Make, Think, Imagine: Engineering the Future of Civilization


John Browne - 2019
    Has social media robbed us of our privacy and fed us with false information? Are the decisions about our health, security and finances made by computer programs inexplicable and biased? Will these algorithms become so complex that we can no longer control them? Are robots going to take our jobs? Will better health care lead to an aging population which cannot be cared for? Can we provide housing for our ever-growing urban populations? And has our demand for energy driven the Earth's climate to the edge of catastrophe?            John Browne argues that we need not and must not put the brakes on technological advance. Civilization is founded on engineering innovation; all progress stems from the human urge to make things and to shape the world around us, resulting in greater freedom, health and wealth for all. Drawing on history, his own experiences and conversations with many of today's great innovators, he uncovers the basis for all progress and its consequences, both good and bad. He argues compellingly that the same spark that triggers each innovation can be used to counter its negative consequences. Make, Think, Imagine provides an eloquent blueprint for how we can keep moving towards a brighter future.

George


Alex Gino - 2015
    But she knows she's not a boy. She knows she's a girl.George thinks she'll have to keep this a secret forever. Then her teacher announces that their class play is going to be Charlotte's Web. George really, really, REALLY wants to play Charlotte. But the teacher says she can't even try out for the part . . . because she's a boy. With the help of her best friend, Kelly, George comes up with a plan. Not just so she can be Charlotte -- but so everyone can know who she is, once and for all.

Speak


Laurie Halse Anderson - 1999
    She is friendless, outcast, because she busted an end-of-summer party by calling the cops, so now nobody will talk to her, let alone listen to her. As time passes, she becomes increasingly isolated and practically stops talking altogether. Only her art class offers any solace, and it is through her work on an art project that she is finally able to face what really happened at that terrible party: she was raped by an upperclassman, a guy who still attends Merryweather and is still a threat to her. Her healing process has just begun when she has another violent encounter with him. But this time Melinda fights back, refuses to be silent, and thereby achieves a measure of vindication. In Laurie Halse Anderson's powerful novel, an utterly believable heroine with a bitterly ironic voice delivers a blow to the hypocritical world of high school. She speaks for many a disenfranchised teenager while demonstrating the importance of speaking up for oneself.Speak was a 1999 National Book Award Finalist for Young People's Literature.

Blood Feud: The Clintons vs. the Obamas


Edward Klein - 2014
    An old-school reporter with incredible insider contacts, Klein reveals just how deep the rivalry between the Obamas and the Clintons runs, with details on closed-door meetings buttressed by hundreds of interviews. Blood Feud is a stunning exposé of the animosity, jealousy, and competition between America’s two most powerful political couples.

Bully of Asia: Why China's Dream is the New Threat to World Order


Steven W. Mosher - 2017
    That enemy is China, a country that invented totalitarianism thousands of years ago whose economic power rivals our own that believes its superior race and culture give it the right to universal deference that teaches its people to hate America for standing in the way of achieving its narcissistic "dream" of world domination that believes in its manifest destiny to usher in the World of Great Harmony which publishes maps showing the exact extent of the nuclear destruction it could rain down on the United States  Steven Mosher exposes the resurgent aspirations of the would-be hegemon–and the roots of China's will to domination in its five-thousand-year history of ruthless conquest and assimilation of other nations, brutal repression of its own people, and belligerence toward any civilization that challenges its claim to superiority.The naïve idealism of our "China hands" has lulled America into a fool's dream of "engagement" with the People's Republic of China and its "peaceful evolution" toward democracy and freedom. Wishful thinking, says Mosher, has blinded us to the danger we face and left the owlrd vulnerable to China's overweening ambitions.Mosher knows China as few Westerners do. Having exposed as a visiting graduate student the monstrous practice of forced abortions, he became the target of the regime's crushing retaliation. His encyclopedic grasp of China's history and its present-day politics, his astute insights, and his bracing realism are the perfect antidote for our dangerous confusion about the Bully of Asia.

Flashcards of My Life


Charise Mericle Harper - 2006
    Includes illustrations by the author.

The Gulag Archipelago [Volume 1]: An Experiment in Literary Investigation


Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn - 1974
    Features a new foreword by Anne Applebaum. "The greatest and most powerful single indictment of a political regime ever leveled in modern times." --George F. Kennan "It is impossible to name a book that had a greater effect on the political and moral consciousness of the late twentieth century." --David Remnick, The New Yorker "Solzhenitsyn's masterpiece. ... The Gulag Archipelago helped create the world we live in today." --Anne Applebaum, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Gulag: A History, from the foreword

The Goats


Brock Cole - 1987
    They are the "goats." The kids at camp think it's a great joke, just a harmless old tradition. But the goats don't see it that way. Instead of trying to get back to camp, they decide to call home. But no one can come and get them. So they're on their own, wandering through a small town trying to find clothing, food, and shelter, all while avoiding suspicious adults—especially the police. The boy and the girl find they rather like life on their own. If their parents ever do show up to rescue them, the boy and the girl might be long gone. . . .

Slaughterhouse-Five


Kurt Vonnegut Jr. - 1969
    Centering on the infamous firebombing of Dresden, Billy Pilgrim's odyssey through time reflects the mythic journey of our own fractured lives as we search for meaning in what we fear most.

The Catcher in the Rye


J.D. Salinger - 1951
    Fleeing the crooks at Pencey Prep, he pinballs around New York City seeking solace in fleeting encounters - shooting the bull with strangers in dive hotels, wandering alone round Central Park, getting beaten up by pimps and cut down by erstwhile girlfriends. The city is beautiful and terrible, in all its neon loneliness and seedy glamour, its mingled sense of possibility and emptiness. Holden passes through it like a ghost, thinking always of his kid sister Phoebe, the only person who really understands him, and his determination to escape the phonies and find a life of true meaning.The Catcher in the Rye is an all-time classic in coming-of-age literature- an elegy to teenage alienation, capturing the deeply human need for connection and the bewildering sense of loss as we leave childhood behind.J.D. Salinger's classic novel of teenage angst and rebellion was first published in 1951. The novel was included on Time's 2005 list of the 100 best English-language novels written since 1923. It was named by Modern Library and its readers as one of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. It has been frequently challenged in the court for its liberal use of profanity and portrayal of sexuality and in the 1950's and 60's it was the novel that every teenage boy wants to read.

The Notebook Girls


Julia Baskin - 2006
    Sophie claims she stole the idea from two girls in her math class. Courtney still has a death grip on the theory that the notebook was her invention. Lindsey doesn't really care; she's just along for the ride. And Julia never knows what's going on anyway.What we do know is that we started the notebook in freshman year at Stuyvesant High School as a way to keep in contact when our conflicting schedules denied us one another's company. It allowed us to express ourselves and our views of the world in a tone of complete sarcasm, obscenity, and blind honesty. We've spent a significant portion of our adolescence trying to figure out who we are. The notebook is the closest we've come.We're just a group of normal girls with normal lives. Our notebook is meant to make you laugh and make you remember.

Brideshead Revisited


Evelyn Waugh - 1945
    It tells the story of Charles Ryder's infatuation with the Marchmains and the rapidly-disappearing world of privilege they inhabit. Enchanted first by Sebastian at Oxford, then by his doomed Catholic family, in particular his remote sister, Julia, Charles comes finally to recognize only his spiritual and social distance from them.

365 Days


Ronald J. Glasser - 1971
    "The stories I have tried to tell here are true, " says Glasser in his foreword. "Those that happened in Japan I was part of; the rest are from the boys I met. I would have liked to disbelieve some of them, and at first I did, but I was there long enough to hear the same stories again and again, and then to see part of it myself." Assigned to Zama, an Army hospital in Japan in September 1968, Glasser arrived as a pediatrician in the U.S. Army Medical Corps to care for the children of officers and high-ranking government officials. The hospital's main mission, however, was to support the war and care for the wounded. At Zama, an average of six to eight thousand patients were attended to per month, and the death and suffering were staggering. The soldiers counted their days by the length of their tour--one year, or 365 days--and they knew, down to the day, how much time they had left. Glasser tells their stories--of lives shockingly interrupted by the tragedies of war--with moving, humane eloquence.

Lord of the Flies


William Golding - 1954
    At first, with no adult supervision, their freedom is something to celebrate; this far from civilization the boys can do anything they want. Anything. They attempt to forge their own society, failing, however, in the face of terror, sin and evil. And as order collapses, as strange howls echo in the night, as terror begins its reign, the hope of adventure seems as far from reality as the hope of being rescued. Labeled a parable, an allegory, a myth, a morality tale, a parody, a political treatise, even a vision of the apocalypse, Lord of the Flies is perhaps our most memorable novel about “the end of innocence, the darkness of man’s heart.”

Brave New World


Aldous Huxley - 1932
    Largely set in a futuristic World State, inhabited by genetically modified citizens and an intelligence-based social hierarchy, the novel anticipates huge scientific advancements in reproductive technology, sleep-learning, psychological manipulation and classical conditioning that are combined to make a dystopian society which is challenged by only a single individual: the story's protagonist.