books tagged “social commentary” (Social commentary)

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  • About a Boy
    by Nick Hornby
    ISBN 0786216069 (0-7862-1606-9)
    Hardcover, Thorndike Pr

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    Book summary:

    Will Lightman is a Peter Pan for the 1990s. At 36, the terminally hip North Londoner is unmarried, hyper-concerned with his coolness quotient, and blithely living off his father's novelty-song royalties. Will sees himself as entirely lacking in hidden depths--and he's proud of it! The only trouble is, his friends are succumbing to responsibilities and children, and he's increasingly left out in the cold. How can someone brilliantly equipped for meaningless relationships ensure that he'll continue to meet beautiful Julie Christie-like women and ensure that they'll throw him over before things get too profound? A brief encounter with a single mother sets Will off on his new career, that of "serial nice guy." As far as he's concerned--and remember, concern isn't his strong suit--he's the perfect catch for the young mother on the go. After an interlude of sexual bliss, she'll realize that her child isn't ready for a man in their life and Will can ride off into the Highgate sunset, where more damsels apparently await. The only catch is that the best way to meet these women is at single-parent get-togethers. In one of Nick Hornby's many hilarious (and embarrassing) scenes, Will falls into some serious misrepresentation at SPAT ("Single Parents--Alone Together"), passing himself off as a bereft single dad: "There was, he thought, an emotional truth here somewhere, and he could see now that his role-playing had a previously unsuspected artistic element to it. He was acting, yes, but in the noblest, most profound sense of the word."

    What interferes with Will's career arc, of course, is reality--in the shape of a 12-year-old boy who is in many ways his polar opposite. For Marcus, cool isn't even a possibility, let alone an issue. For starters, he's a victim at his new school. Things at home are pretty awful, too, since his musical therapist mother seems increasingly in need of therapy herself. All Marcus can do is cobble together information with a mixture of incomprehension, innocence, self-blame, and unfettered clear sight. As fans of Fever Pitch and High Fidelity already know, Hornby's insight into laddishness magically combines the serious and the hilarious. About a Boy continues his singular examination of masculine wish-fulfillment and fear. This time, though, the author lets women and children onto the playing field, forcing his feckless hero to leap over an entirely new--and entirely welcome--set of emotional hurdles. [via]

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  • The American Way of Birth
    by Jessica Mitford
    ISBN 0788163450 (0-7881-6345-0)
    Hardcover, Diane Pub Co

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    Book summary:

    The author of The American Way of Death provides a history of American childbirth from the nineteenth century to the present, exploring conventional and alternative methods, public health-care programs, high-tech births, and more. 75,000 first printing. $75,000 ad/promo. Tour. [via]

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  • The Annotated Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions
    by Ian Stewart, Edwin Abbott Abbott
    ISBN 0738205419 (0-7382-0541-9)
    Hardcover, Perseus Books Group

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    Book summary:

    The product of an agreeably dotty cleric named Edwin Abbott Abbott and first published in 1884, Flatland distills all that the Victorian era knew of higher mathematics--and then some--into a witty, complex novel of ideas.

    Ian Stewart, the author of the equally witty sequel, Flatterland--which adds to Abbott's store of science the key discoveries made since--does a superb job of explaining the original book's enigmas, allusions, ironies, implausibilities, and what Douglas Hofstadter would call "metamagical themas." Among other things, Stewart comments on Abbott's comments on such things as the nature/nurture controversy, the fourth dimension and beyond, the role of multidimensional spaces in economic systems, infinite series and perfect squares, celestial mechanics, and other matters close to the hearts of cosmologists and science buffs alike.

    Stewart's notes make an entertaining and learned addition to an already classic bit of writing--one that has never been out of print since its first publication. For both devoted Abbott fans and newcomers to his work, this is the edition to have. --Gregory McNamee [via]

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  • Born to Buy: The Commercialized Child And The New Consumer Culture
    by Juliet B. Schor
    ISBN 0684870568 (0-684-87056-8)
    Softcover, Simon & Schuster

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    Book summary:

    Over the last fifteen years children's spending power has mushroomed to an estimated USD30 billion in direct purchases and another USD600 billion of influence over parental purchases. Advertising and marketing has exploded alongside expenditures and now totals more than USD12 billion a year. Ads targeted at children are virtually everywhere - in schools, museums and on the internet - and strategies for capturing the child wallet have become ever more sophisticated. Marketers are intruding into a child's most private space, organizing stealthy peer-to-peer viral marketing efforts, and using high tech scientific research methodologies. Together, these trends have led to a pervasive commercialisation of childhood in the West. By eighteen months babies can recognize logos, by two they ask for products by brand name. During their nursery school years children will request an average of twenty-five products a day, by the time they enter primary school the average child can identify 200 logos and children between the ages of six and twelve spend more time shopping than reading, attending youth groups, playing outdoors or spending time in household conversation. On the basis of first-hand research inside the advertising industry, BORN TO BUY lays bare the research, messages and marketing strategies being used to target children, and assesses the impact of those efforts. [via]

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  • Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community
    by Robert D. Putnam
    ISBN 0743203046 (0-7432-0304-6)
    Softcover, Touchstone Books

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    Book summary:

    Once we bowled in leagues, usually after work; but no longer. This seemingly small phenomenon symbolizes a significant social change that Robert Putnam has identified and describes in this brilliant volume, "Bowling Alone."

    Drawing on vast new data from the Roper Social and Political Trends and the DDB Needham Life Style -- surveys that report in detail on Americans' changing behavior over the past twenty-five years -- Putnam shows how we have become increasingly disconnected from family, friends, neighbors, and social structures, whether the PTA, church, recreation clubs, political parties, or bowling leagues. Our shrinking access to the "social capital" that is the reward of communal activity and community sharing is a serious threat to our civic and personal health.

    Putnam's groundbreaking work shows how social bonds are the most powerful predictor of life satisfaction. For example, he reports that getting married is the equivalent of quadrupling your income and attending a club meeting regularly is the equivalent of doubling your income. The loss of social capital is felt in critical ways: Communities with less social capital have lower educational performance and more teen pregnancy, child suicide, low birth weight, and prenatal mortality. Social capital is also a strong predictor of crime rates and other measures of neighborhood quality of life, as it is of our health: In quantitative terms, if you both smoke and belong to no groups, it's a close call as to which is the riskier behavior.

    A hundred years ago, at the turn of the last century, America's stock of social capital was at an ebb, reduced by urbanization, industrialization, and vast immigration thatuprooted Americans from their friends, social institutions, and families, a situation similar to today's. Faced with this challenge, the country righted itself. Within a few decades, a range of organizations was created, from the Red Cross, Boy Scouts, and YWCA to Hadassah and the Knights of Columbus and the Urban League. With these and many more cooperative societies we rebuilt our social capital.

    We can learn from the experience of those decades, Putnam writes, as we work to rebuild our eroded social capital. It won't happen without the concerted creativity and energy of Americans nationwide.

    Like defining works from the past that have endured -- such as "The Lonely Crowd" and "The Affluent Society" -- and like C. Wright Mills, Richard Hofstadter, Betty Friedan, David Riesman, Jane Jacobs, Rachel Carson, and Theodore Roszak, Putnam has identified a central crisis at the heart of our society and suggests what we can do. [via]

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  • Can't Buy My Love: How Advertising Changes the Way We Think and Feel
    by Jean Kilbourne, Mary Pipher
    ISBN 0684866005 (0-684-86600-5)
    Softcover, Free Pr

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    Book summary:

    "When was the last time you felt this comfortable in a relationship?"

    -- An ad for sneakers

    "You can love it without getting your heart broken."

    -- An ad for a car

    "Until I find a real man, I'll settle for a real smoke."

    -- A woman in a cigarette ad

    Many advertisements these days make us feel as if we have an intimate, even passionate relationship with a product. But as Jean Kilbourne points out in this fascinating and shocking exposé, the dreamlike promise of advertising always leaves us hungry for more. We can never be satisfied, because the products we love cannot love us back.

    Drawing upon her knowledge of psychology, media, and women's issues, Kilbourne offers nothing less than a new understanding of a ubiquitous phenomenon in our culture. The average American is exposed to over 3,000 advertisements a day and watches three years' worth of television ads over the course of a lifetime. Kilbourne paints a gripping portrait of how this barrage of advertising drastically affects young people, especially girls, by offering false promises of rebellion, connection, and control. She also offers a surprising analysis of the way advertising creates and then feeds an addictive mentality that often continues throughout adulthood. [via]

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  • Canterbury Tales
    by Geoffrey Chaucer, Barbara Cohen
    ISBN 0688062016 (0-688-06201-6)
    Hardcover, Harpercollins Childrens Books

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    Book summary:

    On a spring day in April--sometime in the waning years of the 14th century--29 travelers set out for Canterbury on a pilgrimage to the shrine of Saint Thomas Beckett. Among them is a knight, a monk, a prioress, a plowman, a miller, a merchant, a clerk, and an oft-widowed wife from Bath. Travel is arduous and wearing; to maintain their spirits, this band of pilgrims entertains each other with a series of tall tales that span the spectrum of literary genres. Five hundred years later, people are still reading Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. If you haven't yet made the acquaintance of the Franklin, the Pardoner, or the Squire because you never learned Middle English, take heart: this edition of the Tales has been translated into modern idiom.

    From the heroic romance of "The Knight's Tale" to the low farce embodied in the stories of the Miller, the Reeve, and the Merchant, Chaucer treated such universal subjects as love, sex, and death in poetry that is simultaneously witty, insightful, and poignant. The Canterbury Tales is a grand tour of 14th-century English mores and morals--one that modern-day readers will enjoy. [via]

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  • Canterbury Tales of Geoffrey Chaucer 1904
    by Geoffrey Chaucer, Percy Mackaye
    ISBN 0766171779 (0-7661-7177-9)
    Softcover, Kessinger Pub Co

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    Book summary:

    The illustrious work of Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, are presented herein as a modern rendering into prose of the Prologue and ten tales. The barrier of obsolete speech is the occasion for this rendering of the Canterbury Tales in English, easily intelligible today. Mr. Mackaye presents a representative portion of Chaucer's unfinished masterpiece in such a form as shall best preserve for a modern reader the substance and style of the original. Handsomely illustrated. [via]

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  • Cell
    by Stephen King
    ISBN 0743292332 (0-7432-9233-2)
    Hardcover, Scribner

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    Witness Stephen King's triumphant, blood-spattered return to the genre that made him famous. Cell, the king of horror's homage to zombie films (the book is dedicated in part to George A. Romero) is his goriest, most horrific novel in years, not to mention the most intensely paced. Casting aside his love of elaborate character and town histories and penchant for delayed gratification, King yanks readers off their feet within the first few pages; dragging them into the fray and offering no chance catch their breath until the very last page.

    In Cell King taps into readers fears of technological warfare and terrorism. Mobile phones deliver the apocalypse to millions of unsuspecting humans by wiping their brains of any humanity, leaving only aggressive and destructive impulses behind. Those without cell phones, like illustrator Clayton Riddell and his small band of "normies," must fight for survival, and their journey to find Clayton's estranged wife and young son rockets the book toward resolution.

    Fans that have followed King from the beginning will recognize and appreciate Cell as a departure--King's writing has not been so pure of heart and free of hang-ups in years (wrapping up his phenomenal Dark Tower series and receiving a medal from the National Book Foundation doesn't hurt either). "Retirement" clearly suits King, and lucky for us, having nothing left to prove frees him up to write frenzied, juiced-up horror-thrillers like Cell. --Daphne Durham [via]

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  • A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
    by Trina Schart Hyman, Mark Twain
    ISBN 0688063462 (0-688-06346-2)
    Hardcover, Harpercollins Childrens Books

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    Book summary:

    Generations of readers have delighted in the biting social satire and hilarious adventures of the Connecticut Yankee, a nineteenth-century mechanic who suffers a blow to the head and wakes up in King Arthur's Britain. The Yankee soon realizes this is not the gallant world of fairy tales, but a cruel, feudalistic society. Ever resourceful, he sets out to modernize and improve things through an ingenious and funny mix of magic and technology, chivalry and sheer tomfoolery. All the trappings of Arthurian legend are here, from damsels in distress to quests and exciting jousts. But who ever heard of knights riding bicycles, or telephones at Camelot? Mark Twain's humorous yet moving classic now features magnificent illustrations by Caldecott medalist Trina Schart Hyman in a beautiful gift edition that all readers will enjoy. [via]

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  • The Corrections
    by Jonathan Franzen
    ISBN 0783897677 (0-7838-9767-7)
    Softcover, Thorndike Pr

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    Jonathan Franzen's exhilarating novel The Corrections tells a spellbinding story with sexy comic brio, and evokes a quirky family akin to Anne Tyler's, only bitter. Franzen's great at describing Christmas homecomings gone awry, cruise-ship follies, self-deluded academics, breast-obsessed screenwriters, stodgy old farts and edgy Tribeca bohemians equally at sea in their lives, and the mad, bad, dangerous worlds of the Internet boom and the fissioning post-Soviet East.

    All five members of the Lambert family get their due, as everybody's lives swirl out of control. Paterfamilias Alfred is slipping into dementia, even as one of his inventions inspires a pharmaceutical giant to revolutionize treatment of his disease. His stubborn wife, Enid, specializes in denial; so do their kids, each in an idiosyncratic way. Their hepcat son, Chip, lost a college sinecure by seducing a student, and his new career as a screenwriter is in peril. Chip's sister, Denise, is a chic chef perpetually in hot water, romantically speaking; banker brother Gary wonders if his stifling marriage is driving him nuts. We inhabit these troubled minds in turn, sinking into sorrow punctuated by laughter, reveling in Franzen's satirical eye:

    Gary in recent years had observed, with plate tectonically cumulative anxiety, that population was continuing to flow out of the Midwest and toward the cooler coasts.... Gary wished that all further migration [could] be banned and all Midwesterners encouraged to revert to eating pasty foods and wearing dowdy clothes and playing board games, in order that a strategic national reserve of cluelessness might be maintained, a wilderness of taste which would enable people of privilege, like himself, to feel extremely civilized in perpetuity.
    Franzen is funny and on the money. This book puts him on the literary map. --Tim Appelo [via]

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  • Count of Monte Cristo
    by Alexandre Dumas, Margaret Brantley
    ISBN 0743487559 (0-7434-8755-9)
    Softcover, Pocket Classics

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    A wonderful children's book filled with great illustrations. [via]

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  • Crime and Punishment
    by Fyodor Dostoevsky, Margaret Brantley
    ISBN 074348763X (0-7434-8763-X)
    Softcover, Washington Square Pr

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    Translated by Constance Garnett, Introduction by Ernest J. Simmons [via]

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  • Crime and Punishment
    by Richard Pevear, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Larissa Volokhonsky
    ISBN 0679734503 (0-679-73450-3)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

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    Mired in poverty, the student Raskolnikov nevertheless thinks well of himself. Of his pawnbroker he takes a different view, and in deciding to do away with her he sets in motion his own tragic downfall. Dostoyevsky's penetrating novel of an intellectual whose moral compass goes haywire, and the detective who hunts him down for his terrible crime, is a stunning psychological portrait, a thriller and a profound meditation on guilt and retribution. [via]

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  • Deadly Persuasion: Why Women and Girls Must Fight the Addictive Power of Advertising
    by Jean Kilbourne
    ISBN 0684865998 (0-684-86599-8)
    Hardcover, Simon & Schuster

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    Book summary:

    Jean Kilbourne first gained prominence in the 1970s as the maker of Killing Us Softly, a documentary that detailed how the images of women in advertising were destructive for women in real life. In the years since, her thesis hasn't changed much, but the evidence supporting it has accumulated at an overwhelming rate. One of the first points that Kilbourne makes clear in Deadly Persuasion is that advertising does influence people, which is why newspapers and magazines engage in cutthroat competition to convince corporations to place ads in their publications, on the principle that their readership consists of the most valuable demographic. What appear in those ads, though, are images that equate emotional well-being with material acquisition; encourage women--beginning in their teenage years--to work at preserving the one "right" look; and associate rebellion and independence with the consumption of alcohol and tobacco.

    Kilbourne is militant on these issues, and some readers may find her positions a bit too extreme, as when she lambastes ads that employ surre alism for imitating a drugged state of altered consciousness or when she declares that most sexual imagery in advertising is "pornographic," elaborating in such a way as to denigrate the very idea of casual sex. And, despite several attempts at grim sarcasm, Deadly Persuasion is ultimately rather humorless. Kilbourne's heart, though, is definitely in the right place, and her demonstration of the extent to which we allow corporations to shape our desires is truly eye-opening. --Ron Hogan [via]

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  • Democracy in America
    by Daniel J. Boorstin, Phillips Bradley, Henry Reeve, Francis Bowen, Alexis De Tocqueville
    ISBN 0679728252 (0-679-72825-2)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

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    Book summary:

    Democracy in America is the classic analysis of America's unique political character, quoted heavily by politicians and perennially popping up on history professors' reading lists. The book's enduring appeal lies in the eloquent, prophetic voice of Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859), a French aristocrat who visited the United States in 1831. A thoughtful young man in a still-young country, he succeeded in penning this penetrating study of America's people, culture, history, geography, politics, legal system, and economy. Tocqueville asserts, "I confess that in America I saw more than America; I sought the image of democracy itself, with its inclinations, its character, its prejudices, and its passions, in order to learn what we have to fear or hope from its progress."

    In addition to a brilliant, perceptive outline of "the philosophical method of the Americans," Volume II of Democracy in America includes the oddly modern-sounding "Why the Americans Are So Restless in the Midst of Their Prosperity," the surprising and provocative "How Americans Understand the Equality of the Sexes," and the more archaic "The Study of Greek and Latin is Peculiarly Useful in Democratic Communities." This edition--which many consider the best--contains the Henry Reeve text, revised by Francis Bowen, and further edited with introduction, editorial notes, and bibliographies by Phillips Bradley. [via]

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  • Postman, Neil: The Disappearance of Childhood
    The Disappearance of Childhood
    by Neil Postman
    ISBN 0679751661 (0-679-75166-1)
    Softcover, Vintage Books

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  • The Dispossessed
    by Ursula K. Le Guin
    ISBN 0785764038 (0-7857-6403-8)
    Hardcover, Bt Bound

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    The ideas of Shevek, a brilliant physicist from the anarchist world of Anarres are being stifled by jealous colleagues. So he goes to the hell-planet Urras, seeking a different kind of freedom - and finds himself embroiled in deadly intrigue and bloody revoulution. [via]

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  • Faggots
    by Larry Kramer, Reynolds Price
    ISBN 0802136915 (0-8021-3691-5)
    Softcover, Grove Pr

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    Very few writers have the prescience or audacity to produce one of the standard works of their era--not a classic, necessarily, but a book that defines its own cultural moment in startling new terms, like One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest or Portnoy's Complaint. Activist and rabble-rouser Larry Kramer has the distinction of having written not only one of the earliest and best-known plays on AIDS, The Normal Heart, but also the astonishing satire of gay urban sexual mores Faggots, perhaps the most reviled novel in the gay literary canon. A grim, graphic expansion on John Rechy's Numbers, which chronicled a hustler's soulless game of sexual conquest, Kramer's pornopticon turns off many readers by about page 3, when its hero, the screenwriter Fred Lemish, is offered an array of dubious pleasures in a private room at the infamous Everard Baths in New York. What Lemish really wants, of course, is true love, preferably from his elusive boyfriend, Dinky Adams. But as long as he's in the room...

    Celebrated and excoriated when it first appeared in 1978, this reprint of a gay anticlassic is not for the faint of heart. For the rest of us, it is a harsh, fascinating, and somewhat eerie revisitation of the carnal excesses of a generation that couldn't hear the bell tolling over the disco beat. [via]

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  • Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream
    by Hunter S. Thompson
    ISBN 0679785892 (0-679-78589-2)
    Softcover, Vintage Books

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    Book summary:

    Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is the ne plus ultra of Hunter S. Thompson and the whole gonzo clan he spawned. Written in the lurid afterglow of the 1960s, Fear and Loathing is a loosely connected series of mad dashes across the desert, trashed hotel rooms, and goofs on the brutish, naïve, or merely unhip, perpetrated by Thompson and his mammoth Samoan attorney. The pair start out high on a medicine cabinet's worth of elixirs, powders, and pills, and stay that way for 200 pages. They careen through an unsettling landscape of paranoia and alienation, but that doesn't mean the book isn't a riot. Here's a small taste: "By this time, the drink was beginning to cut the acid and my hallucinations were down to a tolerable level. The room service waiter had a vaguely reptilian cast to his features, but I was no longer seeing huge pterodactyls lumbering around the corridors in pools of fresh blood."

    Though somewhat dated (it appeared serially in Rolling Stone throughout November 1971), Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is a book of real vitality and Rabelaisian wit. A document of the counterculture after it was well past ripe and deep into rot, the book is a wild ride, a paranoid ramble that is thoroughly exhilarating and worth the trip. No pun intended. [via]

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  • Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Other American Stories
    by Hunter S. Thompson
    ISBN 0679602984 (0-679-60298-4)
    Hardcover, Modern Library

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    Book summary:

    Dr. Thompson made the list of inspirational scribes when I polled in a recent writing workshop, and why not? Back in a spiffy Modern Library edition, replete with additional essays, I find in this iconographic work that HST both invoked--and provoked--an era that was not so much the '60s proper, but rather the mean, shadow-filled death of that time, which is still playing out. Thank God Thompson was there to explode the myth of "objective" journalism and help pave the way for the pens and voices that followed. [via]

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  • Flatland
    by Edwin Abbott Abbott
    ISBN 0691025258 (0-691-02525-8)
    Softcover, Princeton Univ Pr

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    Over a hundred years ago, Edwin Abbott Abbott wrote a mathematical adventure set in a two-dimensional plane world, populated by a hierarchical society of regular geometrical figures-who think and speak and have all too human emotions. Since then Flatland has fascinated generations of readers, becoming a perennial science-fiction favorite. By imagining the contact of beings from different dimensions, the author fully exploited the power of the analogy between the limitations of humans and those of his two-dimensional characters.

    A first-rate fictional guide to the concept of multiple dimensions of space, the book will also appeal to those who are interested in computer graphics. This field, which literally makes higher dimensions seeable, has aroused a new interest in visualization. We can now manipulate objects in four dimensions and observe their three-dimensional slices tumbling on the computer screen. But how do we interpret these images? In his introduction, Thomas Banchoff points out that there is no better way to begin exploring the problem of understanding higher-dimensional slicing phenomena than reading this classic novel of the Victorian era.

    [via]

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  • Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television
    by Jerry Mander
    ISBN 0688082742 (0-688-08274-2)
    Softcover, William Morrow & Co

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    Book summary:

    A total departure from previous writing about television, this book is the first ever to advocate that the medium is not reformable. Its problems are inherent in the technology itself and are so dangerous -- to personal health and sanity, to the environment, and to democratic processes -- that TV ought to be eliminated forever.

    Weaving personal experiences through meticulous research, the author ranges widely over aspects of television that have rarely been examined and never before joined together, allowing an entirely new, frightening image to emerge. The idea that all technologies are "neutral," benign instruments that can be used well or badly, is thrown open to profound doubt. Speaking of TV reform is, in the words of the author, "as absurd as speaking of the reform of a technology such as guns." [via]

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  • The Grapes of Wrath
    by John Steinbeck
    ISBN 0791093050 (0-7910-9305-0)
    Hardcover, Facts on File

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    When The Grapes of Wrath was published in 1939, America, still recovering from the Great Depression, came face to face with itself in a startling, lyrical way. John Steinbeck gathered the country's recent shames and devastations--the Hoovervilles, the desperate, dirty children, the dissolution of kin, the oppressive labor conditions--in the Joad family. Then he set them down on a westward-running road, local dialect and all, for the world to acknowledge. For this marvel of observation and perception, he won the Pulitzer in 1940.

    The prize must have come, at least in part, because alongside the poverty and dispossession, Steinbeck chronicled the Joads' refusal, even inability, to let go of their faltering but unmistakable hold on human dignity. Witnessing their degeneration from Oklahoma farmers to a diminished band of migrant workers is nothing short of crushing. The Joads lose family members to death and cowardice as they go, and are challenged by everything from weather to the authorities to the California locals themselves. As Tom Joad puts it: "They're a-workin' away at our spirits. They're a tryin' to make us cringe an' crawl like a whipped bitch. They tryin' to break us. Why, Jesus Christ, Ma, they comes a time when the on'y way a fella can keep his decency is by takin' a sock at a cop. They're workin' on our decency."

    The point, though, is that decency remains intact, if somewhat battle-scarred, and this, as much as the depression and the plight of the "Okies," is a part of American history. When the California of their dreams proves to be less than edenic, Ma tells Tom: "You got to have patience. Why, Tom--us people will go on livin' when all them people is gone. Why, Tom, we're the people that live. They ain't gonna wipe us out. Why, we're the people--we go on." It's almost as if she's talking about the very novel she inhabits, for Steinbeck's characters, more than most literary creations, do go on. They continue, now as much as ever, to illuminate and humanize an era for generations of readers who, thankfully, have no experiential point of reference for understanding the depression. The book's final, haunting image of Rose of Sharon--Rosasharn, as they call her--the eldest Joad daughter, forcing the milk intended for her stillborn baby onto a starving stranger, is a lesson on the grandest scale. "'You got to,'" she says, simply. And so do we all. --Melanie Rehak [via]

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  • Thompson, Hunter S.: The Great Shark Hunt: Strange Tales from a Strange Time
    The Great Shark Hunt: Strange Tales from a Strange Time
    by Hunter S. Thompson
    ISBN 0743250451 (0-7432-5045-1)
    Softcover, Simon & Schuster

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  • Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin
    by Harold Bloom
    ISBN 0791036723 (0-7910-3672-3)
    Hardcover, Facts on File

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  • How the Other Half Lives: Studies among the Tenements of New York
    by Jacob A. Riis
    ISBN 0760755892 (0-7607-5589-2)
    Hardcover, Barnes & Noble Books

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    Book summary:

    Scoiology, American Studies, American History, US History, Urban Studies [via]

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  • Howards End
    by E. M. Forster
    ISBN 0679722556 (0-679-72255-6)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

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    Book summary:

    Margaret Schlegel, engaged to the much older, widowed Henry Wilcox, meets her intended the morning after accepting his proposal and realizes that he is a man who has lived without introspection or true self-knowledge. As she contemplates the state of Wilcox's soul, her remedy for what ails him has become one of the most oft-quoted passages in literature:

    Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer.
    Like all of Forster's work, Howards End concerns itself with class, nationality, economic status, and how each of these affects personal relationships. It follows the intertwined fortunes of the Schlegel sisters, Margaret and Helen, and the Wilcox family over the course of several years. The Schlegels are intellectuals, devotees of art and literature. The Wilcoxes, on the other hand, can't be bothered with the life of the mind or the heart, leading, instead, outer lives of "telegrams and anger" that foster "such virtues as neatness, decision, and obedience, virtues of the second rank, no doubt, but they have formed our civilization." Helen, after a brief flirtation with one of the Wilcox sons, has developed an antipathy for the family; Margaret, however, forms a brief but intense friendship with Mrs. Wilcox, which is cut short by the older woman's death. When her family discovers a scrap of paper requesting that Henry give their home, Howards End, to Margaret, it precipitates a spiritual crisis among them that will take years to resolve.

    Forster's 1910 novel begins as a collection of seemingly unrelated events--Helen's impulsive engagement to Paul Wilcox; a chance meeting between the Schlegel sisters and an impoverished clerk named Leonard Bast at a concert; a casual conversation between the sisters and Henry Wilcox in London one night. But as it moves along, these disparate threads gradually knit into a tightly woven fabric of tragic misunderstandings, impulsive actions, and irreparable consequences, and, eventually, connection. Though set in the early years of the 20th century, Howards End seems even more suited to our own fragmented era of e-mails and anger. For readers living in such an age, the exhortation to "only connect" resonates ever more profoundly. --Alix Wilber [via]

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  • I know Why the Caged Bird Sings (Blooms Guides)
    by Harold Bloom
    ISBN 0791077683 (0-7910-7768-3)
    Softcover, Facts on File

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  • In a Sunburned Country
    by Bill Bryson
    ISBN 0767903862 (0-7679-0386-2)
    Softcover, Bantam Dell Pub Group

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    Book summary:

    x, 307 p. 25 cm. 4 small b&w maps - and a kangaroo, of course. Hardcover. In mylar-covered pictorial dustjacket. [via]

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  • John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath
    by Harold Bloom
    ISBN 0791082393 (0-7910-8239-3)
    Hardcover, Facts on File

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    Book summary:

    Harold Bloom writes, "The Grapes of Wrath is a flawed but permanent American book." John Steinbeck's novel, still popular a half-century after its original publication, is the focus of this edition of Bloom's Notes. Along with a collection of some of the best criticism available on his work, this text includes a brief biography of the author, structural and thematic analysis, an index of themes and ideas, and more. This series is edited by Harold Bloom, Sterling Professor of the Humanities, Yale University; Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Professor of English, New York University Graduate School. These texts are the ideal aid for all students of literature, presenting concise, easy-to-understand biographical, critical, and bibliographical information on a specific literary work. Also provided are multiple sources for book reports and term papers with a wealth of information on literary works, authors, and major characters. [via]

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  • Kingdom of Fear: Loathsome Secrets of a Star-Crossed Child in the Final Days of the American Century
    by Hunter S. Thompson
    ISBN 0684873249 (0-684-87324-9)
    Softcover, Simon & Schuster

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    Kingdom of Fear is billed as a memoir, but in essence, all of Hunter S. Thompson's books could fit into this category since his life and work have always been tightly bound together by a mythology largely of his own making. (After all, this is the man who, before earning a single dollar as a writer, began meticulously saving a copy of every letter he ever sent.) Still, this is certainly an unconventional memoir, but then what would you expect from the father of gonzo journalism? In these pages Thompson manages to dig deep and reveal a few "loathsome secrets" without offering the kind of personal details he has always avoided. His childhood, for instance, is basically summed up in a sentence: "I look back on my youth with great fondness, but I would not recommend it as a working model to others." He does, however, reflect upon his considerable legacy, including his well-known, and admittedly exaggerated, use of controlled substances ("The brutal reality of politics alone would probably be intolerable without drugs"), as well as offer assessments of his own work, such as Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas ("It's as good as The Great Gatsby and better than The Sun Also Rises").

    In this collection of twisted parables and outlaw adventures, Thompson writes about his early run-ins with agents of authority and the lessons learned; his stint in the Air Force and the beginning of his journalism career; his unsuccessful, though illuminating, bid for Sheriff of Aspen, Colorado in 1970 as the Freak Power candidate; the casualties and unintended consequences thus far in the War on Terror; and numerous examples of present-day injustice and hypocrisy--all with his characteristic mix of brutal frankness laced with humor. He also offers his own take on state of the Union: "The prevailing quality of life in America--by any accepted methods of measuring--was inarguably freer and more politically open under Nixon than it is today in this evil year of Our Lord 2002." Thompson continues to make even the most deadly serious subject matter endlessly entertaining. --Shawn Carkonen [via]

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  • Less Than Zero
    by Bret Easton Ellis
    ISBN 0679781498 (0-679-78149-8)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

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    Book [via]

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  • The Lord of the Rings
    by J. R. R. Tolkien
    ISBN 0791056651 (0-7910-5665-1)
    Hardcover, Facts on File

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    Book summary:

    The struggle between good and evil in Middle Earth.

    The title, J.R.R. Tolkiens The Lord of the Rings, part of Chelsea House Publishers Modern Critical Interpretations series, presents the most important 20th-century criticism on J.R.R. Tolkiens The Lord of the Rings through extracts of critical essays by well-known literary critics. This collection of criticism also features a short biography on J.R.R. Tolkien, a chronology of the authors life, and an introductory essay written by Harold Bloom, Sterling Professor of the Humanities, Yale University. [via]

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  • Manufacturing Consent : The Political Economy of the Mass Media
    by Edward S. Herman, Noam Chomsky
    ISBN 0679720340 (0-679-72034-0)
    Softcover, Knopf Publishing Group

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    Book summary:

    An absolutely brilliant analysis of the ways in which individuals and organizations of the media are influenced to shape the social agendas of knowledge and, therefore, belief. Contrary to the popular conception of members of the press as hard-bitten realists doggedly pursuing unpopular truths, Herman and Chomsky prove conclusively that the free-market economics model of media leads inevitably to normative and narrow reporting. Whether or not you've seen the eye-opening movie, buy this book, and you will be a far more knowledgeable person and much less prone to having your beliefs manipulated as easily as the press. [via]

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  • Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
    by Harold Bloom
    ISBN 0791036669 (0-7910-3666-9)
    Hardcover, Facts on File

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    Book summary:

    Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings accomplishes a controlled poignance in representing a portrait of the young artist as a black woman. Her novel is the focus of this edition of Bloom's Notes. Along with a collection of some of the best criticism available on his work, this text includes a brief biography of the author, structural and thematic analysis, an index of themes and ideas, and more. This series is edited by Harold Bloom, Sterling Professor of the Humanities, Yale University; Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Professor of English, New York University Graduate School. These texts are the ideal aid for all students of literature, presenting concise, easy-to-understand biographical, critical, and bibliographical information on a specific literary work. Also provided are multiple sources for book reports and term papers with a wealth of information on literary works, authors, and major characters. [via]

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  • Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds: The Essential Library
    by Charles MacKay
    ISBN 0738843091 (0-7388-4309-1)
    Softcover, Xlibris Corp

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    Book summary:

    If you've ever wondered where popular catch phrases and slang comes from or why men's beards go in and out of fashion, then this book is for you. How often do you come across a book that can explain most everything? Much of today's news has a basis in prior historical events. The internet IPO market shares striking similarities to the Dutch "tulip mania" of the 1600's. The conflict in the Middle East can trace its roots to the Crusades. The recent satanic child abuse trials are reminiscent of the European witch trials of the 1400s-1600s. This complete two-volume edition demonstrates that the madness and confusion of crowds knows no limits, and has no temporal bounds.

    Here are astonishing and entertaining tales of thievery, greed and madness. This informative, funny collection encompasses a broad range of manias and deceptions from haunted houses and the prophecies of Nostradamus to speculative excess. Charles MacKay explains it all in this classic edition. Enjoy! [via]

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  • The Millionaire Next Door: The Surprising Secrets of America' s Wealthy
    by Thomas J. Stanley, William D. Danko
    ISBN 0743420373 (0-7434-2037-3)
    Softcover, Simon & Schuster

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    Book summary:

    How can you join the ranks of America's wealthy (defined as people whose net worth is over one million dollars)? It's easy, say doctors Stanley and Danko, who have spent the last 20 years interviewing members of this elite club: you just have to follow seven simple rules. The first rule is, always live well below your means. The last rule is, choose your occupation wisely. You'll have to buy the book to find out the other five. It's only fair. The authors' conclusions are commonsensical. But, as they point out, their prescription often flies in the face of what we think wealthy people should do. There are no pop stars or athletes in this book, but plenty of wall-board manufacturers--particularly ones who take cheap, infrequent vacations! Stanley and Danko mercilessly show how wealth takes sacrifice, discipline, and hard work, qualities that are positively discouraged by our high-consumption society. "You aren't what you drive," admonish the authors. Somewhere, Benjamin Franklin is smiling. [via]

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  • Never Let Me Go
    by Kazuo Ishiguro
    ISBN 0786278374 (0-7862-7837-4)
    Hardcover, Thorndike Pr

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    All children should believe they are special. But the students of Hailsham, an elite school in the English countryside, are so special that visitors shun them, and only by rumor and the occasional fleeting remark by a teacher do they discover their unconventional origins and strange destiny. Kazuo Ishiguro's sixth novel, Never Let Me Go, is a masterpiece of indirection. Like the students of Hailsham, readers are "told but not told" what is going on and should be allowed to discover the secrets of Hailsham and the truth about these children on their own.

    Offsetting the bizarreness of these revelations is the placid, measured voice of the narrator, Kathy H., a 31-year-old Hailsham alumna who, at the close of the 1990s, is consciously ending one phase of her life and beginning another. She is in a reflective mood, and recounts not only her childhood memories, but her quest in adulthood to find out more about Hailsham and the idealistic women who ran it. Although often poignant, Kathy's matter-of-fact narration blunts the sharper emotional effects you might expect in a novel that deals with illness, self-sacrifice, and the severe restriction of personal freedoms. As in Ishiguro's best-known work, The Remains of the Day, only after closing the book do you absorb the magnitude of what his characters endure. --Regina Marler [via]

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  • Notes from a Small Island
    by Bill Bryson
    ISBN 0688147259 (0-688-14725-9)
    Hardcover, HarperCollins Publishers

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    Bill Bryson is an unabashed Anglophile who, through a mistake of history, happened to be born and bred in Iowa. Righting that error, he spent 20 years in England before deciding to repatriate: "I had recently read that 3.7 million Americans according to a Gallup poll, believed that they had been abducted by aliens at one time or another, so it was clear that my people needed me." That comic tone enlivens this account of Bryson's farewell walking tour of the countryside of "the green and kindly island that had for two decades been my home." [via]

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  • The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals
    by Michael Pollan
    ISBN 078628952X (0-7862-8952-X)
    Hardcover, Thorndike Pr

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    Book summary:

    One of the New York Times Book Review's Ten Best Books of the Year

    Winner of the James Beard Award

    Author of #1 New York Times Bestsellers In Defense of Food and Food Rules

    Today, buffeted by one food fad after another, America is suffering from what can only be described as a national eating disorder. Will it be fast food tonight, or something organic? Or perhaps something we grew ourselves? The question of what to have for dinner has confronted us since man discovered fire. But as Michael Pollan explains in this revolutionary book, how we answer it now, as the dawn of the twenty-first century, may determine our survival as a species. Packed with profound surprises, The Omnivore's Dilemma is changing the way Americans thing about the politics, perils, and pleasures of eating.

    Coming from The Penguin Press in 2013, Michael Pollans newest book Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation--the story of our most trusted food experts culinary education 

    "Thoughtful, engrossing ... You're not likely to get a better explanation of exactly where your food comes from."
    -The New York Times Book Review

    "An eater's manifesto ... [Pollan's] cause is just, his thinking is clear, and his writing is compelling. Be careful of your dinner!"
    -The Washington Post

    "Outstanding... a wide-ranging invitation to think through the moral ramifications of our eating habits."
    --The New Yorker

    "If you ever thought 'what's for dinner' was a simple question, you'll change your mind after reading Pollan's searing indictment of today's food industry-and his glimpse of some inspiring alternatives.... I just loved this book so much I didn't want it to end."
    -The Seattle Times

     
    [via]

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  • Smith, Zadie: On Beauty
    On Beauty
    by Zadie Smith
    ISBN 078628319X (0-7862-8319-X)
    Hardcover, Thorndike Pr

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  • Oryx and Crake
    by Margaret Atwood
    ISBN 0771008686 (0-7710-0868-6)
    Hardcover, McClelland & Stewart

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    In a science fiction novel that is more Swift than Heinlein, more cautionary tale than "fictional science" (no flying cars here), Margaret Atwood depicts a near-future world that turns from the merely horrible to the horrific, from a fool's paradise to a bio-wasteland. Snowman (a man once known as Jimmy) sleeps in a tree and just might be the only human left on our devastated planet. He is not entirely alone, however, as he considers himself the shepherd of a group of experimental, human-like creatures called the Children of Crake. As he scavenges and tends to his insect bites, Snowman recalls in flashbacks how the world fell apart.

    While the story begins with a rather ponderous set-up of what has become a clichéd landscape of the human endgame, littered with smashed computers and abandoned buildings, it takes on life when Snowman recalls his boyhood meeting with his best friend Crake: "Crake had a thing about him even then. . . . He generated awe . . . in his dark laconic clothing." A dangerous genius, Crake is the book's most intriguing character. Crake and Jimmy live with all the other smart, rich people in the Compounds, gated company towns owned by biotech corporations. (Ordinary folks are kept outside the gates in the chaotic "pleeblands.") Meanwhile, beautiful Oryx, raised as a child prostitute in Southeast Asia, finds her way to the West and meets Crake and Jimmy, setting up an inevitable love triangle. Eventually Crake's experiments in bioengineering cause humanity's shockingly quick demise (with uncanny echoes of SARS, ebola, and mad cow disease), leaving Snowman to try to pick up the pieces. There are a few speed bumps along the way, including some clunky dialogue and heavy-handed symbols such as Snowman's broken watch, but once the bleak narrative gets moving, as Snowman sets out in search of the laboratory that seeded the world's destruction, it clips along at a good pace, with a healthy dose of wry humour. --Mark Frutkin [via]

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  • Our Dumb Century
    ISBN 0762418664 (0-7624-1866-4)
    Hardcover, Running Pr Book Pub

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    Book summary:

    Every Wednesday, work at Amazon.com--along with just about every other company connected to the fantastical "information superhighway" invented by Vice President Al Gore and actress Hedy Lamarr--grinds to a halt as employees hasten to read the latest issue of The Onion, America's most popular newspaper based in Madison, Wisconsin. But most of the paper's fans have started reading it only within the last few years, and are sadly unaware of The Onion's mighty journalistic legacy. To combat this cultural illiteracy, Editor in Chief Scott Dikkers and his writing staff have assembled this collection of great front pages from the last hundred years. Here is just a sampling of the headlines:

    A New Century Dawns! McKinley Ushers in Bold New "Coal Age"

    Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria Boasts: "No Man Can Stop Me"

    AWESOME! Nation Wowed by Tremendous Hindenburg Explosion

    Martin Luther King: "I Had a Really Weird Dream Last Night"

    Clinton Denies Lewinsky Allegations: "We Did Not Have Sex, We Made Love," He Says

    And those are just the headlines; the stories themselves are all masterpieces of the journalist's trade. Of course, readers with delicate sensibilities may find some of these accounts a bit too risqué, and perhaps even tasteless. (Among the potential offenders: Rosa Parks's decision to "screw this bus shit" and take a cab.) But if you're looking for an antidote to all the 20th-century hoopla promulgated by stuffed shirts like Peter Jennings and Harold Evans--not to mention the best history book since 1066 and All That--then Our Dumb Century is the one for you. --Ron Hogan [via]

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  • The People of the Abyss
    by Jack London
    ISBN 0745314155 (0-7453-1415-5)
    Softcover, Stylus Pub Llc

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    In 1902, Jack London, posing as an out-of-work sailor, went underground into the belly of the beast: the slums of London's East End. With passion and vision, he used his skill as a journalist to expose the horrors of the Abyss to the world. Because of his ability to blend in with working people and put them at their ease, because he donned their clothing, and spent nights on the street --working odd jobs, sleeping in the homeless shelters--he gained an insight into the slum life which remains unique. By interweaving the personal stories of the people he encountered with political analysis, he produced a vibrant work of nonfiction, which remains relevant to this day. Consider the following: about one in five children in the US live in poverty. Poverty is war, and it rages on with no end in sight, and the management is still guilty of mismanaging the wealth. Beyond a shadow of a doubt, the People of the Abyss are among us today.

    Jack London was famous for his adventure stories, such as "White Fang" and "The Call of the Wild", but he was also a skilled political writer and social critic. He led a varied and colorful life as a journalist, laborer, fisherman, gold-prospector and even a vagrant. Jack London came to the East End of London in 1902, and "The People of the Abyss" is the result of his investigative journalism that paints a vivid and disturbing portrait. It is both a literary masterpiece and a major sociological study. London posed as a stranded American sailor, sleeping in doss houses and living with the destitute and starving - the record of what he saw there remains as powerful today as it was then. Published to coincide with the centenary of his visit to the East End, this important book is an incredible precursor to the writings of George Orwell, and remains a standard-bearer critique of capitalism.

    [via]

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  • The People of the Abyss: Centenary Edition
    by Jack London, Brigitte Koenig
    ISBN 0745318029 (0-7453-1802-9)
    Softcover, Univ of Michigan Pr

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    Book summary:

    In 1902, Jack London, posing as an out-of-work sailor, went underground into the belly of the beast: the slums of London's East End. With passion and vision, he used his skill as a journalist to expose the horrors of the Abyss to the world. Because of his ability to blend in with working people and put them at their ease, because he donned their clothing, and spent nights on the street --working odd jobs, sleeping in the homeless shelters--he gained an insight into the slum life which remains unique. By interweaving the personal stories of the people he encountered with political analysis, he produced a vibrant work of nonfiction, which remains relevant to this day. Consider the following: about one in five children in the US live in poverty. Poverty is war, and it rages on with no end in sight, and the management is still guilty of mismanaging the wealth. Beyond a shadow of a doubt, the People of the Abyss are among us today.

    Jack London was famous for his adventure stories, such as "White Fang" and "The Call of the Wild", but he was also a skilled political writer and social critic. He led a varied and colorful life as a journalist, laborer, fisherman, gold-prospector and even a vagrant. Jack London came to the East End of London in 1902, and "The People of the Abyss" is the result of his investigative journalism that paints a vivid and disturbing portrait. It is both a literary masterpiece and a major sociological study. London posed as a stranded American sailor, sleeping in doss houses and living with the destitute and starving - the record of what he saw there remains as powerful today as it was then. Published to coincide with the centenary of his visit to the East End, this important book is an incredible precursor to the writings of George Orwell, and remains a standard-bearer critique of capitalism.

    [via]

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  • Austen, Jane: Persuasion
    Persuasion
    by Jane Austen
    ISBN 0755331494 (0-7553-3149-4)
    Softcover, Headline Book Publishing

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    (Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)

    Of all Jane Austens great and delightful novels, Persuasion is widely regarded as the most moving. It is the story of a second chance.

    Anne Elliot, daughter of the snobbish, spendthrift Sir Walter Elliot, is a woman of quiet charm and deep feelings. When she was nineteen, she fell in love withand was engaged toa naval officer, the fearless and headstrong Captain Wentworth. But the young man had no fortune, and Anne allowed herself to be persuaded, against her profoundest instinct, to give him up.Now, at twenty-seven, and believing that she has lost her bloom, Anne is startled to learn that Captain Wentworth has returned to the neighborhood, a rich man and still unwed. Her never-diminished love is muffled by her pride. He seems cold and unforgiving. Even worse, he appears to be infatuated by the flighty and pretty Louisa Musgrove.

    What happens as Anne and Wentworth are thrown together in the social world of Bathand as an eager new suitor appears for Anneis touchingly and wittily told in a masterpiece that is also one of the most entrancing novels in the English language. [via]

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  • Persuasion: Theory and Research
    by Daniel J. O'Keefe
    ISBN 0803933681 (0-8039-3368-1)
    Hardcover, Sage Pubns

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    This volume provides a clear, straightforward introduction to theory and research in persuasion, leaving instructors free to hand-pick non-text materials to satisfy ancillary aims. It includes a discussion of research concerning the production of persuasive messages, as well as the more traditional research on the study of message effects. The text also provides a careful, comprehensive and critical treatment of the relevant research literature including examination of primary as well as secondary and tertiary sources, consideration of a wide body of published research from diverse fields, attention to avoiding premature generalizations from limited research evidence, and a thorough treatment of relevant theoretical and methodological quest [via]

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  • Pledged: The Secret Life Of Sororities
    by Alexandra Robbins
    ISBN 0786888598 (0-7868-8859-8)
    Softcover, Hyperion Books

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    Book summary:

    Now in paperback, the New York Times bestseller-with over 91,000 copies in print-that takes you behind closed doors to see what really goes on in America's sororities. Ever wonder what sorority life is really like In Pledged, bestselling author Alexandra Robbins goes undercover to expose the dark side of collegiate sisterhood-the psychological abuse, hazing rituals, and widespread body image disorders-while at the same time introducing us to many of the intelligent, successful women within its ranks. The result is a compelling sociological exploration of the powerful influence that these organizations wield over young women today. With its fly-on-the-wall voyeurism and remarkable insight, Pledged paints a sharp-eyed portrait of the intriguing and paradoxical world of modern-day sororities. [via]

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  • Race Matters
    by Cornel West
    ISBN 0679749861 (0-679-74986-1)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

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    Book summary:

    With a new introduction, the groundbreaking classic Race Matters affirms its position as the bestselling, most influential, and most original articulation of the urgent issues in America?s ongoing racial debate.

    Cornel West is at the forefront of thinking about race. In Race Matters he addresses a range of issues, from the crisis in black leadership and the myths surrounding black sexuality to affirmative action, the new black conservatism, and the strained relations between Jews and African Americans. He never hesitates to confront the prejudices of all his readers?or wavers in his insistence that they share a common destiny. Bold in its thought and written with a redemptive passion grounded in the tradition of the African-American church, Race Matters is a book that is at once challenging and deeply healing. [via]

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  • The Rum Diary
    by Hunter S. Thompson
    ISBN 0684856476 (0-684-85647-6)
    Softcover, Scribner

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  • Wells, H. G.: The Sleeper Awakes
    The Sleeper Awakes
    by H. G. Wells, J. Gregory Keyes
    ISBN 0803298188 (0-8032-9818-8)
    Softcover, Univ of Nebraska Pr

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  • Slouching Towards Bethlehem : Essays
    by Joan Didion, Elizabeth Hardwick
    ISBN 0679640266 (0-679-64026-6)
    Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group

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    Book summary:

    Upon its publication in 1968, Slouching Towards Bethlehem confirmed Joan Didion as one of the most prominent writers on the literary scene. Her unblinking vision and deadpan tone have influenced subsequent generations of reporters and essayists, changing our expectations of style, voice, and the artistic possibilities of nonfiction.
            
    "In her portraits of people," The New York Times Book Review wrote, "Didion is not out to expose but to understand, and she shows us actors and millionaires, doomed brides and naïve acid-trippers, left-wing ideologues and snobs of the Hawaiian aristocracy in a way that makes them neither villainous nor glamorous, but alive and botched and often mournfully beautiful. . . . A rare display of some of the best prose written today in this country."
            
    In essay after essay, Didion captures the dislocation of the 1960s, the disorientation of a country shredding itself apart with social change. Her essays not only describe the subject at hand--the murderous housewife, the little girl trailing the rock group, the millionaire bunkered in his mansion--but also offer a broader vision of America, one that is both terrifying and tender, ominous and uniquely her own.
            
    Joyce Carol Oates has written, "Joan Didion is one of the very few writers of our time who approaches her terrible subject with absolute seriousness, with fear and humility and awe. Her powerful irony is often sorrowful rather than clever. . . . She has been an articulate witness to the most stubborn and intractable truths of our time, a memorable voice, partly eulogistic, partly despairing; always in control." [via]

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  • Small Pieces Loosely Joined: A Unified Theory of the Web
    by David Weinberger
    ISBN 0738208507 (0-7382-0850-7)
    Softcover, Perseus Books Group

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    David Weinberger's Small Pieces Loosely Joined does not merely celebrate the World Wide Web; it attempts to make a case that the institution has completely remodeled many of the world's self-perceptions. The book does so entertainingly, if not convincingly, and is a lively collection of epigrammatic phrases (the Web is "'place-ial' but not spatial"; "on the Web everyone will be famous to 15 people"), as well as illustrations of these changes. There are intriguing assertions: that the Web is "broken on purpose" and that its many pockets of erroneous information and its available forums for disputing, say, manufacturers' hyperbole, let people feel more comfortable with their own inherent imperfections. At other times the book seems stale: it declares that the Web has disrupted long-held axioms about time, space, and knowledge retrieval and that it has dramatically rearranged notions of community and individuality. Weinberger's analysis, though occasionally facile and too relentlessly optimistic and overstated, is surely destined to be the subject of furious debate in chat rooms the cyber-world over. --H. O'Billovich [via]

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  • Rousseau, Jean-Jacques: The Social Contract
    The Social Contract
    by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, J. H. Brumfitt, John C. Hall, G.D.H. Cole
    ISBN 0760770212 (0-7607-7021-2)
    Softcover, Barnes & Noble Books

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  • The Souls of Black Folk
    by W. E. B. Du Bois
    ISBN 0679725199 (0-679-72519-9)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

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    William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (1868-1963) is the greatest of African American intellectuals--a sociologist, historian, novelist, and activist whose astounding career spanned the nation's history from Reconstruction to the civil rights movement. Born in Massachusetts and educated at Fisk, Harvard, and the University of Berlin, Du Bois penned his epochal masterpiece, The Souls of Black Folk, in 1903. It remains his most studied and popular work; its insights into Negro life at the turn of the 20th century still ring true.

    With a dash of the Victorian and Enlightenment influences that peppered his impassioned yet formal prose, the book's largely autobiographical chapters take the reader through the momentous and moody maze of Afro-American life after the Emancipation Proclamation: from poverty, the neoslavery of the sharecropper, illiteracy, miseducation, and lynching, to the heights of humanity reached by the spiritual "sorrow songs" that birthed gospel and the blues. The most memorable passages are contained in "On Booker T. Washington and Others," where Du Bois criticizes his famous contemporary's rejection of higher education and accommodationist stance toward white racism: "Mr. Washington's programme practically accepts the alleged inferiority of the Negro races," he writes, further complaining that Washington's thinking "withdraws many of the high demands of Negroes as men and American citizens." The capstone of The Souls of Black Folk, though, is Du Bois' haunting, eloquent description of the concept of the black psyche's "double consciousness," which he described as "a peculiar sensation.... One ever feels this twoness--an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder." Thanks to W.E.B. Du Bois' commitment and foresight--and the intellectual excellence expressed in this timeless literary gem--black Americans can today look in the mirror and rejoice in their beautiful black, brown, and beige reflections. --Eugene Holley Jr. [via]

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  • Take the Cannoli: Stories from the New World
    by Sarah Vowell
    ISBN 0743205405 (0-7432-0540-5)
    Softcover, Simon & Schuster

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    Book summary:

    "Take the Cannoli" is a moving and wickedly funny collection of personal stories stretching across the immense landscape of the American scene. Hailed by "Newsweek" as a "cranky stylist with talent to burn," Vowell has an irresistible voice -- caustic and sympathetic, insightful and double-edged -- that has attracted a loyal following for her magazine writing and radio monologues on This American Life.

    While tackling subjects such as identity, politics, religion, art, and history, these autobiographical tales are written with a biting humor, placing Vowell solidly in the tradition of Mark Twain and Dorothy Parker. Vowell searches the streets of Hoboken for traces of the town's favorite son, Frank Sinatra. She goes under cover of heavy makeup in an investigation of goth culture, blasts cannonballs into a hillside on a father-daughter outing, and maps her family's haunted history on a road trip down the Trail of Tears.

    "Take the Cannoli" is an eclectic tour of the New World, a collection of alternately hilarious and heartbreaking essays and autobiographical yarns. [via]

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  • Klinkenborg, Verlyn: Timothy, or, Notes of an Abject Reptile
    Timothy, or, Notes of an Abject Reptile
    by Verlyn Klinkenborg
    ISBN 0679737537 (0-679-73753-7)
    Softcover, Vintage Books

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  • To Kill a Mockingbird
    by Harper Lee
    ISBN 0771052340 (0-7710-5234-0)
    Hardcover, McClelland & Stewart Ltd

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    Book summary:

    Harold Bloom's introduction questions whether Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird is a novel that will endure or has had popularity merely as a time. Along with a collection of some of the best criticism available on his work, this text includes a brief biography of the author, structural and thematic analysis, an index of themes and ideas, and more. This series is edited by Harold Bloom, Sterling Professor of the Humanities, Yale University; Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Professor of English, New York University Graduate School. These texts are the ideal aid for all students of literature, presenting concise, easy-to-understand biographical, critical, and bibliographical information on a specific literary work. Also provided are multiple sources for book reports and term papers with a wealth of information on literary works, authors, and major characters. [via]

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  • Uncle Tom's Cabin
    by Harriet Beecher Stowe, Christopher Paul Curtis
    ISBN 068985126X (0-689-85126-X)
    Softcover, Simon & Schuster

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    Book summary:

    ENDURING LITERATURE ILLUMINATED BY PRACTICAL SCHOLARSHIP Harriet Beecher Stowe's scathing indictment of slavery in the Old South, a novel that has become a landmark of American literature. EACH ENRICHED CLASSIC EDITION INCLUDES: ? A concise introduction that gives readers important background information ? A chronology of the author's life and work ? A timeline of significant events that provides the book's historical context ? An outline of key themes and plot points to help readers form their own interpretations ? Detailed explanatory notes ? Critical analysis, including contemporary and modern perspectives on the work ? Discussion questions to promote lively classroom and book group interaction ? A list of recommended related books and films to broaden the reader's experience Enriched Classics offer readers affordable editions of great works of literature enhanced by helpful notes and insightful commentary. The scholarship provided in Enriched Classics enables readers to appreciate, understand, and enjoy the world's finest books to their full potential. SERIES EDITED BY CYNTHIA BRANTLEY JOHNSON [via]

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  • Vamps and Tramps: New Essays
    by Camille Paglia
    ISBN 0679751203 (0-679-75120-3)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

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    Book summary:

    The bestselling author of Sexual Personae and Sex, Art, and American Culture is back with a fiery new collection of essays on everything from art and celebrity to gay activism, Lorena Bobbitt to Bill and Hillary. These essays have never appeared in book form, and many will be appearing in print for the first time. [via]

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  • Whatever Happened to the Human Race?
    by C. Everett Koop, Francisa Schaeffer
    ISBN 0800710517 (0-8007-1051-7)
    Hardcover, F. H. Revell Co

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    Book summary:

    "If a mother can kill her own children, then what can be next?" Mother Teresa once asked.

    What indeed?

    Once the value of human life has been depreciated, as in Roe v. Wade and the Baby Doe Case, no one is safe. Once "quality of life" is substituted for the absolute value of human life itself, we all are endangered. Already respected scientists are calling for a time period following birth (a week or so) to decide if newborns have "sufficient quality of life" to be allowed to live. Already committees of "medical professionals" would like to decide whether the "quality of life" of the elderly or anyone seriously ill is high enough to allow them to go on living.

    In this moving book, the renowned pediatric surgeon and Surgeon General of the United States, C. Everett Koop, M.D., joins with one of the leading Christian thinkers of our day, Francis A. Schaeffer, to analyze the widespread implications and frightening loss of human rights brought on by today's practices of abortion, infanticide, and euthanasia. They see the present as a crucial turning point. Choices are being made that undermine human rights at their most basic level. Practices once labeled "unthinkable" are now considered acceptable. The destruction of human life, young and old, is being sanctioned on an ever-increasing scale by the medical profession, by the courts, by parents, and by silent citizens.

    "But what can I do?" you ask. "I'm just one person." You can start by reading this book. Yes, it will shock you. And it will make you weep. But it will also help you see how you can actually make a difference.

    [via]

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  • When the Sleeper Wakes
    by H. G. Wells, Leon E. Stover
    ISBN 0786406666 (0-7864-0666-6)
    Hardcover, McFarland & Co Inc Pub

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    Critics rightly view When the Sleeper Wakes as a prototype of the anti-utopian novel, a genre developed by Zamyatin, Huxley, and Orwell into nightmare futures associated with the totalitarian age and the moral horrors of fascism and communism. Suppose, however, that Wells actually intended to present a more positive depiction of political authority misused for ideological ends, a dream rather than a nightmare. This is the possibility explored in the apparatus to the present edition. Annotated by the world's leading Wellsian scholar, in Sleeper is found a greater measure of artistry and characterization than is usually accorded to it. As a complex work combining technological with social speculation, Sleeper is unmatched for canniness in the history of futuristic literature. Indeed, its aeronautical details influenced the Wright Brothers in the design of their flyer, and the novel predicts the promotion of airplanes as a weapon, a prophecy dramatically fulfilled in the twentieth century. This exhaustive critical edition follows other influential titles in the series and features a lengthy introduction, appendices, bibliography and index, and a frontispiece taken from the original 1899 edition. [via]

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  • Wicked
    by Gregory Maguire
    ISBN 0786206438 (0-7862-0643-8)
    Hardcover, Thorndike Pr

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    An astonishingly rich re-creation of the land of Oz, this book retells the story of Elphaba, the Wicked Witch of the West, who wasn't so wicked after all. Taking readers past the yellow brick road and into a phantasmagoric world rich with imagination and allegory, Gregory Maguire just might change the reputation of one of the most sinister characters in literature. [via]

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  • The World's Great Classics
    ISBN 0717200019 (0-7172-0001-9)
    Hardcover, Xs Books

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    Book summary:

    Odyssey, The: The World's Great Classics, by Homer; tr. by S.H. Butcher and Andrew Lang [via]

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  • Xenocide
    by Orson Scott Card
    ISBN 0785716343 (0-7857-1634-3)
    Hardcover, Bt Bound

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    Orson Scott Card's Xenocide is a space opera with verve. In this continuation of Ender Wiggin's story, the Starways Congress has sent a fleet to immolate the rebellious planet of Lusitania, home to the alien race of pequeninos, and home to Ender Wiggin and his family. Concealed on Lusitania is the only remaining Hive Queen, who holds a secret that may save or destroy humanity throughout the galaxy. Familiar characters from the previous novels continue to grapple with religious conflicts and family squabbles while inventing faster-than-light travel and miraculous virus treatments. Throw into the mix an entire planet of mad geniuses and a self-aware computer who wants to be a martyr, and it's hard to guess who will topple the first domino. Due to the densely woven and melodramatic nature of the story, newcomers to Ender's tale will want to start reading this series with the first books, Ender's Game and Speaker for the Dead. --Brooks Peck [via]

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