Дэвид Куаммен4.6 Весь мир был охвачен глобальной пандемией, которая привела к гибели сотен тысяч человек. Новый зоонозный вирус преодолел межвидовой барьер. Это явление, когда новый патоген попадает к людям из дикой природы и может повторяться снова и снова. Можем ли мы предотвратить это? В этой книге эта тема становится главным вопросом, который необходимо задать самим себе.
Известный научный писатель Дэвид Куаммен путешествовал по миру и пытался понять разрушительный потенциал распространения вирусов. Он нашел захватывающие и трагичные истории, тревогу среди чиновников и глубокую обеспокоенность будущим в глазах исследователей. Перед нами встают невероятно важные на сегодняшний день вопросы: являются ли пандемии независимыми несчастьями или они связаны между собой? Они появляются сами по себе или наша деятельность является их причиной? Что мы можем сделать, чтобы не допустить следующей трагедии? Куаммен прослеживает происхождение Эболы, атипичной пневмонии, птичьего гриппа, болезни Лайма и других вирусных вспышек, включая мрачную и неожиданную историю о том, как начался СПИД.
Кэтрин Бу4.0 Мусорщик Абдул, содержащий семью из 11 человек, красавица Манджу, которая слишком хороша для местных женихов, хромоногая Фатима, решающая отомстить ненавистным соседям самым жутким способом, - эти и другие герои живут в трущобах, беднейшем квартале Индии, расположенном в тени ультрасовременного аэропорта Мумбаев. У них нет настоящего дома, постоянной работы и уверенности в завтрашнем дне. Но они хватаются за любую возможность вырваться из крайней нищеты и их попытки приводят к невероятным последствиям…
Сьюзен Кейн3.8 Сьюзен Кейн исследует и развенчивает «экстравертный идеал» успеха, утвердившийся в XX веке, и приходит к выводу, что подлинные революционеры — это «тихие люди», интроверты. Казалось бы, кого в Америке сегодня интересуют тихие молчаливые люди? В джентльменский набор молодого человека всегда входило умение поддержать разговор даже в компании малознакомых людей. Современный американский этикет уходит корнями в далекие 1940-50-е годы. Тогдашние пособия в стиле Дейла Карнеги «Как приобрести уверенность», «Как влиять на людей» вовсю пропагандировали призыв «Не будь застенчивым» . Сегодня одобряется и стимулируется такое же поведение. Достаточно вспомнить всевозможные тренинги и программы развития «лидерских качеств». По крайней мере, эта закономерность присутствует в бизнес-реалиях офисной жизни менеджеров, всевозможных тренеров и тим-билдеров. Сьюзен Кейн заявляет: такие модели поведения не подходят 30-50% американцев. Именно столько в США интровертов. Экстраверт и интроверт для Кейн — едва ли главная бинарная оппозиция в обществе. К ней она подходит, привлекая данные нейропсихологии и культурологии. Исследовательница также популярно объясняет грань между «застенчивостью» и «интровертностью». По ее мнению, застенчивые люди боятся негативного социального опыта — например, разговоров с незнакомцами. В отличие от них интроверты просто не нуждаются во внешних раздражителях вроде компании малознакомых людей. Сьюзен Кейн говорит о современном доминировании «экстравертного идеала», особенно в условиях больших городов и деловой жизни. Исследовательница подчеркивает, что интроверты — это не слабые люди. Несоответствие общественным идеалам отнюдь не является признаком неконкурентности. Наоборот. Поэтому Сьюзен Кейн призывает к «тихой революции». То есть к осознанию очевидного факта: «молчуны» так же полезны. В мире "teambilding" они больше слушают других, прислушиваются к собственным ощущениям, реагируют на обсуждение общих проблем и т.д.. Конечно, книгу не стоит воспринимать как оду интровертам и критику экстравертов. Труд "Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking" раскрывает сильные и слабые стороны обоих модусов. На вопрос «Зачем вы написали эту книгу?» Кейн отвечает: «Затем же, зачем Бетти Фридан в 1963 году написала “Загадку женственности”. Сегодня интроверты по отношению к экстравертам — то же, что женщины по отношению к мужчинам в те времена: люди второго сорта с огромным потенциалом и нереализованными талантами». Среди задач автора — вдохнуть в интровертов уверенность в себе и помочь родителям «тихих» детей.
Джордж Дайсон0.0 “It is possible to invent a single machine which can be used to compute any computable sequence,” twenty-four-year-old Alan Turing announced in 1936. In Turing’s Cathedral, George Dyson focuses on a small group of men and women, led by John von Neumann at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, who built one of the first computers to realize Alan Turing’s vision of a Universal Machine. Their work would break the distinction between numbers that mean things and numbers that do things—and our universe would never be the same.
Using five kilobytes of memory (the amount allocated to displaying the cursor on a computer desktop of today), they achieved unprecedented success in both weather prediction and nuclear weapons design, while tackling, in their spare time, problems ranging from the evolution of viruses to the evolution of stars.
Dyson’s account, both historic and prophetic, sheds important new light on how the digital universe exploded in the aftermath of World War II. The proliferation of both codes and machines was paralleled by two historic developments: the decoding of self-replicating sequences in biology and the invention of the hydrogen bomb. It’s no coincidence that the most destructive and the most constructive of human inventions appeared at exactly the same time.
How did code take over the world? In retracing how Alan Turing’s one-dimensional model became John von Neumann’s two-dimensional implementation, Turing’s Cathedral offers a series of provocative suggestions as to where the digital universe, now fully three-dimensional, may be heading next.
Джим Холт4.3 "Why is there a world rather than nothing at all?" remains the darkest and most enduring of all metaphysical mysteries. Following in the footsteps of Christopher Hitchens, Roger Penrose, and even Stephen Hawking, Jim Holt now enters this fractious debate with his lively and deeply informed narrative that traces the latest efforts to grasp the origins of the universe. The slyly humorous Holt takes on the role of cosmological detective, suggesting that we might have been too narrow in limiting our suspects to Yahweh vs. the Big Bang. Tracking down an eccentric Oxford philosopher, a Physics Nobel Laureate, a French Buddhist monk who lived with the Dalai Lama, and John Updike just before he died, Holt pursues unexplored angles to this cosmic puzzle. As he pieces together a solution--one that sheds new light on the question of God and the meaning of existence--he offers brisk philosophical asides on time and eternity, consciousness, and the arithmetic of nothingness.
Ross King4.6 For more than five centuries The Last Supper has been an artistic, religious and cultural icon. The art historian Kenneth Clark called it "the keystone of European art", and for a century after its creation it was regarded as nothing less than a miraculous image. And yet there is a very human story behind this artistic "miracle". Ross King's Leonardo and the Last Supper is both a "biography" of one of the most famous works of art ever painted and a record of Leonardo da Vinci's last five years in Milan.
Джон Мичем0.0 In this magnificent biography, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of American Lion and Franklin and Winston brings vividly to life an extraordinary man and his remarkable times. Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power gives us Jefferson the politician and president, a great and complex human being forever engaged in the wars of his era. Philosophers think; politicians maneuver. Jefferson’s genius was that he was both and could do both, often simultaneously. Such is the art of power.
Thomas Jefferson hated confrontation, and yet his understanding of power and of human nature enabled him to move men and to marshal ideas, to learn from his mistakes, and to prevail. Passionate about many things—women, his family, books, science, architecture, gardens, friends, Monticello, and Paris—Jefferson loved America most, and he strove over and over again, despite fierce opposition, to realize his vision: the creation, survival, and success of popular government in America. Jon Meacham lets us see Jefferson’s world as Jefferson himself saw it, and to appreciate how Jefferson found the means to endure and win in the face of rife partisan division, economic uncertainty, and external threat. Drawing on archives in the United States, England, and France, as well as unpublished Jefferson presidential papers, Meacham presents Jefferson as the most successful political leader of the early republic, and perhaps in all of American history.
The father of the ideal of individual liberty, of the Louisiana Purchase, of the Lewis and Clark expedition, and of the settling of the West, Jefferson recognized that the genius of humanity—and the genius of the new nation—lay in the possibility of progress, of discovering the undiscovered and seeking the unknown. From the writing of the Declaration of Independence to elegant dinners in Paris and in the President’s House; from political maneuverings in the boardinghouses and legislative halls of Philadelphia and New York to the infant capital on the Potomac; from his complicated life at Monticello, his breathtaking house and plantation in Virginia, to the creation of the University of Virginia, Jefferson was central to the age. Here too is the personal Jefferson, a man of appetite, sensuality, and passion.
The Jefferson story resonates today not least because he led his nation through ferocious partisanship and cultural warfare amid economic change and external threats, and also because he embodies an eternal drama, the struggle of the leadership of a nation to achieve greatness in a difficult and confounding world.
Praise for Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power
“This is probably the best single-volume biography of Jefferson ever written.”—Gordon S. Wood
“A big, grand, absorbing exploration of not just Jefferson and his role in history but also Jefferson the man, humanized as never before.”—Entertainment Weekly
“[Meacham] captures who Jefferson was, not just as a statesman but as a man. . . . By the end of the book . . . the reader is likely to feel as if he is losing a dear friend. . . . [An] absorbing tale.”—The Christian Science Monitor
“This terrific book allows us to see the political genius of Thomas Jefferson better than we have ever seen it before. In these endlessly fascinating pages, Jefferson emerges with such vitality that it seems as if he might still be alive today.”—Doris Kearns Goodwin
Дэвид Насоу0.0 In this magisterial new work The Patriarch, the celebrated historian David Nasaw tells the full story of Joseph P. Kennedy, the founder of the twentieth century's most famous political dynasty. Nasaw—the only biographer granted unrestricted access to the Joseph P. Kennedy papers in the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library—tracks Kennedy's astonishing passage from East Boston outsider to supreme Washington insider. Kennedy's seemingly limitless ambition drove his career to the pinnacles of success as a banker, World War I shipyard manager, Hollywood studio head, broker, Wall Street operator, New Deal presidential adviser, and founding chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission. His astounding fall from grace into ignominy did not come until the years leading up to and following America's entry into the Second World War, when the antiwar position he took as the first Irish American ambassador to London made him the subject of White House ire and popular distaste.
The Patriarch is a story not only of one of the twentieth century's wealthiest and most powerful Americans, but also of the family he raised and the children who completed the journey he had begun. Of the many roles Kennedy held, that of father was most dear to him. The tragedies that befell his family marked his final years with unspeakable suffering.
The Patriarch looks beyond the popularly held portrait of Kennedy to answer the many questions about his life, times, and legacy that have continued to haunt the historical record. Was Joseph P. Kennedy an appeaser and isolationist, an anti-Semite and a Nazi sympathizer, a stock swindler, a bootlegger, and a colleague of mobsters? What was the nature of his relationship with his wife, Rose? Why did he have his daughter Rosemary lobotomized? Why did he oppose the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, the Korean War, and American assistance to the French in Vietnam? What was his relationship to J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI? Did he push his second son into politics and then buy his elections for him?
In this pioneering biography, Nasaw draws on never-before-published materials from archives on three continents and interviews with Kennedy family members and friends to tell the life story of a man who participated in the major events of his times: the booms and busts, the Depression and the New Deal, two world wars and a cold war, and the birth of the New Frontier. In studying Kennedy's life, we relive with him the history of the American Century.
Салман Рушді4.1 У цій автобіографічній книжці всесвітньо відомий автор описує своє життя після публікації його знаменитих «Сатанинських віршів». Радикальні ісламісти визнали роман образливим – іранський аятола Хомейні видав фетву, в якій закликав усіх правовірних до убивства Салмана Рушді, оголошуючи це «богоугодною справою».
Edward O. Wilson4.0 In asking where we came from, what we are and where we are going, Edward O. Wilson directly addresses three fundamental questions of religion, philosophy and science. Refashioning the story of human evolution, he draws on his remarkable knowledge of biology and social behaviour to show that group selection, not kin selection, is the primary driving force of human evolution. He proves that history makes no sense without prehistory and prehistory makes no sense without biology. Demonstrating that the sources of morality, religion and the creative arts are fundamentally biological in nature, Wilson presents us with the clearest explanation ever produced as to the origin of the human condition and why it resulted in our domination of the Earth's biosphere.
