John Vaillant0.0 In May 2016, Fort McMurray, the hub of Canada’s oil industry and America’s biggest foreign supplier, was overrun by wildfire. The multi-billion-dollar disaster melted vehicles, turned entire neighborhoods into firebombs, and drove 88,000 people from their homes in a single afternoon. Through the lens of this apocalyptic conflagration—the wildfire equivalent of Hurricane Katrina—John Vaillant warns that this was not a unique event, but a shocking preview of what we must prepare for in a hotter, more flammable world.
Fire has been a partner in our evolution for hundreds of millennia, shaping culture, civilization, and, very likely, our brains. Fire has enabled us to cook our food, defend and heat our homes, and power the machines that drive our titanic economy. Yet this volatile energy source has always threatened to elude our control, and in our new age of intensifying climate change, we are seeing its destructive power unleashed in previously unimaginable ways.
With masterly prose and a cinematic eye, Vaillant takes us on a riveting journey through the intertwined histories of North America’s oil industry and the birth of climate science, to the unprecedented devastation wrought by modern forest fires, and into lives forever changed by these disasters. John Vaillant’s urgent work is a book for—and from—our new century of fire, which has only just begun.
Дженнифер Хоманс0.0 Arguably the greatest choreographer who ever lived, George Balanchine was one of the cultural titans of the twentieth century--The New York Times called him "the Shakespeare of dancing." His radical approach to choreography--and life--reinvented the art of ballet and made him a legend. Written with enormous style and artistry, and based on more than one hundred interviews and research in archives across Russia, Europe, and the Americas, Mr. B carries us through Balanchine's tumultuous and high-pitched life story and into the making of his extraordinary dances.
Balanchine's life intersected with some of the biggest historical events of his century. Born in Russia under the last czar, Balanchine experienced the upheavals of World War I, the Russian Revolution, exile, World War II, and the Cold War. A co-founder of the New York City Ballet, he pressed ballet in America to the forefront of modernism and made it a popular art. None of this was easy, and we see his loneliness and failures, his five marriages--all to dancers--and many loves. We follow his bouts of ill health and spiritual crises, and learn of his profound musical skills and sensibility and his immense determination to make some of the most glorious, strange, and beautiful dances ever to grace the modern stage.
With full access to Balanchine's papers and many of his dancers, Jennifer Homans, the dance critic for The New Yorker and a former dancer herself, has spent more than a decade researching Balanchine's life and times to write a vast history of the twentieth century through the lens of one of its greatest artists: the definitive biography of the man his dancers called Mr. B.
Jeremy Eichler0.0 An award-winning critic and cultural historian, JEREMY EICHLER currently serves as the chief classical music critic of The Boston Globe. He is the recipient of an ASCAP Deems Taylor Award for writing published in The New Yorker, a fellowship at Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and a Public Scholars grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Formerly a critic for The New York Times and a contributor to many other national publications, he holds a Ph.D. in modern European history from Columbia University. For more information, please visit timesecho.com.
Кристофер Кларк0.0 An epic history of the 1848 revolutions that swept Europe and the charismatic figures who propelled them forward, with deep resonance and frightening parallels to today--from a renowned Cambridge historian.
Historically, 1848 has long been overshadowed by the French Revolution of 1789, the Paris Commune of 1870, and the Russian revolutions of the early twentieth century. And yet in 1848, nearly all of Europe was aflame with conflict. Parallel political tumults spread like brush fire across the entire continent, leading to more significant and lasting change than earlier upheavals. And they brought with them a new awareness of the concept of history; the men and women of 1848 saw and shaped what was happening around them through the lens of previous revolutions.
Celebrated Cambridge historian Christopher Clark describes this continental uprising as "the particle collision chamber at the center of the European nineteenth century," a place where political movements and ideas--from socialism and democratic radicalism to liberalism, nationalism, corporatism, and conservatism--were tested and transformed. The insurgents asked questions that sound modern to our ears: What happens when demands for political or economic liberty conflict with demands for social rights? How do we reconcile representative and direct forms of democracy? How is capitalism connected to social inequality? As a result of the events of 1848, the papacy of Pius IX and even the Catholic Church changed profoundly; Denmark, Piedmont and Prussia issued constitutions; Sicily founded its own all-Sicilian parliament; the Austrian Chancellor Metternich fled from Vienna. The revolutions were short-lived, but their impact was profound. Public life, administrative cultures and political thought were all transformed by this mid-century convulsion. Those who lived through them were marked for life by what they had seen and experienced.
Elegantly written, meticulously researched, and filled with a fascinating cast of charismatic figures, including the social theorist de Tochqueville and the troubled Priest de Lamennais, who struggled to reconcile his faith with politics, Revolutionary Spring is a new understanding of 1848 that offers chilling parallels to our present moment. "Looking back at the revolutions from the end of the first quarter of the twenty-first century, it is impossible not to be struck by the resonances," Clark writes. "If a revolution is coming for us, it may look something like 1848."
Таня Брэниган0.0 An indelible exploration of the Cultural Revolution and how it shapes China today, Red Memory uncovers forty years of silence through the rarely heard stories of individuals who lived through Mao’s decade of madness.
A 13-year-old Red Guard revels in the great adventure, and struggles with her doubts. A silenced composer, facing death, determines to capture the turmoil. An idealistic student becomes the ‘corpse master’ . . .
More than fifty years on, the Cultural Revolution’s scar runs through the heart of Chinese society, and through the souls of its citizens. Stationed in Beijing for the Guardian, Tania Branigan came to realise that this brutal and turbulent decade continues to propel and shape China to this day. Yet official suppression and personal trauma have conspired in national amnesia: it exists, for the most part, as an absence.
Red Memory explores the stories of those who are driven to confront the era, fearing or yearning its return. What happens to a society when you can no longer trust those closest to you? What happens to the present when the past is buried, exploited or redrawn? And how do you live with yourself when the worst is over?
Hannah Barnes0.0 Time to Think goes behind the headlines to reveal the truth about the NHS’s flagship gender service for children.
The Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS), based at the Tavistock and Portman Trust in North London, was set up initially to provide ― for the most part ― talking therapies to young people who were questioning their gender identity. But in the last decade GIDS has referred more than a thousand children, some as young as nine years old, for medication to block their puberty. In the same period, the number of referrals has exploded, increasing thirty-fold, while the profile of the patients has changed, from largely pre-pubescent boys to mostly adolescent girls, who are often contending with other difficulties.
Why had the patients changed so dramatically? Were all these distressed young people actually best served by taking puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones? While some young people appeared to thrive after taking the blocker, many seemed to become worse. Was there enough clinical evidence to justify such profound medical interventions in the lives of young people who had so much else to contend with?
This urgent, scrupulous and dramatic book explains how, in the words of some former staff, GIDS has been the site of a serious medical scandal, in which ideological concerns took priority over clinical practice. Award-winning journalist Hannah Barnes has had unprecedented access to thousands of pages of documents, including internal emails and unpublished reports, and over a hundred hours of personal testimony, to write a disturbing and gripping parable of our times.
Hoyer Katja0.0 In 1990, a country disappeared. When the iron curtain fell, East Germany simply ceased to be. For over forty years, from the ruin of the Second World War to the cusp of a new millennium, the GDR presented a radically different German identity to anything that had come before, and anything that exists today. Socialist solidarity, secret police, central planning, barbed wire: this was a Germany forged on the fault lines of ideology and geopolitics.
In Beyond the Wall, acclaimed historian Katja Hoyer offers a kaleidoscopic new vision of this vanished country. Beginning with the bitter experience of German Marxists exiled by Hitler, she traces the arc of the state they would go on to create, first under the watchful eye of Stalin, and then in an increasingly distinctive German fashion. From the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961, to the relative prosperity of the 1970s, and on to the creaking foundations of socialism in the mid-1980s, Hoyer argues that amid oppression and frequent hardship, East Germany was yet home to a rich political, social and cultural landscape, a place far more dynamic than the Cold War caricature often painted in the West.
Powerfully told, and drawing on a vast array of never-before-seen interviews, letters and records, this is the definitive history of the other Germany, the one beyond the Wall.
Дэвид Гранн4.1 1740 год, Британия. Корабль Его Величества «Вейджер» отправляется в погоню за испанским галеоном. На борту — 250 здоровых крепких мужчин.
1742 год, Бразилия. К берегу причаливает самодельная лодка с остатками команды «Вейджера» — 30 полумертвых истощенных моряков, которые пережили цингу, кораблекрушение, смогли добраться до необитаемого острова, выжили и вернулись назад.
Родина встретила их как героев. Про них писали газеты, каждый получил материальную компенсацию. А еще через четыре года… из ада вернулись еще три члена команды «Вейджера» — капитан и два его помощника, которых уже несколько лет считали мертвыми. И их версия случившего шокировала всех... Британские власти решили созвать военный трибунал, — определить, что на самом деле произошло, — и виновного будет ждать смертный приговор...
Кинематографичная и захватывающая, книга Дэвида Гранна «Вейджер» — это история одного плавания, в котором все пошло наперекосяк; это сага о том, как тяжелые условия на грани выживания могут лишить человеческого облика, толкнуть на предательство... и даже убийство.
Крис Ван Туллекен5.0 We have entered a new 'age of eating' where most of our calories come from an entirely novel set of substances called Ultra-Processed Food, food which is industrially processed and designed and marketed to be addictive. But do we really know what it's doing to our bodies?
Join Chris in his travels through the world of food science and a UPF diet to discover what's really going on. Find out why exercise and willpower can't save us, and what UPF is really doing to our bodies, our health, our weight, and the planet (hint: nothing good).
For too long we've been told we just need to make different choices, when really we're living in a food environment that makes it nigh-on impossible. So this is a book about our rights. The right to know what we eat and what it does to our bodies and the right to good, affordable food.
Nathan Thrall3.0 Immersive and gripping, an intimate story of a deadly accident outside Jerusalem that unravels a tangle of lives, loves, enmities, and histories over the course of one revealing, heartbreaking day.
Five-year-old Milad Salama is excited for a school trip to a theme park on the outskirts of Jerusalem. On the way, his bus collides with a semitrailer. His father, Abed, gets word of the crash and rushes to the site. The scene is chaos―the children have been taken to different hospitals in Jerusalem and the West Bank; some are missing, others cannot be identified. Abed sets off on an odyssey to learn Milad’s fate. It is every parent’s worst nightmare, but for Abed it is compounded by the maze of physical, emotional, and bureaucratic obstacles he must navigate because he is Palestinian. He is on the wrong side of the separation wall, holds the wrong ID to pass the military checkpoints, and has the wrong papers to enter the city of Jerusalem. Abed’s quest to find Milad is interwoven with the stories of a cast of Jewish and Palestinian characters whose lives and histories unexpectedly converge.
Сиддхартха Мукерджи4.5 The discovery of this vital form led to a transformation in medicine but also in our understanding of ourselves - not as bodies or machines but as ecosystems. It has also given us the power to treat a vast array of mortal maladies...and even to create new kinds of human altogether.
Rich with stories of scientists, doctors and the patients whose lives may be saved by their work, The Song of the Cell is a stunning ode to the building blocks of life and the cutting-edge science harnessing their power for the better.
Тия Алисия Майлз0.0 In a display case in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture sits a rough cotton bag, called Ashley’s Sack, embroidered with just a handful of words that evoke a sweeping family story of loss and of love, passed down through generations.
In 1850s South Carolina, an enslaved woman named Rose gave this sack filled with a few precious items to her daughter, Ashley, as a token of love and to try to ensure Ashley’s survival as well. Soon after, the nine-year-old girl was separated from her mother and sold. Decades later, Ashley’s granddaughter Ruth embroidered this family history on the bag in spare yet haunting language—including Rose’s wish that “It be filled with my Love always.” Now, in this illuminating, deeply moving new book inspired by Rose’s gift to Ashley, historian Tiya Miles carefully unearths these women’s faint presence in archival records and draws on objects and art, to follow the paths of their lives—and the lives of so many women like them—in a singular and revelatory history of the experience of slavery, and the uncertain freedom afterward, in the United States.
All That She Carried is a poignant story of resilience and of love passed down through generations of women against steep odds. It honors the creativity and fierce resourcefulness of people who preserved family ties even when official systems refused to do so.
Саймон Джонсон, Дарон Аджемоглу4.6 Каждый день мы слышим, что благодаря беспрецедентным достижениям науки и техники на всех парах мчимся к новому, лучшему миру. Вот вам новый телефон. А вот электромобиль последней модели. Еще немного – и ученые найдут способ вылечить рак, решат проблему глобального потепления и, может быть, даже искоренят бедность!
Инновации стали для нас самоцелью, новые технологии надо вводить всем, всегда, везде. И чем больше, тем лучше!
С человечеством такое случалось уже не раз. Но всеобщее благоденствие и процветание так и не наступили. Напротив, слишком многие изобретения принесли человечеству лишь беды и лишения.
Так что же такое прогресс? Всегда ли он оправдан? Кому приносит основные дивиденды? И главное, как он сочетается с властью?
На эти и многие другие вопросы в своей новой книге "Власть и прогресс" дает ответ создатель бестселлера "Почему одни страны богатые, а другие бедные" Дарон Аджемоглу в соавторстве с Саймоном Джонсоном.
