books tagged “society”

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  • Soros, George: The Age of Fallibility: The Consequences of the War on Terror
    The Age of Fallibility: The Consequences of the War on Terror
    by George Soros
    ISBN 1586483595 (1-58648-359-5)
    Hardcover, Public Affairs

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  • Avram, Wes: Anxious About Empire: Theological Essays on the New Global Realities
    Anxious About Empire: Theological Essays on the New Global Realities
    by Wes Avram
    ISBN 158743119X (1-58743-119-X)
    Softcover, Baker Pub Group

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  • The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
    by Benjamin Franklin
    ISBN 1588276686 (1-58827-668-6)
    Hardcover, Indypublish.Com

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    Book summary:

    This isn't a tale of Ben Franklin the revolutionary -- the text comes to its end long years before that -- but it does give a fascinating portrait of the man who would become one of America's founding fathers. Oh, we see hints of the trouble developing in Britain's relations with "the colonies"; and Franklin surely had dealings with the British military; but here Franklin is just coming into his own as a political figure when the tale comes to its end. But there is a wisdom, here, and a charm; and certainly a fascinating look into the everyday life of our country's pre-Revolutionary era. Even if Franklin had died after completing this text he would have left behind a powerful legacy. [via]

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  • The Beautiful and Damned
    by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Pagan Harleman
    ISBN 1593082452 (1-59308-245-2)
    Softcover, Barnes & Noble

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    The Beautiful and Damned, by F. Scott Fitzgerald, is part of the Barnes & Noble Classics series, which offers quality editions at affordable prices to the student and the general reader, including new scholarship, thoughtful design, and pages of carefully crafted extras. Here are some of the remarkable features of Barnes & Noble Classics:
    All editions are beautifully designed and are printed to superior specifications; some include illustrations of historical interest. Barnes & Noble Classics pulls together a constellation of influences—biographical, historical, and literary—to enrich each reader's understanding of these enduring works.

    In 1921 F. Scott Fitzgerald was twenty-five and heralded as the most promising writer of his generation, owing to the success of his first novel This Side of Paradise. Recently married to the girl of his dreams, the former Zelda Sayre, Fitzgerald built upon his sudden prosperity with The Beautiful and the Damned, a cautionary tale of reckless ambition and squandered talent set amid the glitter of Jazz Age New York. 

    The novel chronicles the relationship of Anthony Patch, a Harvard-educated, aspiring writer, and his beautiful young wife, Gloria. While they wait for Anthonys grandfather to die and pass his millions on to them, the young couple enjoys an endless string of parties, traveling, and extravagance. Beginning with the pop and fizz of life itself, The Beautiful and the Damned quickly evolves into a scathing chronicle of a dying marriage and a hedonistic society in which beauty is all too fleeting.

    A fierce parable about the illusory quality of dreams, the intractable nature of reality, and the ruin wrought by time, The Beautiful and the Damned eerily anticipates the dissipation and decline that would come to the Fitzgeralds themselves before the decade had run its course.

    Pagan Harleman studied literature at Columbia College, then traveled extensively in the Middle East and West Africa before receiving an MFA from New York Universitys graduate film program. While at NYU she made several award-winning shorts and received the Deans Fellowship, the Steven Tisch Fellowship, and a Directors Craft Award.
    [via]

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  • Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors
    by Nicholas Wade
    ISBN 1594200793 (1-59420-079-3)
    Hardcover, Penguin Group USA

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    Based on a groundbreaking synthesis of recent scientific findings, an acclaimed New York Times science reporter tells a bold and provocative new story of the history of our ancient ancestors and the evolution of human nature

    Just in the last three years a flood of new scientific findings-driven by revelations discovered in the human genome-has provided compelling new answers to many long-standing mysteries about our most ancient ancestors-the people who first evolved in Africa and then went on to colonize the whole world. Critically acclaimed New York Times science reporter Nicholas Wade weaves this host of news-making findings together for the first time into an intriguing new history of the human story before the dawn of civilization. Sure to stimulate lively controversy, he makes the case for novel arguments about many hotly debated issues such as the evolution of language and race and the genetic roots of human nature, and reveals that human evolution has continued even to today.

    In wonderfully lively and lucid prose, Wade reveals the answers that researchers have ingeniously developed to so many puzzles: When did language emerge? When and why did we start to wear clothing? How did our ancestors break out of Africa and defeat the more physically powerful Neanderthals who stood in their way? Why did the different races evolve, and why did we come to speak so many different languages? When did we learn to live with animals and where and when did we domesticate man's first animal companions, dogs? How did human nature change during the thirty-five thousand years between the emergence of fully modern humans and the first settlements?

    Wade takes readers to the forefront of research in a sweeping and engrossing narrative unlike any other, the first to reveal how genetic discoveries are helping to weave together the perspectives of archaeology, paleontology, anthropology, linguistics, and many other fields. This will be the most talked about science book of the season. [via]

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  • De Maupassant, Henri Rene Guy: Bel Ami
    Bel Ami
    by Henri Rene Guy De Maupassant
    ISBN 159224422X (1-59224-422-X)
    Softcover, Wildside Pr

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  • The Book Of Five Rings
    by Miyamoto Musashi, Thomas Cleary
    ISBN 1590302486 (1-59030-248-6)
    Softcover, Shambhala Pubns

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    The Book of Five Rings is one of the most insightful texts on the subtle arts of confrontation and victory to emerge from Asian culture. Written not only for martial artists but for anyone who wants to apply the timeless principles of this text to their life, the book analyzes the process of struggle and mastery over conflict that underlies every level of human interaction.

    The Book of Five Rings was composed in 1643 by the famed duelist and undefeated samurai Miyamoto Musashi. Thomas Cleary's translation is immediately accessible, with an introduction that presents the spiritual background of the warrior tradition. Along with Musashi's text, Cleary translates here another important Japanese classic on leadership and strategy, The Book of Family Traditions on the Art of War by Yagyu Munenori, which highlights the ethical and spiritual insights of Taoism and Zen as they apply to the way of the warrior. [via]

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  • The Book Of Five Rings
    by Thomas Cleary, Miyamoto Musashi, Munenori Yagyu
    ISBN 1590300408 (1-59030-040-8)
    Hardcover, Random House Inc

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    The Book of Five Rings is one of the most insightful texts on the subtle arts of confrontation and victory to emerge from Asian culture. Written not only for martial artists but for anyone who wants to apply the timeless principles of this text to their life, the book analyzes the process of struggle and mastery over conflict that underlies every level of human interaction.

    The Book of Five Rings was composed in 1643 by the famed duelist and undefeated samurai Miyamoto Musashi. Thomas Cleary's translation is immediately accessible, with an introduction that presents the spiritual background of the warrior tradition. Along with Musashi's text, Cleary translates here another important Japanese classic on leadership and strategy, The Book of Family Traditions on the Art of War by Yagyu Munenori, which highlights the ethical and spiritual insights of Taoism and Zen as they apply to the way of the warrior. [via]

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  • The Book of Tea
    by K. Okakura, Sam Hamill
    ISBN 1590300831 (1-59030-083-1)
    Hardcover, Random House Inc

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    That a nation should construct one of its most resonant national ceremonies round a cup of tea will surely strike a chord of sympathy with at least some readers of this review. To many foreigners, nothing is so quintessentially Japanese as the tea ceremony--more properly, "the way of tea"--with its austerity, its extravagantly minimalist stylization, and its concentration of extreme subtleties of meaning into the simplest of actions. The Book of Tea is something of a curiosity: written in English by a Japanese scholar (and issued here in bilingual form), it was first published in 1906, in the wake of the naval victory over Russia with which Japan asserted its rapidly acquired status as a world-class military power. It was a peak moment of Westernization within Japan. Clearly, behind the publication was an agenda, or at least a mission to explain. Around its account of the ceremony, The Book of Tea folds an explication of the philosophy, first Taoist, later Zen Buddhist, that informs its oblique celebration of simplicity and directness--what Okakura calls, in a telling phrase, "moral geometry." And the ceremony itself? Its greatest practitioners have always been philosophers, but also artists, connoisseurs, collectors, gardeners, calligraphers, gourmets, flower arrangers. The greatest of them, Sen Rikyu, left a teasingly, maddeningly simple set of rules:

    Make a delicious bowl of tea; lay the charcoal so that it heats the water; arrange the flowers as they are in the field; in summer suggest coolness; in winter, warmth; do everything ahead of time; prepare for rain; and give those with whom you find yourself every consideration.
    A disciple remarked that this seemed elementary. Rikyu replied, "Then if you can host a tea gathering without deviating from any of the rules I have just stated, I will become your disciple." A Zen reply. Fascinating. --Robin Davidson, Amazon.co.uk [via]

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  • Bostonians
    by Henry James, Siri Hustvedt
    ISBN 1593082975 (1-59308-297-5)
    Softcover, Sterling Pub Co Inc

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    Book summary:

    The Bostonians, by Henry James, is part of the Barnes & Noble Classics series, which offers quality editions at affordable prices to the student and the general reader, including new scholarship, thoughtful design, and pages of carefully crafted extras. Here are some of the remarkable features of Barnes & Noble Classics:
    All editions are beautifully designed and are printed to superior specifications; some include illustrations of historical interest. Barnes & Noble Classics pulls together a constellation of influences—biographical, historical, and literary—to enrich each reader's understanding of these enduring works.

     

    Nearly a century before the birth of the contemporary feminist movement, Henry James dealt with its nineteenth-century forerunner in The Bostonians. Mixing acute social observation and psychological analysis with mordant humor, James hangs his story on a unique instance of the traditional romantic triangle. At its apex stands the vibrantly beautiful Verena Tarrant, an intense public speaker who arouses the passions of two very different people. Olive Chancellor, a Boston-bred suffragette, dreams of turning Verena into a fiery campaigner for womens rights. Basil Ransom, a Mississippi-bred lawyer, dreams of turning her into his wife. As these two struggle for possession of Verenas soul—and body—their confusions, crises, and conflicts begin almost preternaturally to prefigure todays sexual politics. In fact, Jamess complex portrait of Olive and her ideals, savagely satirical yet sympathetic and so controversial when it first appeared, continues to evoke both anger and admiration. But he treats Verena and Basil with equal complexity, climaxed by the novels quietly haunting final sentence.

    Siri Hustvedt earned a Ph.D. in English from Columbia University in 1986 and is the author of a book of poetry, Reading to You; three novels: The Blindfold, The Enchantment of Lily Dahl, and What I Loved; and a book of essays, Yonder.

    [via]

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  • Brilliant Orange: The Neurotic Genius of Dutch Soccer
    by David Winner
    ISBN 1585672580 (1-58567-258-0)
    Hardcover, Overlook Press, The

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    Brilliant Orange is a book about Dutch soccer that's not really about Dutch soccer. It's more about an enigmatic way of thinking peculiar to a people whose landscape is unrelentingly flat, mostly below sea level, and who owe their salvation to a boy who plugged a fractured dike with his little finger. If any one thing, Brilliant Orange is about Dutch space, and a people whose unique conception of it has led to some of the most enduring art, the weirdest architecture, and a bizarrely cerebral form of soccer-Total Football-that led in 1974 to a World Cup finals match with arch-rival Germany, and continues with its intricacy and oddity to mystify and delight observers around the world.

    "In the hot summer of 1975 Wim van Hanegem was offered the chance to leave his beloved Feyenoord and join the French club Olympique Marseilles. . . He couldn't decide what to do. . . So he turned to his dog: 'We can't decide. It's up to you now. If you want to go to Marseilles, bark or show me.' For several minutes the dog and Van Hanegem stared at each other. The dog didn't move. 'OK' said Wim, 'he doesn't want to go. We're staying."

    The cast stretches from anarchists and church painters to rabbis and skinheads, and of course, to Holland's beloved soccer players, whose eccentricities are wryly detailed by David Winner through hilarious anecdotes that call to mind Nick Hornby's Fever Pitch. As idiosyncratic as its subject, quirky and provocative, Brilliant Orange reaches out to the reader from an unsuspected place and never lets go.

    "Occasionally a book comes along that you fall in or out of love with on the basis of nothing more than the contents page . . . Brilliant Orange is one of those strangely informative books that will even entertain those who have little interest in either soccer or the Netherlands." (The Economist) [via]

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  • Canterbury Tales
    by Geoffrey Chaucer, Robert W. Hanning, Peter Tuttle
    ISBN 1593083122 (1-59308-312-2)
    Softcover, Barnes & Noble

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    Book summary:

    The Canterbury Tales, by Geoffrey Chaucer, is part of the Barnes & Noble Classics series, which offers quality editions at affordable prices to the student and the general reader, including new scholarship, thoughtful design, and pages of carefully crafted extras. Here are some of the remarkable features of Barnes & Noble Classics:
    • New introductions commissioned from today's top writers and scholars
    • Biographies of the authors
    • Chronologies of contemporary historical, biographical, and cultural events
    • Footnotes and endnotes
    • Selective discussions of imitations, parodies, poems, books, plays, paintings, operas, statuary, and films inspired by the work
    • Comments by other famous authors
    • Study questions to challenge the reader's viewpoints and expectations
    • Bibliographies for further reading
    • Indices & Glossaries, when appropriate
    All editions are beautifully designed and are printed to superior specifications; some include illustrations of historical interest. Barnes & Noble Classics pulls together a constellation of influencesbiographical, historical, and literaryto enrich each reader's understanding of these enduring works.

     

    Pilgrims on their way to worship at the shrine of Saint Thomas à Becket in Canterbury stop at the Tabard Inn. Representing a cross-section of medieval English society, the group includes a knight and his squire, a prioress, a friar, a miller, and a wife. To amuse themselves on their journey, they agree that each will tell a tale. These storiesby turns bawdy, hilarious, scurrilous, romantic, heroic, and movingreveal a great deal about the tellers and the world they live in, which, despite the distance of six hundred years, seems remarkably like our own. Indeed, the structure of The Canterbury Tales and the sophisticated, intricate interplay between the stories, their narrators, and the general narrator (himself a complex comic character) give the book its strikingly modern flavor.

     

    Often called the first book of poetry written in English, Chaucers masterpiece is also the first anthology of English short fiction, one that will resonate with readers for as long as folly and courage, deceit and generosity, love and jealousy remain part of the human personality.

     

    Robert W. Hanning is Professor of English at Columbia University, where he has taught since 1961. He has published The Vision of History in Early Britain, The Individual in Twelfth-Century Romance, The Lais of Marie de France (co-translated with Joan Ferrante), and Castiglione: the Ideal and the Real in Renaissance Culture (co-edited with David Rosand), as well as many articles on Chaucers poetry and other medieval and Renaissance subjects.

     

    Peter Tuttle's most recent poetry is Looking for a Sign in the West, published by Back Short in 2003.

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  • Rooney, Andy: Common Nonsense
    Common Nonsense
    by Andy Rooney
    ISBN 1586482009 (1-58648-200-9)
    Softcover, Public Affairs

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  • Daisy Miller
    by Henry James
    ISBN 1592243002 (1-59224-300-2)
    Softcover, Wildside Pr

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    It was in Rome during the autumn of 1877; a friend then living there but settled now in a South less weighted with appeals and memories happened to mention -- which she might perfectly not have done -- some simple and uninformed American lady of the previous winter, whose young daughter, a child of nature and of freedom, accompanying her from hotel to hotel, had "picked up" by the wayside, with the best conscience in the world, a good-looking Roman, of vague identity, astonished at his luck, yet (so far as might be, by the pair) all innocently, all serenely exhibited and introduced: this at least till the occurrence of some small social check, some interrupting incident, of no great gravity or dignity, and which I forget I had never heard, save on this showing, of the amiable but not otherwise eminent ladies, who weren't in fact named, I think, and whose case had merely served to point a familiar moral; and it must have been just their want of salience that left a margin for the small pencil-mark inveterately signifying, in such connections, "Dramatize, dramatize!" The result of my recognizing a few months later the sense of my pencil-mark was the short chronicle of DAISY MILLER. -- Henry James [via]

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  • Daisy Miller And Washington Square
    by Henry James
    ISBN 1593081057 (1-59308-105-7)
    Softcover, Sterling Pub Co Inc

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    Book summary:

    Daisy Miller and Washington Square, by Henry James, is part of the Barnes & Noble Classics series, which offers quality editions at affordable prices to the student and the general reader, including new scholarship, thoughtful design, and pages of carefully crafted extras. Here are some of the remarkable features of Barnes & Noble Classics:
    All editions are beautifully designed and are printed to superior specifications; some include illustrations of historical interest. Barnes & Noble Classics pulls together a constellation of influences—biographical, historical, and literary—to enrich each reader's understanding of these enduring works.

     

    Strikingly modern in its psychological insight, social observation and stylistic innovation, Henry Jamess fiction continues to attract and intrigue readers a century after its initial appearance. This volume offers two of his most popular and critically admired novellas: Daisy Miller and Washington Square.

    In Daisy Miller, James paints a vivid portrait of a vibrant young American girl visiting Europe for the first time. Lovely, flirtatious, eager for experience, Daisy meets a wealthy American, Mr. Winterbourne, and a penniless but passionate Italian. Her complex encounters with them and others allow James to explore one of his favorite themes, the effect of Americans and Europeans on each other.

    Washington Squares Catherine Sloper is Daisy Millers opposite. Neither pretty nor charming, she lives with her wealthy, widowed, tyrannical father, Dr. Austin Sloper, who can barely conceal his disdain for his shy, awkward daughter. When a handsome suitor, Morris Townsend, comes calling, Catherines father refuses to believe he is anything other than a heartless fortune hunter and sets out to destroy her romance.

    Jennie A. Kassanoff is Assistant Professor of English at Barnard College. Her articles have appeared in Arizona Quarterly and PMLA. Her book, Edith Wharton and the Politics of Race, is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press.

    [via]

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  • Democracy Matters: Winning the Fight Against Imperialism
    by Cornel West
    ISBN 1594200297 (1-59420-029-7)
    Hardcover, Penguin Group USA

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    In his major bestseller, Race Matters, philosopher Cornel West burst onto the national scene with his searing analysis of the scars of racism in American democracy. Race Matters has become a contemporary classic, still in print after ten years, having sold more than four hundred thousand copies. A mesmerizing speaker with a host of fervidly devoted fans, West gives as many as one hundred public lectures a year and appears regularly on radio and television. Praised by The New York Times for his "ferocious moral vision" and hailed by Newsweek as "an elegant prophet with attitude," he bridges the gap between black and white opinion about the country's problems.

    In Democracy Matters, West returns to the analysis of the arrested development of democracy-both in America and in the crisis-ridden Middle East. In a strikingly original diagnosis, he argues that if America is to become a better steward of democratization around the world, we must first wake up to the long history of imperialist corruption that has plagued our own democracy. Both our failure to foster peace in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the crisis of Islamist anti-Americanism stem largely from hypocrisies in our dealings with the world. Racism and imperial expansionism have gone hand in hand in our country's inexorable drive toward hegemony, and our current militarism is only the latest expression of that drive. Even as we are shocked by Islamic fundamentalism, our own brand of fundamentalism, which West dubs Constantinian Christianity, has joined forces with imperialist corporate and political elites in an unholy alliance, and four decades after the murder of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., insidious racism still inflicts debilitating psychic pain on so many of our citizens.

    But there is a deep democratic tradition in America of impassioned commitment to the fight against imperialist corruptions-the last great expression of which was the civil rights movement led by Dr. King-and West brings forth the powerful voices of that great democratizing tradition in a brilliant and deeply moving call for the revival of our better democratic nature. His impassioned and provocative argument for the revitalization of America's democracy will reshape the terms of the raging national debate about America's role in today's troubled world. [via]

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  • Glaser, Milton: The Design Of Dissent
    The Design Of Dissent
    by Milton Glaser, Mirko Ilic
    ISBN 1592531172 (1-59253-117-2)
    Hardcover, Quayside Pub Group

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  • The Design of Dissent: Socially And Politically Driven Graphics
    by Milton Glaser, Mirko Ilic, Tony Kushner
    ISBN 1592533078 (1-59253-307-8)
    Softcover, Quayside Pub Group

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    Book summary:

    Chosen by the Editors at Amazon.com as one of the top 50 Best Books of 2005 - Now in paperback!

    With the world's economy in a slump, the Middle East's never ending conflict, and the on-going war on terrorism, there is a heightened awareness in the world community of the many sides of the numerous issues that both directly and indirectly affect our lives. Increasingly, people are feeling powerless and underrepresented because they have no voice.

    Designers, however, have a voice. They are among the most influential bystanders because their skills enable them to communicate a message easily through the Web or through posters and printed pieces. A picture is worth a thousand words and designers have used this adage to their advantage for years by creating simple yet powerful designs that immediately convey the message to the viewer. The Design of Dissent focuses on graphic work that designers have made as a result of social and political concerns. The time is certainly ripe as the U.S., and world, flares in opposition on so many important issues.

    [via]

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  • Sudjic, Deyan: The Edifice Complex: How the Rich And Powerful Shape the World
    The Edifice Complex: How the Rich And Powerful Shape the World
    by Deyan Sudjic
    ISBN 1594200688 (1-59420-068-8)
    Hardcover, Penguin Group USA

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  • The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time
    by Jeffrey D. Sachs, Bono
    ISBN 1594200459 (1-59420-045-9)
    Hardcover, Penguin Group (USA) Incorporated

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    Book summary:

    Celebrated economist Jeffrey Sachs has a plan to eliminate extreme poverty around the world by 2025. If you think that is too ambitious or wildly unrealistic, you need to read this book. His focus is on the one billion poorest individuals around the world who are caught in a poverty trap of disease, physical isolation, environmental stress, political instability, and lack of access to capital, technology, medicine, and education. The goal is to help these people reach the first rung on the "ladder of economic development" so they can rise above mere subsistence level and achieve some control over their economic futures and their lives. To do this, Sachs proposes nine specific steps, which he explains in great detail in The End of Poverty. Though his plan certainly requires the help of rich nations, the financial assistance Sachs calls for is surprisingly modest--more than is now provided, but within the bounds of what has been promised in the past. For the U.S., for instance, it would mean raising foreign aid from just 0.14 percent of GNP to 0.7 percent. Sachs does not view such help as a handout but rather an investment in global economic growth that will add to the security of all nations. In presenting his argument, he offers a comprehensive education on global economics, including why globalization should be embraced rather than fought, why international institutions such as the United Nations, International Monetary Fund, and World Bank need to play a strong role in this effort, and the reasons why extreme poverty exists in the midst of great wealth. He also shatters some persistent myths about poor people and shows how developing nations can do more to help themselves.

    Despite some crushing statistics, The End of Poverty is a hopeful book. Based on a tremendous amount of data and his own experiences working as an economic advisor to the UN and several individual nations, Sachs makes a strong moral, economic, and political case for why countries and individuals should battle poverty with the same commitment and focus normally reserved for waging war. This important book not only makes the end of poverty seem realistic, but in the best interest of everyone on the planet, rich and poor alike. --Shawn Carkonen [via]

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  • Essays
    by Michel E. De Montaigne, Percival Chubb, John Florio
    ISBN 1591022703 (1-59102-270-3)
    Softcover, Prometheus Books

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    Living at a time of religious strife and the decline of the intellectual optimism that had begun in the Renaissance, Michel Eyquem de Montaigne (1533-1592) expressed in his writings both a deep skepticism about human affairs and a wide-ranging intellectual curiosity reflective of the age. Having witnessed firsthand the bloody armed conflicts, fanaticism, and persecutions that arose out of religious differences between French Catholics and Protestant Huguenots, Montaigne was especially skeptical about human claims to knowledge. For this reason he published, not systematic philosophy, but mere attempts at knowledge, essays in understanding, or essais, as he called them in French. He thus inaugurated a new literary genre that proved to be very influential.
    Despite his skepticism Montaigne realized that the intellectual horizon of his day was full of exciting new developments. The New World had only recently been discovered and explorers to many parts of the hitherto undiscovered world were bringing back reports of strange lands, people, and customs. At the same time the intellectual discoveries of the Renaissance had uncovered the powerful works of ancient Greek and Latin authors, and science, still in its infancy, was beginning to ask important new questions.
    The essays reflect all these interests, plus a refreshing honesty about the frailties of human nature. Montaigne writes about vanity, the value of friendship, constancy, idleness, liars, virtue, cowardice, prognostication, cannibals, the greatness of Rome, "That to Study Philosophy Is to Learn to Die," and a host of other topics.
    Filled with insights and keen observations that have inspired later writers as diverse as Shakespeare, Bacon, Voltaire, Rousseau, Flaubert, Virginia Woolf, and Roland Barthes, the Essays of Montaigne should be on the shelf of every student, scholar, and book lover. [via]

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  • Extraordinary Popular Delusions & the Madness of Crowds
    by Charles MacKay
    ISBN 1586635581 (1-58663-558-1)
    Hardcover, Sterling Pub Co Inc

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    Why do otherwise intelligent individuals form seething masses of idiocy when they engage in collective action? Why do financially sensible people jump lemming-like into hare-brained speculative frenzies--only to jump broker-like out of windows when their fantasies dissolve? We may think that the Great Crash of 1929, junk bonds of the '80s, and over-valued high-tech stocks of the '90s are peculiarly 20th century aberrations, but Mackay's classic--first published in 1841--shows that the madness and confusion of crowds knows no limits, and has no temporal bounds. These are extraordinarily illuminating,and, unfortunately, entertaining tales of chicanery, greed and naivete. Essential reading for any student of human nature or the transmission of ideas.

    In fact, cases such as Tulipomania in 1624--when Tulip bulbs traded at a higher price than gold--suggest the existence of what I would dub "Mackay's Law of Mass Action:" when it comes to the effect of social behavior on the intelligence of individuals, 1+1 is often less than 2, and sometimes considerably less than 0. [via]

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  • Fathers and Sons
    by Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
    ISBN 1592243851 (1-59224-385-1)
    Softcover, Wildside Pr

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    FATHERS AND SONS was the most closely studied of Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev's works in the Soviet high school curriculum. An inadvertent political agenda favorite, juxtaposing two generations, "the fathers," or the fading aristocracy, and "the sons," or the new fresh blood of the middle class and the nihilists, the novel seemed a perfect vehicle for portraying the brewing unrest of the pre-revolutionary era, and introduced the character of Bazarov -- the spirited nihilist who was seen as a brilliant idealistic rebel, the new kind of perfect man who rejected the old notions of class and came to disrupt nobility's status quo. Growing up, Turgenev witnessed much class injustice in Russia, and his themes reflect his overwhelming concern with the suffering of the poor and the voiceless serfs. But FATHERS AND SONS is not merely a convenient socio-political piece; Turgenev is a lyrical romantic. At the novel's heart lies the ultimately tragic human story of Bazarov's flippant kiss of a servant girl and the bizarre tension it causes in a cozy country gentry household where he is a guest. An important period classic. [via]

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  • Bourke, Joanna: Fear: A Cultural History
    Fear: A Cultural History
    by Joanna Bourke
    ISBN 1593761546 (1-59376-154-6)
    Softcover, Shoemaker & Hoard

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    Fear — the word, itself, conjures the appropriate response. With a dark cacophony of associations like fright, dread, horror, panic, alarm, anxiety, and terror, fear is universally understood as one of the most basic and powerful of human emotions, obtaining a nearly palpable and overwhelming substance in today's world.

    In this groundbreaking book, acclaimed historian and prize-winning author Joanna Bourke covers the landscape of fear over the past two hundred years: From the nineteenth century dread of being buried alive — a subject dear to the heart of Edgar Allen Poe — to the current worry over being able to die when one chooses; from the diagnoses of phobias and anxieties produced by psychotherapists and lovingly catalogued, to the role of popular culture and media in inciting panic and dread; from the horrors of the nuclear age to the fear of twenty-first century terrorism, Fear tells the story of anguish in modern times.

    A blend of social and cultural history with psychology, philosophy, and popular science, this astonishing book — exhaustively researched and beautifully written — offers strikingly original insights into the mind and worldview of the “long twentieth century from one of the most brilliant scholars of our time.
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  • Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq
    by Thomas E. Ricks
    ISBN 159420103X (1-59420-103-X)
    Hardcover, Penguin Group USA

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    Fiasco is a more strongly worded title than you might expect a seasoned military reporter such as Thomas E. Ricks to use, accustomed as he is to the even-handed style of daily newspaper journalism. But Ricks, the Pentagon correspondent for the Washington Post and the author of the acclaimed account of Marine Corps boot camp, Making the Corps, has written a thorough and devastating history of the war in Iraq from the planning stages through the continued insurgency in early 2006, and he does not shy away from naming those he finds responsible. His tragic story is divided in two. The first part--the runup to the war and the invasion in 2003--is familiar from books like Cobra II and Plan of Attack, although Ricks uses his many military sources to portray an officer class that was far more skeptical of the war beforehand than generally reported. But the heart of his book is the second half, beginning in August 2003, when, as he writes, the war really began, with the bombing of the Jordanian embassy and the emergence of the insurgency. His strongest critique is that the U.S. military failed to anticipate--and then failed to recognize--the insurgency, and tried to fight it with conventional methods that only fanned its flames. What makes his portrait particularly damning are the dozens of military sources--most of them on record--who join in his critique, and the thousands of pages of internal documents he uses to make his case for a war poorly planned and bravely but blindly fought. --Tom Nissley

    Making a Fiasco

    Thomas Ricks spent five tours in Iraq during the war, reporting for the Washington Post and researching and writing Fiasco. Like many of the officers he most admires, when he wanted to understand what was happening as American troops encountered stronger and longer-lived resistance to the occupation than expected, he turned to recent and classic accounts of insurgencies and counterinsurgencies, from the U.S. occupation of the Philippines through the lessons of Vietnam, and he reports on his favorites for us in his list of the 10 books for understanding Iraq that aren't about Iraq. You can also get a glimpse into his writing process with a much different list he has prepared for us: the music he listened to while writing and researching the book, from Stevie Wonder and Joni Mitchell to Ryan Adams and Josh Ritter. And he took the time to answer a few questions about Fiasco:

    Amazon.com: As military correspondent for the Post, you have made five trips to Iraq over the last four years. How has it changed over that time?

    Thomas E. Ricks: It has been markedly worse each time, in terms of security. On my first trip, in April-May 2003, we would walk out on the streets of Baghdad at night, albeit with caution. Even on my second trip, in the summer of 2003, I would feel comfortable hopping in a car and driving 100 miles north from Baghdad to Tikrit. To do either of those things now would be suicidal. In January and February of this year, Baghdad felt worse to me Mogadishu did when I was there in 1993 or Sarajevo did when I was there a few years later. It appeared to me that there was no security, except what you provided for yourself with armed men and careful planning. One Army major described the city to me as being in "the pure Hobbesian state" in which everybody is fighting everybody.

    By the way, contrary to what I see asserted occasionally, most reporters don't live in the Green Zone, the walled-off area in central Baghdad that is the headquarters of the American effort in Iraq. Reporters live out in the city, and I think generally have a better feel for what is going on than do people living in the Zone or on big American military bases. In the area of Baghdad I stayed in, I constantly heard gunfire and explosions. Yet an American colonel told me that my neighborhood was deemed "secure." I think that really meant that U.S. troops could drive through it while heavily armed--say, with a .50 caliber machine gun atop a Humvee--and usually not be attacked.

    I worry that what the Americans measure are threats to U.S. troops and the killings of Iraqis. That neglects a huge spectrum of other significant activities--rapes, robberies, kidnappings, acts of extortion, and, most importantly, acts of violent intimidation.

    Amazon.com: You cite many strategic errors in the planning and execution of the war, but perhaps the central one is that the U.S. military leadership failed to recognize that they were fighting an insurgency, and their methods of fighting in fact helped to create that insurgency. Can you explain those methods, and their effects?

    Ricks: The U.S. military that went into Iraq in 2003 was the best military in the world for fighting another military. But it was woefully unprepared for the task at hand. For example, U.S. military culture believes in bringing overwhelming force to bear. Yet classic counterinsurgency doctrine calls for using only the minimal amount of force necessary to get the job done. U.S. soldiers and their commanders, untrained and unschooled in the difficult art of counterinsurgency, tended to improvise. So in the summer of 2003, some soldiers in Baghdad decided that the best way to deter looters was to make them cry--and they sometimes did this by threatening to shoot the children of looters, and even conducting mock executions.

    More broadly, the Army in the fall of 2003 fell back on what it knew how to do, which was conduct large-scale "cordon-and-sweep" operations. These missions scarfed up thousands of Iraqis, most of them fence-sitting neutrals, and detained them. U.S. military intelligence officials later concluded that 85% of those detained were of no intelligence value. The detention experience frequently was humiliating for Iraqis, a violation of another key counterinsurgency principle: Treat your prisoners well. (Your readers who want to know more about this should read a terrific little book by David Galula titled Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice.)

    Not every unit was ineffective or counterproductive. I was struck at how successful the 101st Airborne was in Mosul in 2003-04. And some units showed remarkable improvement--the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment had a mediocre first tour of duty in Iraq, but when it went back in 2005 for a second tour, it did extremely well. Col. H.R. McMaster, the regimental commander (and author of a very good book about the Vietnam War, Dereliction of Duty) told his troops that, "Every time you disrespect an Iraqi, you are working for the enemy." I was especially struck by how his regiment handled its prisoners--it even had a program called "Ask the Customer" that quizzed detainees when they were released about whether they felt treated well. This recognized the lesson of past wars that the best way to end an insurgency is to get its leaders to put down their guns and enter the political system, and to get the rank-and-file to desert or switch sides. But it will be harder to discuss the sewage system with the new mayor next year if your troops beat him in his cell when he was your prisoner last year.

    Amazon.com: But today's military leadership was formed in Vietnam, when all of those lessons of counterinsurgency were supposedly learned before. Why didn't that experience translate into a preparation for the current conflict?

    Ricks: Military experts, such at Andrew Krepinevich (The Army and Vietnam) and Lt. Col. John Nagl (Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife) say that after that war ended, the Army washed its hands of the entire experience and essentially concluded that it was never going to do anything like that again. It was almost as if the very word "counterinsurgency" was banned from official Army discourse.

    In Iraq, there was a tiny minority of American soldiers early on who understood how to win the occupation. These generally were civil affairs officers and other Special Forces types. But their wisdom often was disregarded. "What you are seeing here is an unconventional war being fought conventionally," one Special Forces lieutenant colonel glumly commented one day in Baghdad.

    Amazon.com: You've been writing about the military for the Post and the Wall Street Journal for years now, and Fiasco is built from the testimony of a remarkable array of sources up and down the chain of command, some off the record but many more on the record. Can you talk about your sources? Is this level of public criticism of a war from within the military precedented??

    Ricks: Yeah, reporting the book was a pretty emotional experience. Even having covered this war as it unfolded, I was taken aback by the rage that some officers felt toward the Bush Administration, and especially toward Defense Secretary Rumsfeld. And also toward Paul Wolfowitz, who was then the no. 2 guy at the Pentagon. I think the rage is probably like what the military felt about Robert McNamara during the Vietnam War. What is unprecedented, I think, is that many officers had doubts about the wisdom of invading Iraq, especially in the way we did it.

    The emotions also hit me pretty hard at times, especially when I was writing my chapter 13, about how widespread abuse was by American soldiers in 2003-04, often because they hadn't been trained for the mission they faced. I have spent more than 15 years covering the military. I tend to like and admire these people. So when I learned about a 4th Infantry Division soldier shooting an unarmed, handcuffed Iraqi detainee in the stomach, and the investigating MPs saying the soldier should be charged with homicide, and instead the commander simply discharged the soldier from the Army--well, that bothered me.

    Another thing that struck me with sources was the mountain of information that was available. I read over 30,000 pages of documents for this book. At the end of one interview a guy gave me a CD-ROM with every e-mail he had sent to Ambassador Bremer, who ran the civilian end of the first year of the occupation. Other people showed me diaries, unit logs, official briefings, and such. Also the ACLU did a great job of obtaining and releasing piles of official U.S. military documents related to abuse--so I could see the time stamp on an e-mail in which an intelligence officer stated that "the gloves are coming off" in interrogations, and one soldier recommended blows to the chest while another wrote back recommending low-level electrocution.

    Unfortunately the Army wouldn't release the details of citations for valorous acts by soldiers, which means that the Pentagon made it easier for me to learn about the sins of soldiers than about their acts of bravery. The Marine Corps did give me those "narratives" that support the bestowing of medals, which I really appreciated. Those documents really brought home to me the fierceness of the two Battles of Fallujah, in April and November 2004--probably the toughest fighting American troops have seen since Hue and Khe Sanh in the Vietnam War.

    Amazon.com: In the last section of the book, you project a variety of possible scenarios for the next 10 years in the Middle East, mostly grim ones, and just in the past two weeks the sudden violence between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon is leading to talk of a wider regional conflict. Where do you think those events are leading us?

    Ricks: We are really in unexplored territory. We are carrying out the first-ever U.S. occupation of an Arab nation. This is also almost the first time we have engaged in sustained combat ground war with an all-volunteer force. (I think the suppression of the Philippines insurrection might count as a small precedent.)

    Even more significantly, I think the Bush Administration doesn't really like "stability" in the Middle East. In its view, "stability" has been the goal of previous administrations, but pursuing it led to 9/11. It is not the goal, it is the target. So they are for rolling the dice, both in Iraq and in Lebanon. I think the big worry is those wars spilling over borders. Fasten your seat belts.

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  • The Future of Work: How the New Order of Business Will Shape Your Organization, Your Management Style, and Your Life
    by Thomas W. Malone
    ISBN 1591391253 (1-59139-125-3)
    Hardcover, Harvard Business School Pr

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    A renowned visionary on organizational theory provides the first workable model for creating and managing within the organization of the future. Malone shows us that our current notions about decentralization and empowerment merely scratch the surface of what will be possible as technological and economic forces render "command and control" management obsolete. In its place will be a "coordinate and cultivate" approach that will spawn entirely new types of decentralized organizations - from internal markets to democracies to loose hierarchies that reap the scale and knowledge efficiencies of large organizations while enabling the freedom, flexibility, and human values that drive smaller firms. [via]

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  • Gag Rule: On the Suppression of Dissent and the Stifling of Democracy
    by Lewis Lapham
    ISBN 1594200173 (1-59420-017-3)
    Hardcover, Penguin Group USA

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    From one of America's most important voices of protest, an urgent new polemic about the stifling of the American public's capacity for meaningful dissent, the lifeblood of our democracy, at the hands of a government and media increasingly beholden only to the country's wealthy few.

    Dissent is democracy. Democracy is in trouble. Never before, argues Lewis Lapham, have voices of protest been so locked out of the mainstream political conversation: they are criminalized, marginalized, and muted by a government that recklessly disregards civil liberties and by an ever-more concentrated and profit-driven media, in which the safe and the selling sweep all uncomfortable truths from view. As a result, we face a crisis of democracy as serious as any in our history. Never has the public conversation been more in need of dissent, and never has protest been more effectively quarantined into zones where it has so little effect on the political process. Under the noses of a cowed and silenced populace, Lapham posits, the Bush regime is "assembling from the ruins of a democratic republic the corporate splendor of a precision-guided empire....What the Bush administration has in mind is not the defense of the American citizenry against a foreign enemy, but the protection of the American oligarchy from the American democracy."

    Dissent has always had a hard time of it, Lapham shows in a bravura short tour of political dissent in American history, and an especially hard one in time of war. The more ill defined the conflict and the more invisible the enemy, the worse it is for civil liberties, particularly the liberty to disagree. And now, just when the electorate is most narcotized and apathetic, spoon-fed its infotainment by a small gang of gigantic media conglomerates, and the government is in the hands of a terrifyingly self-righteous crew, comes a conflict, the "war on terror," that makes the hunt for Communists in the 1950s look like the Normandy landings on D-Day in its clarity of aim and purpose. It's a witch's brew that is pure poison for a living democracy.

    Gag Rule is a rousing and necessary call to action in defense of one of our most important liberties-the right to raise our voices against the powers that be and have those voices heard. [via]

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  • Good Earth
    by Pearl S. Buck
    ISBN 1587249057 (1-58724-905-7)
    Softcover, Wheeler Pub Inc

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    The story begins on the wedding day of farmer Wang Lung and follows his simple, often one-sided view of the Chinese culture, times, and his connection with the land. The land is a recurring theme throughout the novel, seemingly nurtured by the apparent protagonists, rejected and ruined by the antagonists. The author uses the House of Hwang, a nearby house of nobles, to contrast and predict their rise and fall. As the House of Hwang meets its slow and desperate end, Wang Lung rises.

    However, as the weather turns disastrous for farming, Wang Lung's family has to flee to the city to scrape out a meager living. Upon returning home, the family fares better. Wang Lung eventually becomes a prosperous man, his rise contrasting with the downfall of the Hwang family, who lose their connection to the land. At the end of the novel, when Wang Lung is an old man, he overhears his sons plotting to sell some of the land, thus showing the end of the cycle of wealth and downfall. [via]

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  • Schaefer, Carol: Grandmothers Counsel the World: Women Elders Offer Their Vision for Our Planet
    Grandmothers Counsel the World: Women Elders Offer Their Vision for Our Planet
    by Carol Schaefer, Winona Laduke
    ISBN 1590302931 (1-59030-293-1)
    Softcover, Shambhala Pubns

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  • Gulliver's Travels
    by Jonathan Swift, Michael Seidel
    ISBN 1593080573 (1-59308-057-3)
    Softcover, Sterling Pub Co Inc

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    Gulliver's Travels, by Jonathan Swift, is part of the Barnes & Noble Classics series, which offers quality editions at affordable prices to the student and the general reader, including new scholarship, thoughtful design, and pages of carefully crafted extras. Here are some of the remarkable features of Barnes & Noble Classics:
    All editions are beautifully designed and are printed to superior specifications; some include illustrations of historical interest. Barnes & Noble Classics pulls together a constellation of influences—biographical, historical, and literary—to enrich each reader's understanding of these enduring works.
     
    Considered the greatest satire ever written in English, Jonathan Swifts Gullivers Travels chronicles the fantastic voyages of Lemuel Gulliver, principally to four marvelous realms: Lilliput, where the people are six inches tall; Brobdingnag, a land inhabited by giants; Laputa, a wondrous flying island; and a country where the Houyhnhnms, a race of intelligent horses, are served by savage humanoid creatures called Yahoos.

    Beneath the surface of this enchanting fantasy lurks a devastating critique of human malevolence, stupidity, greed, vanity, and short-sightedness. A brilliant combination of adventure, humor, and philosophy, Gullivers Travels is one of literatures most durable masterpieces.

     

    Michael Seidel is Jesse and George Siegel Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University. He has written widely on eighteenth-century literature. His books include Satiric Inheritance: Rabelais to Sterne (1979), Exile and the Narrative Imagination (1986), and Robinson Crusoe: Island Myths and the Novel (1991).

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  • Hard Times
    by Charles Dickens, Karen Odden
    ISBN 1593081561 (1-59308-156-1)
    Softcover, Sterling Pub Co Inc

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    Hard Times, by Charles Dickens, is part of the Barnes & Noble Classics series, which offers quality editions at affordable prices to the student and the general reader, including new scholarship, thoughtful design, and pages of carefully crafted extras. Here are some of the remarkable features of Barnes & Noble Classics:
    New introductions commissioned from today's top writers and scholars Biographies of the authors Chronologies of contemporary historical, biographical, and cultural events Footnotes and endnotes Selective discussions of imitations, parodies, poems, books, plays, paintings, operas, statuary, and films inspired by the work Comments by other famous authors Study questions to challenge the reader's viewpoints and expectations Bibliographies for further reading Indices & Glossaries, when appropriateAll editions are beautifully designed and are printed to superior specifications; some include illustrations of historical interest. Barnes & Noble Classics pulls together a constellation of influencesbiographical, historical, and literaryto enrich each reader's understanding of these enduring works.
     
    Set amid smokestacks and factories, Charles Dickenss Hard Times is a blistering portrait of Victorian England as it struggles with the massive economic turmoil brought on by the Industrial Revolution.

    Championing the mind-numbing materialism of the period is Thomas Gradgrind, one of Dickenss most vivid characters. He opens the novel by arguing that boys and girls should be taught nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Forbidding the development of imagination, Gradgrind is ultimately forced to confront the results of his philosophyhis own daughters terrible unhappiness.
    Full of suspense, humor, and tenderness, Hard Times is a brilliant defense of art in an age of mechanism.

    Karen Odden received her Ph.D. from New York University, where she did her dissertation on Victorian literature. Most recently a lecturer at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, she is now a freelance writer and lives in Arizona.
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  • The Heart of Darkness
    by Joseph Conrad
    ISBN 159224646X (1-59224-646-X)
    Hardcover, Wildside Pr

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    JOSEPH CONRAD (1857-1924) was one of the most remarkable figures in English literature. Born in Poland, and originally named Josef Teodor Konrad Walecz Korzeniowski, he went to sea at the age of seventeen and eventually joined the crew of an English vessel, becoming a British citizen in the process. He retired from the sea in 1894 and took up the pen, writing all his works in English, a language he had only learned as an adult. Despite this, he was a master stylist, both lush and precise. His outsider's eye gave him special insights into the moral dangers of the great age of European empires. The book you hold in your hands -- Conrad's immortal HEART OF DARKNESS -- was the basis for the renowned film, APOCALYPSE NOW. [via]

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  • Bradsher, Keith: High and Mighty: Suvs--The World's Most Dangerous Vehicles and How They Got That Way
    High and Mighty: Suvs--The World's Most Dangerous Vehicles and How They Got That Way
    by Keith Bradsher
    ISBN 1586481231 (1-58648-123-1)
    Hardcover, Perseus Books Group

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  • Dewey, John: Human Nature and Conduct: An Introduction to Social Psychology
    Human Nature and Conduct: An Introduction to Social Psychology
    by John Dewey
    ISBN 1591020328 (1-59102-032-8)
    Softcover, Prometheus Books

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  • The Idiot: Library Edition
    by Fyodor Dostoevsky, Constance Black Garnett, Elina Yuffa
    ISBN 1593080581 (1-59308-058-1)
    Softcover, Sterling Pub Co Inc

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    The Idiot, by Fyodor Dostoevsky, is part of the Barnes & Noble Classics series, which offers quality editions at affordable prices to the student and the general reader, including new scholarship, thoughtful design, and pages of carefully crafted extras. Here are some of the remarkable features of Barnes & Noble Classics:
    New introductions commissioned from today's top writers and scholars Biographies of the authors Chronologies of contemporary historical, biographical, and cultural events Footnotes and endnotes Selective discussions of imitations, parodies, poems, books, plays, paintings, operas, statuary, and films inspired by the work Comments by other famous authors Study questions to challenge the reader's viewpoints and expectations Bibliographies for further reading Indices & Glossaries, when appropriateAll editions are beautifully designed and are printed to superior specifications; some include illustrations of historical interest. Barnes & Noble Classics pulls together a constellation of influencesbiographical, historical, and literaryto enrich each reader's understanding of these enduring works.
     
    Just two years after completing Crime and Punishment, which explored the mind of a murderer, Dostoevsky produced another masterpiece, The Idiot. This time the author portrays a truly beautiful soula character he found difficult to bring to life because, as he wrote, beauty is the ideal, and neither my country, nor civilized Europe, know what that ideal of beauty is. The result was one of Dostoevskys greatest charactersPrince Myshkin, a saintly, Christ-like, yet deeply human figure.

    The story begins when Myshkin arrives on Russian soil after a stay in a Swiss sanatorium. Scorned by St. Petersburg society as an idiot for his generosity and innocence, the prince finds himself at the center of a struggle between a rich, kept woman and a beautiful, virtuous girl, who both hope to win his affection. Unfortunately, Myshkins very goodness seems to bring disaster to everyone he meets. The shocking denouement tragically reveals how, in a world obsessed with money, power, and sexual conquest, a sanatorium is the only place for a saint.
     
    Joseph Frank is Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature at Princeton University and Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature and Slavic Languages and Literature at Stanford University. He is the author of a five-volume study of Dostoevskys life and work. The first four volumes received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography, two Christian Gauss Awards, two James Russell Lowell Awards of the Modern Language Association, a Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and other honors. Frank is also the author of Through the Russian Prism: Essays on Literature and Culture, The Widening Gyre, and The Idea of Spatial Form. He also wrote the introduction to the Barnes & Noble Classics edition of Dostoevskys The House of the Dead and Poor Folk.

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  • Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
    by Harriet A. Jacobs
    ISBN 1593082835 (1-59308-283-5)
    Softcover, Sterling Pub Co Inc

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    Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, by Harriet Jacobs, is part of the Barnes & Noble Classics series, which offers quality editions at affordable prices to the student and the general reader, including new scholarship, thoughtful design, and pages of carefully crafted extras. Here are some of the remarkable features of Barnes & Noble Classics:
    All editions are beautifully designed and are printed to superior specifications; some include illustrations of historical interest. Barnes & Noble Classics pulls together a constellation of influences—biographical, historical, and literary—to enrich each reader's understanding of these enduring works.

     

    In what has become a landmark of American history and literature, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl recounts the incredible but true story of Harriet Jacobs, born a slave in North Carolina in 1813. Her tale gains its importance from her descriptions, in great and painful detail, of the sexual exploitation that daily haunted her life—and the life of every other black female slave.

    As a child, Harriet Jacobs remained blissfully unaware that she was a slave until the deaths of both her mother and a benevolent mistress exposed her to a sexually predatory master, Dr. Flint. Determined to escape, she spends seven years hidden away in a garret in her grandmothers house, three feet high at its tallest point, with almost no air or light, and with only glimpses of her children to sustain her courage. In the face of seemingly insurmountable odds, she finally wins her battle for freedom by escaping to the North in 1842.

    A powerful, unflinching portrayal of the brutality of slave life, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl stands alongside Frederick Douglasss classic autobiographies as one of the most significant slave narratives ever written.

    Farah Jasmine Griffin is Professor of English and Comparative Literature and African American Studies at Columbia University in New York City.

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  • The Interpretation of Dreams
    by Sigmund Freud, Daniel T. O'Hara, A.A. Brill
    ISBN 1593082983 (1-59308-298-3)
    Softcover, Barnes & Noble

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    Book summary:

    Whether we love or hate Sigmund Freud, we all have to admit that he revolutionized the way we think about ourselves. Much of this revolution can be traced to The Interpretation of Dreams, the turn-of-the-century tour de force that outlined his theory of unconscious forces in the context of dream analysis. Introducing the id, the superego, and their problem child, the ego, Freud advanced scientific understanding of the mind immeasurably by exposing motivations normally invisible to our consciousness. While there's no question that his own biases and neuroses influenced his observations, the details are less important than the paradigm shift as a whole. After Freud, our interior lives became richer and vastly more mysterious.

    These mysteries clearly bothered him--he went to great (often absurd) lengths to explain dream imagery in terms of childhood sexual trauma, a component of his theory jettisoned mid-century, though now popular among recovered-memory therapists. His dispassionate analyses of his own dreams are excellent studies for cognitive scientists wishing to learn how to sacrifice their vanities for the cause of learning. Freud said of the work contained in The Interpretation of Dreams, "Insight such as this falls to one's lot but once in a lifetime." One would have to feel quite fortunate to shake the world even once. --Rob Lightner [via]

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  • Lady Chatterly's Lover
    by D. H. Lawrence, Susan Ostrov Weisser
    ISBN 1593082398 (1-59308-239-8)
    Softcover, Sterling Pub Co Inc

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    Perhaps the most famous of Lawrence's novels, the 1928 Lady Chatterley's Lover is no longer distinguished for the once-shockingly explicit treatment of its subject matter--the adulterous affair between a sexually unfulfilled upper-class married woman and the game keeper who works for the estate owned by her wheelchaired husband. Now that we're used to reading about sex, and seeing it in the movies, it's apparent that the novel is memorable for better reasons: namely, that Lawrence was a masterful and lyrical writer, whose story takes us bodily into the world of its characters. [via]

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  • Leaves of Grass
    by Walt Whitman, Karen Karbiener
    ISBN 1593080832 (1-59308-083-2)
    Softcover, Sterling Pub Co Inc

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    Book summary:

    Leaves of Grass (1855) is a poetry collection by the American poet Walt Whitman. Among the poems in the collection are "Song of Myself," "I Sing the Body Electric," and in later editions, Whitman's elegy to the assassinated President Abraham Lincoln, "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd." Whitman spent his entire life writing Leaves of Grass, revising it in several editions until his death.

    Leaves of Grass has its genesis in an essay called The Poet by Ralph Waldo Emerson, published in 1845, which expressed the need for the United States to have its own new and unique poet to write about the new country's virtues and vices. Whitman, reading the essay, consciously set out to answer Emerson's call as he began work on the first edition of Leaves of Grass. Whitman, however, downplayed Emerson's influence, stating, "I was simmering, simmering, simmering; Emerson brought me to a boil".



    On May 15, 1855, Whitman registered the title Leaves of Grass with the clerk of the United States District Court, Southern District of New Jersey, and received its copyright. The first edition was published in Brooklyn at the Fulton Street printing shop of two Scottish immigrants, James and Andrew Rome, whom Whitman had known since the 1840s, on July 4, 1855. Whitman paid for and did much of the typesetting for the first edition himself. The book did not include the author's name, instead offering an engraving by Samuel Hollyer depicting the poet in work clothes and a jaunty hat, arms at his side. Early advertisements for the first edition appealed to "lovers of literary curiosities" as an oddity. Sales on the book were few but Whitman was not discouraged.

    The first edition was very small, collecting only twelve unnamed poems in 95 pages. Whitman once said he intended the book to be small enough to be carried in a pocket. "That would tend to induce people to take me along with them and read me in the open air: I am nearly always successful with the reader in the open air. "About 800 were printed, though only 200 were bound in its trademark green cloth cover. The only American library known to have purchased a copy of the first edition was in Philadelphia. The poems of the first edition, which were given titles in later issues, were "Song of Myself," "A Song For Occupations," "To Think of Time," "The Sleepers," "I Sing the Body Electric," "Faces," "Song of the Answerer," "Europe: The 72d and 73d Years of These States," "A Boston Ballad," "There Was a Child Went Forth," "Who Learns My Lesson Complete?", and "Great Are the Myths."

    The title Leaves of Grass was a pun. "Grass" was a term given by publishers to works of minor value and "leaves" is another name for the pages on which they were printed.

    Whitman sent a copy of the first edition of Leaves of Grass to Emerson, the man who had inspired its creation. In a letter to Whitman, Emerson said "I find it the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom America has yet contributed." He went on, "I am very happy in reading it, as great power makes us happy." [via]

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  • Les Liaisons Dangereuses
    by Choderlos De Laclos, Alfred MacAdam, Ernest Christopher Dowson
    ISBN 1593082401 (1-59308-240-1)
    Softcover, Sterling Pub Co Inc

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    Les Liaisons Dangereuses, by Peirre Choderlos de Laclos, is part of the Barnes & Noble Classics series, which offers quality editions at affordable prices to the student and the general reader, including new scholarship, thoughtful design, and pages of carefully crafted extras. Here are some of the remarkable features of Barnes & Noble Classics:
    All editions are beautifully designed and are printed to superior specifications; some include illustrations of historical interest. Barnes & Noble Classics pulls together a constellation of influences—biographical, historical, and literary—to enrich each reader's understanding of these enduring works.
     
    Love . . . sex . . . seduction. Of the three, only the last matters. Love is a meaningless word, and sex an ephemeral pleasure, but seduction is an amusing game in which victory means power and the ability to humiliate ones enemies and revel with ones friends. So it is for the Vicomte de Valmont and the Marquise de Merteuil, two supremely bored aristocrats during the final years before the French Revolution. Together they concoct a wildly wicked wager: If Valmont can successfully seduce the virtuous wife of a government official, Madame de Tourvel, then Madame Merteuil will sleep with him again. But Madame Merteuil also wants Valmont to conquer the young and innocent former convent schoolgirl, Cécile Volanges. Can he do both?

    When Les Liaisons Dangereuses was first published in 1782, it both scandalized and titillated the aristocracy it was aimed against, who publicly denounced it and privately devoured it. Today we still recognize its relevance, for what could be more contemporary than its appalling image of everyday evil — small, selfish, manipulative, and mean.
     
    Alfred Mac Adam, Professor at Barnard College–Columbia University, teaches Latin American and comparative literature. He is a translator of Latin American fiction and writes extensively on art.
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  • Les Miserables
    by Victor Hugo, Charles E. Wilbour, Laurence M. Porter
    ISBN 1593080662 (1-59308-066-2)
    Softcover, Sterling Pub Co Inc

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    Les Miserables, by Victor Hugo, is part of the Barnes & Noble Classics series, which offers quality editions at affordable prices to the student and the general reader, including new scholarship, thoughtful design, and pages of carefully crafted extras. Here are some of the remarkable features of Barnes & Noble Classics:
    All editions are beautifully designed and are printed to superior specifications; some include illustrations of historical interest. Barnes & Noble Classics pulls together a constellation of influences—biographical, historical, and literary—to enrich each reader's understanding of these enduring works.
     
    One of the most widely read novels of all time, Les Misérables was the crowning literary achievement of Victor Hugos stunning career. Though he was considered the greatest French writer of his day, Hugo was forced to flee the country because of his opposition to Napoleon III. While in exile he completed Les Misérables, an enormous melodrama set against the background of political upheaval in France following the rule of Napoleon I.

    This newly abridged edition of Les Misérables tells the story of the peasant Jean Valjean—unjustly imprisoned, baffled by destiny, and hounded by his nemesis, the magnificently realized, ambiguously malevolent police detective Javert. As Valjean struggles to redeem his past, we are thrust into the teeming underworld of Paris with all its poverty, ignorance, and suffering. Just as cruel tyranny threatens to extinguish the last vestiges of hope, rebellion sweeps over the land like wildfire, igniting a vast struggle for the democratic ideal in France.

    A monumental classic dedicated to the oppressed, the underdog, the laborer, the rebel, the orphan, and the misunderstood, Les Misérables is a rich, emotional novel that captures nothing less than the entirety of life in nineteenth-century France.

    Laurence M. Porter has published twelve books, including Victor Hugo (1999), and a hundred articles and chapters. He was a National Endowment for the Humanties Senior Fellow in 1998. He teaches French at Michigan State University, where he won the Distinguished Faculty Award in 1995.

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  • Lies (And the Lying Liars Who Tell Them): A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right
    by Al Franken
    ISBN 1594130388 (1-59413-038-8)
    Softcover, Large Print Pr

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    Having previously dissected the factual inaccuracies of a single bellicose talk show host in Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot, Al Franken takes his fight to a larger foe: President George W. Bush, the Bush Administration, Ann Coulter, Bill OReilly, and scores of other conservatives whom, he says, are playing loose with the facts. It's a lot of ground to cover, as evidenced by the 43 chapters in Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them, but the results are often entertaining and insightful. Franken occupies a unique place in the modern political dialogue as perhaps the media's only comedy writer and performer who is also a Harvard fellow as well as a liberal political commentator. This unique and vaguely lonely position lends a charming quixotic quality to adventures such as a tense encounter with the Fox News staff at the National Press Club, a challenge to fisticuffs with National Review Editor Rich Lowry, and an oddly sweet admissions visit to ultra-conservative Bob Jones University (with a young research assistant posing as his son when Franken's real-life son refuses to participate in the charade). Less useful are comic book dramatizations of "Supply Side Jesus" and a fictitious Vietnam War story featuring the numerous righties who, Franken intimates, improperly avoided service. And Franken's criticisms of conservative talk show hosts Sean Hannity, OReilly, and columnist Coulter, while admirable in their attention to detail, fail to shed much new light on people who have built careers on broad arguments and relentless self-aggrandizement. But Franken is at his best, and most compellingly readable, when he backs off the wackiness and the personal grudges and writes about more personal matters such as the political circus surrounding the memorial service of the late Senator Paul Wellstone. But even on these more serious topics, Franken's wit is still present and, in fact, grows sharper. In a time when much political discourse is composed of rage and shouting, it's refreshing that Al Franken is able to shout in a witty manner. --John Moe [via]

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  • Lighthouses
    by Virginia Woolf, Valerie E. Kenney
    ISBN 1586631489 (1-58663-148-9)
    Hardcover, Sterling Pub Co Inc

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    A visual celebration of the magnificent and romantic structures that have guided seafarers for generations. Introduction by the founder of the Lighthouse Preservation Society. 75 photos. [via]

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  • Looking Backward, 2000-1887
    by Edward Bellamy
    ISBN 1594084882 (1-59408-488-2)
    Hardcover, Cork Hill Press

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    Book summary:

    This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book. [via]

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  • The Lord of the Rings
    by J. R. R. Tolkien, SparkNotes Staff
    ISBN 1586637908 (1-58663-790-8)
    Softcover, Spark Publishing Group

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    Featuring explanations of key themes, Motifs, and Symbols including: The ambiguity of evil Fellowship Redemption Songs of singing The natural world The ring And detailed analysis of these important characters: Fordo baggings Sam Gamgee Gandalf Aragorn Pippin took Gollum [via]

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  • The Lovely Bones: A Novel
    by Alice Sebold
    ISBN 159413023X (1-59413-023-X)
    Softcover, Thorndike Press

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    On her way home from school on a snowy December day, 14-year-old Susie Salmon is lured into a cornfield and brutally raped and murdered, the latest victim of a serial killer. The Lovely Bones, Alice Sebold's haunting and heartbreaking debut novel, unfolds from heaven, where "life is a perpetual yesterday" and where Susie narrates and keeps watch over her grieving family and friends, as well as her brazen killer and the sad detective working on her case.

    As Sebold fashions it, everyone has his or her own version of heaven. Susie's resembles the athletic fields and landscape of a suburban high school: a heaven of her "simplest dreams", where "there were no teachers... We never had to go inside except for art class... The boys did not pinch our backsides or tell us we smelled; our textbooks were Seventeen and Glamour and Vogue".

    The Lovely Bones works as an odd yet affecting coming-of-age story. Susie struggles to accept her death while still clinging to the lost world of the living, following her family's dramas over the years. Her family disintegrates in their grief: her father becomes determined to find her killer, her mother withdraws, her little brother Buckley attempts to make sense of the new hole in his family and her younger sister Lindsey moves through the milestone events of her teenage and young adult years with Susie riding spiritual shotgun. Random acts and missed opportunities run throughout the book--Susie recalls her sole kiss with a boy on earth as "like an accident--a beautiful gasoline rainbow".

    Though sentimental at times, The Lovely Bones is a moving exploration of loss and mourning that ultimately puts its faith in the living and that is made even more powerful by a cast of convincing characters. Sebold orchestrates a big finish and though things tend to wrap up a little too well for everyone in the end, one can only imagine (or hope) that heaven is indeed a place filled with such happy endings. --Brad Thomas Parsons, Amazon.com [via]

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  • Mein Kampf
    by Adolf Hitler, James Murphy
    ISBN 1593640064 (1-59364-006-4)
    Hardcover, Liberty Bell Pubns

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    The angry ranting of an obscure, small-party politician, the first volume of Mein Kampf was virtually ignored when it was originally published in 1925. Likewise the second volume, which appeared in 1926. The book details Hitler's childhood, the "betrayal" of Germany in World War I, the desire for revenge against France, the need for lebensraum for the German people, and the means by which the National Socialist party can gain power. It also includes Hitler's racist agenda and his glorification of the "Aryan" race. The few outside the Nazi party who read it dismissed it as nonsense, not believing that anyone could--or would--carry out its radical, terrorist programs. As Hitler and the Nazis gained power, first party members and then the general public were pressured to buy the book. By the time Hitler became chancellor of the Third Reich in 1933, the book stood atop the German bestseller lists. Had the book been taken seriously when it was first published, perhaps the 20th century would have been very different.

    Beyond the anger, hatred, bigotry, and self-aggrandizing, Mein Kampf is saddled with tortured prose, meandering narrative, and tangled metaphors (one person was described as "a thorn in the eyes of venal officials"). That said, it is an incredibly important book. It is foolish to think that the Holocaust could not happen again, especially if World War II and its horrors are forgotten. As an Amazon.com reader has pointed out, "If you want to learn about why the Holocaust happened, you can't avoid reading the words of the man who was most responsible for it happening." Mein Kampf, therefore, must be read as a reminder that evil can all too easily grow. --Sunny Delaney [via]

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  • The Metamorphosis and Other Stories
    by Franz Kafka, Donna Freed, Jason Baker
    ISBN 1593080298 (1-59308-029-8)
    Softcover, Sterling Pub Co Inc

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    The Metamorphosis and Other Stories, by Franz Kafka, is part of the Barnes & Noble Classics series, which offers quality editions at affordable prices to the student and the general reader, including new scholarship, thoughtful design, and pages of carefully crafted extras. Here are some of the remarkable features of Barnes & Noble Classics:
    New introductions commissioned from today's top writers and scholars Biographies of the authors Chronologies of contemporary historical, biographical, and cultural events Footnotes and endnotes Selective discussions of imitations, parodies, poems, books, plays, paintings, operas, statuary, and films inspired by the work Comments by other famous authors Study questions to challenge the reader's viewpoints and expectations Bibliographies for further reading Indices & Glossaries, when appropriateAll editions are beautifully designed and are printed to superior specifications; some include illustrations of historical interest. Barnes & Noble Classics pulls together a constellation of influencesbiographical, historical, and literaryto enrich each reader's understanding of these enduring works.

     
    Virtually unknown during his lifetime, Franz Kafka is now one of the worlds most widely read and discussed authors. His nightmarish novels and short stories have come to symbolize modern mans anxiety and alienation in a bizarre, hostile, and dehumanized world. This vision is most fully realized in Kafkas masterpiece, The Metamorphosis, a story that is both harrowing and amusing, and a landmark of modern literature.

    Bringing together some of Kafkas finest work, this collection demonstrates the richness and variety of the authors artistry. The Judgment, which Kafka considered to be his decisive breakthrough, and The Stoker, which became the first chapter of his novel Amerika, are here included. These two, along with The Metamorphosis, form a suite of stories Kafka referred to as The Sons, and they collectively present a devastating portrait of the modern family.



    Also included are In the Penal Colony, a story of a torture machine and its operators and victims, and A Hunger Artist, about the absurdity of an artist trying to communicate with a misunderstanding public. Kafkas lucid, succinct writing chronicles the labyrinthine complexities, the futility-laden horror, and the stifling oppressiveness that permeate his vision of modern life.

    Jason Baker is a writer of short stories living in Brooklyn, New York.

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  • Moby Dick
    by Herman Melville, George Stade, Carl F. Hovde
    ISBN 1593080182 (1-59308-018-2)
    Softcover, Sterling Pub Co Inc

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    Moby-Dick, by Herman Melville, is part of the Barnes & Noble Classics series, which offers quality editions at affordable prices to the student and the general reader, including new scholarship, thoughtful design, and pages of carefully crafted extras. Here are some of the remarkable features of Barnes & Noble Classics:

    New introductions commissioned from today's top writers and scholars Biographies of the authors Chronologies of contemporary historical, biographical, and cultural events Footnotes and endnotes Selective discussions of imitations, parodies, poems, books, plays, paintings, operas, statuary, and films inspired by the work Comments by other famous authors Study questions to challenge the reader's viewpoints and expectations Bibliographies for further reading Indices & Glossaries, when appropriateAll editions are beautifully designed and are printed to superior specifications; some include illustrations of historical interest. Barnes & Noble Classics pulls together a constellation of influencesbiographical, historical, and literaryto enrich each reader's understanding of these enduring works.

     

    On a previous voyage, a mysterious white whale had ripped off the leg of a sea captain named Ahab. Now the crew of the Pequod, on a pursuit that features constant adventure and horrendous mishaps, must follow the mad Ahab into the abyss to satisfy his unslakeable thirst for vengeance. Narrated by the cunningly observant crew member Ishmael, Moby-Dick is the tale of the hunt for the elusive, omnipotent, and ultimately mystifying white whaleMoby Dick.

     

    On its surface, Moby-Dick is a vivid documentary of life aboard a nineteenth-century whaler, a virtual encyclopedia of whales and whaling, replete with facts, legends, and trivia that Melville had gleaned from personal experience and scores of sources. But as the quest for the whale becomes increasingly perilous, the tale works on allegorical levels, likening the whale to human greed, moral consequence, good, evil, and life itself. Who is good? The great white whale who, like Nature, asks nothing but to be left in peace? Or the bold Ahab who, like scientists, explorers, and philosophers, fearlessly probes the mysteries of the universe? Who is evil? The ferocious, man-killing sea monster? Or the revenge-obsessed madman who ignores his own better nature in his quest to kill the beast?

     

    Scorned by critics upon its publication, Moby-Dick was publicly derided during its authors lifetime. Yet Melvilles masterpiece has outlived its initial misunderstanding to become an American classic of unquestionably epic proportions.

     

    Includes an extensive Dictionary of Sea Terms (37 pages).



    Carl F. Hovde taught at Columbia University for thirty-five years. An editor for the Princeton University Press edition of Henry David Thoreau, he has also written about Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry James, and William Faulkner.

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  • Bellaccomo, Josephine: Move the Message: Your Guide to Making A Difference and Changing the World
    Move the Message: Your Guide to Making A Difference and Changing the World
    by Josephine Bellaccomo
    ISBN 1590560299 (1-59056-029-9)
    Softcover, Rudolf Steiner Pr

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  • Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies
    by Ian Buruma, Avishai Margalit
    ISBN 1594200084 (1-59420-008-4)
    Hardcover, Penguin Group USA

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    Book summary:

    A pioneering investigation of the lineage of anti-Western stereotypes that traces them back to the West itself.

    Twenty-five years ago, Edward Said's Orientalism spawned a generation of scholarship on the denigrating and dangerous mirage of "the East" in the Western colonial mind. But "the West" is the more dangerous mirage of our own time, Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit argue, and the idea of "the West" in the minds of its self-proclaimed enemies remains largely unexamined and woefully misunderstood. Occidentalism is their groundbreaking investigation of the demonizing fantasies and stereotypes about the Western world that fuel such hatred in the hearts of others.

    We generally understand "radical Islam" as a purely Islamic phenomenon, but Buruma and Margalit show that while the Islamic part of radical Islam certainly is, the radical part owes a primary debt of inheritance to the West. Whatever else they are, al Qaeda and its ilk are revolutionary anti-Western political movements, and Buruma and Margalit show us that the bogeyman of the West who stalks their thinking is the same one who has haunted the thoughts of many other revolutionary groups, going back to the early nineteenth century. In this genealogy of the components of the anti-Western worldview, the same oppositions appear again and again: the heroic revolutionary versus the timid, soft bourgeois; the rootless, deracinated cosmopolitan living in the Western city, cut off from the roots of a spiritually healthy society; the sterile Western mind, all reason and no soul; the machine society, controlled from the center by a cabal of insiders-often Jews-pulling the hidden levers of power versus an organically knit-together one, a society of "blood and soil." The anti-Western virus has found a ready host in the Islamic world for a number of legitimate reasons, they argue, but in no way does that make it an exclusively Islamic matter.

    A work of extraordinary range and erudition, Occidentalism will permanently enlarge our collective frame of vision. [via]

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  • Wilsey, Sean: Oh The Glory Of It All
    Oh The Glory Of It All
    by Sean Wilsey
    ISBN 1594200513 (1-59420-051-3)
    Hardcover, Penguin Group USA

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  • On Beauty
    by Zadie Smith
    ISBN 1594200637 (1-59420-063-7)
    Hardcover, Penguin Group USA

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    In an author's note at the end of On Beauty, Zadie Smith writes: "My largest structural debt should be obvious to any E.M. Forster fan; suffice it to say he gave me a classy old frame, which I covered with new material as best I could." If it is true that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, Forster, perched on a cloud somewhere, should be all puffed up with pride. His disciple has taken Howards End, that marvelous tale of class difference, and upped the ante by adding race, politics, and gender. The end result is a story for the 21st century, told with a perfect ear for everything: gangsta street talk; academic posturing, both British and American; down-home black Floridian straight talk; and sassy, profane kids, both black and white.

    Howard Belsey is a middle-class white liberal Englishman teaching abroad at Wellington, a thinly disguised version of one of the Ivies. He is a Rembrandt scholar who can't finish his book and a recent adulterer whose marriage is now on the slippery slope to disaster. His wife, Kiki, a black Floridian, is a warm, generous, competent wife, mother, and medical worker. Their children are Jerome, disgusted by his father's behavior, Zora, Wellington sophomore firebrand feminist and Levi, eager to be taken for a "homey," complete with baggy pants, hoodies and the ever-present iPod. This family has no secrets--at least not for long. They talk about everything, appropriate to the occasion or not. And, there is plenty to talk about.

    The other half of the story is that of the Kipps family: Monty, stiff, wealthy ultra-conservative vocal Christian and Rembrandt scholar, whose book has been published. His wife Carlene is always slightly out of focus, and that's the way she wants it. She wafts over all proceedings, never really connecting with anyone. That seems to be endemic in the Kipps household. Son Michael is a bit of a Monty clone and daughter Victoria is not at all what Daddy thinks she is. Indeed, Forster's advice, "Only connect," is lost on this group.

    The two academics have long been rivals, detesting each other's politics and disagreeing about Rembrandt. They are thrown into further conflict when Jerome leaves Wellington to get away from the discovery of his father's affair, lands on the Kipps' doorstep, falls for Victoria and mistakes what he has going with her for love. Howard makes it worse by trying to fix it. Then, Kipps is granted a visiting professorship at Wellington and the whole family arrives in Massachusetts.

    From this raw material, Smith has fashioned a superb book, her best to date. She has interwoven class, race, and gender and taken everyone prisoner. Her even-handed renditions of liberal and/or conservative mouthings are insightful, often hilarious, and damning to all. She has a great time exposing everyone's clay feet. This author is a young woman cynical beyond her years, and we are all richer for it. --Valerie Ryan [via]

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  • The Ox-Bow Incident
    by Walter Van Tilburg Clark
    ISBN 158547701X (1-58547-701-X)
    Hardcover, Center Point Pub

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    Book summary:

    Novel about the lynching of three innocent men on the western frontier. [via]

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  • Paradise Lost
    by John Milton
    ISBN 1593080956 (1-59308-095-6)
    Softcover, Sterling Pub Co Inc

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    Paradise Lost, by John Milton, is part of the Barnes & Noble Classics series, which offers quality editions at affordable prices to the student and the general reader, including new scholarship, thoughtful design, and pages of carefully crafted extras. Here are some of the remarkable features of Barnes & Noble Classics:
    New introductions commissioned from today's top writers and scholars Biographies of the authors Chronologies of contemporary historical, biographical, and cultural events Footnotes and endnotes Selective discussions of imitations, parodies, poems, books, plays, paintings, operas, statuary, and films inspired by the work Comments by other famous authors Study questions to challenge the reader's viewpoints and expectations Bibliographies for further reading Indices & Glossaries, when appropriateAll editions are beautifully designed and are printed to superior specifications; some include illustrations of historical interest. Barnes & Noble Classics pulls together a constellation of influencesbiographical, historical, and literaryto enrich each reader's understanding of these enduring works.
     

    As a young student, John Milton fantasized about bringing the poetic elocution of Homer and Virgil to the English language. Milton realized this dream with his graceful, sonorous Paradise Lost, now considered the most influential epic poem in English literature.

     

    A retelling of the biblical story of mankinds fall from grace, Miltons epic opens shortly after the dramatic expulsion of Satan and his army of angels from Heaven. What follows is a cosmic battle between good and evil that ranges across vast, splendid tracts of time and space, from the wild abyss of Chaos and the fiery lake of Hell to the Gate of Heaven and Gods newly created paradise, the Garden of Eden. Controversy still swirls around Miltons magnificent and sympathetic characterization of Satan, a portrait so compelling that many critics have maintained that he is the true hero of the story.
     
    David Hawkes is Associate Professor of English at Lehigh University. His books include Idols of the Marketplace (2001) and Ideology (second edition, 2003), and he has contributed articles to The Nation, the Times Literary Supplement, and the Journal of the History of Ideas. 
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  • The Portrait of a Lady
    by Henry James
    ISBN 1593080964 (1-59308-096-4)
    Softcover, Sterling Pub Co Inc

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    The Portrait of a Lady, by Henry James, is part of the Barnes & Noble Classics series, which offers quality editions at affordable prices to the student and the general reader, including new scholarship, thoughtful design, and pages of carefully crafted extras. Here are some of the remarkable features of Barnes & Noble Classics:
    All editions are beautifully designed and are printed to superior specifications; some include illustrations of historical interest. Barnes & Noble Classics pulls together a constellation of influences—biographical, historical, and literary—to enrich each reader's understanding of these enduring works.

     

    Widely regarded as Henry Jamess greatest masterpiece, The Portrait of a Lady features one of the authors most magnificent heroines: Isabel Archer, a beautiful, spirited American who becomes a victim of her provincialism during her travels in Europe.

    As the story begins, Isabel, resolved to determine her own fate, has turned down two eligible suitors. Her cousin, who is dying of tuberculosis, secretly gives her an inheritance so that she can remain independent and fulfill a grand destiny, but the fortune only leads her to make a tragic choice and marry Gilbert Osmond, an American expatriate who lives in Florence. Outwardly charming and cultivated, but fundamentally cold and cruel, Osmond only brings heartbreak and ruin to Isabels life. Yet she survives as she begins to realize that true freedom means living with her choices and their consequences.

    Richly complex and nearly aesthetically perfect, The Portrait of a Lady brilliantly portrays the clash between the innocence and exuberance of the New World and the corruption and wisdom of the Old.

    Gabriel Brownstein is the author of a collection of stories—The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Apt 3W—which won the 2002 PEN/Hemingway Award. His essays, reviews, and criticism have appeared in the Boston Globe, the New Leader, Scribners British Writers, and on Nerve.com.

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  • Portrait Of An Artist As A Young Man And Dubliners
    by James Joyce
    ISBN 159308031X (1-59308-031-X)
    Softcover, Sterling Pub Co Inc

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  • Twain, Mark: Pudd'nhead Wilson and Those Extraordinary Twins
    Pudd'nhead Wilson and Those Extraordinary Twins
    by Mark Twain, Darryl Pinckney
    ISBN 159308255X (1-59308-255-X)
    Softcover, Barnes & Noble

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  • The Return of the Native
    by Thomas Hardy, Lauren Walsh
    ISBN 1593082207 (1-59308-220-7)
    Softcover, Sterling Pub Co Inc

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    The Return of the Native, by Thomas Hardy, is part of the Barnes & Noble Classics series, which offers quality editions at affordable prices to the student and the general reader, including new scholarship, thoughtful design, and pages of carefully crafted extras. Here are some of the remarkable features of Barnes & Noble Classics:
    All editions are beautifully designed and are printed to superior specifications; some include illustrations of historical interest. Barnes & Noble Classics pulls together a constellation of influences—biographical, historical, and literary—to enrich each reader's understanding of these enduring works.
     
    A haunting tale of romantic self-deception, The Return of the Native focuses on mismatched lovers who see in each other only what they want to see, and decidedly not what is actually there.

    Clym Yeobright, the native of the title, returns to Hardys fictional Egdon Heath determined to be a force for social progress. Dazzled by the beauty of Eustacia Vye, he imagines theyre soul mates, woos and wins her, and enters into what is at first a passionate marriage. He soon discovers that what she really wants is a passport to a more exciting and sophisticated life, away from provincial England. Surrounding them are Clyms mother, strongly opposed to his marriage; Damon Wildeve, in love with Eustacia but married to Clyms cousin, Thomasin; and the oddly ambiguous observer Diggory Venn, whose frustrated love for Thomasin turns him into either a guardian angel or a jealous manipulator—or perhaps both. This stew of curdled love and conflicting emotions can only boil over into tragedy, and the books darkly ironic ending marks it as both a classically Victorian novel and a forerunner of the modernist fiction that followed it.
     
    Lauren Walsh teaches a writing seminar at Columbia University, where she is completing her Ph.D. in English and Comparative Literature.
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  • Right Ho Jeeves
    by P.G. Wodehouse
    ISBN 1585670588 (1-58567-058-8)
    Hardcover, Penguin Group USA

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    On the 25th anniversary of Wodehouse's death, booksellers and readers will be cheered to find the finest editions available of his classic novels--the first in a series of his best known works--by one of the greatest English comic writers of our time.

    Fans devoted to the master of comic fiction P. G. Wodehouse are legion. He represents an antic high point in the world of farce and social satire. Best known for the creation of two fictional worlds based on Blandings Castle and the Wooster-Jeeves gentleman-valet duo, Wodehouse is appreciated the world over for his exceedingly clever and comically savvy send-ups of the idle rich in Edwardian England.

    In Right Ho, Jeeves Bertie's old friend Gussie Fink-Nottle has fallen in love and, as usual, makes a hash of the affair until Jeeves comes to his rescue.

    With each volume edited and reset and printed on Scottish cream-wove, acid-free paper, sewn and bound in cloth, these novels are elegant additions to any Wodehouse fan's library. [via]

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  • The Right Nation: Conservative Power In America
    by Adrian Wooldridge, John Micklethwait
    ISBN 1594200203 (1-59420-020-3)
    Hardcover, Penguin Group USA

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    With a unique blend of insight, balance, and wit, two of our most renowned America watchers brilliantly anatomize the conservative movement and explain how it has stamped its program so deeply into American life.

    The Right Nation is not "for" liberals, and it's not "for" conservatives. It's for any of us who want to understand one of the most important forces shaping American life. How did America's government become so much more conservative in just a generation? Compared to Europe-or to America under Richard Nixon-even President Howard Dean would preside over a distinctly more conservative nation in many crucial respects: welfare is gone; the death penalty is deeply rooted; abortion is under siege; regulations are being rolled back; the pillars of New Deal liberalism are turning to sand. Conservative positions have not prevailed everywhere, of course, but this book shows us why they've been so successfully advanced over such a broad front: because the battle has been waged by well-organized, shrewd, and committed troops who to some extent have been lucky in their enemies.

    John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, like modern-day Tocquevilles, have the perspective to see this vast subject in the round, unbeholden to forces on either side. They steer The Economist's coverage of the United States and have unrivaled access to resources and-because of the magazine's renown for iconoclasm and analytical rigor-have had open-door access wherever the book's research has led them. And it has led them everywhere: To reckon with the American right, you have to get out there where its centers are and understand the power flow among the brain trusts, the mouthpieces, the organizers, and the foot soldiers. The authors write with wit and skewer whole herds of sacred cows, but they also bring empathy to bear on a subject that sees all too little of it. You won't recognize this America from the far-left's or the far-right's caricatures. Divided into three parts-history, anatomy, and prophecy-The Right Nation comes neither to bury the American conservative movement nor to praise it blindly but to understand it, in all its dimensions, as the most powerful and effective political movement of our age. [via]

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  • The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture
    by John Battelle
    ISBN 1591841410 (1-59184-141-0)
    Softcover, Penguin Group USA

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    What does the world want? According to John Battelle, a company that answers that question -- in all its shades of meaning -- can unlock the most intractable riddles of both business and culture. And for the past few years, that's exactly what Google has been doing.

    Jumping into the game long after Yahoo, Alta Vista, Excite, Lycos, and other pioneers, Google offered a radical new approach to search, redefined the idea of viral marketing, survived the dotcom crash, and pulled off the largest and most talked about initial public offering in the history of Silicon Valley.

    But The Search offers much more than the inside story of Google's triumph. It's also a big-picture book about the past, present, and future of search technology, and the enormous impact it is starting to have on marketing, media, pop culture, dating, job hunting, international law, civil liberties, and just about every other sphere of human interest.

    More than any of its rivals, Google has become the gateway to instant knowledge. Hundreds of millions of people use it to satisfy their wants, needs, fears, and obsessions, creating an enormous artifact that Battelle calls "the Database of Intentions." Somewhere in Google's archives, for instance, you can find the agonized research of a gay man with AIDS, the silent plotting of a would-be bombmaker, and the anxiety of a woman checking out her blind date. Combined with the databases of thousands of other search-driven businesses, large and small, it all adds up to a goldmine of information that powerful organizations (including the government) will want to get their hands on.

    No one is better qualified to explain this entire phenomenon than Battelle, who cofounded Wired and founded The Industry Standard. Perhaps more than any other journalist, he has devoted his career to finding the holy grail of technology -- something as transformational as the Macintosh was in the mid- 1980s. And he has finally found it in search.

    Battelle draws on more than 350 interviews with major players from Silicon Valley to Seattle to Wall Street, including Google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin and CEO Eric Schmidt, as well as competitors like Louis Monier, who invented AltaVista, and Neil Moncrief, a soft-spoken Georgian whose business Google built, destroyed, and built again.

    Battelle lucidly reveals how search technology actually works, explores the amazing power of targeted advertising, and reports on the frenzy of the Google IPO, when the company tried to rewrite the rules of Wall Street and declared "don't be evil" as its corporate motto.

    For anyone who wants to understand how Google really succeeded -- and the implications of a world in which every click can be preserved forever -- THE SEARCH is an eye-opening and indispensable read. [via]

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  • Seay, Elizabeth: Searching for Lost City: On the Trail of America's Native Languages
    Searching for Lost City: On the Trail of America's Native Languages
    by Elizabeth Seay
    ISBN 1592281958 (1-59228-195-8)
    Hardcover, Globe Pequot Pr

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  • The Shadow of the Wind: A Novel
    by Carlos Ruiz Zafon, Lucia Graves
    ISBN 1594200106 (1-59420-010-6)
    Hardcover, Penguin Group (USA) Incorporated

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    Book summary:

    Make this your next book club selection and everyone saves.
    Get 15% off when you order 5 or more of this title for your book club.
    Simply enter the coupon code ZAFONSHADOW at checkout.
    This offer does not apply to eBook purchases. This offer applies to only one downloadable audio per purchase.

    Barcelona, 1945just after the war, a great world city lies in shadow, nursing its wounds, and a boy named Daniel awakes on his eleventh birthday to find that he can no longer remember his mothers face. To console his only child, Daniels widowed father, an antiquarian book dealer, initiates him into the secret of the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, a library tended by Barcelonas guild of rare-book dealers as a repository for books forgotten by the world, waiting for someone who will care about them again. Daniels father coaxes him to choose a volume from the spiraling labyrinth of shelves, one that, it is said, will have a special meaning for him. And Daniel so loves the novel he selects, The Shadow of the Wind by one Julian Carax, that he sets out to find the rest of Caraxs work. To his shock, he discovers that someone has been systematically destroying every copy of every book this author has written. In fact, he may have the last one in existence. Before Daniel knows it his seemingly innocent quest has opened a door into one of Barcelonas darkest secrets, an epic story of murder, magic, madness and doomed love. And before long he realizes that if he doesnt find out the truth about Julian Carax, he and those closest to him will suffer horribly.

    As with all astounding novels, The Shadow of the Wind sends the mind groping for comparisons The Crimson Petal and the White? The novels of Arturo Pérez-Reverte? Of Victor Hugo? Love in the Time of Cholera?but in the end, as with all astounding novels, no comparison can suffice. As one leading Spanish reviewer wrote, The originality of Ruiz Zafóns voice is bombproof and displays a diabolical talent. The Shadow of the Wind announces a phenomenon in Spanish literature. An uncannily absorbing historical mystery, a heart-piercing romance, and a moving homage to the mystical power of books, The Shadow of the Wind is a triumph of the storytellers art.

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  • Shopgirl
    by Steve Martin
    ISBN 1587240122 (1-58724-012-2)
    Hardcover, Wheeler Pub Inc

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  • Sister Carrie
    by Theodore Dreiser, Herbert Leibowitz
    ISBN 1593082266 (1-59308-226-6)
    Softcover, Barnes & Noble

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    Sister Carrie, Theodore Dreiser's revolutionary first novel, was published in 1900--sort of. The story of Carrie Meeber, an 18-year-old country girl who moves to Chicago and becomes a kept woman, was strong stuff at the turn of the century, and what Dreiser's wary publisher released was a highly expurgated version. Times change, and we now have a restored "author's cut" of Sister Carrie that shows how truly ahead of his time Dreiser was. First and foremost, he has written an astute, nonmoralizing account of a woman and her limited options in late-19th-century America. That's impressive in and of itself, but Dreiser doesn't stop there. Digging deeply into the psychological underpinnings of his characters, he gives us people who are often strangers to themselves, drifting numbly until fate pushes them on a path they can later neither defend nor even remember choosing.

    Dreiser's story unfolds in the measured cadences of an earlier era. This sometimes works brilliantly as we follow the choices, small and large, that lead some characters to doom and others to glory. On the other hand, the middle chapters--of which there are many--do drag somewhat, even when one appreciates Dreiser's intentions. If you can make it through the sagging midsection, however, you'll be rewarded by Sister Carrie's last 150 pages, which depict the harrowing downward spiral of one of the book's central characters. Here Dreiser portrays with brutal power how the wrong decision--or lack of decision--can lay waste to a life. --Rebecca Gleason [via]

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  • Smartest Guys in the Room: The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron
    by Peter Elkind, Bethany McLean
    ISBN 1591840538 (1-59184-053-8)
    Softcover, Penguin Group USA

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    Like its subject, The Smartest Guys in the Room is ambitious, grand in scope, and ruthless in its dealings. Unlike Enron, the Texas-based energy giant that has come to represent the post-millennium collapse of 1990s go-go corporate culture, it's also ultimately successful. Penned by Fortune scribes Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind, the 400-page-plus chronicle of the scandal digs deep inside the numbers while, wisely, maintaining focus on the "smart guys" deep-frying the books. The likes of paternal but disengaged CEO Ken Lay (dubbed "Kenny Boy" by George W. Bush, one of many prominent public figures with whom he rubbed shoulders), cutthroat man-behind-the-curtain Jeff Skilling, and ethically blind numbers whiz Andy Fastow vividly come to life as they make a mockery of conventional accounting practices and grow increasingly arrogant and bind to their collective hubris. They're not a likable lot, and the writers find it difficult to suppress their astonishment and revulsion with the crew who rapidly went from golden boys and girls of the financial world to pariahs when the bill finally came due. The authors' unrepressed sarcasms are more than often unnecessarily given the scope of the outrage. Enron's leading lights were or a time celebrated for their ability to concoct nearly unfathomable business schemes to hide mounting shortfalls and keeping track on their machinations can be a chore, but, by sticking hard to the story behind the fall, McLean and Elkind have reported and written the definitive account of the Enron debacle. --Steven Stolder [via]

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  • The Souls of Black Folk
    by W. E. B. Du Bois
    ISBN 159308014X (1-59308-014-X)
    Softcover, Barnes & Noble

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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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  • Southern Daughter: The Life of Margaret Mitchell and the Making of Gone With the Wind
    by Darden Asbury Pyron
    ISBN 1588180972 (1-58818-097-2)
    Softcover, Gibbs Smith

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    Book summary:

    A biography about Margaret Mitchell [via]

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  • Sparknotes Moby-Dick
    by Herman Melville
    ISBN 1586634151 (1-58663-415-1)
    Softcover, Spark Pub Group

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    Book summary:

    Get your "A" in gear!

    They're today's most popular study guides-with everything you need to succeed in school. Written by Harvard students for students, since its inception SparkNotes" has developed a loyal community of dedicated users and become a major education brand. Consumer demand has been so strong that the guides have expanded to over 150 titles. SparkNotes'" motto is Smarter, Better, Faster because:

    · They feature the most current ideas and themes, written by experts.
    · They're easier to understand, because the same people who use them have also written them.
    · The clear writing style and edited content enables students to read through the material quickly, saving valuable time.

    And with everything covered--context; plot overview; character lists; themes, motifs, and symbols; summary and analysis, key facts; study questions and essay topics; and reviews and resources--you don't have to go anywhere else!



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  • Standing By Words: Essays
    by Wendell Berry
    ISBN 1593760558 (1-59376-055-8)
    Softcover, Shoemaker & Hoard

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    In these six essays, award-winning author Wendell Berry considers the degeneration of language that is manifest throughout our culture, from poetry to politics, from conversation to advertising, and he shows how the ever widening cleft between words and their referents mirrors the increasing isolation of individuals from their communities and of their communities from the land. From the essay, Standing by Words, Berry writes, “Two epidemic illnesses of our time—upon both of which virtual industries of cures have been founded—are the disintegration of communities and the disintegration of persons. That these two are related (that private loneliness, for example, will necessarily accompany public confusion) is clear enough. What seems not so well understood, because not so much examined, is the relation between these disintegrations and the disintegration of language. My impression is that we have seen, for perhaps a hundred and fifty years, a gradual increase in language that is either meaningless or destructive of meaning. And I believe that this increasing unreliability of language parallels the increasing disintegration, over the same period, of persons and communities. Out-of-print for more than fifteen years, Standing by Words offers a masterfully written argument for the literary tradition.
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  • The Stories of English
    by David Crystal
    ISBN 1585677191 (1-58567-719-1)
    Softcover, Overlook Pr

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    The English language is now accepted as the global lingua franca of the modern age, spoken or written in by over a quarter of the human race. But how did it evolve? How did a language spoken originally by a few thousand Anglo-Saxons become one used by more than 1,500 million? What developments can be seen as we move from Beowulf to Chaucer to Shakespeare to Dickens and the present day? A host of fascinating questions are answered in The Stories of English ? a groundbreaking history of the language by David Crystal, the world-renowned writer and commentator on English. Many books have been written about English, but they have all focused on a single variety ? the educated, printed language called ?standard? English. David Crystal turns the history of English on its head and instead provides a startlingly original view of where the richness, creativity and diversity of the language truly lies ? in the accents and dialects of nonstandard English users all over the world. Whatever their regional, social or ethnic background, each group has a story worth telling, whether it is in Scotland or Somerset, South Africa or Singapore. Interweaved within this central chronological story are accounts of uses of dialect around the world as well as in literary classics from The Canterbury Tales to The Lord of the Rings. For the first time, regional speech and writing is placed centre stage, giving a sense of the social realities behind the development of English. This significant shift in perspective enables the reader to understand for the first time the importance of everyday, previously marginalized, voices in our language and provides an argument too for the way English should be taught in the future. [via]

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  • Tales of Adam
    by Daniel Quinn, Michael McCurdy
    ISBN 1586420747 (1-58642-074-7)
    Hardcover, Random House Inc

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    Ever since the publication of Ishmael in 1992, readers have yearned for a glimpse into a dimension of spiritual revelation the author only hinted at in that and later books. Now at long last they have it in seven profound but delightfully simple tales that illuminate the world in which humans became humans. This is a world seen through animist eyes: as friendly to human life as it was to the life of gazelles, lions, lizards, mosquitos, jellyfish, and seals  not a world in which humans lived like trespassers who must conquer and subdue an alien territory. It's a world in which humans have a place in the community of life  not as rulers but as equals  with the paths of all held together in the hand of god.This is not an ancient world or a lost world. It exists as surely today as it ever did  for those who have eyes to see it. Tales of Adam, delightfully illustrated by Michael McCurdy, is a book that will come to be shelved alongside The Prophet, Jonathan Livingston Seagull, and The Alchemist. [via]

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  • The Time Machine and the Invisible Man
    by H. G. Wells, Alfred Mac Adam
    ISBN 1593083254 (1-59308-325-4)
    Hardcover, Sterling Pub Co Inc

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    Book summary:

    The Time Machine and The Invisible Man, by H. G. Wells, is part of the Barnes & Noble Classics series, which offers quality editions at affordable prices to the student and the general reader, including new scholarship, thoughtful design, and pages of carefully crafted extras. Here are some of the remarkable features of Barnes & Noble Classics:
    New introductions commissioned from today's top writers and scholars Biographies of the authors Chronologies of contemporary historical, biographical, and cultural events Footnotes and endnotes Selective discussions of imitations, parodies, poems, books, plays, paintings, operas, statuary, and films inspired by the work Comments by other famous authors Study questions to challenge the reader's viewpoints and expectations Bibliographies for further reading Indices & Glossaries, when appropriateAll editions are beautifully designed and are printed to superior specifications; some include illustrations of historical interest. Barnes & Noble Classics pulls together a constellation of influencesbiographical, historical, and literaryto enrich each reader's understanding of these enduring works.
     
    The Time Machine, H. G. Wellss first novel, is a tale of Darwinian evolution taken to its extreme. Its hero, a young scientist, travels 800,000 years into the future and discovers a dying earth populated by two strange humanoid species: the brutal Morlocks and the gentle but nearly helpless Eloi.

    The Invisible Man mixes chilling terror, suspense, and acute psychological understanding into a tale of an equally adventurous scientist who discovers the formula for invisibilitya secret that drives him mad.

    Immensely popular during his lifetime, H. G. Wells, along with Jules Verne, is credited with inventing science fiction. This new volume offers two of Wellss best-loved and most critically acclaimed scientific romances. In each, the author grounds his fantastical imagination in scientific fact and conjecture while lacing his narrative with vibrant action, not merely to tell a ripping yarn, but to offer a biting critique on the world around him. The strength of Mr. Wells, wrote Arnold Bennett, lies in the fact that he is not only a scientist, but a most talented student of character, especially quaint character. He will not only ingeniously describe for you a scientific miracle, but he will set down that miracle in the midst of a country village, sketching with excellent humour the inn-landlady, the blacksmith, the chemists apprentice, the doctor, and all the other persons whom the miracle affects.
     
    Alfred Mac Adam teaches literature at Barnard College-Columbia University. He is a translator and art critic.
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  • The Time Traveler's Wife
    by Audrey Niffenegger
    ISBN 1587246392 (1-58724-639-2)
    Hardcover, Wheeler Pub Inc

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    A New York Times Bestseller
    A Today Show Book Club Selection

    This is the story of Clare, a beautiful art student, and Henry, an adventuresome librarian. They met when Clare was six and Henry was thirty-six, and married when Clare was twenty-three and Henry thirty-one. Impossible but true: Henry is one of the first people diagnosed with Chrono-Displacement Disorder. Periodically his genetic clock resets and he finds himself misplaced in time, disappearing spontaneously for experiences alternately harrowing and amusing.

    Available only in Wheeler Hardcover 7. [via]

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  • Fishman, Charles: The Wal-Mart Effect: How the World's Most Powerful Company Really Works--and How It's Transforming the American Economy
    The Wal-Mart Effect: How the World's Most Powerful Company Really Works--and How It's Transforming the American Economy
    by Charles Fishman
    ISBN 1594200769 (1-59420-076-9)
    Hardcover, Penguin Group USA

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  • War and Peace
    by Leo Tolstoy, SparkNotes Staff
    ISBN 1586638149 (1-58663-814-9)
    Softcover, Spark Publishing Group

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    Book summary:

    War and Peace, by Leo Tolstoy, is part of the Barnes & Noble Classics series, which offers quality editions at affordable prices to the student and the general reader, including new scholarship, thoughtful design, and pages of carefully crafted extras. Here are some of the remarkable features of Barnes & Noble Classics:
    All editions are beautifully designed and are printed to superior specifications; some include illustrations of historical interest. Barnes & Noble Classics pulls together a constellation of influences—biographical, historical, and literary—to enrich each reader's understanding of these enduring works.
     
    The most famous—and perhaps greatest—novel of all time, Tolstoys War and Peace tells the story of five families struggling for survival during Napoleons invasion of Russia.
     
    Among its many unforgettable characters is Prince Andrey Bolkonsky, a proud, dashing man who, despising the artifice of high society, joins the army to achieve glory.  Badly wounded at Austerlitz, he begins to discover the emptiness of everything to which he has devoted himself.  His death scene is considered one of the greatest passages in Russian literature.
     
    The novel's other hero, the bumbling Pierre Bezukhov, tries to find meaning in life through a series of philosophical systems that promise to resolve all questions. He at last discovers the Tolstoyan truth that wisdom is to be found not in systems but in the ordinary processes of daily life, especially in his marriage to the novel's most memorable heroine, Natasha.
     
    Both an intimate study of individual passions and an epic history of Russia and its people, War and Peace is nothing more or less than a complete portrait of human existence.

     

    Joseph Frank is Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature at Princeton University and Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature and Slavic Languages and Literature at Stanford University. He is the author of a five-volume study of Dostoevskys life and work.

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  • The Waste Land and Other Poems
    by T. S. Eliot, Randy Malamud
    ISBN 1593082797 (1-59308-279-7)
    Softcover, Sterling Pub Co Inc

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    Book summary:

    After sitting through T.S. Eliot's reading of "The Waste Land," listeners may be inclined to hang up the earphones for a spell. There are no flaws to Eliot's steady-toned interpretation; in fact, his delivery is quite remarkable in its ability to match the poem's constant, somber mood. It's just that 25-plus minutes of Eliot's desolate landscapes--rendered even more real by the author's incessant tones--can wear on the emotions.

    In addition to the full-length version of "The Waste Land," this recording includes Eliot's stirring narration of "The Hollow Men," "Sweeney Among the Nightingales," and "Macavity the Mystery Cat." Listen to Eliot read from "The Waste Land." Visit our audio help page for more information. (Running time: 47 minutes, 1 cassette) --Rob McDonald [via]

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  • Will the Boat Sink the Water?: The Life of China's Peasants
    by Chen Guidi, Wu Chuntao, Guidi Chen, Tao Chun, Zhu Hong
    ISBN 1586483587 (1-58648-358-7)
    Hardcover, Public Affairs

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    Book summary:

    The Chinese economic miracle is happening despite, not because of, China's 900 million peasants. They are missing from the portraits of booming Shanghai, or Beijing. Many of China's underclass live under a feudalistic system unchanged since the fifteenth century. They are truly the voiceless in modern China. They are also, perhaps, the reason that China will not be able to make the great social and economic leap forward, because if it is to leap it must carry the 900 million with it. Chinese journalists Wu Chuntao and Chen Guidi returned to Wu's home province of Anhui, one of China's poorest, to undertake a three-year survey of what had happened to the peasants there, asking the question: Have the peasants been betrayed by the revolution undertaken in their name by Mao and his successors? The result is a brilliant narrative of life among the 900 million, and a vivid portrait of the petty dictators that run China's villages and counties and the consequences of their bullying despotism on the people they administer. Told principally through four dramatic narratives of paricular Anhui people, Will the Boat Sink the Water? gives voice to the unheard masses and looks beneath the gloss of the new China to find the truth of daily life for its vast population of rural poor.
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  • Wuthering Heights
    by Emily Bronte
    ISBN 1593080441 (1-59308-044-1)
    Softcover, Sterling Pub Co Inc

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    Wuthering Heights, by Emily Bronte, is part of the Barnes & Noble Classics series, which offers quality editions at affordable prices to the student and the general reader, including new scholarship, thoughtful design, and pages of carefully crafted extras. Here are some of the remarkable features of Barnes & Noble Classics:
    All editions are beautifully designed and are printed to superior specifications; some include illustrations of historical interest. Barnes & Noble Classics pulls together a constellation of influences—biographical, historical, and literary—to enrich each reader's understanding of these enduring works.
     
    Emily Brontës only novel, Wuthering Heights remains one of literatures most disturbing explorations into the dark side of romantic passion. Heathcliff and Cathy believe theyre destined to love each other forever, but when cruelty and snobbery separate them, their untamed emotions literally consume them.

    Set amid the wild and stormy Yorkshire moors, Wuthering Heights, an unpolished and devastating epic of childhood playmates who grow into soul mates, is widely regarded as the most original tale of thwarted desire and heartbreak in the English language.
     

    Daphne Merkin is the author of a novel, Enchantment, which won the Edward Lewis Wallant award for best new work of American-Jewish fiction, and an essay collection, Dreaming of Hitler. She has written essays and reviews for publications that include American Scholar, the New York Times, where she is a regular contributor to the Book Review, the Los Angeles Times Book Review, Elle, and Vogue.

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