine creature. Big Meg charts the evolution of megalodon, its super-predator status for about fifteen million years and its decline and extinction. It delves into the fossil record to answer questions about its behavior and role in shaping marine ecosystems as well as its impact on the human psyche. It contains stories of the scientist and amateur fossil hunters who have scoured the seas, and land, for fossil remains, drawn to the beauty and mystique of the great shark, sometimes meeting their death in the process. Deemed "in the league of the all-time great explorers" by David Attenborough, Tim Flannery has come together with Emma Flannery to spin a story of the great natural history of our planet as enthralling as the fossil record itself"--
Subjects: Animals, Fossil.; Carcharocles megalodon.; Paleontology.; Sharks, Fossil.; Sharks.;

Juicy realm [electronic resource]. by Sony Computer Entertainment.;
Game.Juicy Realm is a roguelite game in which players must square off against bizarre fruits all across the world. The line between the animal and the plant world has become blurred, and the food chain has been completely disrupted. Humans, upon making this incredible discovery, have set up outposts along the border of the aggressive plants' habitat for investigations, defense, and in preparation for what may come. You take the role of a soldier on the front lines charged with confronting this strange new enemy. "Many years in the future, humanity looks upward in despair at plants, now standing atop the food chain. How could they have been so arrogant ... " Only when plants began sprouting arms and legs and developing self-awareness did humanity truly begin to understand the menace that these once photosynthesis-dependent creatures posed. No one could understand how the plants took this large evolutionary leap in such a short time, something that took their animal counterparts millions of years to accomplish. One thing is certain, now is the time for humanity to make their stand in order to stay at the top of the food chain.ESRB Content Rating: E10, Everyone, 10+ (Fantasy violence, mild blood).Ultra HD Blu-ray disc compatible with Playstation 5 console ; HDTV 720p/1080i/1080p/4K/8K ; in game surround sound ; 2 GB storage required ; Vibration function supported.
Subjects: Adventure video games.; Role playing video games.; Video games.; Action adventure video games.; Roguelike video games.; Sony video games.; Playstation 5 (Video game console); Video games.; Fruit; Plants; Juicy realm (Game); Evolution (Biology);

Juicy realm [electronic resource]. by Nintendo of America Inc.;
Game.Juicy Realm is a roguelite game in which players must square off against bizarre fruits all across the world. The line between the animal and the plant world has become blurred, and the food chain has been completely disrupted. Humans, upon making this incredible discovery, have set up outposts along the border of the aggressive plants' habitat for investigations, defense, and in preparation for what may come. You take the role of a soldier on the front lines charged with confronting this strange new enemy. "Many years in the future, humanity looks upward in despair at plants, now standing atop the food chain. How could they have been so arrogant ... " Only when plants began sprouting arms and legs and developing self-awareness did humanity truly begin to understand the menace that these once photosynthesis-dependent creatures posed. No one could understand how the plants took this large evolutionary leap in such a short time, something that took their animal counterparts millions of years to accomplish. One thing is certain, now is the time for humanity to make their stand in order to stay at the top of the food chain.ESRB Content Rating: E10, Everyone, 10+ (Fantasy violence, mild blood).Cartridge compatible with Nintendo Switch video game system ; HDTV 720p/1080i/1080p ; in game surround sound ; Nintendo Switch Pro controller compatible.
Subjects: Nintendo video games.; Adventure video games.; Role playing video games.; Video games.; Action adventure video games.; Roguelike video games.; Nintendo Switch (Video game console); Nintendo Switch video games.; Video games.; Fruit; Plants; Juicy realm (Game); Evolution (Biology);

Swimming in Paris A Life in Three Stories [electronic resource] : by Schneck, Colombe.aut; Huber, Hillary.nrt; CloudLibrary;
A Natalie Portman Book Club Pick “Sinewy, tough, sharp . . . Even though Schneck works at a scale that is deliberately small, insistently concrete, and extremely lean, her writing somehow exposes whole vistas of the female experience.” —Katie Roiphe, The Atlantic From the award-winning and bestselling French author Colombe Schneck, a woman’s personal journey through abortion, sex, friendship, love, and swimming At fifty years old, while taking swimming lessons, I finally realized that my body was not actually as incompetent as I’d thought. My physical gestures had been, until then, small, worried, tense. In swimming I learned to extend them. I saw male bodies swimming beside me, and I swam past them, I was delighted, my breasts got smaller, my uterus stopped working. My body, by showing me who I was, allowed me to become fully myself. In Seventeen, Friendship, and Swimming, Colombe Schneck orchestrates a coming-of-age in three movements. Beautiful, masterfully controlled, yet filled with pathos, they invite the reader into a decades-long evolution of sexuality, bodily autonomy, friendship, and loss. Schneck’s prose maintains an unwavering intimacy, whether conjuring a teenage abortion in the midst of a privileged Parisian upbringing, the nuance of a long friendship, or a midlife romance. Swimming in Paris is an immersive, propulsive triptych—fundamentally human in its tender concern for every messy and glorious reality of the body, and deeply wise in its understanding of both desire and of letting go.
Subjects: Audiobooks.; Biographical;
© 2024., Penguin Random House,

Every living thing : the great and deadly race to know all life / by Roberts, Jason(President of Panmedia Corporation),author.;
Includes bibliographical references and index."From the bestselling author of A Sense of the World comes this dramatic, globe-spanning and meticulously-researched story of two scientific rivals and their race to survey all life on Earth. In the 18th century, two men dedicated their lives to the same daunting task: identifying and describing all life on Earth. Their approaches could not have been more different. Carl Linnaeus, a pious Swedish doctor with a huckster's flair, believed that life belonged in tidy, static categories. Georges-Louis de Buffon, an aristocratic polymath and keeper of France's royal garden, viewed life as a dynamic swirl of complexities. Both began believing their work to be difficult, but not impossible--how could the planet possibly hold more than a few thousand species? Stunned by life's diversity, both fell far short of their goal. But in the process they articulated starkly divergent views on nature, on humanity's role in shaping the fate of our planet and on humanity itself. The rivalry between these two unique, driven individuals created reverberations that still echo today. Linnaeus, with the help of acolyte explorers he called "apostles" (only half of whom returned alive), gave the world such concepts as mammal, primate and homo sapiens--but he also denied species change and promulgated racist pseudo-science. Buffon coined the term reproduction, formulated early prototypes of evolution and genetics, and argued passionately against prejudice. It was a clash that, during their lifetimes, Buffon seemed to be winning. But their posthumous fates would take a very different turn. With elegant, propulsive prose grounded in more than a decade of research, featuring appearances by Voltaire, Benjamin Franklin and Charles Darwin, bestselling author Jason Roberts tells an unforgettable true-life tale of intertwined lives and enduring legacies, tracing an arc of insight and discovery that extends across three centuries into the present day"--
Subjects: Biographies.; Buffon, Georges Louis Leclerc, comte de, 1707-1788.; Linné, Carl von, 1707-1778.; Biology; Life (Biology); Natural history; Naturalists; Naturalists;

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