Politics
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Pandora's Lunchbox: How Processed Food Took Over the American Meal
Author/Actors/Director/etc.: Melanie Warner
Format: Hardcover
Publisher: Scribner (2013, Feb 26th).
Pages: 256
In the tradition of Fast Food Nation and The Omnivore’s Dilemma comes a fascinating and cutting-edge look at the scary truth about what really goes into our food. If a piece of individually wrapped cheese can retain its shape, color, and texture for years, what does it say about the food we eat and feed to our children? Former New York Times business reporter and mother Melanie Warner decided to explore that question when she observed the phenomenon of the indestructible cheese. She began an investigative journey that took her to research labs, university food science departments, and factories around the country. What she discovered provides a rare, eye-opening—and sometimes disturbing—account of what we’re really eating. more
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Mirror, Mirror Off the Wall: How I Learned to Love My Body by Not Looking at It for a Year
Author/Actors/Director/etc.: Kjerstin Gruys
Format: Hardcover
Publisher: Avery (2013, May 2nd).
Pages: 320
A scholar, fashionista, and bride-to-be spends a year without mirrors to get a better view of herself, her life, and what’s really important. When Kjerstin Gruys became engaged to the love of her life, she was thrilled—until it came time to shop for a wedding dress. Having overcome an eating disorder years before, Gruys found herself struggling to maintain a positive self-image as her pending nuptials imposed a new set of impossible beauty standards. She decided to embark on a bold plan for boosting her self-esteem while refocusing her attention on the beautiful world around her. A memoir of discovery, Mirror Mirror Off the Wall charts Gruys’ awakening as she vows to give up mirrors and other reflective surfaces, relying instead on her friends and her fiancé to help her gauge both her appearance and her outlook on life. more
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Top of the Morning: Inside the Cutthroat World of Morning TV
Author/Actors/Director/etc.: Brian Stelter
Format: Hardcover
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing (2013, Apr 23rd).
Pages: 320
Like Bill Carter chronicling the late night wars in his classic The Late Shift, star New York Times reporter Brian Stelter reveals all the dish and dirt behind the polite smiles and perky demeanors of morning television in his much-anticipated...TOP OF THE MORNINGWhen America wakes up with personable and charming hosts like Matt Lauer, Robin Roberts, and George Stephanopoulos, it's hard to imagine their show bookers having to guard a guest's hotel room all night to prevent rival shows from poaching. But that is just part of the intense reality New York Times staff writer Brian Stelter reveals in TOP OF THE MORNING--a gripping look at the most competitive time slot in television, complete with Machiavellian booking wars and manic behavior by the producers, executives, and stars. more
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Time Reborn: From the Crisis in Physics to the Future of the Universe
Author/Actors/Director/etc.: Lee Smolin
Format: Hardcover
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (2013, Apr 23rd).
Pages: 352
From one of our foremost thinkers and public intellectuals, a radical new view of the nature of time and the cosmosWhat is time?This deceptively simple question is the single most important problem facing science as we probe more deeply into the fundamentals of the universe. All of the mysteries physicists and cosmologists face—from the Big Bang to the future of the universe, from the puzzles of quantum physics to the unification of forces and particles—come down to the nature of time.The fact that time is real may seem obvious. You experience it passing every day when you watch clocks tick, bread toast, and children grow. But most physicists, from Newton to Einstein to today’s quantum theorists, have seen things differently. more
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Control: Exposing the Truth About Guns
Author/Actors/Director/etc.: Glenn Beck
Format: Paperback
Publisher: Threshold Editions; Original edition (2013, Apr 30th).
Pages: 176
When our founding fathers secured the Constitutional “right of the people to keep and bear arms,” they also added the admonition that this right SHALL NOT BE INFRINGED. It is the only time this phrase appears in the Bill of Rights. So why aren’t more people listening? History has proven that guns are essential to self-defense and liberty—but tragedy is a powerful force and has led many to believe that guns are the enemy, that the Second Amendment is outdated, and that more restrictions or outright bans on firearms will somehow solve everything. They are wrong. In CONTROL, Glenn Beck presents a passionate, fact-based case for guns that reveals why gun control isn’t really about controlling guns at all; it’s about controlling us. more
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Napalm: An American Biography
Author/Actors/Director/etc.: Robert M. Neer
Format: Hardcover
Publisher: Belknap Press (2013, Mar 4th).
Pages: 352
Napalm, incendiary gel that sticks to skin and burns to the bone, came into the world on Valentine’s Day 1942 at a secret Harvard war research laboratory. On March 9, 1945, it created an inferno that killed over 87,500 people in Tokyo—more than died in the atomic explosions at Hiroshima or Nagasaki. It went on to incinerate sixty-four of Japan’s largest cities. The Bomb got the press, but napalm did the work. After World War II, the incendiary held the line against communism in Greece and Korea—Napalm Day led the 1950 counter-attack from Inchon—and fought elsewhere under many flags. Americans generally applauded, until the Vietnam War. Today, napalm lives on as a pariah: a symbol of American cruelty and the misguided use of power, according to anti-war protesters in the 1960s and popular culture from Apocalypse Now to the punk band Napalm Death and British street artist Banksy. more
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The Great Deformation: The Corruption of Capitalism in America
Author/Actors/Director/etc.: David A. Stockman
Format: Hardcover
Publisher: PublicAffairs (2013, Apr 2nd).
Pages: 768
A New York Times bestsellerThe Great Deformation is a searing look at Washington’s craven response to the recent myriad of financial crises and fiscal cliffs. It counters conventional wisdom with an eighty-year revisionist history of how the American state—especially the Federal Reserve—has fallen prey to the politics of crony capitalism and the ideologies of fiscal stimulus, monetary central planning, and financial bailouts. These forces have left the public sector teetering on the edge of political dysfunction and fiscal collapse and have caused America’s private enterprise foundation to morph into a speculative casino that swindles the masses and enriches the few.Defying right- and left-wing boxes, David Stockman provides a catalogue of corrupters and defenders of sound money, fiscal rectitude, and free markets. more
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The New Digital Age: Reshaping the Future of People, Nations and Business
Author/Actors/Director/etc.: Eric Schmidt
Format: Deckle Edge]
Publisher: Knopf (2013, Apr 23rd).
Pages:
In an unparalleled collaboration, two leading global thinkers in technology and foreign affairs give us their widely anticipated, transformational vision of the future: a world where everyone is connected—a world full of challenges and benefits that are ours to meet and to harness. Eric Schmidt is one of Silicon Valley’s great leaders, having taken Google from a small startup to one of the world’s most influential companies. Jared Cohen is the director of Google Ideas and a former adviser to secretaries of state Condoleezza Rice and Hillary Clinton. With their combined knowledge and experiences, the authors are uniquely positioned to take on some of the toughest questions about our future: Who will be more powerful in the future, the citizen or the state? Will technology make terrorism easier or harder to carry out? What is the relationship between privacy and security, and how much will we have to give up to be part of the new digital age? In this groundbreaking book, Schmidt and Cohen combine observation and insight to outline the promise and peril awaiting us in the coming decades. more
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Intuition Pumps And Other Tools for Thinking
Author/Actors/Director/etc.: Daniel C. Dennett
Format: Hardcover
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company (2013, May 6th).
Pages: 512
One of the world’s leading philosophers offers aspiring thinkers his personal trove of mind-stretching thought experiments.Over a storied career, Daniel C. Dennett has engaged questions about science and the workings of the mind. His answers have combined rigorous argument with strong empirical grounding. And a lot of fun. Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking offers seventy-seven of Dennett’s most successful "imagination-extenders and focus-holders" meant to guide you through some of life’s most treacherous subject matter: evolution, meaning, mind, and free will. With patience and wit, Dennett deftly deploys his thinking tools to gain traction on these thorny issues while offering readers insight into how and why each tool was built. more
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Big, Hot, Cheap, and Right: What America Can Learn from the Strange Genius of Texas
Author/Actors/Director/etc.: Erica Grieder
Format: Hardcover
Publisher: PublicAffairs (2013, Apr 23rd).
Pages: 304
Texas may well be America’s most controversial state. Evangelicals dominate the halls of power, millions of its people live in poverty, and its death row is the busiest in the country. Skeptical outsiders have found much to be offended by in the state’s politics and attitude. And yet, according to journalist (and Texan) Erica Grieder, the United States has a great deal to learn from Texas.In Big, Hot, Cheap, and Right, Grieder traces the political history of a state that was always larger than life. From its rowdy beginnings, Texas has combined a long-standing suspicion of government intrusion with a passion for business. Looking to the present, Greider assesses the unique mix of policies on issues like immigration, debt, taxes, regulation, and energy, which together have sparked a bonafide Texas Miracle of job growth. more
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