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Elements of surprise: our mental limits and the satisfactions of plot
By Vera Tobin. 2018
Cognitive scientist examines the use of surprise endings in literary fiction and popular literature and challenges two common beliefs: that…
biases are a form of moral weakness and surprise endings are shallow gimmicks. Delves into plot twists, unreliable narrators, and more. 2018The Black Prince and the capture of a king, Poitiers 1356: Poitiers 1356
By Morgen Witzel, Marilyn Livingstone. 2018
An account of the Battle of Poitiers in 1356, during the Hundred Years' War, and the capture of France's King…
Jean by the English. Provides a day-by-day description of the campaign that climaxed with that battle and briefly discusses the long-reaching effects of its outcome. 2018The darkening age: the Christian destruction of the classical world
By Catherine Nixey. 2018
Journalist examines the rise of Christianity in the ancient world and the destruction of Mediterranean literature and cultural artifacts that…
led to the time known as the Dark Ages. Discusses the loss of architecture, intellectual and technological advancements, and art. Analyzes the reasoning behind zealotry and targeted attacks. 2017Scotland: a very short introduction (Very Short Introductions)
By Rab Houston. 2008
Professor of modern history examines Scotland's politics, laws, society, religious institutions, schools and universities, culture, and relationship with the world,…
including the factors that have distinguished it from England both before and after Union. 2008The impostor: a true story
By Javier Cercas. 2018
An account of the investigation into the life of Barcelona resident Enric Marco, who was uncovered as a fraud in…
2005 after a lifetime of claiming to be a Holocaust survivor. Originally published in Spanish as El Impostor. 2014The best American science and nature writing: 2018 (The best American series)
By Tim Folger, Sam Kean. 2018
Twenty-six previously published essays on topics in the areas of science and nature. In "The Starship or the Canoe," Kenneth…
Brower revisits his subjects from The Starship and the Canoe (DB 14719) in light of a 2015 planetary discovery. 2018Moimoimoimoimoi : le sujet contemporain n'en pincerait que pour lui-même. Ce lieu commun serait amplement confirmé par la culture populaire…
et certaines pratiques numériques. Mais cette évidence en est-elle vraiment une? Et si certains exemples de cette fascination de soi nous invitaient plutôt à déjouer le piège du narcissisme afin de ne pas sombrer, comme le héros du mythe grec, dans l'abysse que cache notre propre reflet?News from Germany: The Competition to Control World Communications, 1900-1945 (Harvard Historical Studies #190)
By Heidi J. S. Tworek. 2019
Winner of the Barclay Book Prize, German Studies Association Winner of the Gomory Prize in Business History, American Historical Association…
and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Winner of the Fraenkel Prize, Wiener Library for the Study of Holocaust and Genocide Honorable Mention, European Studies Book Award, Council for European Studies To control information is to control the world. This innovative history reveals how, across two devastating wars, Germany attempted to build a powerful communication empire--and how the Nazis manipulated the news to rise to dominance in Europe and further their global agenda. Information warfare may seem like a new feature of our contemporary digital world. But it was just as crucial a century ago, when the great powers competed to control and expand their empires. In News from Germany, Heidi Tworek uncovers how Germans fought to regulate information at home and used the innovation of wireless technology to magnify their power abroad. Tworek reveals how for nearly fifty years, across three different political regimes, Germany tried to control world communications--and nearly succeeded. From the turn of the twentieth century, German political and business elites worried that their British and French rivals dominated global news networks. Many Germans even blamed foreign media for Germany's defeat in World War I. The key to the British and French advantage was their news agencies--companies whose power over the content and distribution of news was arguably greater than that wielded by Google or Facebook today. Communications networks became a crucial battleground for interwar domestic democracy and international influence everywhere from Latin America to East Asia. Imperial leaders, and their Weimar and Nazi successors, nurtured wireless technology to make news from Germany a major source of information across the globe. The Nazi mastery of global propaganda by the 1930s was built on decades of Germany's obsession with the news. News from Germany is not a story about Germany alone. It reveals how news became a form of international power and how communications changed the course of history.Le rapt ontologique: penser l'être des singularités (Philosophie continentale)
By Thomas Dommange. 2019
Ce qui est, est deux fois : une fois comme être générique, une fois comme être singularisé par ses manières.…
Mais tant que les manières d'être continuent de renvoyer à un être qui les possèdent, tant qu'elles ne sont pas substantialisées, hypostasiées, pour devenir le tout de l'être, la singularité se perd comme se perdent les vagues qui ne se soulèvent au-dessus de la mer que pour mieux y retomber. Pour saisir chacune d'elles dans la singularité de son roulement, il faut voler à l'océan sa substantialité pour la confier à la seule écume qui en déforme la surface. Ce qui suit est l'histoire de ce rapt ontologique. Il consiste à arracher les manières à l'être auquel elles semblent appartenir de droit, pour les charger du poids ontologique qui d'ordinaire revient à la substance.Pushcart prize XLI: best of the small presses, 2017 (Pushcart Prize #41)
By Bill Henderson. 2017
Collection of seventy-one poems, stories, essays, and memoirs originally published by small presses. Includes pieces by Sally Wen Mao, Rebecca…
Makkai, Elizabeth Scanlon, T. C. Boyle, and Chris Offutt. Some violence, some strong language, and some descriptions of sex. 2017Berlin 1936: sixteen days in August
By Jefferson Chase, Oliver Hilmes. 2018
A German historian examines the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin from the point of view of Nazi leaders, foreign diplomats,…
journalists, competitors, and ordinary Berliners. Translated from the 2016 German edition. 2018Pushcart prize XLII: best of the small presses, 2018 (The Pushcart Prize #42)
By Bill Henderson, Pushcart. 2018
Collection of seventy poems, stories, essays, and memoirs originally published by small presses. Includes pieces by Jamie Quatro, Saeed Jones,…
George Saunders, Rachel Cusk, Natasha Trethewey, and Francisco Cantú. Some violence, some strong language, and some descriptions of sex. 2018Thick: and other essays
By Tressie McMillan Cottom. 2019
Eight essays exploring the author's experiences as a black woman. "In the Name of Beauty" examines the reactions to an…
essay she wrote regarding Miley Cyrus in which she called herself unattractive. Strong language and some descriptions of sex. 2019Essential essays: culture, politics, and the art of poetry
By Adrienne Rich, Sandra M. Gilbert. 2018
Twenty-six previously published essays by National Book Award-winning poet that explore political, personal, and poetical themes. In her 1980 essay…
"Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence," Rich explores the tensions between feminist movements and sexual identity. 2018Pushcart prize XLIII: best of the small presses, 2019 (The Pushcart Prize Anthologies Ser. #43)
By Bill Henderson, Pushcart. 2019
Seventy poems, stories, essays, and memoirs originally published by small presses. In his poem "Autism Screening Questionnaire--Speech and Language Delay,"…
Oliver de la Paz explores the interactions of a parent with a child who is undergoing a diagnosis. Some violence, some strong language, and some descriptions of sex. 2019Danubia: A personal history of habsburg europe
By Simon Winder. 2018
From the end of the Middle Ages to the First World War, Europe was dominated by one family: the Habsburgs.…
Their unprecedented rule is the focus of Simon Winder's vivid third book, DanubiaCitizen: An american lyric
By Claudia Rankine. 2015
Claudia Rankine's bold new book recounts mounting racial aggressions in ongoing encounters in twenty-first-century daily life and in the media.…
Some of these encounters are slights, seeming slips of the tongue, and some are intentional offensives in the classroom, at the supermarket, at home, on the tennis court with Serena Williams and the soccer field with Zinedine Zidane, online, on TV-everywhere, all the time. The accumulative stresses come to bear on a person's ability to speak, perform, and stay alive. Our addressability is tied to the state of our belonging, Rankine argues, as are our assumptions and expectations of citizenshipHero of two worlds: The marquis de lafayette in the age of revolution
By Mike Duncan. 2021
From the massively popular podcaster and New York Times bestselling author comes the story of the Marquis de Lafayette's lifelong…
quest to protect the principles of democracy, told through the lens of the three revolutions he participated in: the American Revolution, the French Revolution, and the Revolution of 1830. Few in history can match the breadth and depth of the revolutionary career of the Marquis de Lafayette. Over fifty incredible years at the heart of the Age of Revolution, he fought as one with righteous revolutionaries on both sides of the Atlantic.As an idealistic and courageous teenager serving in the American Revolution, he used his considerable wealth and savvy to help the Americans defeat the British. Then he returned home, and was a principle player in the French Revolution. And in his final act, at seventy years old, he was instrumental in the dramatic overthrow of the Bourbon Dynasty during the Revolution of 1830.All the while, he never wavered from the principles he had written into the Declaration of the Rights of Man in 1789: That men are born and remain free and equal, deserving of liberty, property, safety, freedom of speech, and the ability to resist oppression.Through this age of upheaval, Lafayette remained unshakably committed to the principles he had outlined. From the time that he was an enthusiastic 19-year-old to the time he was a world-weary 74-year-old, his resolve never wavered.As the saying goes, if we don't learn from history, we are doomed to repeat it. Today, the values codified and practiced by Lafayette are increasingly taken for granted. His life is thus the story of where we came from-and what we stand to lose if we abandon the ideals for which he foughtThe incredible untold story of WWII&’s greatest secret fighting force, as told by our great modern master of wartime intrigue…
Britain&’s Special Air Service—or SAS—was the brainchild of David Stirling, a young, gadabout aristocrat whose aimlessness in early life belied a remarkable strategic mind. Where most of his colleagues looked at a battlefield map of World War II&’s African theater and saw a protracted struggle with Rommel&’s desert forces, Stirling saw an opportunity: given a small number of elite, well-trained men, he could parachute behind enemy lines and sabotage their airplanes and war material. Paired with his constitutional opposite, the disciplined martinet Jock Lewes, Stirling assembled a revolutionary fighting force that would upend not just the balance of the war, but the nature of combat itself. He faced no little resistance from those who found his tactics ungentlemanly or beyond the pale, but in the SAS&’s remarkable exploits facing the Nazis in the Africa and then on the Continent can be found the seeds of nearly all special forces units that would follow. Bringing his keen eye for psychological detail to a riveting wartime narrative, Ben Macintyre uses his unprecedented access to SAS archives to shine a light inside a legendary unit long shrouded in secrecy. The result is not just a tremendous war story, but a fascinating group portrait of men of whom history and country asked the mostOrwell's roses
By Rebecca Solnit. 2021
&“An exhilarating romp through Orwell&’s life and times and also through the life and times of roses.&” —Margaret Atwood &“A…
captivating account of Orwell as gardener, lover, parent, and endlessly curious thinker.&” —Claire Messud, Harper's &“Nobody who reads it will ever think of Nineteen Eighty-Four in quite the same way.&”— Vogue A lush exploration of roses, pleasure, and politics, and a fresh take on George Orwell as an avid gardener whose political writing was grounded in his passion for the natural world &“In the year 1936 a writer planted roses.&” So begins Rebecca Solnit&’s new book, a reflection on George Orwell&’s passionate gardening and the way that his involvement with plants, particularly flowers, and the natural world illuminates his other commitments as a writer and antifascist, and the intertwined politics of nature and power. Sparked by her unexpected encounter with the surviving roses he planted in 1936, Solnit&’s account of this understudied aspect of Orwell&’s life explores his writing and his actions—from going deep into the coal mines of England, fighting in the Spanish Civil War, critiquing Stalin when much of the international left still supported him (and then critiquing that left), to his analysis of the relationship between lies and authoritarianism. Through Solnit&’s celebrated ability to draw unexpected connections, readers encounter the photographer Tina Modotti&’s roses and her Stalinism, Stalin&’s obsession with forcing lemons to grow in impossibly cold conditions, Orwell&’s slave-owning ancestors in Jamaica, Jamaica Kincaid&’s critique of colonialism and imperialism in the flower garden, and the brutal rose industry in Colombia that supplies the American market. The book draws to a close with a rereading of Nineteen Eighty-Four that completes her portrait of a more hopeful Orwell, as well as a reflection on pleasure, beauty, and joy as acts of resistance