The Aesthetics of Disappearance


Paul Virilio - 1980
    Speed and Politics defined the society of speed; The Aesthetics of Disappearance defines what it feels like to live in the society of speed."I always write with images," Virilio has claimed, and this statement is nowhere better illustrated than with The Aesthetics of Disappearance. Moving from the movie theater to the freeway, and from Craig Breedlove's attainment of terrifying speed in a rocket-power car to the immobility of Howard Hughes in his dark room atop the Desert Inn, Virilio himself jump cuts from such disparate reference points as Fred Astaire, Franz Liszt, and Adolf Loos to Dostoyevsky, Paul Morand, and Aldous Huxley. In its extension of the "aesthetics of disappearance" to war, film, and politics, this book paved the way to Virilio's follow-up: the celebrated study, War and Cinema.This edition features a new introduction by Jonathan Crary, one of the leading theorists of modern visual culture.Foreign Agents series. Distributed for Semiotext(e)

How (Not) to Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor


James K.A. Smith - 2014
    This book by Jamie Smith is a small field guide to Taylor's genealogy of the secular, making it accessible to a wide array of readers. Smith's How (Not) to Be Secular is also, however, a philosophical guidebook for practitioners a kind of how-to manual that ultimately offers guidance on how to live in a secular age. It's an adventure in self-understanding and a way to get our bearings in postmodernity. Whether one is proclaiming faith to the secularized or is puzzled that there continue to be people of faith in this day and age, this is a philosophical story meant to help us locate where we are and what's at stake.

The Undercover Economist


Tim Harford - 2005
    The Undercover Economist is for anyone who's wondered why the gap between rich and poor nations is so great, or why they can't seem to find a decent second-hand car, or how to outwit Starbucks. This book offers the hidden story behind these and other questions, as economist Tim Harford ranges from Africa, Asia, Europe, and of course the United States to reveal how supermarkets, airlines, and coffee chains--to name just a few--are vacuuming money from our wallets. Harford punctures the myths surrounding some of today's biggest controversies, including the high cost of health-care; he reveals why certain environmental laws can put a smile on a landlord's face; and he explains why some industries can have high profits for innocent reasons, while in other industries something sinister is going on. Covering an array of economic concepts including scarce resources, market power, efficiency, price gouging, market failure, inside information, and game theory, Harford sheds light on how these forces shape our day-to-day lives, often without our knowing it. Showing us the world through the eyes of an economist, Tim Harford reveals that everyday events are intricate games of negotiations, contests of strength, and battles of wits. Written with a light touch and sly wit, The Undercover Economist turns "the dismal science" into a true delight.

Mortal Error: The Shot That Killed JFK


Bonar Menninger - 1993
    Another conspiracy theory identifies the two men who, operating separately, allegedly shot President Kennedy in the ""Crime of the Century."" Reprint.

Nightmare in Napa: The Wine Country Murders (48 Hours Mystery)


Paul LaRosa - 2007
    A third roommate heard the horrific commotion but never saw the killer. News of the tragedy sent shockwaves throughout the peaceful region as well as the nation -- but while investigators pursued every angle from a satanic cult to a disgruntled suitor, the murders of Leslie Mazzara and Adriane Insogna remained unsolved. Until someone came forward with a shocking confession -- someone who was close enough to the women to escape suspicion. Someone who knew the victims all too well.Complete with up-to-the-minute court action and the stunning crime scene breakthroughs that turned the case around, here is the full story of the Nightmare In Napa.

The Samoan Pyramid: The true story behind an extraordinary mystery


Maya Lynch - 2017
    An ancient curse. A real-life archaeological adventure.Since the 1800s rumours have circulated about an ancient pyramid, built on an immense scale, hidden deep in the jungles of Samoa. Evidence perhaps of a great forgotten Pacific Empire. And yet there is no mention of the pyramid in the entire pantheon of Samoan myth. Samoan society is steeped in tradition but the local legends are silent on the subject of the pyramid."A bold and gutsy adventure" -Christopher Dunn - Author of the Giza Power PlantWhen one woman digging into the archives discovers an outlier in the dataset of Pacific history, it is the catalyst for an adventure that takes us on a treasure hunt deep into the jungles of Samoa. The Samoan Pyramid interweaves the spellbinding stories behind archaeology’s centuries-long quest to find the forgotten pyramid with the author's own journey into the jungles of Samoa as she unravels one of the greatest archaeological mysteries of the Pacific.Buy the Samoan Pyramid and uncover the secret today.

Royal Murder


Marc Alexander - 1978
    . .’ So wrote Shakespeare in Richard II, and in his new book Royal Murder Marc Alexander investigates the sad stories of the victims of royal murders. Ignoring violent death by battle or political execution, this book is devoted to personal acts of jealousy and revenge which has stained the Crown with blue blood down the ages. The subjects range from those murders one may vaguely remember from schooldays without being aware of their backgrounds of intrigue and mystery, to lesser known scandals such as the secret murder of Count von Konigsmarck, the lover of Princess Sophia of Zell, wife of George the First. About the Author… Marc Alexander left Poverty Bay, New Zealand, to become a journalist in London. After four years on Fleet Street, he became the editorial director of a small magazine group, then the organiser of an annual film festival. Four years ago he became a full-time author, his books ranging from fiction to history.

God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World--and Why Their Differences Matter


Stephen R. Prothero - 2010
    For good and for evil, religion is the single greatest influence in the world. We accept as self-evident that competing economic systems (capitalist or communist) or clashing political parties (Republican or Democratic) propose very different solutions to our planet's problems. So why do we pretend that the world's religious traditions are different paths to the same God? We blur the sharp distinctions between religions at our own peril, argues religion scholar Stephen Prothero, and it is time to replace naÏve hopes of interreligious unity with deeper knowledge of religious differences. In Religious Literacy, Prothero demonstrated how little Americans know about their own religious traditions and why the world's religions should be taught in public schools. Now, in God Is Not One, Prothero provides readers with this much-needed content about each of the eight great religions. To claim that all religions are the same is to misunderstand that each attempts to solve a different human problem. For example: –Islam: the problem is pride / the solution is submission –Christianity: the problem is sin / the solution is salvation –Confucianism: the problem is chaos / the solution is social order –Buddhism: the problem is suffering / the solution is awakening –Judaism: the problem is exile / the solution is to return to God Prothero reveals each of these traditions on its own terms to create an indispensable guide for anyone who wants to better understand the big questions human beings have asked for millennia—and the disparate paths we are taking to answer them today. A bold polemical response to a generation of misguided scholarship, God Is Not One creates a new context for understanding religion in the twenty-first century and disproves the assumptions most of us make about the way the world's religions work.

Our Pasts - I (Textbook in History for class VI)


NCERT - 2013
    It starts from an introduction to archaeology to basics of Indian History. Overall, the book is to introduce Indian history and how its studied along with explaining its importance in present world. Since the book is for teens and is an introductory literature, its full of interesting graphics and activities appropriate for target audience - 6th standard kids. This book is freely available at http://www.ncert.nic.in/ncerts/textbo... for personal use only.

The Dirty Days: A Young Girl's Journey to and from the Oklahoma Dust Bowl


Norma Welty - 2012
    

Why We Act Like Canadians


Pierre Berton - 1982
    He does so, not with abstract opinions but with apt and colourful examples taken from the past and the present: Sam Steele’s gold rush censorship of the Turkish Whirlwind Danseuse; Ontario’s grudging acceptance of beer in three Toronto ballparks; New York’s St. Patrick’s Day Parade; Lorne Greene’s rueful return to Toronto; William Van Horne’s tirade against winter carnivals; the role of Kentucky in the War of 1812; W.A.C. Bennett’s surprising takeover of the B.C. Electric Company on the day of its president’s funeral. All these apparently disconnected incidents are woven into a carefully thought-out dissection of the national character, a distillation of more than thirty years of Berton research.

Agatha Christie: Murder in the Making: More Stories and Secrets from Her Notebooks


John Curran - 2011
    For the very first time, this book prints Agatha's original ending, painstakingly transcribed from the hand-written draft in one of her earliest notebooks.Every decade saw Agatha Christie's success grow to new heights. The emergence of the world-famous Collins Crime Club in 1930 brought with it the very first Miss Marple novel; the austerity of the 1940s had Agatha Christie preparing to kill off Hercule Poirot; and the 1950s saw her experiment increasingly with stories influenced by more modern thrillers. Focusing on more than 20 Christie novels as detailed evidence, John Curran demonstrates the evolution of Agatha's writing through the decades, including her perseverance through the Swinging Sixties and Seventies into old age, concluding with a look at Agatha's last notebook and her ideas for an unwritten final book.As well as revealing more than a dozen unpublished book ideas, 'Agatha Christie's Murder in the Making' contains two new short stories from her archives - 'The Man Who Knew' and an early Miss Marple draft, 'The Case of the Caretaker's Wife'.NB: The first edition, first printing, has the ISBN on the reverse of the title page as in this record of the book but the back of the dust wrapper carries a different ISBN - 9780007908561! In addition there seems to be a variant title in that in some editions the last word of the sub-title is 'Notebooks' as opposed to 'Archive'.

The Cases That Haunt Us


John E. Douglas - 2000
    Provocative. Shocking. Call them what you will...but don't call them open and shut. Did Lizzie Borden murder her own father and stepmother? Was Jack the Ripper actually the Duke of Clarence? Who killed JonBenet Ramsey?America's foremost expert on criminal profiling and twenty-five-year FBI veteran John Douglas, along with author and filmmaker Mark Olshaker, explores those tantalizing questions and more in this mesmerizing work of detection. With uniquely gripping analysis, the authors reexamine and reinterpret the accepted facts, evidence, and victimology of the most notorious murder cases in the history of crime, including the Lindbergh baby kidnapping, the Zodiac Killer, and the Whitechapel murders.Utilizing techniques developed by Douglas himself, they give detailed profiles and reveal chief suspects in pursuit of what really happened in each case.The Cases That Haunt Us not only offers convincing and controversial conclusions, it deconstructs the evidence and widely held beliefs surrounding each case and rebuilds them -- with fascinating, surprising, and haunting results.

Confessions Subprime Lender


Richard Bitner - 2008
    In Confessions of a Subprime Lender: An Insider's Tale of Greed, Fraud, and Ignorance, he reveals the truth about how the subprime lending business spiraled out of control, pushed home prices to unsustainable levels, and turned unqualified applicants into qualified borrowers through creative financing. Learn about the ways the mortgage industry can be fixed with his twenty suggestions for critical change.

How to Be Animal: A New History of What It Means to Be Human


Melanie Challenger - 2020
    But we are also an animal that does not think it is an animal. How well do we really know ourselves?How to Be Animal tells a remarkable story of what it means to be human and argues that at the heart of our existence is a profound struggle with being animal. We possess a psychology that seeks separation between humanity and the rest of nature, and we have invented grand ideologies to magnify this. As well as piecing together the mystery of how this mindset evolved, Challenger's book examines the wide-reaching ways in which it affects our lives, from our politics to the way we distance ourselves from other species. We travel from the origin of homo sapiens through the agrarian and industrial revolutions, the age of the internet, and on to the futures of AI and human-machine interface. Challenger examines how technology influences our sense of our own animal nature and our relationship with other species with whom we share this fragile planet.That we are separated from our own animality is a delusion, according to Challenger. Blending nature writing, history, and moral philosophy, How to Be Animal is both a fascinating reappraisal of what it means to be human, and a robust defense of what it means to be an animal.