| Search | About | Preferences | Interact | Help | |
| 150 million books. 1 search engine. | ||
books tagged “society”
books tagged “society”
›› Find signed collectible books by ''
After Youby Helen R. MyersISBN 0373055994 (0-373-05599-4)
Softcover, Harlequin Books
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'After You'More editions of After You:
-
Annie on My Mindby Nancy GardenISBN 0374400113 (0-374-40011-3)
Softcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Annie on My Mind'Book summary:Liza never knew that falling in love could be so wonderful . . . and so confusing.[via]
"'Liza,' Mom said, looking into my eyes, 'I want you to tell me the truth, not because I want to pry, but because I have to know. This could get very unpleasant . . . Now--have you and Annie--done any more than the usual experimenting . . . '
'No, Mom,' I said, trying to look back at her calmly. I'm not proud of it, I make no excuses--I lied to her." 
Arabellaby Georgette HeyerISBN 0373835558 (0-373-83555-8)
Softcover, Harlequin Enterprises, Limited
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Arabella'More editions of Arabella:
-
The Art of Travelby Alain De BottonISBN 0375420827 (0-375-42082-7)
Hardcover, Random House Inc
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Art of Travel'Book summary:Aside from love, few actvities seem to promise us as much happiness as going traveling: taking off for somewhere else, somewhere far from home, a place with more interesting weather, customs, and landscapes. But although we are inundated with advice on where to travel, few people seem to talk about why we should go and how we can become more fulfilled by doing so. In The Art of Travel, Alain de Botton, author of How Proust Can Change Your Life, explores what the point of travel might be and modestly suggets how we can learn to be a little happier in our travels. [via]
More editions of The Art of Travel:
The Big Oyster: History on the Half Shellby Mark KurlanskyISBN 0345476395 (0-345-47639-5)
Softcover, Random House Inc
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Big Oyster: History on the Half Shell'More editions of The Big Oyster: History on the Half Shell:
Bitchfest: Ten Years of Cultural Criticism from the Pages of Bitch Magazineby Lisa Jervis, Andi ZeislerISBN 0374113432 (0-374-11343-2)
Softcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Bitchfest: Ten Years of Cultural Criticism from the Pages of Bitch Magazine'More editions of Bitchfest: Ten Years of Cultural Criticism from the Pages of Bitch Magazine:
The Black Diasporaby Ronald SegalISBN 0374524904 (0-374-52490-4)
Softcover, Noonday Pr
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Black Diaspora'More editions of The Black Diaspora:
The Black Diaspora: Five Centuries of the Black Experience Outside Africaby Ronald SegalISBN 0374113963 (0-374-11396-3)
Hardcover, Farrar, Straus & Giroux
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Black Diaspora: Five Centuries of the Black Experience Outside Africa'More editions of The Black Diaspora: Five Centuries of the Black Experience Outside Africa:
-
The Blind Assassinby Margaret AtwoodISBN 0375430857 (0-375-43085-7)
Hardcover, Random House Large Print
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Blind Assassin'Book summary:The Blind Assassin is a tale of two sisters, one of whom dies under ambiguous circumstances in the opening pages. The survivor, Iris Chase Griffen, initially seems a little cold-blooded about this death in the family. But as Margaret Atwood's most ambitious work unfolds--a tricky process, in fact, with several nested narratives and even an entire novel-within-a-novel--we're reminded of just how complicated the familial game of hide-and-seek can be:
What had she been thinking of as the car sailed off the bridge, then hung suspended in the afternoon sunlight, glinting like a dragonfly, for that one instant of held breath before the plummet? Of Alex, of Richard, of bad faith, of our father and his wreckage; of God, perhaps, and her fatal, triangular bargain.
Meanwhile, Atwood immediately launches into an excerpt from Laura Chase's novel, The Blind Assassin, posthumously published in 1947. In this double-decker concoction, a wealthy woman dabbles in blue-collar passion, even as her lover regales her with a series of science-fictional parables. Complicated? You bet. But the author puts all this variegation to good use, taking expert measure of our capacity for self-delusion and complicity, not to mention desolation. Almost everybody in her sprawling narrative manages to--or prefers to--overlook what's in plain sight. And memory isn't much of a salve either, as Iris points out: "Nothing is more difficult than to understand the dead, I've found; but nothing is more dangerous than to ignore them." Yet Atwood never succumbs to postmodern cynicism, or modish contempt for her characters. On the contrary, she's capable of great tenderness, and as we immerse ourselves in Iris's spliced-in memoir, it's clear that this buttoned-up socialite has been anything but blind to the chaos surrounding her. --Darya Silver [via]More editions of The Blind Assassin:
-
The Bridegroom : Storiesby Ha JinISBN 0375420673 (0-375-42067-3)
Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Bridegroom : Stories'Book summary:It's the little things that kill us, as that master of the miniature Ha Jin well knows. Not oppression in general, but the tea thrown at us by railroad policemen; not failure, but the old flame who fails to visit; not grief, but the peanuts our kindergarten teacher stole from our pockets. In The Bridegroom, such moments run surprisingly deep, as if they traced the grooves history has left on individual hearts. The book's 12 tales capture a China in transition, en route from Maoism to market-friendly socialism, from isolation to increasing contact with the West. "I never thought money could make so much difference," says the narrator of "An Entrepreneur's Story," who's been transformed from black-market lowlife to new-economy hero. He wins respect and gets the girl, but it all feels too easy somehow, and he revenges himself by lighting his kerosene stove with bank notes.
Other characters navigate this sea change with similar bewilderment. The professor mistaken for "The Saboteur" thinks news articles about the end of the cultural revolution mean he can reason with the police (wrong!), while the bridegroom of the title story is hauled off to jail for so-called hooliganism rooted in "Western capitalism and bourgeois lifestyle"--that is, loving other men. "What a wonderful husband he could have been if he were not sick," his father-in-law thinks. In the story that deals most explicitly with the conflict between East and West, an American chain named Cowboy Chicken sets up shop in Muji City. The new order isn't that different from the old one, thinks one of the Chinese workers: "We nicknamed Mr. Shapiro 'Party Secretary,' because just like a Party boss anywhere he didn't do any work. The only difference was that he didn't organize political studies or demand we report to him our inner thoughts." In the end, as often happens, greed begets revolution--but whose greed? When the workers at Cowboy Chicken go on strike, jealous of one of their coworker's paychecks, they're replaced by an African American woman who teaches English at a nearby college and her students, who sing "We Shall Overcome" while they wipe tables.
But as in Jin's National Book Award-winning novel, Waiting, even the broadest political and cultural ironies are painted with an extraordinarily light-handed brush. Despite their apparent simplicity, these stories run deep; it's as if some 19th century master had wandered into our midst, writing prose whose unruffled surface recalls the virtues of the very long view. Like Chekhov, another great miniaturist and the writer he most resembles, Jin understands that humor is compassion, that a well-honed appreciation for the absurd is sometimes the best and most honest way to honor failed lives. While his characters attempt to balance the needs of the self and the demands of the state, we see less what is foreign to us than what is native to the human heart. --Mary Park [via]
More editions of The Bridegroom : Stories:
-
Building a Bridge to the 18th Century: How the Past Can Improve Our Futureby Neil PostmanISBN 0375401296 (0-375-40129-6)
Hardcover, Alfred a Knopf Inc
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Building a Bridge to the 18th Century: How the Past Can Improve Our Future'Book summary:The problem with the world today, says Neil Postman, is that we've become so caught up in hurtling towards the future that we've lost our societal "narrative," a humane cultural tradition that creates "a sense of purpose and continuity"--in other words, something to believe in. "In order to have an agreeable encounter with the twenty-first century," he asserts, "we will have to take into it some good ideas. And in order to do that, we need to look back to take stock of the good ideas available to us." He finds rich source material in the Enlightenment, the salad days for philosophers such as Goethe, Voltaire, Diderot, Paine, and Jefferson, "the beginnings of much that is worthwhile about the modern world." Yet Building a Bridge to the Eighteenth Century is a call for cultural progress, not regression: "I am not suggesting that we become the eighteenth century," Postman notes, "only that we use it for what it is worth and all it is worth."
Chief among the values Postman cites is the development of the intellect; it plays a part in many of his recommendations, from the cultivation of a healthy skepticism towards overhyped technology to sweeping educational reforms that include replacing grammar instruction with logic and rhetoric and introducing courses on comparative religion and the history of science. He also lashes out at postmodernists who start with the premise that language "is a major factor in producing our perceptions, judgments, knowledge, and institutions" and conclude that language is therefore tenuously connected to reality at best. Enlightenment thinkers knew that language molded perception, he notes, but they also believed that "it is possible to use language to say things about the world that are true" and "to communicate ideas to oneself and to others." Postman is excessively curmudgeonly at times, as in his reference to philosopher Jean Baudrillard as "a Frenchman, of all things," or his remarks on the ancient Athenians: "I know they are the classic example of Dead White Males, but we should probably listen to them anyway." But for anybody with a stake in the culture wars, or who wants to apply the lessons of philosophy to the modern world, Building a Bridge to the Eighteenth Century will make for provocative reading. [via]
More editions of Building a Bridge to the 18th Century: How the Past Can Improve Our Future:
The Complete Works of Sakiby Hector Hugh MunroISBN 0370303601 (0-370-30360-1)
Hardcover, Random House of Canada Ltd
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Complete Works of Saki'More editions of The Complete Works of Saki:
Concrete Islandby J.G. BallardISBN 0374524130 (0-374-52413-0)
Softcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Concrete Island'-
A Consumer's Republic : The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar Americaby Lizabeth CohenISBN 0375407502 (0-375-40750-2)
Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'A Consumer's Republic : The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America'Book summary:The three decades after World War II are often heralded as a Golden Era of American affluence. But as Lizabeth Cohen makes clear, the pursuit of prosperity defined much more than the nations economy; it also became a basic component of American citizenship. Consumers were encouraged to buy not just for themselves, but for the good of the nation.
After a decade and a half of hard times resulting from the Great Depression and the war, the embrace of mass consumption, with its supposed far-reaching benefitsgreater freedom, democracy, and equalitytransformed American life. The extensive suburbanization of metropolitan areas (propelled by such government policies as the GI Bill), the shift from downtowns to shopping centers, and the advent of targeted marketing all fueled the consumer economy, but also sharpened divisions among Americans along gender, class, and racial lines. At the same time, mass consumption changed American politics, inspiring new forms of political activism through the civil rights and consumer movements and prompting politicians to apply the latest marketing strategies to their political campaigns.
Cohen traces the legacy of the Consumers Republic into our time, demonstrating how it has reshaped our relationship to government itself, with Americans increasingly judging public servicesas if one more purchased goodby the personal benefits they derive from them.
Brilliantly researched and reasoned, A Consumers Republic is a starkly illuminating social and political history. [via]More editions of A Consumer's Republic : The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America:
-
The Control of Natureby John McPheeISBN 0374522596 (0-374-52259-6)
Softcover, Noonday Pr
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Control of Nature'Book summary:Master how-it-works writer John McPhee has instructed his readers in the arcana of how oranges are commercially graded, how mountains form, how canoes are built and oceans crossed. In The Control of Nature he turns his attention once more to geology and the human struggle against nature. In one sketch, he explores the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' unrealized plan to divert the flow of the Mississippi River into a tributary, the Atchafalaya, for flood control; in another, he looks at the ingenious ways in which an Icelandic engineer saved a southern harbor on that island from being destroyed by a lava flow; in a third, he examines a complex scheme to protect Los Angeles from boulders ejected from mountains by compression and tectonic movement. As always, McPhee combines a deep knowledge of his subject with a narrative approach that is wholly accessible; you may not have thought you were interested in earthquakes and flood control, but he gently leads you to take a passionate concern in such matters. [via]
-
Crowds and Powerby Elias Canetti, Carol StewartISBN 0374518203 (0-374-51820-3)
Softcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Crowds and Power'Book summary:Elias Canetti's 1981 Nobel Prize was awarded mainly on the basis of this, his masterwork of philosophical anthropology about la condition humaine on an overpopulated planet.
Ranging from soccer crowds and political rallies to Bushmen and the pilgrimage to Mecca, Canetti exhaustively reviews the way crowds form, develop, and dissolve, using this taxonomy of mass movement as a key to the dynamics of social life. The style is abstract, erudite, and anecdotal, which makes Crowds and Power the sort of work that awes some readers with its profundity while irritating others with its elusiveness. Canetti loves to say something brilliant but counterintuitive, and then leave the reader to figure out both why he said it and whether it's really true. --Richard Farr [via]
More editions of Crowds and Power:
The Devil's Cup: A History of the World According to Coffeeby Stewart Lee AllenISBN 0345441494 (0-345-44149-4)
Softcover, Ballantine Books
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Devil's Cup: A History of the World According to Coffee'More editions of The Devil's Cup: A History of the World According to Coffee:
-
The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolutionby Shulamith FirestoneISBN 0374527873 (0-374-52787-3)
Softcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution'Book summary:No one can understand how feminism has evolved without reading this radical, inflammatory second-wave landmark. Naomi Wolf[via]
Originally published in 1970, when Shulamith Firestone was just twenty-five years old, and going on to become a bestseller, The Dialectic of Sex was the first book of the womens liberation movement to put forth a feminist theory of politics.
Beginning with a look at the radical and grassroots history of the first wave (with its foundation in the abolition movement of the time), Firestone documents its major victory, the granting of the vote to women in 1920, and the fifty years of ridicule that followed. She goes on to deftly synthesize the work of Freud, Marx, de Beauvoir, and Engels to create a cogent argument for feminist revolution. Identifying women as a caste, she declares that they must seize the means of reproductionfor as long as women (and only women) are required to bear and rear children, they will be singled out as inferior. Ultimately she presents feminism as the key radical ideology, the missing link between Marx and Freud, uniting their visions of the political and the personal.
In the wake of recent headlines bemoaning womens squandered fertility and the ongoing debate over the appropriate role of genetics in the future of humanity, The Dialectic of Sex is revealed as remarkably relevant to todays societya testament to Shulamith Firestones startlingly prescient vision. Firestone died in 2012, but her ideas live on through this extraordinary book.More editions of The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution:
Diamonds in the Sky: A Social History of Air Travelby Kenneth Hudson, Julian PettiferISBN 0370301625 (0-370-30162-5)
Hardcover, Bodley Head : British Broadcasting Corp
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Diamonds in the Sky: A Social History of Air Travel'More editions of Diamonds in the Sky: A Social History of Air Travel:
-
Doctor Fischer of Geneva, or The Bomb Partyby Graham GreeneISBN 0370303164 (0-370-30316-4)
Hardcover, Bodley Head
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Doctor Fischer of Geneva, or The Bomb Party'Book summary:A darkly comic novel about a misanthropic millionaire who decides to hold the last of his famous parties, but this time it is to be his own deadly version of the Book of Revelation. Reissued as part of the VINTAGE CLASSICS series, from the author of THE COMEDIANS and THE HUMAN FACTOR. [via]
More editions of Doctor Fischer of Geneva, or The Bomb Party:
-
Driving over Lemons : An Optimist in Andaluciaby Chris StewartISBN 0375410287 (0-375-41028-7)
Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Driving over Lemons : An Optimist in Andalucia'Book summary:When English sheep shearer Chris Stewart (once a drummer for Genesis) bought an isolated farmhouse in the mountains outside of Granada, Spain, he was fully aware that it didn't have electricity, running water, or access to roads. But he had little idea of the headaches and hilarity that would follow (including scorpions, runaway sheep, and the former owner who won't budge). He also had no idea that his memoir about southern Spain would set a standard for literary travel writing.
This rip-roaringly funny book about seeking a place in an earthy community of peasants and shepherds gives a realistic sense of the hassles and rewards of foreign relocation. Part of its allure stems from the absence of rose-colored glasses, mainly Stewart's refusal to merely coo about the piece of heaven he's found or to portray all residents as angels. Stewart's hilarious and beautifully written passages are deep in their honest perceptions of the place and the sometimes xenophobic natives, whose reception of the newcomers ranges from warm to gruff.
After reading about struggles with dialects, animal husbandry, droughts, flooding, and such local rituals as pig slaughters and the rebuilding of bridges, you may not wish to live Chris Stewart's life. But you can't help but admire him and his wife, Ana, for digging out a niche in these far-flung mountains, for successfully befriending the denizens, and for so eloquently and comically telling the truth. The rich, vibrant, and unromanticized candor of Driving over Lemons makes it a laudable standout in a genre too often typified by laughable naiveté. --Melissa Rossi [via]
More editions of Driving over Lemons : An Optimist in Andalucia:
-
The Eagle's Shadow: Why America Fascinates and Infuriates the Worldby Mark HertsgaardISBN 0374103836 (0-374-10383-6)
Hardcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Eagle's Shadow: Why America Fascinates and Infuriates the World'Book summary:What America looks like to the rest of the world Americans rarely used to think about the outside world. As the mightiest nation in history, the United States could do as it pleased. Now Americans have learned the hard way that what outsiders think matters. When terror struck last September 11, author Mark Hertsgaard was completing a trip around the world, gathering perceptions about America from people in fifteen countries. Whether sophisticated business leaders, starry-eyed teenagers, or Islamic fundamentalists, his subjects felt both admiring and uneasy about the United States, enchanted yet bewildered, appalled yet envious. This complex catalogue of impressions--good, bad, but never indifferent--is the departure point for a short, pointed essay in the tradition of Common Sense and The Fate of the Earth . How can the world's most open society be so proud of its founding ideals yet so inconsistent in applying them? So loved for its pop culture but so resented for its high-handedness? Exploring such paradoxes, Hertsgaard exposes uplifting and uncomfortable truths that force natives and outsiders alike to see America with fresh eyes. "Like it or not, America is the future," a European tells Hertsgaard. In a world growing more American by the day, The Eagle's Shadow is a major statement about and to the place everyone discusses but few understand. [via]
More editions of The Eagle's Shadow: Why America Fascinates and Infuriates the World:
Essaysby George Orwell, John CareyISBN 0375415033 (0-375-41503-3)
Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Essays'More editions of Essays:
-
Extraordinary Popular Delusions: And the Madness of Crowdsby Charles MacKayISBN 0374502765 (0-374-50276-5)
Softcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Extraordinary Popular Delusions: And the Madness of Crowds'Book summary: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]
More editions of Extraordinary Popular Delusions: And the Madness of Crowds:
The Female Thing: Dirt, Sex, Envy, Vulnerabilityby Laura KipnisISBN 0375424172 (0-375-42417-2)
Hardcover, Random House Inc
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Female Thing: Dirt, Sex, Envy, Vulnerability'More editions of The Female Thing: Dirt, Sex, Envy, Vulnerability:
-
Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generationby Joseph J. EllisISBN 0375405445 (0-375-40544-5)
Hardcover, Random House Inc
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation'Book summary:In retrospect, it seems as if the American Revolution was inevitable. But was it? In Founding Brothers, Joseph J. Ellis reveals that many of those truths we hold to be self-evident were actually fiercely contested in the early days of the republic.
Ellis focuses on six crucial moments in the life of the new nation, including a secret dinner at which the seat of the nation's capital was determined--in exchange for support of Hamilton's financial plan; Washington's precedent-setting Farewell Address; and the Hamilton and Burr duel. Most interesting, perhaps, is the debate (still dividing scholars today) over the meaning of the Revolution. In a fascinating chapter on the renewed friendship between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson at the end of their lives, Ellis points out the fundamental differences between the Republicans, who saw the Revolution as a liberating act and hold the Declaration of Independence most sacred, and the Federalists, who saw the revolution as a step in the building of American nationhood and hold the Constitution most dear. Throughout the text, Ellis explains the personal, face-to-face nature of early American politics--and notes that the members of the revolutionary generation were conscious of the fact that they were establishing precedents on which future generations would rely.
In Founding Brothers, Ellis (whose American Sphinx won the National Book Award for nonfiction in 1997) has written an elegant and engaging narrative, sure to become a classic. Highly recommended. --Sunny Delaney [via]
More editions of Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation:
From Bauhaus to Our Houseby Tom WolfeISBN 0374158924 (0-374-15892-4)
Hardcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'From Bauhaus to Our House'Book summary:Tom Wolfe, "America's most skillful satirist" (The Atlantic Monthly), examines the strange saga of American architecture in this sequel to The Painted Word.[via]-
From Beirut to Jerusalemby Thomas L. FriedmanISBN 0374158959 (0-374-15895-9)
Hardcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'From Beirut to Jerusalem'Book summary:This won the 1989 National Book Award. This is an original work. It is a personal piece of scholarship on the intractable problem of Arabs and Jews in the Middle East. This is the book to read on the Middle East. [via]
-
Glamoramaby Bret Easton EllisISBN 0375404120 (0-375-40412-0)
Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Glamorama'Book summary:Glamorama is a satirical mass-murder opus more ambitious than Bret Easton Ellis's 1990 American Psycho. It starts as a spritz-of-consciousness romp about kid-club entrepreneur Victor Ward, "the It boy of the moment," an actor-model up for Flatliners II. Ellis has perfect pitch for glam-speak, and he gives nightlife the fizz, pace, and shimmer it lacks in drab reality. Anyone could cite the right celeb names and tunes, but like a rock-polishing machine, his prose gives literary sheen to fame-chasing air-kissers. He's coldly funny: when Victor's girl tries to argue him out of a breakup, she angrily snorts six bumps of coke, stops, mutters, "Wrong vial," snorts four corrective doses from whatever she has in her other fist, then objects to a rival at the party wearing the same dress she's wearing.
You had to be there; Ellis makes you feel you are. But such satire is a very smart bomb targeting a very large barn. Models' status anxiety doesn't merit Ellis's Tom Wolfe-esque expertise. Glamorama gets better when Victor gets drafted into a mysterious group of model-terrorists who bomb 747s and the Ritz in Paris, wearing Kevlar-lined Armani suits. Oh, they still behave like shallow snobs, pronouncing "cool" as if it had 12 o's. But now when somebody swills Cristal, it's apt to be poisoned, to horrific effect, which Ellis expertly, affectlessly describes. His enfant-terrible debut, Less Than Zero, aped Joan Didion. Now Ellis has grown into a lesser Don DeLillo--and that's high praise. --Tim Appelo [via]
More editions of Glamorama:
Going Nativeby Stephen WrightISBN 0374164908 (0-374-16490-8)
Hardcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Going Native'More editions of Going Native:
-
Grassroots: A Field Guide For Feminist Activismby Jennifer Baumgardner, Amy RichardsISBN 0374528659 (0-374-52865-9)
Softcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Grassroots: A Field Guide For Feminist Activism'Book summary:From the authors of Manifesta, an activism handbook that illustrates how to truly make the personal political.Grassroots is an activism handbook for social justice. Aimed at everyone from students to professionals, stay-at-home moms to artists, Grassroots answers the perennial question: What can I do? Whether you are concerned about the environment, human rights violations in Tibet, campus sexual assault policies, sweatshop labor, gay marriage, or the ongoing repercussions from 9-11, Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards believe that we all have something to offer in the fight against injustice. Based on the authors' own experiences, and the stories of both the large number of activists they work with as well as the countless everyday people they have encountered over the years, Grassroots encourages people to move beyond the "generic three" check writing, calling congresspeople, and volunteering and make a difference with clear guidelines and models for activism. The authors draw heavily on individual stories as examples, inspiring readers to recognize the tools right in front of them--be it the office copier or the family living room--in order to make change. Activism is accessible to all, and Grassroots shows how anyone, no matter how much or little time they have to offer, can create a world that more clearly reflects their values. [via]
More editions of Grassroots: A Field Guide For Feminist Activism:
The Great Transformationby Karl PolanyiISBN 0374965137 (0-374-96513-7)
Hardcover, Octagon Books
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Great Transformation'More editions of The Great Transformation:
Greenwich Village, 1920-1930: A Comment on American Civilization in the Post-War Yearsby Caroline Farrar WareISBN 0374982309 (0-374-98230-9)
Hardcover, Octagon Books
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Greenwich Village, 1920-1930: A Comment on American Civilization in the Post-War Years'More editions of Greenwich Village, 1920-1930: A Comment on American Civilization in the Post-War Years:
Gulliver's Travelsby Jonathan Swift, Derick BownISBN 0361031580 (0-361-03158-0)
Hardcover, Prentice Hall of Canada Ltd
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Gulliver's Travels'More editions of Gulliver's Travels:
Half and Half : Writers on Growing up Biracial and Biculturalby Claudine C. O'HearnISBN 0375400311 (0-375-40031-1)
Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Half and Half : Writers on Growing up Biracial and Bicultural'More editions of Half and Half : Writers on Growing up Biracial and Bicultural:
A Home in the Heart of a Cityby Kathleen HirschISBN 0374280797 (0-374-28079-7)
Hardcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'A Home in the Heart of a City'More editions of A Home in the Heart of a City:
The Idiotby Richard Pevear, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Larissa VolokhonskyISBN 0375413928 (0-375-41392-8)
Hardcover, Random House Inc
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Idiot'More editions of The Idiot:
-
Illness As Metaphor and Aids and Its Metaphorsby Susan SontagISBN 0374102570 (0-374-10257-0)
Hardcover, Farrar, Straus & Giroux
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Illness As Metaphor and Aids and Its Metaphors'More editions of Illness As Metaphor and Aids and Its Metaphors:
-
An Incomplete Education: 3,684 Things You Should Have Learned but Probably Didn'tby William Wilson, Judy JonesISBN 0345468902 (0-345-46890-2)
Hardcover, Ballantine Books
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'An Incomplete Education: 3,684 Things You Should Have Learned but Probably Didn't'Book summary:When it was originally published in 1987, An Incomplete Education became a surprise bestseller. Now this instant classic has been completely updated, outfitted with a whole new arsenal of indispensable knowledge on global affairs, popular culture, economic trends, scientific principles, and modern arts. Heres your chance to brush up on all those subjects you slept through in school, reacquaint yourself with all the facts you once knew (then promptly forgot), catch up on major developments in the world today, and become the Renaissance man or woman you always knew you could be!
How do you tell the Balkans from the Caucasus? Whats the difference between fission and fusion? Whigs and Tories? Shiites and Sunnis? Deduction and induction? Why arent all Shakespearean comedies necessarily thigh-slappers? What are transcendental numbers and what are they good for? What really happened in Platos cave? Is postmodernism dead or just having a bad hair day? And for extra credit, when should you use the adjective continual and when should you use continuous?
An Incomplete Education answers these and thousands of other questions with incomparable wit, style, and clarity. American Studies, Art History, Economics, Film, Literature, Music, Philosophy, Political Science, Psychology, Religion, Science, and World History: Heres the bottom line on each of these major disciplines, distilled to its essence and served up with consummate flair.
In this revised edition youll find a vitally expanded treatment of international issues, reflecting the seismic geopolitical upheavals of the past decade, from economic free-fall in South America to Central Africas world war, and from violent radicalization in the Muslim world to the crucial trade agreements that are defining globalization for the twenty-first century. And dont forget to read the section A Nervous Americans Guide to Living and Loving on Five Continents before you answer a personal ad in the International Herald Tribune.
As delightful as it is illuminating, An Incomplete Education packs ten thousand years of culture into a single superbly readable volume. This is a book to celebrate, to share, to give and receive, to pore over and browse through, and to return to again and again. [via]More editions of An Incomplete Education: 3,684 Things You Should Have Learned but Probably Didn't:
India Unbound : From Independence to the Global Information Ageby Gurcharan DasISBN 037541164X (0-375-41164-X)
Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'India Unbound : From Independence to the Global Information Age'More editions of India Unbound : From Independence to the Global Information Age:
-
The Ingenuity Gapby Thomas F. Homer-Dixon, Thomas Homer DixonISBN 0375401865 (0-375-40186-5)
Hardcover, Random House Inc
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Ingenuity Gap'Book summary:As the world becomes more complex, so do its problems--and the solutions to these problems become tougher to grasp, writes University of Toronto professor Thomas Homer-Dixon in The Ingenuity Gap. "As we strive to maintain or increase our prosperity and improve the quality of our lives, we must make far more sophisticated decisions, and in less time, than ever before," he writes. Is the day coming in which our ingenuity can't keep up? Homer-Dixon fears that it is: "the hour is late," and we're blindly "careening into the future." What we face, he says, is a "very real chasm that sometimes looms between our ever more difficult problems and our lagging ability to solve them." There are moments when Homer-Dixon comes close to sounding like a modern-day Malthus, with his never-ending worries about population growth, the environment, the strength of international financial institutions, civil wars, and so on. Yet parts of this book are downright fascinating; at its best, The Ingenuity Gap reads like one of Malcolm Gladwell's stories for The New Yorker (or his book The Tipping Point).
Homer-Dixon is very good when he tackles particular problems, and his interests are wide-ranging, moving from the psychology of an airplane cockpit during a crisis to the depletion of the world's fisheries to differences between the minds of Neanderthals and Homo sapiens. He also dredges up fine details. Did you know that "the largest human-made structure on the planet is not an Egyptian pyramid or a hydroelectric dam but the Staten Island Fresh Kills landfill near New York City, which has a depth of one hundred meters and an area of nine square kilometers"? There's plenty to argue with on these pages, and some readers will find Homer-Dixon's tendency to write in the first person a bit self-indulgent. Yet fans of big-think books like Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel, David Landes's The Wealth and Poverty of Nations, and Robert Wright's The Moral Animal will find The Ingenuity Gap riveting. --John J. Miller [via]
More editions of The Ingenuity Gap:
LA Batardeby Violette LeducISBN 0374513716 (0-374-51371-6)
Softcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'LA Batarde'More editions of LA Batarde:
-
Les Miserablesby Victor Hugo, Charles E. Wilbour, Peter WashingtonISBN 0375403175 (0-375-40317-5)
Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Les Miserables'Book summary:(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)
It has been said that Victor Hugo has a street named after him in virtually every town in France. A major reason for the singular celebrity of this most popular and versatile of the great French writers is Les Misérables (1862). In this story of the trials of the peasant Jean Valjeana man unjustly imprisoned, baffled by destiny, and hounded by his nemesis, the magnificently realized, ambiguously malevolent police detective JavertHugo achieves the sort of rare imaginative resonance that allows a work of art to transcend its genre.
Les Misérables is at once a tense thriller that contains one of the most compelling chase scenes in all literature, an epic portrayal of the nineteenth-century French citizenry, and a vital dramahighly particularized and poetic in its rendition but universal in its implicationsof the redemption of one human being. [via]More editions of Les Miserables:
The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimageby Paul ElieISBN 0374529213 (0-374-52921-3)
Softcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage'More editions of The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage:
-
Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism, and the Futureby Jennifer Baumgardner, Amy RichardsISBN 0374526222 (0-374-52622-2)
Softcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism, and the Future'Book summary:A powerful indictment from within of the current state of feminism, and a passionate call to armsFrom Lilith Fair to Buffy the Vampire Slayer to the WNBA--everywhere you look, girl culture is clearly ascendant. Young women live by feminism's goals, yet feminism itself is undeniably at a crossroads; "girl power" feminists appear to be obsessed with personal empowerment at the expense of politics while political institutions such as Ms. and NOW are so battle weary they've lost their ability to speak to a new generation. In Manifesta, Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards show the snags in each feminist hub--from the dissolution of riot grrrls into the likes of the Spice Girls, to older women's hawking of young girls' imperiled self-esteem, to the hyped hatred of feminist thorns like Katie Roiphe and Naomi Wolf--and prove that these snags have not, in fact, torn feminism asunder. In an intelligent and incendiary argument, Baumgardner and Richards address issues instead of feelings and the political as well as the personal. They describe the seven deadly sins the media commits against feminism, provide keys to accessible and urgent activism, discuss why the ERA is still a relevant and crucial political goal, and spell out what a world with equality would look like. They apply Third Wave confidence to Second Wave consciousness, all the while maintaining that the answer to feminism's problems is still feminism. [via]
More editions of Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism, and the Future:
-
Middlesexby Jeffrey EugenidesISBN 0374199698 (0-374-19969-8)
Hardcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Middlesex'Book summary:"I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974." And so begins Middlesex, the mesmerizing saga of a near-mythic Greek American family and the "roller-coaster ride of a single gene through time." The odd but utterly believable story of Cal Stephanides, and how this 41-year-old hermaphrodite was raised as Calliope, is at the tender heart of this long-awaited second novel from Jeffrey Eugenides, whose elegant and haunting 1993 debut, The Virgin Suicides, remains one of the finest first novels of recent memory.
Eugenides weaves together a kaleidoscopic narrative spanning 80 years of a stained family history, from a fateful incestuous union in a small town in early 1920s Asia Minor to Prohibition-era Detroit; from the early days of Ford Motors to the heated 1967 race riots; from the tony suburbs of Grosse Pointe and a confusing, aching adolescent love story to modern-day Berlin. Eugenides's command of the narrative is astonishing. He balances Cal/Callie's shifting voices convincingly, spinning this strange and often unsettling story with intelligence, insight, and generous amounts of humor:
Emotions, in my experience aren't covered by single words. I don't believe in "sadness," "joy," or "regret." & I'd like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions, Germanic traincar constructions like, say, "the happiness that attends disaster." Or: "the disappointment of sleeping with one's fantasy." ... I'd like to have a word for "the sadness inspired by failing restaurants" as well as for "the excitement of getting a room with a minibar." I've never had the right words to describe my life, and now that I've entered my story, I need them more than ever.
When you get to the end of this splendorous book, when you suddenly realize that after hundreds of pages you have only a few more left to turn over, you'll experience a quick pang of regret knowing that your time with Cal is coming to a close, and you may even resist finishing it--putting it aside for an hour or two, or maybe overnight--just so that this wondrous, magical novel might never end. --Brad Thomas Parsons [via]
More editions of Middlesex:
Miss Wyomingby Douglas CouplandISBN 0375407340 (0-375-40734-0)
Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Miss Wyoming'More editions of Miss Wyoming:
The Missing Peace: The Inside Story of the Fight for Middle East Peaceby Dennis RossISBN 0374529809 (0-374-52980-9)
Softcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Missing Peace: The Inside Story Of The Fight For Middle East Peace'More editions of The Missing Peace: The Inside Story of the Fight for Middle East Peace:
-
Modern Times, Modern Places : A Monumental Study of the Transformation of Art and Life in the Twentieth Centuryby Peter ConradISBN 037540113X (0-375-40113-X)
Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Modern Times, Modern Places : A Monumental Study of the Transformation of Art and Life in the Twentieth Century'Book summary:"The earth," said Gertrude Stein in 1938, "is not the same as in the 19th century." And how. Covering a staggeringly vast distance, Peter Conrad traces the development of modern consciousness during the 20th century through the art and thought of Vienna, Paris, Berlin, and Tokyo. He compares the progress to that of a human life, passing from youthful zest to maturity, but only by way of anguish and torment. This sounds simplistic; the book is not. Conrad's prose is as fluid as his ideas are sharp, and the scope of his reference is vast, its application unassailable. This is intellectual writing at its most accessible. He considers Freud and Chaplin, Stravinsky and Einstein, as he pursues his theme of a planet that has shrunk, as we have grown, to a size that we can manipulate and, as Hiroshima showed, we can destroy. Society's greatest advances have been technological, he argues, yet at the expense of reducing the individualism of humankind, of "dumbing down" to a sedative senility. Wisely avoiding the business of prediction, his declaration of faith in laughter when facing the future, and in the reinterpretation of the past in order to escape it, provides a pleasantly unexpected conclusion.
Arranged in 30 chapters, each a rounded essay in its own right, Modern Times, Modern Places is a powerfully evocative appraisal of the 20th century and its achievements that succeeds, quite frankly, where many will fail. --David Vincent [via]
More editions of Modern Times, Modern Places : A Monumental Study of the Transformation of Art and Life in the Twentieth Century:
-
Mythologiesby R. BarthesISBN 0374521506 (0-374-52150-6)
Softcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Mythologies'Book summary:"[Mythologies] illustrates the beautiful generosity of Barthes's progressive interest in the meaning (his word is signification) of practically everything around him, not only the books and paintings of high art, but also the slogans, trivia, toys, food, and popular rituals (cruises, striptease, eating, wrestling matches) of contemporary life . . . For Barthes, words and objects have in common the organized capacity to say something; at the same time, since they are signs, words and objects have the bad faith always to appear natural to their consumer, as if what they say is eternal, true, necessary, instead of arbitrary, made, contingent. Mythologies finds Barthes revealing the fashioned systems of ideas that make it possible, for example, for 'Einstein's brain' to stand for, be the myth of, 'a genius so lacking in magic that one speaks about his thought as a functional labor analogous to the mechanical making of sausages.' Each of the little essays in this book wrenches a definition out of a common but constructed object, making the object speak its hidden, but ever-so-present, reservoir of manufactured sense."--Edward W. Said[via]More editions of Mythologies:
-
Not in Front of the Children: Indecency, Censorship, and the Innocence of Youthby Marjorie HeinsISBN 0374175454 (0-374-17545-4)
Hardcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Not in Front of the Children: Indecency, Censorship, and the Innocence of Youth'Book summary:The first comprehensive history of our battles over children and censorship.
From Huckleberry Finn to Harry Potter, Internet filters to the V-chip, censorship exercised on behalf of children and adolescents is often based on the assumption that they must be protected from "indecent" information that might harm their development -- whether in art, in literature, or on a Web site. But where does this assumption come from, and is it true?
In Not in Front of the Children, Marjorie Heins explores the fascinating history of "indecency" laws and other restrictions aimed at protecting youth. From Plato's argument for rigid censorship, through Victorian laws aimed at repressing libidinous thoughts, to contemporary battles over sex education in public schools and violence in the media, Heins guides us through what became, and remains, an ideological minefield. With fascinating examples drawn from around the globe, she suggests that the "harm-to-minors" argument rests on shaky foundations.
There is an urgent need for informed, dispassionate debate about the perceived conflict between the free-expression rights of young people and the widespread urge to shield, protect, or censor them. Not in Front of the Children will spur this long-needed conversation. [via]
More editions of Not in Front of the Children: Indecency, Censorship, and the Innocence of Youth:
-
Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolutionby Francis FukuyamaISBN 0374236437 (0-374-23643-7)
Hardcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution'Book summary:Maybe we have a future after all: Our Posthuman Future is political historian Francis Fukuyama's reconsideration of his 1989 announcement that history had reached an end. He claims that science, particularly genome studies, offers radical changes, possibly more profound than anything since the development of language, in the way we think about human nature. He makes his case thoroughly and eloquently, rarely dipping into philosophical or critical jargon and consistently maintaining an informal tone.
Fukuyama is deeply concerned about the erosion of the foundations of liberal democracy under pressure from new concepts of humans and human rights, and most readers will find some room for agreement. Ultimately, he argues for strong international regulation of human biotechnology and thoughtfully disposes of the most compelling counterarguments. While readers might not agree that we're at risk of creating Huxley's Brave New World, it's hard to deny that things are changing quickly and that perhaps we ought to consider the changes before they're irrevocable. --Rob Lightner [via]
More editions of Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution:
-
The Painted Wordby Tom WolfeISBN 0374228787 (0-374-22878-7)
Hardcover, Farrar, Straus & Giroux
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Painted Word'Book summary:In 1975, after having put radical chic and '60s counterculture to the satirical torch, Tom Wolfe turned his attention to the contemporary art world. The patron saint (and resident imp) of New Journalism couldn't have asked for a better subject. Here was a hotbed of pretension, nitwit theorizing, social climbing, and money, money, money--all Wolfe had to do was sharpen his tools and get to work. He did! Much of The Painted Word is a superb burlesque on that modern mating ritual whereby artists get to despise their middle-class audience and accommodate it at the same time. The painter, Wolfe writes, "had to dedicate himself to the quirky god Avant-Garde. He had to keep one devout eye peeled for the new edge on the blade of the wedge of the head on the latest pick thrust of the newest exploratory probe of this fall's avant-garde Breakthrough of the Century.... At the same time he had to keep his other eye cocked to see if anyone in le monde was watching."
The other bone Wolfe has to pick is with the proliferation of art theory, particularly the sort purveyed by postwar colossi like Harold Rosenberg, Clement Greenberg, and Leo Steinberg. Decades after the heyday of abstract expressionism, these guys make pretty easy targets. What could be more absurd, after all, than endless Jesuitical disputes about the flatness of the picture plane? So most of them get a highly comical spanking from the author. It's worth pointing out, of course, that Wolfe paints with a broad (as it were) brush. If he's skewering the entire army of artistic pretenders in a single go, there's no room to admit that Jasper Johns or Willem DeKooning might actually have some talent. But as he would no doubt admit, The Painted Word isn't about the history of art. It's about the history of taste and middlebrow acquisition--and nobody has chronicled these two topics as hilariously or accurately as Tom Wolfe. --James Marcus [via]
More editions of The Painted Word:
-
Persepolisby Marjane SatrapiISBN 0375422307 (0-375-42230-7)
Hardcover, Random House Inc
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Persepolis'Book summary:Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis is an exemplary autobiographical graphic novel, in the tradition of Art Spiegelman's classic Maus. Set in Iran during the Islamic Revolution, young Satrapi is the six-year-old daughter of two committed and well-to-do Marxists. As she grows up, she witness first-hand the effects that the revolution and the war with Iraq have on her home, family and school.
Like Maus, the main strength of Persepolis is its ability to make the political personal.
Told through the eyes of a child (as reflected in Satrapi's simplistic yet expressive black-and-white artwork), young Marjane learns about her family history and how it is entwined with the history of Iran, and watches her liberal parents cope with a fundamentalist regime that gets increasingly rigid as it gains more power. Outspoken and intelligent, Marjane chafes at Iran's increasingly conservative interpretation of Islamic law, especially as she grows into a bright and independent teenager. Throughout, Marjane remains a hugely likeable young woman
Persepolis gives the reader a snapshot of daily life in a country struggling with an internal cultural revolution and a bloody war, but within an intensely personal context. It's a very human history, beautifully and sympathetically told. --Robert Burrow [via]
More editions of Persepolis:
-
Platformby Michel Houellebecq, Frank WynneISBN 0375414622 (0-375-41462-2)
Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Platform'Book summary:Michel Renault is a human void. Following the death of the father he barely knew, he endures his civil ser-
vice job while eking out an existence of prepackaged pleasure, hollow friendships, TV dinners, and pornography. On a group holiday in Thailand, however, he meets the shyly compelling Valérie, who soon pursues an agenda that Michel himself could never have thought possible: his own humanization.
Back in Paris, they plunge into an affair that strays into S&M, public sex, and partner swapping, even as they devise a scheme to save Valéries ailing travel company by capitalizing on the only trade Michel has seen flourish in the Third World. Before long, he quits his job, and their business model for sex tourism is gradually implemented. But when they return to Thailand, where Michels philosophy will be put into practice, he discovers that sex is neither the most consuming nor dangerous of passions . . .
From a suburbanized West crippled by hate crime to an East subsumed by materialism, Michel Houellebecq exploreswith characteristic provocativeness, but also with surprising tendernessthe emotions that seem most resilient to any influence: love and hate. Platform is, as Anita Brookner has written, a brilliant novel, casting a prescient eye on the abuses and inequalities that lead to wider trouble. [via]More editions of Platform:
Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Centuryby John BrewerISBN 0374234582 (0-374-23458-2)
Hardcover, Farrar, Straus & Giroux
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century'More editions of Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century:
Political Fictionsby Joan DidionISBN 0375413383 (0-375-41338-3)
Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Political Fictions'More editions of Political Fictions:
-
Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Clubby Charles DickensISBN 0375405488 (0-375-40548-8)
Hardcover, Random House Inc
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club'Book summary:(Book Jacket Status: Not Jacketed)Charles Dickenss satirical masterpiece, The Pickwick Papers, catapulted the young writer into literary fame when it was first serialized in 183637. It recounts the rollicking adventures of the members of the Pickwick Club as they travel about England getting into all sorts of mischief. Laugh-out-loud funny and endlessly entertaining, the book also reveals Dickenss burgeoning interest in the parliamentary system, lawyers, the Poor Laws, and the ills of debtors prisons. As G. K. Chesterton noted, Before [Dickens] wrote a single real story, he had a kind of vision . . . a map full of fantastic towns, thundering coaches, clamorous market-places, uproarious inns, strange and swaggering figures. That vision was Pickwick. [via]
More editions of Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club:
Power to the People: How the Coming Energy Revolution Will Transform an Industry, Change Our Lives, and Maybe Even Save the Planetby Vijay VaitheeswaranISBN 0374529701 (0-374-52970-1)
Softcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Power to the People: How the Coming Energy Revolution Will Transform an Industry, Change Our Lives, and Maybe Even Save the Planet'More editions of Power to the People: How the Coming Energy Revolution Will Transform an Industry, Change Our Lives, and Maybe Even Save the Planet:
- Power to the People: How the Coming Energy Revolution Will Transform an Industry, Change Our Lives, and Maybe Even Save the Planet: ISBN 0374236755 (0-374-23675-5)
Hardcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux - Power to the People: How the Coming Energy Revolution Will Transform an Industry, Change Our Lives, and Maybe Even Save the Planet: ISBN 0374529701 (0-374-52970-1)
Softcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux
- Power to the People: How the Coming Energy Revolution Will Transform an Industry, Change Our Lives, and Maybe Even Save the Planet: ISBN 0374236755 (0-374-23675-5)
The Pump House Gangby Tom WolfeISBN 0374238642 (0-374-23864-2)
Hardcover, Farrar, Straus & Giroux
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Pump House Gang'
The Raw and the Cookedby Claude Levi-StraussISBN 0374949530 (0-374-94953-0)
Hardcover, Octagon Books
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Raw and the Cooked'More editions of The Raw and the Cooked:
-
Revolutionary Wealth: How It Will be Created And How It Will Change Our Livesby Alvin Toffler, Heidi TofflerISBN 0375401741 (0-375-40174-1)
Hardcover, Random House Inc
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Revolutionary Wealth: How It Will be Created And How It Will Change Our Lives'Book summary:Starting with the publication of their seminal bestseller, Future Shock, Alvin and Heidi Toffler have given millions of readers new ways to think about personal life in todays high-speed world with its constantly changing, seemingly random impacts on our businesses, governments, families and daily lives. Now, writing with the same rare grasp and clarity that made their earlier books classics, the Tofflers turn their attention to the revolution in wealth now sweeping the planet. And once again, they provide a penetrating, coherent way to make sense of the seemingly senseless.
Revolutionary Wealth is about how tomorrows wealth will be created, and who will get it and how. But twenty-first-century wealth, according to the Tofflers, is not just about money, and cannot be understood in terms of industrial-age economics. Thus they write here about everything from education and child rearing to Hollywood and China, from everyday truth and misconceptions to what they call our third job the unnoticed work we do without pay for some of the biggest corporations in our country.
They show the hidden connections between extreme sports, chocolate chip cookies, Linux software and the surplus complexity in our lives as society wobbles back and forth between depressing decadence and a hopeful post-decadence.
In their earlier work, the Tofflers coined the word prosumer for people who consume what they themselves produce. In Revolutionary Wealth they expand the concept to reveal how many of our activitieswhether parenting or volunteering, blogging, painting our house, improving our diet, organizing a neighborhood council or even mashing musicpump free lunch from the hidden non-money economy into the money economy that economists track. Prosuming, they forecast, is about to explode and compel radical changes in the way we measure, make and manipulate wealth.
Blazing with fresh ideas, Revolutionary Wealth provides readers with powerful new tools for thinking aboutand preparing fortheir future. [via]More editions of Revolutionary Wealth: How It Will be Created And How It Will Change Our Lives:
-
A Sense of the Mysterious : Science and the Human Spiritby Alan LightmanISBN 0375423206 (0-375-42320-6)
Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'A Sense of the Mysterious : Science and the Human Spirit'Book summary:Unusually gifted as both a physicist and a novelist, Alan Lightman has lived in the dual worlds of
science and art for much of his life. In these brilliant essays, the two worlds meet. In A Sense of the Mysterious, Lightman records his personal struggles to reconcile certainty with uncertainty, logic with intuition, questions with answers and questions without. Lightman explores the emotional life of science, the power of metaphor and imagination in science, the creative moment, the different uses of language in science and literature, and the alternate ways in which scientists and humanists think about the world. Included are in-depth portraits of some of the great scientists of our time: Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman, Edward Teller, and astronomer Vera Rubin. Rather than finding a forbidding gulf between the two cultures, as did the physicist and novelist C. P. Snow fifty years ago, Lightman discovers complementary ways of looking at the world, both part of being human.
Original, thoughtful, and beautifully written, A Sense of the Mysterious confirms Alan Lightmans unique position at the crossroads of science and art. [via]More editions of A Sense of the Mysterious : Science and the Human Spirit:
-
Shelters of Stoneby Jean M. AuelISBN 0375431748 (0-375-43174-8)
Hardcover, Ballantine Books
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Shelters of Stone'Book summary:Jean Auel's fifth novel about Ayla, the Cro-Magnon cavewoman raised by Neanderthals, is the biggest comeback bestseller in Amazon.com history. In The Shelters of Stone, Ayla meets the Zelandonii tribe of Jondalar, the Cro-Magnon hunk she rescued from Baby, her pet lion. Ayla is pregnant. How will Jondalar's mom react? Or his bitchy jilted fiancée? Ayla wows her future in-laws by striking fire from flint and taming a wild wolf. But most regard her Neanderthal adoptive Clan as subhuman "flatheads." Clan larynxes can't quite manage language, and Ayla must convince the Zelandonii that Clan sign language isn't just arm-flapping. Zelandonii and Clan are skirmishing, and those who interbreed are deemed "abominations." What would Jondalar's tribe think if they knew Ayla had to abandon her half-breed son in Clan country? The plot is slow to unfold, because Auel's first goal is to pack the tale with period Pleistocene detail, provocative speculation, and bits of romance, sex, tribal politics, soap opera, and homicidal wooly rhino-hunting adventure. It's an enveloping fact-based fantasy, a genre-crossing time trip to the Ice Age. --Tim Appelo [via]
More editions of Shelters of Stone:
-
The Shockwave Riderby John BrunnerISBN 0345467175 (0-345-46717-5)
Softcover, Ballantine Books
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Shockwave Rider'Book summary:This book has always been popular with the techy-geeky crowd, but, since it was first published in the '70s, it missed out on the cyberpunk revolution of the '80s. It's too bad, because this is a compelling story of a future world tied together by a universal data network, a world that could be our tomorrow. It's a tense place filled with information overload and corporate domination, and nearly everything is known about everybody. Except Nickie Haflinger, a prodigy whose talents allow him to switch identities with a phone call. Nickie plans to change the world, if only he can keep from getting caught. [via]
More editions of The Shockwave Rider:
-
A Short History of Nearly Everythingby Bill BrysonISBN 0375432000 (0-375-43200-0)
Hardcover, Random House Large Print
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'A Short History of Nearly Everything'Book summary:One of the worlds most beloved and bestselling writers takes his ultimate journey -- into the most intriguing and intractable questions that science seeks to answer.
In A Walk in the Woods, Bill Bryson trekked the Appalachian Trail -- well, most of it. In In A Sunburned Country, he confronted some of the most lethal wildlife Australia has to offer. Now, in his biggest book, he confronts his greatest challenge: to understand -- and, if possible, answer -- the oldest, biggest questions we have posed about the universe and ourselves. Taking as territory everything from the Big Bang to the rise of civilization, Bryson seeks to understand how we got from there being nothing at all to there being us. To that end, he has attached himself to a host of the worlds most advanced (and often obsessed) archaeologists, anthropologists, and mathematicians, travelling to their offices, laboratories, and field camps. He has read (or tried to read) their books, pestered them with questions, apprenticed himself to their powerful minds. A Short History of Nearly Everything is the record of this quest, and it is a sometimes profound, sometimes funny, and always supremely clear and entertaining adventure in the realms of human knowledge, as only Bill Bryson can render it. Science has never been more involving or entertaining. [via]More editions of A Short History of Nearly Everything:
-
Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle Eastby Michael OrenISBN 0345461924 (0-345-46192-4)
Softcover, Ballantine Books
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East'Book summary:
Though it lasted for only six tense days in June, the 1967 Arab-Israeli war never really ended. Every crisis that has ripped through this region in the ensuing decades, from the Yom Kippur War of 1973 to the ongoing intifada, is a direct consequence of those six days of fighting. Michael B. Orens magnificent Six Days of War, an internationally acclaimed bestseller, is the first comprehensive account of this epoch-making event.
Writing with a novelists command of narrative and a historians grasp of fact and motive, Oren reconstructs both the lightning-fast action on the battlefields and the political shocks that electrified the world. Extraordinary personalitiesMoshe Dayan and Gamal Abdul Nasser, Lyndon Johnson and Alexei Kosyginrose and toppled from power as a result of this war; borders were redrawn; daring strategies brilliantly succeeded or disastrously failed in a matter of hours. And the balance of power changedin the Middle East and in the world. A towering work of history and an enthralling human narrative, Six Days of War is the most important book on the Middle East conflict to appear in a generation. [via]More editions of Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East:
-
Slam Dunks and No-Brainers : Language in Your Life, the Media, Business, Politics, and, Like, Whateverby Leslie SavanISBN 0375402470 (0-375-40247-0)
Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Slam Dunks and No-Brainers : Language in Your Life, the Media, Business, Politics, and, Like, Whatever'Book summary:A marvelously original and informative book about the ever-changing American language that offers surprising insights into why we talk the way we talk.
With dazzling wit and acuity, three-time Pulitzer Prize finalist Leslie Savan dissects contemporary language to discover what our most popular idioms reveal about America today. She traces the paths that words and expressions travel from obscurity to ubiquity. She describes how real people create slang and colorful phrases (I dont think so; Bring it on!; Dude; Outside the box); how the media, advertising, politics, and business mine the language for these phrases in order to better sell products, ideas, and personalities; and how these expressions, now that theyve hit the big time, then burst out of our mouths as celebrity words, newly glamorous and persuasive.
Words like Duh! and Whatever have become such an indispensable form of communication that theyre replacing our need to articulate any real thought. Whether its George Tenet convincing George W. Bush that finding WMD in Iraq would be a slam dunk or Microsoft telling you that its latest software is a no-brainer, this bright, snappy language affects us allup close and personal.
Smart, dynamic, and great fun, Slam Dunks and No-Brainers isfor everyone who loves the mysteries and idiosyncrasies of languagewell, a no-brainer. [via]More editions of Slam Dunks and No-Brainers : Language in Your Life, the Media, Business, Politics, and, Like, Whatever:
Snowby Orhan Pamuk, Maureen FreelyISBN 0375406972 (0-375-40697-2)
Hardcover, Random House Inc
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Snow'More editions of Snow:
The Sorcerer's Apprentice: Picasso, Provence, and Douglas Cooperby John RichardsonISBN 0375400338 (0-375-40033-8)
Hardcover, Random House Inc
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Sorcerer's Apprentice: Picasso, Provence, and Douglas Cooper'More editions of The Sorcerer's Apprentice: Picasso, Provence, and Douglas Cooper:
-
Sports In Americaby James A. MichenerISBN 0345483065 (0-345-48306-5)
Softcover, Ballantine Books
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Sports In America'Book summary:"A comprehensive, controversial examination of sports as a major force in American life." Los Angeles Times
There is a crisis in American sports, and it's getting worse. Drugs, violence, and the corrupting effects of money and fame. Even before these problems made national headlines, master writer James A. Michener was growing concerned about the state of sports in America. Only Michener could tackle a subject so big and leave us amazed and apalled by what we've learned, yet still loving the games we grew up on.
From the Paperback edition. [via]More editions of Sports In America:
-
Strong Motionby Jonathan FranzenISBN 0374271054 (0-374-27105-4)
Hardcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Strong Motion'Book summary:A suspenseful, complex novel dealing with the issues of our day--environmental pollution, religious fundamentalism, abortion, and the threat of apocalypse. It is also a tender and fresh love story--a story of betrayal and redemption--from the author of The Twenty-Seventh City. [via]
More editions of Strong Motion:
Stuffed : Adventures of a Restaurant Familyby Patricia VolkISBN 0375411062 (0-375-41106-2)
Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Stuffed : Adventures of a Restaurant Family'More editions of Stuffed : Adventures of a Restaurant Family:
-
Subtle Knifeby Philip PullmanISBN 0345916417 (0-345-91641-7)
Softcover, Ballantine Books
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Subtle Knife'Book summary:With The Golden Compass Philip Pullman garnered every accolade under the sun. Critics lobbed around such superlatives as "elegant," "awe-inspiring," "grand," and "glittering," and used "magnificent" with gay abandon. Each reader had a favorite chapter--or, more likely, several--from the opening tour de force to Lyra's close call at Bolvangar to the great armored-bear battle. And Pullman was no less profligate when it came to intellectual firepower or singular characters. The dæmons alone grant him a place in world literature. Could the second installment of his trilogy keep up this pitch, or had his heroine and her too, too sullied parents consumed him? And what of the belief system that pervaded his alternate universe, not to mention the mystery of Dust? More revelations and an equal number of wonders and new players were definitely in order.
The Subtle Knife offers everything we could have wished for, and more. For a start, there's a young hero--from our world--who is a match for Lyra Silvertongue and whose destiny is every bit as shattering. Like Lyra, Will Parry has spent his childhood playing games. Unlike hers, though, his have been deadly serious. This 12-year-old long ago learned the art of invisibility: if he could erase himself, no one would discover his mother's increasing instability and separate them.
As the novel opens, Will's enemies will do anything for information about his missing father, a soldier and Arctic explorer who has been very much airbrushed from the official picture. Now Will must get his mother into safe seclusion and make his way toward Oxford, which may hold the key to John Parry's disappearance. But en route and on the lam from both the police and his family's tormentors, he comes upon a cat with more than a mouse on her mind: "She reached out a paw to pat something in the air in front of her, something quite invisible to Will." What seems to him a patch of everyday Oxford conceals far more: "The cat stepped forward and vanished." Will, too, scrambles through and into another oddly deserted landscape--one in which children rule and adults (and felines) are very much at risk. Here in this deathly silent city by the sea, he will soon have a dustup with a fierce, flinty little girl: "Her expression was a mixture of the very young--when she first tasted the cola--and a kind of deep, sad wariness." Soon Will and Lyra (and, of course, her dæmon, Pantalaimon) uneasily embark on a great adventure and head into greater tragedy.
As Pullman moves between his young warriors and the witch Serafina Pekkala, the magnetic, ever-manipulative Mrs. Coulter, and Lee Scoresby and his hare dæmon, Hester, there are clear signs of approaching war and earthly chaos. There are new faces as well. The author introduces Oxford dark-matter researcher Mary Malone; the Latvian witch queen Ruta Skadi, who "had trafficked with spirits, and it showed"; Stanislaus Grumman, a shaman in search of a weapon crucial to the cause of Lord Asriel, Lyra's father; and a serpentine old man whom Lyra and Pan can't quite place. Also on hand are the Specters, beings that make cliff-ghasts look like rank amateurs.
Throughout, Pullman is in absolute control of his several worlds, his plot and pace equal to his inspiration. Any number of astonishing scenes--small- and large-scale--will have readers on edge, and many are cause for tears. "You think things have to be possible," Will demands. "Things have to be true!" It is Philip Pullman's gift to turn what quotidian minds would term the impossible into a reality that is both heartbreaking and beautiful. --Kerry Fried [via]
More editions of Subtle Knife:
-
Sulaby Toni MorrisonISBN 0375415351 (0-375-41535-1)
Hardcover, Random House Inc
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Sula'Book summary:In Sula, Toni Morrison, winner of the 1993 Nobel Prize for literature, tells the story of two women--friends since childhood, separated in young adulthood, and reunited as grown women. Nel Wright grows up to become a wife and mother, happy to remain in her hometown of Medallion, Ohio. Sula Peace leaves Medallion to experience college, men, and life in the big city, an exceptional choice for a black woman to make in the late 1920s.
As girls, Nel and Sula are the best of friends, only children who find in each other a kindred spirit to share in each girl's loneliness and imagination. When they meet again as adults, it's clear that Nel has chosen a life of acceptance and accommodation, while Sula must fight to defend her seemingly unconventional choices and beliefs. But regardless of the physical and emotional distance that threatens this extraordinary friendship, the bond between the women remains unbreakable: "Her old friend had come home.... Sula, whose past she had lived through and with whom the present was a constant sharing of perceptions. Talking to Sula had always been a conversation with herself."
Lyrical and gripping, Sula is an honest look at the power of friendship amid a backdrop of family, love, race, and the human condition. --Gisele Toueg [via]
More editions of Sula:
-
True Notebooks : A Writer's Year at Juvenile Hallby Mark SalzmanISBN 0375413081 (0-375-41308-1)
Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'True Notebooks : A Writer's Year at Juvenile Hall'Book summary:When Mark Salzman is invited to visit a writing class at Central Juvenile Hall, a lockup for Los Angeless most violent teenage offenders, he scrambles for a polite reason to decline. He goesexpecting the worstand is so astonished by what he finds that he becomes a teacher there himself. True Notebooks is an account of Salzmans first years teaching at Central. Through it, we come to know his students as he did: in their own words.
At times impossible and at times irresistible, they write with devastating clarity about their pasts, their fears, their confusions, their regrets, and their hopes. They write about what led them to crime and to gangs, about love for their mothers and anger toward their (mostly absent) fathers, about guilt for the pain they have caused, and about what it is like to be facing life in prison at the age of seventeen. Most of all, they write about trying to find some reason to believe in themselvesand othersin spite of all that has gone wrong.
Surprising, charming, upsetting, enlightening, and ultimately hopefuldriven by the insight and humor of Salzmans voice and by the intelligence, candor, and strength of his students, whose writing appears throughout the bookTrue Notebooks is itself a reward of the self-expression Mark Salzman teaches: a revelatory meditation on the process, power, and meaning of writing. [via]More editions of True Notebooks : A Writer's Year at Juvenile Hall:
-
Ulyssesby James Joyce, Claus Melchior, Wolfhard Steppe, Hans Walter GablerISBN 0370307372 (0-370-30737-2)
Hardcover, Bodley Head
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Ulysses'Book summary:Ulysses has been labeled dirty, blasphemous, and unreadable. In a famous 1933 court decision, Judge John M. Woolsey declared it an emetic book--although he found it sufficiently unobscene to allow its importation into the United States--and Virginia Woolf was moved to decry James Joyce's "cloacal obsession." None of these adjectives, however, do the slightest justice to the novel. To this day it remains the modernist masterpiece, in which the author takes both Celtic lyricism and vulgarity to splendid extremes. It is funny, sorrowful, and even (in a close-focus sort of way) suspenseful. And despite the exegetical industry that has sprung up in the last 75 years, Ulysses is also a compulsively readable book. Even the verbal vaudeville of the final chapters can be navigated with relative ease, as long as you're willing to be buffeted, tickled, challenged, and (occasionally) vexed by Joyce's sheer command of the English language.
Among other things, a novel is simply a long story, and the first question about any story is: What happens?. In the case of Ulysses, the answer might be Everything. William Blake, one of literature's sublime myopics, saw the universe in a grain of sand. Joyce saw it in Dublin, Ireland, on June 16, 1904, a day distinguished by its utter normality. Two characters, Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom, go about their separate business, crossing paths with a gallery of indelible Dubliners. We watch them teach, eat, stroll the streets, argue, and (in Bloom's case) masturbate. And thanks to the book's stream-of-consciousness technique--which suggests no mere stream but an impossibly deep, swift-running river--we're privy to their thoughts, emotions, and memories. The result? Almost every variety of human experience is crammed into the accordian folds of a single day, which makes Ulysses not just an experimental work but the very last word in realism.
Both characters add their glorious intonations to the music of Joyce's prose. Dedalus's accent--that of a freelance aesthetician, who dabbles here and there in what we might call Early Yeats Lite--will be familiar to readers of Portrait of an Artist As a Young Man. But Bloom's wistful sensualism (and naive curiosity) is something else entirely. Seen through his eyes, a rundown corner of a Dublin graveyard is a figure for hope and hopelessness, mortality and dogged survival: "Mr Bloom walked unheeded along his grove by saddened angels, crosses, broken pillars, family vaults, stone hopes praying with upcast eyes, old Ireland's hearts and hands. More sensible to spend the money on some charity for the living. Pray for the repose of the soul of. Does anybody really?" --James Marcus [via]
More editions of Ulysses:
Under the Sign of Saturnby Susan SontagISBN 0374280762 (0-374-28076-2)
Hardcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Under the Sign of Saturn'More editions of Under the Sign of Saturn:
-
The Undercover Economistby Tim HarfordISBN 0345494016 (0-345-49401-6)
Softcover, Random House Inc
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Undercover Economist'Book summary:The economy [isnt] a bunch of rather dull statistics with names like GDP (gross domestic product), notes Tim Harford, columnist and regular guest on NPRs Marketplace, economics is about who gets what and why. In this acclaimed and riveting bookpart exposé, part users manualthe astute and entertaining columnist from the Financial Times demystifies the ways in which money works in the world. From why the coffee in your cup costs so much to why efficiency is not necessarily the answer to ensuring a fair society, from improving health care to curing crosstown trafficall the dirty little secrets of dollars and cents are delightfully revealed by The Undercover Economist.
A rare specimen: a book on economics that will enthrall its readers . . . It brings the power of economics to life.
Steven D. Levitt, coauthor of Freakonomics
A playful guide to the economics of everyday life, and as such is something of an elder sibling to Steven Levitts wild child, the hugely successful Freakonomics.
The Economist
A tour de force . . . If you need to be convinced of the everrelevant and fascinating nature of economics, read this insightful and witty book.
Jagdish Bhagwati, author of In Defense of Globalization
This is a book to savor.
The New York Times
Harford writes like a dream. From his book I found out why theres a Starbucks on every corner [and] how not to get duped in an auction. Reading The Undercover Economist is like spending an ordinary day wearing X-ray goggles.
David Bodanis, author of Electric Universe
Much wit and wisdom.
The Houston Chronicle
From Publishers Weekly
Nattily packaged-the cover sports a Roy Lichtensteinesque image of an economist in Dick Tracy garb-and cleverly written, this book applies basic economic theory to such modern phenomena as Starbucks' pricing system and Microsoft's stock values. While the concepts explored are those encountered in Microeconomics 101, Harford gracefully explains abstruse ideas like pricing along the demand curve and game theory using real world examples without relying on graphs or jargon. The book addresses free market economic theory, but Harford is not a complete apologist for capitalism; he shows how companies from Amazon.com to Whole Foods to Starbucks have gouged consumers through guerrilla pricing techniques and explains the high rents in London (it has more to do with agriculture than one might think). Harford comes down soft on Chinese sweatshops, acknowledging "conditions in factories are terrible," but "sweatshops are better than the horrors that came before them, and a step on the road to something better." Perhaps, but Harford doesn't question whether communism or a capitalist-style industrial revolution are the only two choices available in modern economies. That aside, the book is unequaled in its accessibility and ability to show how free market economic forces affect readers' day-to-day.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Bookmarks Magazine
Harford exposes the dark underbelly of capitalism in Undercover Economist. Compared with Steven Levitts and Stephen J. Dubners popular Freakonomics (*** July/Aug 2005), the book uses simple, playful examples (written in plain English) to elucidate complex economic theories. Critics agree that the book will grip readers interested in understanding free-market forces but disagree about Harfords approach. Some thought the author mastered the small ideas while keeping in sight the larger context of globalization; others faulted Harford for failing to criticize certain economic theories and to ground his arguments in political, organizational structures. Either way, his case studiessome entertaining, others indicative of times to comewill make you think twice about that cup of coffee.
Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc. [via]More editions of The Undercover Economist:
-
Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnsonby Geoffrey C. WardISBN 0375415327 (0-375-41532-7)
Hardcover, Random House Inc
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson'Book summary:He was the first black heavyweight champion in history, the most celebratedand most reviledAfrican American of his age. In Unforgivable Blackness, the prizewinning biographer Geoffrey C. Ward brings to vivid life the real Jack Johnson, a figure far more complex and compelling than the newspaper headlines he inspired could ever convey. Johnson battled his way from obscurity to the top of the heavyweight ranks and in 1908 won the greatest prize in American sportsone that had always been the private preserve of white boxers. At a time when whites ran everything in America, he took orders from no one and resolved to live as if color did not exist. While most blacks struggled just to survive, he reveled in his riches and his fame. And at a time when the mere suspicion that a black man had flirted with a white woman could cost him his life, he insisted on sleeping with whomever he pleased, and married three. Because he did so the federal government set out to destroy him, and he was forced to endure a year of prison and seven years of exile. Ward points out that to most whites (and to some African Americans as well) he was seen as a perpetual threatprofligate, arrogant, amoral, a dark menace, and a danger to the natural order of things.
Unforgivable Blackness is the first full-scale biography of Johnson in more than twenty years. Accompanied by more than fifty photographs and drawing on a wealth of new materialincluding Johnsons never-before-published prison memoirit restores Jack Johnson to his rightful place in the pantheon of American individualists. [via]More editions of Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson:
-
War and Peaceby Leo TolstoyISBN 0345472403 (0-345-47240-3)
Softcover, Bantam Classic & Loveswept
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'War and Peace'Book summary:Often called the greatest novel ever written, War and Peace is at once an epic of the Napoleonic Wars, a philosophical study, and a celebration of the Russian spirit. Tolstoys genius is seen clearly in the multitude of fully realized and equally memorable characters that populate this massive chronicle. Out of this complex narrative emerges a profound examination of the individuals place in the historical process, one that makes it clear why Thomas Mann praised Tolstoy for his Homeric powers and placed War and Peace in the same category as the Iliad: To read him . . . is to find ones way home . . . to everything within us that is fundamental and sane. [via]
More editions of War and Peace:
-
We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwandaby Philip GourevitchISBN 0374286973 (0-374-28697-3)
Hardcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda'Book summary:"Hutus kill Tutsis, then Tutsis kill Hutus--if that's really all there is to it, then no wonder we can't be bothered with it," Philip Gourevitch writes, imagining the response of somebody in a country far from the ethnic strife and mass killings of Rwanda. But the situation is not so simple, and in this complex and wrenching book, he explains why the Rwandan genocide should not be written off as just another tribal dispute.
The "stories" in this book's subtitle are both the author's, as he repeatedly visits this tiny country in an attempt to make sense of what has happened, and those of the people he interviews. These include a Tutsi doctor who has seen much of her family killed over decades of Tutsi oppression, a Schindleresque hotel manager who hid hundreds of refugees from certain death, and a Rwandan bishop who has been accused of supporting the slaughter of Tutsi schoolchildren, and can only answer these charges by saying, "What could I do?" Gourevitch, a staff writer for the New Yorker, describes Rwanda's history with remarkable clarity and documents the experience of tragedy with a sober grace. The reader will ask along with the author: Why does this happen? And why don't we bother to stop it? --Maria Dolan [via]
More editions of We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda:
-
What Should I Do With My Life?: The True Story of People Who Answered the Ultimate Questionby Po BronsonISBN 0345485920 (0-345-48592-0)
Softcover, Ballantine Books
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'What Should I Do With My Life?: The True Story of People Who Answered the Ultimate Question'Book summary:In What Should I Do with my Life? Po Bronson manages to create a career book that is a page-turner. His 50 vivid profiles of people searching for "their soft spot--their true calling" will engage readers because Bronson is asking himself the same question. He explores his premise, that "nothing is braver than people facing up to their own identity," as an anthropologist and autobiographer. He tackles thorny, nuanced issues about self-determination. Among them: paradoxes of money and meaning, authorship and destiny, brain candy and novelty versus soul food. Bronsons stories, limited to professional people and complete with photos, are gems. They include a Los Angeles lawyer who became a priest, a Harvard MBA catfish farmer turned biotech executive, and a Silicon Valley real estate agent who opened a leather crafts factory in Costa Rica.
Bronson is a gifted intuitive writer, the bestselling author of The Nudist on the Late Shift, whose thoughtful, vulnerable voice emerges as the books greatest strength and challenge. He describes his subjects lives along with the ways they annoy, puzzle, and worry him. He frets about meddling with his questions, yet once, memorably and appropriately, he offers a talented man a top post in his publishing company. While this creates the juiciness of his portraits, it also can make Bronson the books most memorable character and the only one whose story is not resolved. Even so, this remarkable career chronicle sets the gold standard for the worth of the examined life. --Barbara Mackoff [via]
More editions of What Should I Do With My Life?: The True Story of People Who Answered the Ultimate Question:
The Whole Equation: A History of Hollywoodby David ThomsonISBN 0375400168 (0-375-40016-8)
Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Whole Equation: A History of Hollywood'More editions of The Whole Equation: A History of Hollywood:
The Whole Womanby Germaine GreerISBN 0375407472 (0-375-40747-2)
Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Whole Woman'More editions of The Whole Woman:
Why Most Things Fail: Evolution, Extinction And Economicsby Paul OrmerodISBN 0375424059 (0-375-42405-9)
Hardcover, Random House Inc
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Why Most Things Fail: Evolution, Extinction And Economics'More editions of Why Most Things Fail: Evolution, Extinction And Economics:
-
Why They Kill : The Discoveries of a Maverick Criminologistby Richard RhodesISBN 0375402497 (0-375-40249-7)
Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Why They Kill : The Discoveries of a Maverick Criminologist'Book summary:Why do some men, women and even children assault, batter, rape, mutilate and murder? In his stunning new book, the Pulitzer Prize-winner Richard Rhodes provides a startling and persuasive answer.Why They Killexplores the discoveries of a maverick American criminologist, Dr. Lonnie Athens -- himself the child of a violent family -- which challenge conventional theories about violent behavior. By interviewing violent criminals in prison, Dr. Athens has identified a pattern of social development common to all seriously violent people -- a four-stage process he calls "violentization": -- First, brutalization: A young person is forced by violence or the threat of violence to submit to an aggressive authority figure; he witnesses the violent subjugation of intimates, and the authority figure coaches him to use violence to settle disputes.-- Second, belligerency: The dispirited subject, determined to prevent his further violent subjugation, heeds his coach and resolves to resort to violence.-- Third, violent performances: His violent response to provocation succeeds, and he reads respect and fear in the eyes of others.-- Fourth, virulency: Exultant, he determines from now on to utilize serious violence as a means of dealing with people -- and he bonds with others who believe as he does.Since all four stages must be fully experienced in sequence and completed to produce a violent individual, we see how intervening to interrupt the process can prevent a tragic outcome.Rhodes supports Athens's theory with historical evidence and shows how it explains such violent careers as those of Perry Smith (the killer central to Truman Capote's narrative In Cold Blood), Mike Tyson, "preppy rapist" Alex Kelly, and Lee Harvey Oswald.Why They Kill challenges with devastating evidence the theory that violent behavior is impulsive, unconsciously motivated and predetermined. [via]
More editions of Why They Kill : The Discoveries of a Maverick Criminologist:
-
The Working Poor: Invisible In Americaby David K. ShiplerISBN 0375408908 (0-375-40890-8)
Hardcover, Random House Inc
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Working Poor: Invisible In America'Book summary:Most of the people I write about in this book do not have the luxury of rage. They are caught in exhausting struggles. Their wages do not lift them far enough from poverty to improve their lives, and their lives, in turn, hold them back. The term by which they are usually described, working poor, should be an oxymoron. Nobody who works hard should be poor in America. from the Introduction
From the author of the Pulitzer Prizewinning Arab and Jew, a new book that presents a searing, intimate portrait of working American families struggling against insurmountable odds to escape poverty.
As David K. Shipler makes clear in this powerful, humane study, the invisible poor are engaged in the activity most respected in American ideologyhard, honest work. But their version of the American Dream is a nightmare: low-paying, dead-end jobs; the profound failure of government to improve upon decaying housing, health care, and education; the failure of families to break the patterns of child abuse and substance abuse. Shipler exposes the interlocking problems by taking us into the sorrowful, infuriating, courageous lives of the poorwhite and black, Asian and Latino, citizens and immigrants. We encounter them every day, for they do jobs essential to the American economy.
We meet drifting farmworkers in North Carolina, exploited garment workers in New Hampshire, illegal immigrants trapped in the steaming kitchens of Los Angeles restaurants, addicts who struggle into productive work from the cruel streets of the nations capitaleach life another aspect of a confounding, far-reaching urgent national crisis. And unlike most works on poverty, this one delves into the calculations of some employers as welltheir razor-thin profits, their anxieties about competition from abroad, their frustrations in finding qualified workers.
This impassioned book not only dissects the problems, but makes pointed, informed recommendations for change. It is a book that stands to make a difference. [via]More editions of The Working Poor: Invisible In America:
Wuthering Heightsby Emily BronteISBN 0361031637 (0-361-03163-7)
Hardcover, Purnell
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Wuthering Heights'More editions of Wuthering Heights:
Results page: PREV 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 NEXT
![[powered by Muze Inc.]](http://i.bookfinder.com/images/site/muze/powered_by_muze.gif){kind=small}