Title search results
Showing 101 - 120 of 21522 items
Trust: Twenty Ways to Build a Better Country
By David Johnston. 2018
From our esteemed former Governor General--and author of the bestsellers The Idea of Canada and Ingenious--a very timely guide for…
restoring personal, community, and national trust.Trust is a much-needed manual for the repair and restoration of the social quality on which all democracies rely. One of Canada's most revered governors general, David Johnston mines his long life and varied career to give Canadians twenty ways to make themselves, their institutions, and their country more worthy of trust. Many of these habits, attitudes, and approaches stem from his experiences serving as the representative of the head of state in Canada for seven years. Some ways are individual--listen first, never manipulate, be consistent in public and private. Some are geared toward leaders at all levels and of all stripes--be barn-raisers, tell everyone your plans, depend on those around you. And some are societal--apologize, cherish teachers, invite others to dance. As such, not only every Canadian, but also every person who cares about their democratic way of life is wise to heed David Johnston's polite yet pressing call. You can become more worthy of trust. You can spot and encourage this vital quality in others. You can be an instrumental force in restoring trust in your community and country--making them better for yourself and your fellow citizens, and the world better for all.21 Lessons for the 21st Century
By Yuval Noah Harari. 2018
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • In Sapiens, he explored our past. In Homo Deus, he looked to our future.…
Now, one of the most innovative thinkers on the planet turns to the present to make sense of today’s most pressing issues."Fascinating . . . a crucial global conversation about how to take on the problems of the twenty-first century."—Bill Gates, The New York Times Book ReviewNAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY FINANCIAL TIMES AND PAMELA PAUL, KQED How do computers and robots change the meaning of being human? How do we deal with the epidemic of fake news? Are nations and religions still relevant? What should we teach our children? Yuval Noah Harari’s 21 Lessons for the 21st Century is a probing and visionary investigation into today’s most urgent issues as we move into the uncharted territory of the future. As technology advances faster than our understanding of it, hacking becomes a tactic of war, and the world feels more polarized than ever, Harari addresses the challenge of navigating life in the face of constant and disorienting change and raises the important questions we need to ask ourselves in order to survive. In twenty-one accessible chapters that are both provocative and profound, Harari builds on the ideas explored in his previous books, untangling political, technological, social, and existential issues and offering advice on how to prepare for a very different future from the world we now live in: How can we retain freedom of choice when Big Data is watching us? What will the future workforce look like, and how should we ready ourselves for it? How should we deal with the threat of terrorism? Why is liberal democracy in crisis? Harari’s unique ability to make sense of where we have come from and where we are going has captured the imaginations of millions of readers. Here he invites us to consider values, meaning, and personal engagement in a world full of noise and uncertainty. When we are deluged with irrelevant information, clarity is power. Presenting complex contemporary challenges clearly and accessibly, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century is essential reading."If there were such a thing as a required instruction manual for politicians and thought leaders, Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari’s 21 Lessons for the 21st Century would deserve serious consideration. In this collection of provocative essays, Harari . . . tackles a daunting array of issues, endeavoring to answer a persistent question: ‘What is happening in the world today, and what is the deep meaning of these events?’"—BookPage (top pick)In this work of immersive journalism, based on hundreds of hours of reporting, Carl Hoffman journeys deep inside Donald Trump's…
rallies, seeking to understand the strange and powerful tribe that forms the president's baseWe keep the dead close: a murder at Harvard and a half century of silence
By Becky Cooper. 2020
Forty years after the fact, Becky Cooper, a curious Harvard undergrad, first heard whispers of a murdered student, one bludgeoned…
to death by a professor to cover up an affair. Though that motive proved false, the story that unfolded, one that Cooper followed for ten years, is even more complex: a tale of gender inequality in academia, the silencing effect of institutions, and our compulsion to rewrite the stories of female victimsLand: How the hunger for ownership shaped the modern world
By Simon Winchester. 2021
The author of The Professor and the Madman and The Perfectionists explores the notion of property—our proprietary relationship with the…
land—through human history, how it has shaped us and what it will mean for our future. Land—whether meadow or mountainside, desert or peat bog, parkland or pasture, suburb or city—is central to our existence. It quite literally underlies and underpins everything. Employing the keen intellect, insatiable curiosity, and narrative verve that are the foundations of his previous bestselling works, Simon Winchester examines what we human beings are doing—and have done—with the billions of acres that together make up the solid surface of our planet. Land: How the Hunger for Ownership Shaped the Modern World examines in depth how we acquire land, how we steward it, how and why we fight over it, and finally, how we can, and on occasion do, come to share it. Ultimately, Winchester confronts the essential question: who actually owns the world's land—and why does it matter? Supplemental enhancement PDF accompanies the audiobookTen lessons for a post-pandemic world
By Fareed Zakaria. 2020
COVID-19 is speeding up history, but how? What is the shape of the world to come? Lenin once said, "There…
are decades when nothing happens and weeks when decades happen." This is one of those times when history has sped up. CNN host and bestselling author Fareed Zakaria helps listeners to understand the nature of a post-pandemic world: the political, social, technological, and economic impacts that may take years to unfold. In the form of ten straightforward "lessons," covering topics from globalization and threat-preparedness to inequality and technological advancement, Zakaria creates a structure for listeners to begin thinking beyond the immediate impacts of COVID-19. Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World speaks to past, present, and future, and, while urgent and timely, is sure to become an enduring stapleA woman like her: The story behind the honor killing of a social media star
By Sanam Maher. 2020
The murder of a Pakistani social media star exposes a culture divided between accelerating modernity and imposed traditional values—and the…
tragedy of those caught in the middle. In 2016, Pakistan's first social media celebrity, Qandeel Baloch, was murdered in a suspected honor killing. Her death quickly became a media sensation. It was both devastatingly routine and breathtakingly brutal, and in a new media landscape, it couldn't be ignored. Qandeel had courted attention and outrage with a talent for self-promotion that earned her comparisons to Kim Kardashian—and made her the constant victim of harassment and death threats. Social media and reality television exist uneasily alongside honor killings and forced marriages in a rapidly, if unevenly, modernizing Pakistan, and Qandeel Baloch's story became emblematic of the cultural divide. In this deftly reported and artfully told account, Sanam Maher reconstructs the story of Qandeel's life and explores the depth and range of her legacy from her impoverished hometown rankled by her infamy, to the aspiring fashion models who follow her footsteps, to the Internet activists resisting the same vicious online misogyny she faced. Maher depicts a society at a crossroads, where women serve as an easy scapegoat for its anxieties and dislocations, and teases apart the intrigue and myth-making of the Qandeel Baloch story to restore the humanity of the woman at its centerDo nothing: How to break away from overworking, overdoing, and underliving
By Celeste Headlee. 2020
&“A welcome antidote to our toxic hustle culture of burnout.&”—Arianna Huffington &“This book is so important and could truly save…
lives.&”—Elizabeth Gilbert &“A clarion call to work smarter [and] accomplish more by doing less.&”—Adam Grant We work feverishly to make ourselves happy. So why are we so miserable? Despite our constant search for new ways to optimize our bodies and minds for peak performance, human beings are working more instead of less, living harder not smarter, and becoming more lonely and anxious. We strive for the absolute best in every aspect of our lives, ignoring what we do well naturally and reaching for a bar that keeps rising higher and higher. Why do we measure our time in terms of efficiency instead of meaning? Why can&’t we just take a break? In Do Nothing, award-winning journalist Celeste Headlee illuminates a new path ahead, seeking to institute a global shift in our thinking so we can stop sabotaging our well-being, put work aside, and start living instead of doing. As it turns out, we&’re searching for external solutions to an internal problem. We won&’t find what we&’re searching for in punishing diets, productivity apps, or the latest self-improvement schemes. Yet all is not lost—we just need to learn how to take time for ourselves, without agenda or profit, and redefine what is truly worthwhile. Pulling together threads from history, neuroscience, social science, and even paleontology, Headlee examines long-held assumptions about time use, idleness, hard work, and even our ultimate goals. Her research reveals that the habits we cling to are doing us harm; they developed recently in human history, which means they are habits that can, and must, be broken. It&’s time to reverse the trend that&’s making us all sadder, sicker, and less productive, and return to a way of life that allows us to thriveDesert notebooks: A road map for the end of time
By Ben Ehrenreich. 2020
As inhabitants of the Anthropocene, what might some of our own histories tell us about how to confront apocalypse? And…
how might the geologies and ecologies of desert spaces inform how we see and act toward time—the pasts we have erased and paved over, this anxious present, the future we have no choice but to build? National Magazine Award winner Ben Ehrenreich examines how the unprecedented pace of the destruction of our environment and an increasingly unstable geopolitical landscape have led us to the brink of a calamity greater than any humankind has confronted before. But in the canyons and oases of the Mojave and in Las Vegas's neon apocalypse, Ehrenreich finds beauty, and even hope, surging up in the most unlikely places, from the most barren rocks and the apparent emptiness of the sky. He draws on that stark grandeur to ask how we might reckon with the uncertainty that surrounds us and fight off the crises that have already begun. Layering climate science, mythologies, nature writing, and personal experiences, Desert Notebooks offers a vital and necessary chronicle of our past and our present—perfect for fans of Robert Macfarlane and Elizabeth Rush—that's unflinching, urgent, and yet timeless and profoundMongolian Chronicles: A Story of Eagles, Demons, and Empires
By Allen Smutylo. 2019
Longlisted, RBC Taylor PrizeIn the shadows of the Altai Mountains live the Kazakh nomads of western Mongolia. These hard-living nomads…
survive on windswept steppes, grazing their herds and keeping an ancient practice alive: hunting not with traps or guns, but on horseback with golden eagles.The Mongolian Chronicles recounts a story of this untamed world, seen through the eyes of artist, writer, and traveller Allen Smutylo. Smutylo lived with seven eagle hunters and their families for several weeks over two years, affording him rare insight into a disappearing culture. His extraordinary narrative is set within the context of Mongolia's turbulent past — the long shadow cast by the empire of Genghis Khan, the deprivations of early twentieth century warlords-cum-mystics — and its protean present, where ancient customs and shamanistic beliefs exist among an increasingly urbanized people.Smutylo's vivid prose and powerful artwork portray a Mongolia of contradictions and extremes. Readers will encounter a country with a vast wilderness that nonetheless has one of the most polluted capitals on earth; a modern economy in which tent-dwelling nomads still rely on their animals for survival; a people unchanged for millennia, yet recognizing that their way of life may disappear with their generation.Take Back The Fight: Organizing Feminism for the Digital Age
By Nora Loreto. 2020
Two decades of neoliberalism have destroyed a structured, pan-regional feminist movement in Canada. As a result, new generations of feminists…
have come to age without ever seeing the force that an organized social movement can have in democratic society. They have never benefited from the knowledge, the debates, the actions, the mass mobilizations or the leadership that all accompany a social movement and instead organize in decentralized silos. As a result, government and corporate leaders have co-opted feminism to turn it into something that can be bought, sold, or used to attract voters. Campaigns like #BeenRapedNeverReported, #MeToo, the SlutWalks and the Canadian Women’s marches, while important, don’t yet have the organized power to bring the changes that activists seek to make in society. In Take Back The Fight, Nora Loreto examines the state of modern feminism in Canada and argues that feminists must organize to take back feminism from politicians, business leaders and journalists who distort and obscure its power. Furthermore, Loreto urges today’s activists to overcome the challenges that sank the movement decades ago, to stop centering whiteness as the quintessential woman’s experience, and to find ways to rebuild the communities that have been obliterated by neoliberal economic policies.A timely and impassioned exploration of how our society has commodified feminism and continues to systemically shut out women of…
color—perfect for fans of White Fragility and Good and Mad . Join the important conversation about race, empowerment, and inclusion in the United States with this powerful new feminist classic and rousing call for change. Koa Beck, writer and former editor-in-chief of Jezebel , boldly examines the history of feminism, from the true mission of the suffragettes to the rise of corporate feminism with clear-eyed scrutiny and meticulous detail. She also examines overlooked communities—including Native American, Muslim, transgender, and more—and their difficult and ongoing struggles for social change. In these pages she meticulously documents how elitism and racial prejudice has driven the narrative of feminist discourse. She blends pop culture, primary historical research, and first-hand storytelling to show us how we have shut women out of the movement, and what we can do to course correct for a new generation—perfect for women of color looking for a more inclusive way to fight for women's rights. Combining a scholar's understanding with hard data and razor-sharp cultural commentary, White Feminism is a witty, whip-smart, and profoundly eye-opening book that challenges long-accepted conventions and completely upends the way we understand the struggle for women's equalityA Last Goodbye
By Elin Kelsey. 2020
How do we say goodbye to a loved one after they die? This book broaches a difficult topic in a…
heartfelt way by exploring the beauty in how animals mourn. From elephants to whales, parrots to bonobos, and lemurs to humans, we all have rituals to commemorate our loved ones and to lift each other up in difficult times. New from the award-winning team behind You Are Stardust, Wild Ideas, and You Are Never Alone, this book gently recognizes death as a natural part of life for humans and all animals. Written in spare, poetic language and illustrated with stunning dioramas, it draws out our similarities with other animals as it honors the universal experience of mourning. The touching and uplifting book ends on a hopeful note, showing how we live on both in memories and on the planet, our bodies nourishing new life in the Earth and the oceans.Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
By Jared Diamond. 2011
In this "artful, informative, and delightful" (William H. McNeill, New York Review of Books) book, Jared Diamond convincingly argues that…
geographical and environmental factors shaped the modern world. Societies that had had a head start in food production advanced beyond the hunter-gatherer stage, and then developed religionas well as nasty germs and potent weapons of warand adventured on sea and land to conquer and decimate preliterate cultures. A major advance in our understanding of human societies, Guns, Germs, and Steel chronicles the way that the modern world came to be and stunningly dismantles racially based theories of human history. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the Phi Beta Kappa Award in Science, the Rhone-Poulenc Prize, and the Commonwealth Club of California's Gold Medal.North of the Color Line examines life in Canada for the estimated 5,000 blacks, both African Americans and West Indians,…
who immigrated to Canada after the end of Reconstruction in the United States. Through the experiences of black railway workers and their union, the Order of Sleeping Car Porters, Sarah-Jane Mathieu connects social, political, labor, immigration, and black diaspora history during the Jim Crow era.By World War I, sleeping car portering had become the exclusive province of black men. White railwaymen protested the presence of the black workers and insisted on a segregated workforce. Using the firsthand accounts of former sleeping car porters, Mathieu shows that porters often found themselves leading racial uplift organizations, galvanizing their communities, and becoming the bedrock of civil rights activism.Examining the spread of segregation laws and practices in Canada, whose citizens often imagined themselves as devoid of racism, Mathieu historicizes Canadian racial attitudes, and explores how black migrants brought their own sensibilities about race to Canada, participating in and changing political discourse there.The new rules of pregnancy: what to eat, do, think about, and let go of while your body is making
By Danielle Claro, Adrienne L. Simone, Jaqueline Worth. 2020
Finally, a calming pregnancy book that cuts through the noise to tell expectant mothers exactly what they need to know-and…
what they can stop obsessing about and over-researching. In The New Rules of Pregnancy, two leading OB-GYNs guide you, the modern pregnant woman, through all aspects of pregnant life in an easy-to-digest, compassionate, and motivating way. Instead of a detailed week-by-week look at your baby's development, it's all about you and how to help your pregnancy go as smoothly as possible. It assumes an intelligent, busy listener (who, somewhere inside, is shouting, "Just tell me what to do!"). Every aspect of pregnant life is covered-from the practical details (how to fly pregnant) to the complex issues ("What makes it postpartum depression?"). The book also covers that critical "fourth trimester"-"Nursing" and "How to Feel Like Yourself Again"-because once the baby is born, self-care typically goes out the window, and you really need someone to have your back. Its strong point of view and expertise come from gynecologist Adrienne Simone and obstetrician Jaqueline Worth-two renowned New York doctors dedicated to bringing patients the safest, calmest, least invasive pregnancies possible. The book's voice-motivating, supportive, real-comes from Danielle Claro, coauthor of The New Health RulesWitches: the transformative power of women working together
By Sam George-Allen. 2020
Covens. Girl Bands. Ballet troupes. Convents. In all times and places, girls and women have come together in communities of…
vocation, of necessity, of support. In Witches, Sam George-Allen explores how magic happens wherever women gather. Female farmers change the way we grow our food. Online beauty communities democratize skin-care rituals. And more than any other demographic, it's teen girls that shape our culture. Patriarchal societies have long been content to champion boys' clubs while viewing groups that exclude men as sites of rivalry and suspicion. This deeply personal investigation takes us from our workplaces to our social circles, surveying our heroes, our outcasts, and ourselves in order to dismantle the persistent and pernicious cultural myth of female isolation and competition...once and for allSurrender: The Call of the American West
By Joanna Pocock. 2019
An evocative blend of narrative nonfiction, personal memoir, nature writing, and reportage in the style of Barry Lopez and Annie…
Dillard, Surrender explores the changing landscape of the American West and the outsider eco-cultures that have taken root in an era of increasing climatic disruption.The mid-life crisis handed to Joanna Pocock came in a box marked with one simple word: Montana. With their seven-year-old daughter in tow, Joanna and her husband packed up their house, filled one suitcase each, and left the rhythms of life in England behind for their great adventure in the American West.Blending personal memoir with insightful reportage and vivid nature writing, award-winning writer Joanna Pocock investigates the changing landscape of the West and the radical environmental movements that have taken root in the Mountain States. She witnesses the annual tribal bison hunt near Yellowstone Park, where she meets a scavenger community honing ancestral skills. She joins Finisia Medrano, a transgender rewilder who for many years has been living on the “hoop,” following her food source by seasonal migration. She attends the Ecosex Convergence — an annual gathering of people who place their relationship with the earth above everything else — and attends a workshop led by Reverend Teri Ciacchi, a sexologist, priestess of Aphrodite, and holistic spiritual healer in the Living Love Revolution Church.In the style of Barry Lopez, Annie Dillard, and Eula Biss, Surrender explores the outsider cultures oblossoming in the new American West in an era of increasing climatic disruption, rising sea levels, animal extinctions, melting glaciers, and catastrophic wildfires.How to Be Animal: A New History of What It Means to Be Human
By Melanie Challenger. 2021
What makes us human, and why are we so sure we're different from other animals?Humans are the most inquisitive, emotional,…
imaginative, aggressive, and baffling animals on the planet. But how well do we really know ourselves? How to Be Animal rewrites the remarkable human story and argues that at the heart of our psychology is a profound struggle with being animal.Most of our effects on the planet are the consequences of technological improvements and advances in our understanding of natural mechanisms. But why did this cognitive and technological edge come about in the first place and what kind of being has it made us? In How to Be Animal, Challenger brilliantly argues that this dizzying trajectory is the result of a singular characteristic of our species: the struggle with being an animal. Using a combination of memoir, historical texts, interweaving interviews and cultural and environmental history, How to Be Animal is lively and thought-provoking, bursting with ideas. This is a book for anyone who has ever contemplated what humans are and what makes our species so simultaneously brilliant and awful. Even more so, it is a book that asks tantalizing philosophical questions, such as whether and how human life matters. How to Be Animal is a tough-minded but ultimately sympathetic portrait of humanity. It exposes human beings as extraordinary animals defined by a profound struggle. In the third millennium, the way humans respond to being an animal among animals is the greatest and most inspiring challenge we face.A little devil in america: Notes in praise of black performance
By Hanif Abdurraqib. 2021
A stirring meditation on Black performance in America from the New York Times bestselling author of Go Ahead in the…
Rain &“Whether heralding unsung entertainers or reexamining legends, Hanif Abdurraqib weaves together gorgeous essays that reveal the resilience, heartbreak, and joy within Black performance. I read this book breathlessly.&”—Brit Bennett, author of The Vanishing Half At the March on Washington in 1963, Josephine Baker was fifty-seven years old, well beyond her most prolific days. But in her speech she was in a mood to consider her life, her legacy, her departure from the country she was now triumphantly returning to. &“I was a devil in other countries, and I was a little devil in America, too,&” she told the crowd. Inspired by these few words, Hanif Abdurraqib has written a profound and lasting reflection on how Black performance is inextricably woven into the fabric of American culture. Each moment in every performance he examines—whether it&’s the twenty-seven seconds in &“Gimme Shelter&” in which Merry Clayton wails the words &“rape, murder,&” a schoolyard fistfight, a dance marathon, or the instant in a game of spades right after the cards are dealt—has layers of resonance in Black and white cultures, the politics of American empire, and Abdurraqib&’s own personal history of love, grief, and performance. Abdurraqib writes prose brimming with jubilation and pain, infused with the lyricism and rhythm of the musicians he loves. With care and generosity, he explains the poignancy of performances big and small, each one feeling intensely familiar and vital, both timeless and desperately urgent. Filled with sharp insight, humor, and heart, A Little Devil in America exalts the Black performance that unfolds in specific moments in time and space—from midcentury Paris to the moon, and back down again to a cramped living room in Columbus, Ohio