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"Our species has been on Earth for little more than 200,000 years, just a fraction of the history of life - and yet in that short period, we have gone from a group of simple foragers to a planet-dominating force, capable of everything from art to atom bombs. In Transcendence, Gaia Vince shows how it happened. Although prevailing theory holds that a recent cognitive revolution transformed humans, Vince argues that we are the product of a unique coevolution...
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"Iceland is the best place on earth to be a woman-but why? For the past twelve years, the World Economic Forum's Global Gender Gap Report has ranked Iceland number one on its list of countries closing the gap in equality between men and women. What is it about Iceland that makes many women's experience there so positive? Why has their society made such meaningful progress in this ongoing battle, from electing the world's first female president to...
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"Eating one's own kind is completely natural behavior in thousands of species, including humans. Throughout history we have engaged in cannibalism for reasons relating to famine, burial rites, and medicinal remedies. Cannibalism has been used as a form of terrorism but also as the ultimate expression of filial piety. With unexpected wit and a wealth of knowledge, Bill Schutt, a research associate at the American Museum of Natural History, takes us...
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The “dazzling” and essential portrayal of 1960s America from the author of South and West and The Year of Magical Thinking (The New York Times).
Capturing the tumultuous landscape of the United States, and in particular California, during a pivotal era of social change, the first work of nonfiction from one of American literature’s most distinctive prose stylists is a modern classic.
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Capturing the tumultuous landscape of the United States, and in particular California, during a pivotal era of social change, the first work of nonfiction from one of American literature’s most distinctive prose stylists is a modern classic.
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A blend of Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel and Simon Winchester's Pacific, a thrilling intellectual detective story that looks deep into the past to uncover who first settled the islands of the remote Pacific, where they came from, how they got there, and how we know.
For more than a millennium, Polynesians have occupied the remotest islands in the Pacific Ocean, a vast triangle stretching from Hawaii to New Zealand to Easter Island. Until...
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"Before Tom Wolfe was a bestselling novelist, he was a groundbreaking journalist. Now the maestro storyteller turns his attention to the mystery behind the creation of his own most important tool: language. In The Kingdom of Speech, Wolfe makes the captivating, paradigm-shifting argument that speech--not evolution--is responsible for humanity's complex societies and achievements. From Alfred Russel Wallace, the self-taught Englishman who beat Charles...
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"Style is not just the clothes on our backs--it is self-expression, representation, and transformation. As a fashion-obsessed Ojibwe teen, Christian Allaire rarely saw anyone that looked like him in the magazines or movies he looked to for inspiration. Now the Fashion and Style Writer for Vogue, he is working to change that--because clothes are never just clothes. Men's heels are a statement of pride in the face of LGTBQ+ discrimination, while ribbon...
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"In sharply argued, fast-moving chapters, Cory Doctorow's Information Doesn't Want to Be Free takes on the state of copyright and creative success in the digital age. Can small artists still thrive in the Internet era? Can giant record labels avoid alienating their audiences? This is a book about the pitfalls and the opportunities that creative industries (and individuals) are confronting today - about how the old models have failed or found new footing,...
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"The Story of Ireland" is an 1887 work by Emily Lawless that offers the reader a fantastic overview of Irish history. The Hon. Emily Lawless (1845-1913) was an Irish historian, gardener, poet, entomologist, and novelist of the early modern period. Contents include: "Primeval Ireland", "The Legends and the Legend Makers", "Pre-Christian Ireland", "St Patrick the Missionary", "The First Irish Monasteries", "St Columba and the Western Church", "The Northern...
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This ethnography of NYC’s scammers presents “a revealing portrait of a critical but little known element of city life…timely, incisive, and poignant” (Elijah Anderson, author of Code of the Street).
This vivid account of hustling in New York City explores the sociological reasons why con artists play their game and the psychological tricks they use to win it. Sociologists Terry Williams...
This vivid account of hustling in New York City explores the sociological reasons why con artists play their game and the psychological tricks they use to win it. Sociologists Terry Williams...
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For almost a century and a half, Bulfinch's Mythology has been the text by which the great tales of the gods and goddesses, Greek and Roman antiquity; Scandinavian, Celtic, and Oriental fables and myths; and the age of chivalry have been known. The stories are divided into three sections: The Age of Fable or Stories of Gods and Heroes (first published in 1855); The Age of Chivalry (1858), which contains King Arthur and His Knights, The Mabinogeon,...
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A major history of Afghanistan and its changing political culture
Afghanistan traces the historic struggles and the changing nature of political authority in this volatile region of the world, from the Mughal Empire in the sixteenth century to the Taliban resurgence today. Thomas Barfield introduces readers to the bewildering diversity of tribal and ethnic groups in Afghanistan, explaining what unites them as Afghans despite the
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"The book is breezy and entertaining and Hopgood is charmingly self-deprecating about her own mothering of the formidable Sofia, who emerges as a sassy character in her own right."-Boston Globe
A tour of global practices that will inspire American parents to expand their horizons (and geographical borders) and learn that there's more than one way to diaper a baby.
Mei-Ling Hopgood, a first-time mom from suburban Michigan-now living in Buenos...
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"Examines the role that video games play in girls' lives, including how games structure girls' leisure time, how playing video games constitutes different performances of femininity, and what influences girls to play or not play video games. Through interviews, focus groups, and qualitative content analyses, this book analyzes girls' involvement with video games. It also examines different contexts in which discourses of girls and video games occur,...
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When Johnson went to work for the US Antarctic Program (devoted to scientific research and education in support of the national interest in the Antarctic), he figured he'd find adventure, beauty, penguins, and lofty-minded scientists. Instead he found boredom, alcohol, and bureaucracy. As a dishwasher and garbage man at McMurdo Station, Johnson quickly shed his illusions about Antarctica. Since he and his coworkers seldom ventured beyond the station's...
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This early work by G. K. Chesterton was originally published in 1922. Gilbert Keith Chesterton was born in London in 1874. He studied at the Slade School of Art, and upon graduating began to work as a freelance journalist. Over the course of his life, his literary output was incredibly diverse and highly prolific, ranging from philosophy and ontology to art criticism and detective fiction. However, he is probably best-remembered for his Christian...