en-US Sun, 13 Apr 2025 16:42:48 -0700 60 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg 211004838 John Lennon and Paul McCartney knew each other for twenty-three years, from 1957 to 1980. This book is the myth-shattering biography of a relationship that changed the cultural history of the world.

The Beatles shook the world to its core in the 1960’s and, to this day, remain an active ingredient in our cultural bloodstream, as new generations fall in love with their songs and their story. At the heart of this phenomenon lies the dynamic between John and Paul. Few other musical partnerships have been rooted in such a deep, intense and complicated personal relationship.

John and Paul’s relationship was defined by its complexity: compulsive, tender and tempestuous; full of longing, riven by jealousy. Like the band, their relationship was always in motion, never in equilibrium for long. John and Paul traces its twists and turns and reveals how these shifts manifested themselves in the music. Yoko Ono remarked on the resemblance of their friendship to a romantic relationship and suggested that at some point that’s what John wanted it to be. The two of them shared a private language, rooted in the stories, comedy and songs they both loved as teenagers, and later, in the lyrics of Beatles songs.

In John and Paul, acclaimed writer on human psychology and creativity Ian Leslie traces the shared journey of these men before, during and after The Beatles, offering us both a new look at two of the greatest icons in music history, and rich insights into the nature of creativity, collaboration, and human intimacy.]]> 424 Ian Leslie 1250869544 Danny 0 to-read 4.51 2025
author: Ian Leslie
name: Danny
average rating: 4.51
book published: 2025
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]]> 18144590 The Alchemist has become a modern classic, selling millions of copies around the world and transforming the lives of countless readers across generations.

Paulo Coelho's masterpiece tells the mystical story of Santiago, an Andalusian shepherd boy who yearns to travel in search of a worldly treasure. His quest will lead him to riches far different—and far more satisfying—than he ever imagined. Santiago's journey teaches us about the essential wisdom of listening to our hearts, recognizing opportunity and learning to read the omens strewn along life's path, and, most importantly, following our dreams.]]> 182 Paulo Coelho 0062315005 Danny 0 to-read 4.01 1988
author: Paulo Coelho
name: Danny
average rating: 4.01
book published: 1988
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/22
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]]> 214151287 Dr Andrew Huberman, host of the world’s leading health podcast, Huberman Lab, and neuroscientist and tenured professor at Stanford School of Medicine, introduces Protocols, an essential guide to improving brain function, enhancing mood and energy, optimising bodily health and physical performance, and rewiring your nervous system to learn new skills and behaviours that can transform your life.

Protocols provides simple, powerful and evidence-based solutions to life’s most common challenges. Designed to improve your mental health, physical health and performance, these guidelines are customisable, allowing you to adapt them to your specific needs. With his clear and engaging style, Dr Huberman explains the scientific principles behind each protocol and how they can deliver immediate, effective results. Protocols is your essential road map for achieving optimal health.]]> 384 Andrew D. Huberman 1668032147 Danny 0 to-read 4.00
author: Andrew D. Huberman
name: Danny
average rating: 4.00
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date added: 2025/01/01
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]]> 55145261 A deeply moving and mind-expanding collection of personal essays in the first ever work of non-fiction from #1 internationally bestselling author John Green

The Anthropocene is the current geological age, in which human activity has profoundly shaped the planet and its biodiversity. In this remarkable symphony of essays adapted and expanded from his ground-breaking, critically acclaimed podcast, John Green reviews different facets of the human-centered planet - from the QWERTY keyboard and Halley's Comet to Penguins of Madagascar - on a five-star scale.

Complex and rich with detail, the Anthropocene's reviews have been praised as 'observations that double as exercises in memoiristic empathy', with over 10 million lifetime downloads. John Green's gift for storytelling shines throughout this artfully curated collection about the shared human experience; it includes beloved essays along with six all-new pieces exclusive to the book.]]> 304 John Green 0525555218 Danny 0 to-read 4.37 2021
author: John Green
name: Danny
average rating: 4.37
book published: 2021
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/27
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]]> 844630
Why can't he commit? Many women find themselves asking this question when in love with a man who won't get married, won't stop womanizing, or refuses to give up his sex addictions. Often this kind of man is bound by an unhealthy attachment to his mother. This phenomenon is called "mother-son enmeshment." In When He's Married to Mom , clinical psychologist and renowned intimacy expert Dr. Kenneth M. Adams goes beyond the stereotypes of momma's boys and meddling mothers to explain how mother-son enmeshment affects everyone: the mother, the son, and the woman who loves him. In his twenty-five years of practice, Dr. Adams has successfully treated hundreds of enmeshed men and shares their stories in this informative guide. He provides proven methods to make things better, including:

—Guidelines to help women create fulfilling relationships with mother-enmeshed men
—Tools to help mother-enmeshed men have healthy and successful dating experiences leading to serious relationships and marriage
—Strategies to help parents avoid enmeshing their children]]> 267 Kenneth M. Adams 0743291387 Danny 0 to-read, self-improvement 4.38 2007
author: Kenneth M. Adams
name: Danny
average rating: 4.38
book published: 2007
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/20
shelves: to-read, self-improvement
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]]> 53330118
LONGLISTED FOR THE PORCHLIGHT BUSINESS BOOK AWARD � “A masterpiece.”—Angela Duckworth, bestselling author of Grit � Malcolm Gladwell, Susan Cain, Adam Grant, and Daniel H. Pink’s Next Big Idea Club Winter 2021 Winning Selection

One of the best new books of the year—The Washington Post, BBC, USA Today, CNN Underscored, Shape, Behavioral Scientist, PopSugar � Kirkus Reviews, Publishers Weekly, and Shelf Awareness starred reviews

Is talking to yourself normal? The truth is that we all have a voice in our head. When we talk to ourselves, we often hope to tap into our inner coach but find our inner critic instead. When we’re facing a tough task, our inner coach can buoy us up: Focus—you can do this. But, just as often, our inner critic sinks us entirely: I’m going to fail. They’ll all laugh at me. What’s the use?

In Chatter, acclaimed psychologist Ethan Kross explores the silent conversations we have with ourselves. Interweaving groundbreaking behavioral and brain research from his own lab with real-world case studies—from a pitcher who forgets how to pitch, to a Harvard undergrad negotiating her double life as a spy—Kross explains how these conversations shape our lives, work, and relationships. He warns that giving in to negative and disorienting self-talk—what he calls “chatter”—can tank our health, sink our moods, strain our social connections, and cause us to fold under pressure.

But the good news is that we’re already equipped with the tools we need to make our inner voice work in our favor. These tools are often hidden in plain sight—in the words we use to think about ourselves, the technologies we embrace, the diaries we keep in our drawers, the conversations we have with our loved ones, and the cultures we create in our schools and workplaces.

Brilliantly argued, expertly researched, and filled with compelling stories, Chatter gives us the power to change the most important conversation we have each day: the one we have with ourselves.]]> 272 Ethan Kross 0525575235 Danny 0 to-read 3.94 2021
author: Ethan Kross
name: Danny
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2021
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/06
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]]> 173404111 The impossible life of Tiger Woods—how did he become the GOAT, and what drove him to fall so spectacularly? In Patterson’s hands, Tiger’s story is a hole-in-one thriller.

Filled with brand-new interviews,Ěý Tiger Woods is the first nonfiction collaboration between James Patterson and golf reporter Peter de Jonge, co-authors of theĚý New York TimesĚý bestselling “Miracleâ€� golf novels.Ěý
Ěý
Tiger Woods is unrivaled as an athlete. He made the ultimate commitment to his chosen sport—and transformed it. Before the age of twenty-five, he rose to phenomenon twice named "Sportsman of the Year" byĚý Sports Illustrated ; won more than thirty professional tournaments; and became the youngest player to win pro golf’s four Grand Slam tournaments.Ěý
Ěý
How did Woods do it? On watching the ball, Woods says, "I practice putting with my left eye closed, so I can't see the target line at all with my peripheral vision. That makes it easier to keep my eyes looking straight down."ĚýĚý
Ěý
Patterson and de Jonge tap into the transformative moments of Woods’s life, revealing in vivid, dramatic scenes what Woods saw and felt on the course and in his inner life—from his only "perfect" shot (a 3-wood on No. 14 at St. Andrews) to his missed first putt at the 1995 Masters through his recent comeback tours. ĚýĚý
Ěý]]> 448 James Patterson 031643860X Danny 0 to-read 3.79 2024
author: James Patterson
name: Danny
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2024
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date added: 2024/07/27
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]]> 200443011
Born into the spotlight, John F. Kennedy Jr. lived a short but remarkable life filled with expectation, ambition, family pressures, love, and tragedy. JFK Jr. dives deep into his complicated psyche and explores the what-ifs, illuminating both the cultural and political moment he inhabited and the way this son of a president, so full of promise and possibility, embodied America’s most cherished hopes.]]> 432 RoseMarie Terenzio 1668018519 Danny 0 to-read 4.28
author: RoseMarie Terenzio
name: Danny
average rating: 4.28
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date added: 2024/07/26
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]]> 204736844 The Pulitzer Prize–winning, bestselling author of Evicted reimagines the debate on poverty, making a new and bracing argument about why it persists in because the rest of us benefit from it. ONE OF THE MOST ANTICIPATED BOOKS OF 2023: The Washington Post, Time, Esquire, Newsweek, Minneapolis Star Tribune, Elle, Salon, Lit Hub, Kirkus ReviewsThe United States, the richest country on earth, has more poverty than any other advanced democracy. Why? Why does this land of plenty allow one in every eight of its children to go without basic necessities, permit scores of its citizens to live and die on the streets, and authorize its corporations to pay poverty wages? In this landmark book, acclaimed sociologist Matthew Desmond draws on history, research, and original reporting to show how affluent Americans knowingly and unknowingly keep poor people poor. Those of us who are financially secure exploit the poor, driving down their wages while forcing them to overpay for housing and access to cash and credit. We prioritize the subsidization of our wealth over the alleviation of poverty, designing a welfare state that gives the most to those who need the least. And we stockpile opportunity in exclusive communities, creating zones of concentrated riches alongside those of concentrated despair. Some lives are made small so that others may grow. Elegantly written and fiercely argued, this compassionate book gives us new ways of thinking about a morally urgent problem. It also helps us imagine solutions. Desmond builds a startlingly original and ambitious case for ending poverty. He calls on us all to become poverty abolitionists, engaged in a politics of collective belonging to usher in a new age of shared prosperity and, at last, true freedom.]]> 320 Matthew Desmond 0593239938 Danny 0 to-read 4.23 2023
author: Matthew Desmond
name: Danny
average rating: 4.23
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]]> 203931794 A candid and inspiring memoir from Olympic gold medalist, world champion, and one of the best swimmers ever to compete: Katie Ledecky.

Katie Ledecky has won more individual Olympic races than any female swimmer in history. She is a three-time Olympian, a seven-time gold medalist, a twenty-one-time world champion, eight-time NCAA Champion, and a world record-holder in individual swimming events. Time and again, the question is posed to her family, her coaches, and to her—what makes her a champion? Now, for the first time, she shares what it takes to compete at an elite level.

Again and again, Ledecky has broken records: those of others and, increasingly, her own. She is both consistent and innovative—consistent at setting goals and shattering them, and innovative in the way she approaches her training. A true competitor, she sets her goals by choosing the ones that feel the scariest. But, crucially, she never sacrifices the joy of competition, even in the face of adversity. Her positive mental outlook and a great support system provides the springboard to her success.

Just Add Water charts Ledecky’s life in swimming. It details her start in Bethesda, Maryland, where she played sharks and minnows and first discovered the joy of the pool; her early foray into the Olympics at the tender age of fifteen where, as the youngest member of the American team, she stunned everyone by winning her first gold medal; her time balancing competition and her education at Stanford University; how she developed a champion’s mindset that has allowed her to persevere through so many meets, even under intense pressure; and how she has maintained her dominance in a sport where success depends on milliseconds. You learn how every element of her life—from the support of her family to the tutelage of her coaches, from her childhood spent in summer league swimming to the bright lights of Olympic pools in London, Rio, and Tokyo—set her up to become the champion she is.

In the end, Katie’s story is about testing yourself against the difficult, and seeing who you become on the other side.]]> 256 Katie Ledecky 1668060205 Danny 0 to-read 4.12 2024
author: Katie Ledecky
name: Danny
average rating: 4.12
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]]> 183932735 224 Anne Applebaum 0241627893 Danny 5 to-read 4.21 2024
author: Anne Applebaum
name: Danny
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2024
rating: 5
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date added: 2024/06/17
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]]> 101160753
When NASA sent astronauts to the moon in the 1960s and 1970s the agency excluded women from the corps, arguing that only military test pilots—a group then made up exclusively of men—had the right stuff. It was an era in which women were steered away from jobs in science and deemed unqualified for space flight. Eventually, though, NASA recognized its blunder and opened the application process to a wider array of hopefuls, regardless of race or gender. From a candidate pool of 8,000 six elite women were selected in 1978—Sally Ride, Judy Resnik, Anna Fisher, Kathy Sullivan, Shannon Lucid, and Rhea Seddon.

In The Six , acclaimed journalist Loren Grush shows these brilliant and courageous women enduring claustrophobic—and sometimes deeply sexist—media attention, undergoing rigorous survival training, and preparing for years to take multi-million-dollar payloads into orbit. Together, the Six helped build the tools that made the space program run. One of the group, Judy Resnik, sacrificed her life when the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded at 46,000 feet. Everyone knows of Sally Ride’s history-making first space ride, but each of the Six would make their mark.]]> 432 Loren Grush 1982172800 Danny 0 to-read 4.32 2023
author: Loren Grush
name: Danny
average rating: 4.32
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]]> 157095669 #1 New York Times bestseller

"This brilliant book will shatter your assumptions about what it takes to improve and succeed. I wish I could go back in time and gift it to my younger self. It would've helped me find a more joyful path to progress."
-Serena Williams, 23-time Grand Slam singles tennis champion

The #1 New York Times bestselling author of Think Again illuminates how we can elevate ourselves and others to unexpected heights.

We live in a world that’s obsessed with talent. We celebrate gifted students in school, natural athletes in sports, and child prodigies in music. But admiring people who start out with innate advantages leads us to overlook the distances we ourselves can travel. We can all improve at improving. And when opportunity doesn’t knock, there are ways to build a door.

Hidden Potential offers a new framework for raising aspirations and exceeding expectations. Adam Grant weaves together groundbreaking evidence, surprising insights, and vivid story­telling that takes us from the classroom to the boardroom, the playground to the Olympics, and underground to outer space. He shows that progress depends less on how hard you work than how well you learn. Growth is not about the genius you possess � it’s about the character you develop. Grant explores how to build the charac­ter skills and motivational structures to realize our own potential, and how to design systems that create opportunities for those who have been underrated and overlooked.

This book reveals how anyone can rise to achieve greater things. The true measure of your potential is not the height of the peak you’ve reached, but how far you’ve climbed to get there.]]> 304 Adam M. Grant 0593653149 Danny 0 to-read 4.09 2023
author: Adam M. Grant
name: Danny
average rating: 4.09
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]]> 157981712
A new understanding of memory is emerging from the latest scientific research. In Why We Remember , pioneering neuroscientist and psychologist Charan Ranganath radically reframes the way we think about the everyday act of remembering. Combining accessible language with cutting-edge research, he reveals the surprising ways our brains record the past and how we use that information to understand who we are in the present, and to imagine and plan for the future.

Memory, Dr. Ranganath shows, is a highly transformative force that shapes how we experience the world in often invisible and sometimes destructive ways. Knowing this can help us with daily remembering tasks, like finding our keys, and with the challenge of memory loss as we age. What’s more, when we work with the brain’s ability to learn and reinterpret past events, we can heal trauma, shed our biases, learn faster, and grow in self-awareness.

Including fascinating studies and examples from pop culture, and drawing on Ranganath’s life as a scientist, father, and child of immigrants, Why We Remember is a captivating read that unveils the hidden role memory plays throughout our lives. When we understand its power-- and its quirks--we can cut through the clutter and remember the things we want to remember. We can make freer choices and plan a happier future.]]> 304 Charan Ranganath 038554863X Danny 0 to-read 3.91 2024
author: Charan Ranganath
name: Danny
average rating: 3.91
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/06/14
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]]> 31113949 172 Susie Moore Danny 0 to-read 4.29
author: Susie Moore
name: Danny
average rating: 4.29
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date added: 2024/05/31
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]]> 204927599 From the author of Sapiens comes the groundbreaking story of how information networks have made, and unmade, our world.

For the last 100,000 years, we Sapiens have accumulated enormous power. But despite all our discoveries, inventions, and conquests, we now find ourselves in an existential crisis. The world is on the verge of ecological collapse. Misinformation abounds. And we are rushing headlong into the age of AI—a new information network that threatens to annihilate us. For all that we have accomplished, why are we so self-destructive?

Nexus looks through the long lens of human history to consider how the flow of information has shaped us, and our world. Taking us from the Stone Age, through the canonization of the Bible, early modern witch-hunts, Stalinism, Nazism, and the resurgence of populism today, Yuval Noah Harari asks us to consider the complex relationship between information and truth, bureaucracy and mythology, wisdom and power. He explores how different societies and political systems throughout history have wielded information to achieve their goals, for good and ill. And he addresses the urgent choices we face as non-human intelligence threatens our very existence.

Information is not the raw material of truth; neither is it a mere weapon. Nexus explores the hopeful middle ground between these extremes, and in doing so, rediscovers our shared humanity.]]> 528 Yuval Noah Harari 059373422X Danny 0 to-read 4.14 2024
author: Yuval Noah Harari
name: Danny
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/05/24
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]]> 44890084 352 Tom Selleck 0062945769 Danny 0 to-read 3.77 2024
author: Tom Selleck
name: Danny
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/05/16
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]]> 63079845 This is not a self-help book. It's a wake-up call!

Can't Hurt Me, David Goggins' smash hit memoir, demonstrated how much untapped ability we all have but was merely an introduction to the power of the mind. In Never Finished, Goggins takes you inside his Mental Lab, where he developed the philosophy, psychology, and strategies that enabled him to learn that what he thought was his limit was only his beginning and that the quest for greatness is unending.

The stories and lessons in this raw, revealing, unflinching memoir offer the reader a blueprint they can use to climb from the bottom of the barrel into a whole new stratosphere that once seemed unattainable. Whether you feel off-course in life, are looking to maximize your potential or drain your soul to break through your so-called glass ceiling, this is the only book you will ever need.]]> 312 David Goggins 154453406X Danny 0 to-read 4.41 2022
author: David Goggins
name: Danny
average rating: 4.41
book published: 2022
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date added: 2024/04/27
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]]> 191746386
On July 12th, 1776, Captain James Cook, already lionized as the greatest explorer in British history, set off on his third voyage in his ship the HMS Resolution . Two-and-a-half years later, on a beach on the island of Hawaii, Cook was killed in a conflict with native Hawaiians. How did Cook, who was unique among captains for his respect for Indigenous peoples and cultures, come to that fatal moment?

Hampton Sides� bravura account of Cook’s last journey both wrestles with Cook’s legacy and provides a thrilling narrative of the titanic efforts and continual danger that characterized exploration in the 1700s. Cook was renowned for his peerless seamanship, his humane leadership, and his dedication to science-–the famed naturalist Joseph Banks accompanied him on his first voyage, and Cook has been called one of the most important figures of the Age of Enlightenment. He was also deeply interested in the native people he encountered. In fact, his stated mission was to return a Tahitian man, Mai, who had become the toast of London, to his home islands. On previous expeditions, Cook mapped huge swaths of the Pacific, including the east coast of Australia, and initiated first European contact with numerous peoples. He treated his crew well, and endeavored to learn about the societies he encountered with curiosity and without judgment.

Yet something was different on this last voyage. Cook became mercurial, resorting to the lash to enforce discipline, and led his two vessels into danger time and again. Uncharacteristically, he ordered violent retaliation for perceived theft on the part of native peoples. This may have had something to do with his secret orders, which were to chart and claim lands before Britain’s imperial rivals could, and to discover the fabled Northwest Passage. Whatever Cook’s intentions, his scientific efforts were the sharp edge of the colonial sword, and the ultimate effects of first contact were catastrophic for Indigenous people around the world. The tensions between Cook’s overt and covert missions came to a head on the shores of Hawaii. His first landing there was harmonious, but when Cook returned after mapping the coast of the Pacific Northwest and Alaska, his exploitative treatment of the Hawaiians led to the fatal encounter.

At once a ferociously-paced story of adventure on the high seas and a searching examination of the complexities and consequences of the Age of Exploration, THE WIDE WIDE SEA is a major work from one of our finest narrative nonfiction writers.]]> 408 Hampton Sides 0385544766 Danny 0 to-read 4.47 2024
author: Hampton Sides
name: Danny
average rating: 4.47
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]]> 199798785
On January 28, 1986, just seventy-three seconds into flight, the space shuttle Challenger broke apart over the Atlantic Ocean, killing all seven people on board. Millions of Americans witnessed the tragic deaths of a crew including New Hampshire schoolteacher Christa McAuliffe. Like 9/11 or JFK’s assassination, the Challenger disaster is a defining moment in 20th-century history—yet the details of what took place that day, and why, have largely been forgotten. Until now.

Based on extensive archival records and meticulous, original reporting, Challenger follows a handful of central protagonists—including each of the seven members of the doomed crew—through the years leading up to the accident, a detailed account of the tragedy itself, and into the investigation that followed. It’s a tale of optimism and promise undermined by political cynicism and cost-cutting in the interests of burnishing national prestige; of hubris and heroism; and of an investigation driven by leakers and whistleblowers determined to bring the truth to light. Throughout, there are the ominous warning signs of a tragedy to come, recognized but then ignored, and ultimately kept from the public.

Higginbotham reveals the history of the shuttle program, the lives of men and women whose stories have been overshadowed by the disaster as well as the designers, engineers, and test pilots who struggled against the odds to get the first shuttle into space.]]> 563 Adam Higginbotham 198217661X Danny 0 to-read 4.52 2024
author: Adam Higginbotham
name: Danny
average rating: 4.52
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date added: 2024/04/19
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]]> 174039288 272 Lydia Millet 1324073659 Danny 0 to-read, animal-welfare 3.77 2024
author: Lydia Millet
name: Danny
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/04/19
shelves: to-read, animal-welfare
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]]> 181109973 208 Brianna Madia 0063316099 Danny 0 to-read 4.16
author: Brianna Madia
name: Danny
average rating: 4.16
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rating: 0
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date added: 2024/04/15
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]]> 182733784
Every generation, a journalist has looked deep into the heart of the nuclear military establishment: the technologies, the safeguards, the plans, and the risks. These investigations are vital to how we understand the world we really live in—where one nuclear missile will beget one in return, and where the choreography of the world’s end requires massive decisions made on seconds� notice with information that is only as good as the intelligence we have.

Pulitzer Prize finalist Annie Jacobsen’s Nuclear War: A Scenario explores this ticking-clock scenario, based on dozens of exclusive new interviews with military and civilian experts who have built the weapons, have been privy to the response plans, and have been responsible for those decisions should they have needed to be made. Nuclear War: A Scenario examines the handful of minutes after a nuclear missile launch. It is essential reading, and unlike any other book in its depth and urgency.]]> 400 Annie Jacobsen 0593476093 Danny 0 to-read 4.36 2024
author: Annie Jacobsen
name: Danny
average rating: 4.36
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/04/07
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]]> 2956 327 Mark Twain 0142437174 Danny 0 to-read 3.82 1884
author: Mark Twain
name: Danny
average rating: 3.82
book published: 1884
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/03/30
shelves: to-read
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]]> 173754979 A brilliant reimagining of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn—both harrowing and satirical—told from the enslaved Jim's point of view

When Jim overhears that he is about to be sold to a man in New Orleans, separated from his wife and daughter forever, he runs away until he can formulate a plan. Meanwhile, Huck has faked his own death to escape his violent father. As all readers of American literature know, thus begins the dangerous and transcendent journey by raft down the Mississippi River toward the elusive and unreliable promise of the Free States and beyond.

Brimming with nuanced humor and lacerating observations that have made Everett a literary icon, this brilliant and tender novel radically illuminates Jim's agency, intelligence, and compassion as never before. James is destined to be a major publishing event and a cornerstone of twenty-first-century American literature.

Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9780385550369.]]> 303 Percival Everett Danny 0 to-read 4.46 2024
author: Percival Everett
name: Danny
average rating: 4.46
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/03/30
shelves: to-read
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]]> 201009490
In June 2021, the whole world was listening as Britney Spears spoke in open court. The impact of sharing her voice—her truth—was undeniable, and it changed the course of her life and the lives of countless others. The Woman in Me reveals for the first time her incredible journey—and the strength at the core of one of the greatest performers in pop music history.

Written with remarkable candor and humor, Spears’s groundbreaking book illuminates the enduring power of music and love—and the importance of a woman telling her own story, on her own terms, at last.]]> 277 Britney Spears Danny 0 to-read 3.77 2023
author: Britney Spears
name: Danny
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/02/17
shelves: to-read
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]]> 58733693 Remarkably Bright Creatures, an exploration of friendship, reckoning, and hope, tracing a widow's unlikely connection with a giant Pacific octopus.

After Tova Sullivan's husband died, she began working the night shift at the Sowell Bay Aquarium, mopping floors and tidying up. Keeping busy has always helped her cope, which she's been doing since her eighteen-year-old son, Erik, mysteriously vanished on a boat in Puget Sound over thirty years ago.

Tova becomes acquainted with curmudgeonly Marcellus, a giant Pacific octopus living at the aquarium. Marcellus knows more than anyone can imagine but wouldn't dream of lifting one of his eight arms for his human captors--until he forms a remarkable friendship with Tova.

Ever the detective, Marcellus deduces what happened the night Tova's son disappeared. And now Marcellus must use every trick his old invertebrate body can muster to unearth the truth for her before it's too late.

Shelby Van Pelt's debut novel is a gentle reminder that sometimes taking a hard look at the past can help uncover a future that once felt impossible.]]> 368 Shelby Van Pelt 0063204150 Danny 0 to-read, animal-welfare 4.35 2022
author: Shelby Van Pelt
name: Danny
average rating: 4.35
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/01/02
shelves: to-read, animal-welfare
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]]> 71872930
When a pair of young lovers abscond from a Puritan colony, little do they know that their humble cabin in the woods will become home to an extraordinary succession of inhabitants . An English soldier, destined for glory, abandons the battlefields of the New World to devote himself to apples. A pair of spinster twins survive war and famine, only to succumb to envy and desire.ĚýA crime reporter unearths a mass grave, but finds the ancient trees refuse to give up their secrets. A lovelorn painter, a conman, a stalking panther, a lusty beetle; as each one confronts the mysteries of the north woods, they come to realize that the dark, raucous, beautiful past is very much alive.

Traversing cycles of history, nature, and even literature, North Woods shows the myriad, magical ways in which we’re connected to our environment and to one another, across time, language and space. Written along with the seasons and divided into the twelve months of the year, it is an unforgettable novel about secrets and fates that asks the timeless how do we live on, even after we’re gone?]]> 372 Daniel Mason 0593597036 Danny 0 to-read 4.11 2023
author: Daniel Mason
name: Danny
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/12/29
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]]> 195608683 The #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Splendid and the Vile brings to life the pivotal five months between the election of Abraham Lincoln and the start of the Civil War—a slow-burning crisis that finally tore a deeply divided nation in two.

On November 6, 1860, Abraham Lincoln became the fluky victor in a tight race for president. The country was bitterly at odds; Southern extremists were moving ever closer to destroying the Union, with one state after another seceding and Lincoln powerless to stop them. Slavery fueled the conflict, but somehow the passions of North and South came to focus on a lonely federal fortress in Charleston: Fort Sumter.
Ěý
Master storyteller Erik Larson offers a gripping account of the chaotic months between Lincoln’s election and the Confederacy’s shelling of Sumter—a period marked by tragic errors and miscommunications, enflamed egos and craven ambitions, personal tragedies and betrayals. Lincoln himself wrote that the trials of these five months were “so great that, could I have anticipated them, I would not have believed it possible to survive them.�
Ěý
At the heart of this suspense-filled narrative are Major Robert Anderson, Sumter’s commander and a former slave owner sympathetic to the South but loyal to the Union; Edmund Ruffin, a vain and bloodthirsty radical who stirs secessionist ardor at every opportunity; and Mary Boykin Chesnut, wife of a prominent planter, conflicted over both marriage and slavery and seeing parallels between both. In the middle of it all is the overwhelmed Lincoln, battling with his duplicitous Secretary of State, William Seward, as he tries desperately to avert a war that he fears is inevitable—one that will eventually kill 750,000 Americans.
Ěý
Drawing on diaries, secret communiques, slave ledgers, and plantation records, Larson gives us a political horror story that captures the forces that led America to the brink—a dark reminder that we often don’t see a cataclysm coming until it’s too late.]]> 565 Erik Larson 0385348746 Danny 0 to-read 4.12 2024
author: Erik Larson
name: Danny
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/12/25
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]]> 34217598
In 2010, Sergeant Craig Grossi was doing intelligence work for Marine RECON—the most elite fighters in the Corps—in a remote part of Afghanistan. While on patrol, he spotted a young dog "with a big goofy head and little legs" who didn’t seem vicious or run in a pack like most strays they’d encountered. After eating a piece of beef jerky Craig offered—against military regulations—the dog began to follow him. "Looks like you made a friend," another Marine yelled. Grossi heard, "Looks like a 'Fred.'" The name stuck, and a beautiful, life-changing friendship was forged.

Fred not only stole Craig’s heart; he won over the RECON fighters, who helped Craig smuggle the dog into heavily fortified Camp Leatherneck in a duffel bag—risking jail and Fred’s life. With the help of a crew of DHL workers, a sympathetic vet, and a military dog handler, Fred eventually made it to Craig’s family in Virginia.

Months later, when Craig returned to the U.S., it was Fred’s turn to save the wounded Marine from Post-Traumatic Stress. Today, Craig and Fred are touching lives nationwide, from a swampy campground in a Louisiana State Park to the streets of Portland, Oregon, and everywhere in between.

A poignant and inspiring tale of hope, resilience, and optimism, with a timeless message at its heartâ€�"it is not what happens to us that matters, but how we respond to it"â€�CraigĚý& Fred is a shining example of the power of love to transform our hearts and our lives.]]> 272 Craig Grossi 0062693387 Danny 0 to-read 4.29
author: Craig Grossi
name: Danny
average rating: 4.29
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]]> 63133205 The Woman in Me is a brave and astonishingly moving story about freedom, fame, motherhood, survival, faith, and hope.

In June 2021, the whole world was listening as Britney Spears spoke in open court. The impact of sharing her voice—her truth—was undeniable, and it changed the course of her life and the lives of countless others. The Woman in Me reveals for the first time her incredible journey—and the strength at the core of one of the greatest performers in pop music history.

Written with remarkable candor and humor, Spears’s groundbreaking book illuminates the enduring power of music and love—and the importance of a woman telling her own story, on her own terms, at last.]]> 288 Britney Spears 1668009048 Danny 0 to-read 3.83 2023
author: Britney Spears
name: Danny
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/12/19
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]]> 61358638 Reimagining the debate on poverty, making a new and bracing argument about why it persists in America: because the rest of us benefit from it.

The United States, the richest country on earth, has more poverty than any other advanced democracy. Why? Why does this land of plenty allow one in every eight of its children to go without basic necessities, permit scores of its citizens to live and die on the streets, and authorize its corporations to pay poverty wages?

In this landmark book, acclaimed sociologist Matthew Desmond draws on history, research, and original reporting to show how affluent Americans knowingly and unknowingly keep poor people poor. Those of us who are financially secure exploit the poor, driving down their wages while forcing them to overpay for housing and access to cash and credit. We prioritize the subsidization of our wealth over the alleviation of poverty, designing a welfare state that gives the most to those who need the least. And we stockpile opportunity in exclusive communities, creating zones of concentrated riches alongside those of concentrated despair. Some lives are made small so that others may grow.

Elegantly written and fiercely argued, this compassionate book gives us new ways of thinking about a morally urgent problem. It also helps us imagine solutions. Desmond builds a startlingly original and ambitious case for ending poverty. He calls on us all to become poverty abolitionists, engaged in a politics of collective belonging to usher in a new age of shared prosperity and, at last, true freedom.]]> 304 Matthew Desmond 0593239911 Danny 0 to-read 4.27 2023
author: Matthew Desmond
name: Danny
average rating: 4.27
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/12/19
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]]> 61153739 #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER � A groundbreaking manifesto on living better and longer that challenges the conventional medical thinking on aging and reveals a new approach to preventing chronic disease and extending long-term health, from a visionary physician and leading longevity expert

Wouldn’t you like to live longer? And better? In this operating manual for longevity, Dr. Peter Attia draws on the latest science to deliver innovative nutritional interventions, techniques for optimizing exercise and sleep, and tools for addressing emotional and mental health.

For all its successes, mainstream medicine has failed to make much progress against the diseases of aging that kill most people: heart disease, cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, and type 2 diabetes. Too often, it intervenes with treatments too late to help, prolonging lifespan at the expense of healthspan, or quality of life. Dr. Attia believes we must replace this outdated framework with a personalized, proactive strategy for longevity, one where we take action now, rather than waiting.

This is not “biohacking,� it’s science: a well-founded strategic and tactical approach to extending lifespan while also improving our physical, cognitive, and emotional health. Dr. Attia’s aim is less to tell you what to do and more to help you learn how to think about long-term health, in order to create the best plan for you as an individual. In Outlive, readers will discover:

� Why the cholesterol test at your annual physical doesn’t tell you enough about your actual risk of dying from a heart attack.
� That you may already suffer from an extremely common yet underdiagnosed liver condition that could be a precursor to the chronic diseases of aging.
� Why exercise is the most potent pro-longevity “drug”—and how to begin training for the “Centenarian Decathlon.�
� Why you should forget about diets, and focus instead on nutritional biochemistry, using technology and data to personalize your eating pattern.
� Why striving for physical health and longevity, but ignoring emotional health, could be the ultimate curse of all.

Aging and longevity are far more malleable than we think; our fate is not set in stone. With the right roadmap, you can plot a different path for your life, one that lets you outlive your genes to make each decade better than the one before.]]> 496 Peter Attia 0593236599 Danny 0 science, currently-reading 4.33 2023
author: Peter Attia
name: Danny
average rating: 4.33
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/12/19
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]]> 123206645 A masterfully paced thriller about a reclusive ex–movie star and her famous friends whose spontaneous trip to a private Greek island is upended by a murder � from the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Silent Patient.

This is a tale of murder.

Or maybe that’s not quite true. At its heart, it’s a love story, isn’t it?

Lana Farrar is a reclusive ex–movie star and one of the most famous women in the world. Every year, she invites her closest friends to escape the English weather and spend Easter on her idyllic private Greek island.

I tell you this because you may think you know this story. You probably read about it at the time � it caused a real stir in the tabloids, if you remember. It had all the necessary ingredients for a press a celebrity; a private island cut off by the wind…and a murder.

We found ourselves trapped there overnight. Our old friendships concealed hatred and a desire for revenge. What followed was a game of cat and mouse � a battle of wits, full of twists and turns, building to an unforgettable climax. The night ended in violence and death, as one of us was found murdered.

But who am I?

My name is Elliot Chase, and I’m going to tell you a story unlike any you’ve ever heard.]]> 298 Alex Michaelides 125075898X Danny 0 to-read 3.34 2024
author: Alex Michaelides
name: Danny
average rating: 3.34
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/12/07
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]]> 77265004 848 Homer 1324001801 Danny 0 to-read 4.09 -800
author: Homer
name: Danny
average rating: 4.09
book published: -800
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/12/05
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]]> 63024269
From the author of The Genius of Birds and The Bird Way, a brilliant scientific investigation into owls—the most elusive of birds—and why they exert such a hold on human imagination

For millennia, owls have captivated and intrigued us. Our fascination with these mysterious birds was first documented more than thirty thousand years ago in the Chauvet Cave paintings in southern France. With their forward gaze and quiet flight, owls are often a symbol of wisdom, knowledge, and foresight. But what does an owl really know? And what do we really know about owls? Though our fascination goes back centuries, scientists have only recently begun to understand in deep detail the complex nature of these extraordinary birds. Some two hundred sixty species of owls exist today, and they reside on every continent except Antarctica, but they are far more difficult to find and study than other birds because they are cryptic, camouflaged, and mostly active in the dark of night.

Jennifer Ackerman illuminates the rich biology and natural history of these birds and reveals remarkable new scientific discoveries about their brains and behavior. She joins scientists in the field and explores how researchers are using modern technology and tools to learn how owls communicate, hunt, court, mate, raise their young, and move about from season to season. We now know that the hoots, squawks, and chitters of owls follow sophisticated and complex rules, allowing them to express not just their needs and desires but their individuality and identity. Owls duet. They migrate. They hoard their prey. Some live in underground burrows; some roost in large groups; some dine on black widows and scorpions.

Ackerman brings this research alive with her own personal field observations about owls and dives deep into why these birds beguile us. What an Owl Knows is an awe-inspiring exploration of owls across the globe and through human history, and a spellbinding account of their astonishing hunting skills, communication, and sensory prowess. By providing extraordinary new insights into the science of owls, What an Owl Knows pulls back the curtain on the nature of the world’s most enigmatic group of birds.]]> 333 Jennifer Ackerman 0593298888 Danny 0 to-read, animal-welfare 4.14 2023
author: Jennifer Ackerman
name: Danny
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/11/30
shelves: to-read, animal-welfare
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]]> 224379 The Gulag—the vast array of Soviet concentration camps—was a system of repression and punishment whose rationalized evil and institutionalized inhumanity were rivaled only by the Holocaust.

The Gulag entered the world's historical consciousness in 1972, with the publication of Alexander Solzhenitsyn's epic oral history of the Soviet camps, The Gulag Archipelago. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, dozens of memoirs and new studies covering aspects of that system have been published in Russia and the West. Using these new resources as well as her own original historical research, Anne Applebaum has now undertaken, for the first time, a fully documented history of the Soviet camp system, from its origins in the Russian Revolution to its collapse in the era of glasnost. It is an epic feat of investigation and moral reckoning that places the Gulag where it belongs: at the center of our understanding of the troubled history of the twentieth century.

Anne Applebaum first lays out the chronological history of the camps and the logic behind their creation, enlargement, and maintenance. The Gulag was first put in place in 1918 after the Russian Revolution. In 1929, Stalin personally decided to expand the camp system, both to use forced labor to accelerate Soviet industrialization and to exploit the natural resources of the country's barely habitable far northern regions. By the end of the 1930s, labor camps could be found in all twelve of the Soviet Union's time zones. The system continued to expand throughout the war years, reaching its height only in the early 1950s. From 1929 until the death of Stalin in 1953, some 18 million people passed through this massive system. Of these 18 million, it is estimated that 4.5 million never returned.

But the Gulag was not just an economic institution. It also became, over time, a country within a country, almost a separate civilization, with its own laws, customs, literature, folklore, slang, and morality. Topic by topic, Anne Applebaum also examines how life was lived within this shadow country: how prisoners worked, how they ate, where they lived, how they died, how they survived. She examines their guards and their jailers, the horrors of transportation in empty cattle cars, the strange nature of Soviet arrests and trials, the impact of World War II, the relations between different national and religious groups, and the escapes, as well as the extraordinary rebellions that took place in the 1950s. She concludes by examining the disturbing question why the Gulag has remained relatively obscure, in the historical memory of both the former Soviet Union and the West.

Gulag: A History will immediately be recognized as a landmark work of historical scholarship and an indelible contribution to the complex, ongoing, necessary quest for truth.]]> 677 Anne Applebaum 0767900561 Danny 0 to-read 4.27 2003
author: Anne Applebaum
name: Danny
average rating: 4.27
book published: 2003
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/11/13
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]]> 63027856 276 Cassian Schmidt 1838664246 Danny 0 to-read 4.40
author: Cassian Schmidt
name: Danny
average rating: 4.40
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rating: 0
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date added: 2023/11/05
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]]> 123627807 A New York Times Notable Book of 2023 and Editors' Choice � A Science News Favorite Book of 2023 � A Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Book of 2023 � A Smithsonian Staff Favorite of 2023 � A New Yorker Best Book of 2023 � Finalist for the New York Public Library's Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism � Finalist for the Reading the West Award � Finalist for the Colorado Book Award � Winner of the Banff Mountain Book Competition in Environmental Literature � Winner of the Sierra Club's Rachel Carson Award for Excellence in Environmental Writing

An eye-opening account of the global ecological transformations wrought by roads, from the award-winning author of Eager. Some 40 million miles of roadways encircle the earth, yet we tend to regard them only as infrastructure for human convenience. While roads are so ubiquitous they’re practically invisible to us, wild animals experience them as entirely alien forces of death and disruption. In Crossings, environmental journalist Ben Goldfarb travels throughout the United States and around the world to investigate how roads have transformed our planet. A million animals are killed by cars each day in the U.S. alone, but as the new science of road ecology shows, the harms of highways extend far beyond roadkill. Creatures from antelope to salmon are losing their ability to migrate in search of food and mates; invasive plants hitch rides in tire treads; road salt contaminates lakes and rivers; and the very noise of traffic chases songbirds from vast swaths of habitat. Yet road ecologists are also seeking to blunt the destruction through innovative solutions. Goldfarb meets with conservationists building bridges for California’s mountain lions and tunnels for English toads, engineers deconstructing the labyrinth of logging roads that web national forests, animal rehabbers caring for Tasmania’s car-orphaned wallabies, and community organizers working to undo the havoc highways have wreaked upon American cities. Today, as our planet’s road network continues to grow exponentially, the science of road ecology has become increasingly vital. Written with passion and curiosity, Crossings is a sweeping, spirited, and timely investigation into how humans have altered the natural world―and how we can create a better future for all living beings. 20 illustrations]]> 384 Ben Goldfarb 1324005890 Danny 5 4.42 2023
author: Ben Goldfarb
name: Danny
average rating: 4.42
book published: 2023
rating: 5
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date added: 2023/09/07
shelves: to-read, animal-welfare, environment, science
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]]> 80861942
It was a cool, quiet evening at Calumet Farm, where the most valuable racehorses—including the prolific stallion Alydar—had settled into their stalls for the evening. Alton Stone, filling in for the regular night watchman, completed his rounds at the barn. Although nothing seemed out of the ordinary, an inexplicable hunch led Stone to check on Alydar. What he found—a grievously injured horse with no discernable cause—jump-started one of the biggest mysteries to ever hit the horse racing world.

One part true-crime investigation, one part evocative history of the adrenaline-filled days of horse racing’s golden age, Broken follows Alydar’s rise to fame and then dives into the sordid details of the crime and trial that came to define his legacy. Told with the taut pacing of a legal thriller, Broken investigates Alydar’s death, the $36.5 million insurance payout, and the stain it left on the sport of horse racing.

Throughout, animal rights attorney and author Fred M. Kray weaves together shocking testimony and key evidence from the trials, featuring dramatic photos taken the night of the incident. Drawing on interviews conducted with more than twenty-five key witnesses, Kray reveals insider-only details and, in order to discover the truth about the death of this magnificent horse, embarks on a major investigation—one that leads to an unexpected and startling conclusion.]]> 377 Fred M. Kray Danny 0 to-read 4.14
author: Fred M. Kray
name: Danny
average rating: 4.14
book published:
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date added: 2023/08/07
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]]> 61714633 From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Killers of the Flower Moon, a page-turning story of shipwreck, survival, and savagery, culminating in a court martial that reveals a shocking truth. The powerful narrative reveals the deeper meaning of the events on the Wager, showing that it was not only the captain and crew who ended up on trial, but the very idea of empire.

On January 28, 1742, a ramshackle vessel of patched-together wood and cloth washed up on the coast of Brazil. Inside were thirty emaciated men, barely alive, and they had an extraordinary tale to tell. They were survivors of His Majesty's Ship the Wager, a British vessel that had left England in 1740 on a secret mission during an imperial war with Spain. While the Wager had been chasing a Spanish treasure-filled galleon known as "the prize of all the oceans," it had wrecked on a desolate island off the coast of Patagonia. The men, after being marooned for months and facing starvation, built the flimsy craft and sailed for more than a hundred days, traversing nearly 3,000 miles of storm-wracked seas. They were greeted as heroes.

But then . . . six months later, another, even more decrepit craft landed on the coast of Chile. This boat contained just three castaways, and they told a very different story. The thirty sailors who landed in Brazil were not heroes - they were mutineers. The first group responded with countercharges of their own, of a tyrannical and murderous senior officer and his henchmen. It became clear that while stranded on the island the crew had fallen into anarchy, with warring factions fighting for dominion over the barren wilderness. As accusations of treachery and murder flew, the Admiralty convened a court martial to determine who was telling the truth. The stakes were life-and-death--for whomever the court found guilty could hang.

The Wager is a grand tale of human behavior at the extremes told by one of our greatest nonfiction writers. Grann's recreation of the hidden world on a British warship rivals the work of Patrick O'Brian, his portrayal of the castaways' desperate straits stands up to the classics of survival writing such as The Endurance, and his account of the court martial has the savvy of a Scott Turow thriller. As always with Grann's work, the incredible twists of the narrative hold the reader spellbound.]]> 331 David Grann 0385534264 Danny 0 to-read 4.14 2023
author: David Grann
name: Danny
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/06/04
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]]> 822469 AsĂ­ arranca la novela de Mario Vargas Llosa PantaleĂłn y las visitadoras, publicada en 1973 y llevada posteriormente al cine.
Mario Vargas Llosa utiliza está anécdota para subrayar la hipocresía de las instituciones que se llaman ejemplares en relación con el oficio más viejo del mundo.]]> 392 Mario Vargas Llosa 8495501023 Danny 0 to-read 4.00 1973
author: Mario Vargas Llosa
name: Danny
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1973
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/01/29
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]]> 58537332 In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, a groundbreaking investigation into the causes of illness, a bracing critique of how our society breeds disease, and a pathway to health and healing.

In this revolutionary book, renowned physician Gabor Maté eloquently dissects how in Western countries that pride themselves on their healthcare systems, chronic illness and general ill health are on the rise. Nearly 70 percent of Americans are on at least one prescription drug; more than half take two. In Canada, every fifth person has high blood pressure. In Europe, hypertension is diagnosed in more than 30 percent of the population. And everywhere, adolescent mental illness is on the rise. So what is really “normal� when it comes to health?

Over four decades of clinical experience, Maté has come to recognize the prevailing understanding of “normal� as false, neglecting the roles that trauma and stress, and the pressures of modern-day living, exert on our bodies and our minds at the expense of good health. For all our expertise and technological sophistication, Western medicine often fails to treat the whole person, ignoring how today’s culture stresses the body, burdens the immune system, and undermines emotional balance. Now Maté brings his perspective to the great untangling of common myths about what makes us sick, connects the dots between the maladies of individuals and the declining soundness of society—and offers a compassionate guide for health and healing. Co-written with his son Daniel, The Myth of Normal is Maté’s most ambitious and urgent book yet.]]> 576 Gabor Maté 0593083881 Danny 0 to-read 4.30 2022
author: Gabor Maté
name: Danny
average rating: 4.30
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/01/17
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]]> 43669269
When Ben Moon moved from the Midwest to Oregon, he hadn't planned on getting a dog. But when he first met the soulful gaze of a rescue pup in a shelter, Ben instantly felt a connection, and his friendship with Denali was born. The two of them set out on the road together, on an adventure that would take them across the American west and through some of the best years of their lives. But when Ben was diagnosed with colorectal cancer at age 29, he faced a difficult battle with the disease, and Denali never once left his side until they were back out surfing and climbing crags. It was only a short time later that Denali was struck by the same disease, and Ben had the chance to return the favor. Denali is the story of this powerful friendship that shaped Ben and Denali's lives, showing the strength and love that we give and receive when we have our friends by our side.]]> 288 Ben Moon 0143133616 Danny 0 4.05 2020
author: Ben Moon
name: Danny
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2020
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/01/16
shelves: currently-reading, biographies, animal-welfare
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]]> 60784614 The revelatory New York Times and Publishers Weekly bestseller, shortlisted for the Financial Times Best Business Book of the Year Award.

An unflinching investigation reveals the human rights abuses behind the Congo’s cobalt mining operation―and the moral implications that affect us all.

Cobalt Red is the searing, first-ever exposé of the immense toll taken on the people and environment of the Democratic Republic of the Congo by cobalt mining, as told through the testimonies of the Congolese people themselves. Activist and researcher Siddharth Kara has traveled deep into cobalt territory to document the testimonies of the people living, working, and dying for cobalt. To uncover the truth about brutal mining practices, Kara investigated militia-controlled mining areas, traced the supply chain of child-mined cobalt from toxic pit to consumer-facing tech giants, and gathered shocking testimonies of people who endure immense suffering and even die mining cobalt.

Cobalt is an essential component to every lithium-ion rechargeable battery made today, the batteries that power our smartphones, tablets, laptops, and electric vehicles. Roughly 75 percent of the world’s supply of cobalt is mined in the Congo, often by peasants and children in sub-human conditions. Billions of people in the world cannot conduct their daily lives without participating in a human rights and environmental catastrophe in the Congo. In this stark and crucial book, Kara argues that we must all care about what is happening in the Congo―because we are all implicated.]]> 288 Siddharth Kara 1250284309 Danny 0 to-read, environment 4.36 2023
author: Siddharth Kara
name: Danny
average rating: 4.36
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/01/03
shelves: to-read, environment
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]]> 61272660 Named a Most Anticipated Book of the Year by Time, Entertainment Weekly, Vogue, Good Housekeeping, Oprah Daily, Glamour, USA TODAY, Parade, Bustle, San Francisco Chronicle, The Seattle Times, The Boston Globe, Tampa Bay Times, BuzzFeed, and Vulture

“A compelling read that showcases Egan’s masterful storytelling.� �Time
“Dazzling.� �Vogue
“Radiant, exhilarating.� �Slate
“Mesmerizing…A thought-provoking examination of how and why we change.� �People

From one of the most celebrated writers of our time comes an “inventive, effervescent� (Oprah Daily) novel about the memory and quest for authenticity and human connection.

The Candy House opens with the staggeringly brilliant Bix Bouton, whose company, Mandala, is so successful that he is “one of those tech demi-gods with whom we’re all on a first name basis.� Bix is forty, with four kids, restless, and desperate for a new idea, when he stumbles into a conversation group, mostly Columbia professors, one of whom is experimenting with downloading or “externalizing� memory. Within a decade, Bix’s new technology, “Own Your Unconscious”—which allows you access to every memory you’ve ever had, and to share your memories in exchange for access to the memories of others—has seduced multitudes.

In the world of Egan’s spectacular imagination, there are “counters� who track and exploit desires and there are “eluders,� those who understand the price of taking a bite of the Candy House. Egan introduces these characters in an astonishing array of narrative styles—from omniscient to first person plural to a duet of voices, an epistolary chapter, and a chapter of tweets. Intellectually dazzling, The Candy House is also a moving testament to the tenacity and transcendence of human longing for connection, family, privacy, and love.

“A beautiful exploration of loss, memory, and history� (San Francisco Chronicle), “this is minimalist maximalism. It’s as if Egan compressed a big 19th-century novel onto a flash drive� (The New York Times).]]> 368 Jennifer Egan 1476716773 Danny 0 to-read 3.52 2022
author: Jennifer Egan
name: Danny
average rating: 3.52
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/01/01
shelves: to-read
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]]> 57224204
Ten years after his prize-winning novel Chinaman established him as one of Sri Lanka’s foremost authors, Shehan Karunatilaka is back with a “thrilling satire� (Economist) and rip-roaring state-of-the-nation epic that offers equal parts mordant wit and disturbing, profound truths.]]> 386 Shehan Karunatilaka 1908745908 Danny 0 to-read 3.89 2022
author: Shehan Karunatilaka
name: Danny
average rating: 3.89
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2022/12/24
shelves: to-read
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]]> 58446227 NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER - The award-winning, best-selling author of Station Eleven and The Glass Hotel returns with a novel of art, time travel, love, and plague that takes the reader from Vancouver Island in 1912 to a dark colony on the moon five hundred years later, unfurling a story of humanity across centuries and space.

One of the Best Books of the Year: The New York Times, NPR, GoodReads

"One of [Mandel's] finest novels and one of her most satisfying forays into the arena of speculative fiction yet." --The New York Times

Edwin St. Andrew is eighteen years old when he crosses the Atlantic by steamship, exiled from polite society following an ill-conceived diatribe at a dinner party. He enters the forest, spellbound by the beauty of the Canadian wilderness, and suddenly hears the notes of a violin echoing in an airship terminal--an experience that shocks him to his core.

Two centuries later a famous writer named Olive Llewellyn is on a book tour. She's traveling all over Earth, but her home is the second moon colony, a place of white stone, spired towers, and artificial beauty. Within the text of Olive's best-selling pandemic novel lies a strange passage: a man plays his violin for change in the echoing corridor of an airship terminal as the trees of a forest rise around him.

When Gaspery-Jacques Roberts, a detective in the black-skied Night City, is hired to investigate an anomaly in the North American wilderness, he uncovers a series of lives upended: The exiled son of an earl driven to madness, a writer trapped far from home as a pandemic ravages Earth, and a childhood friend from the Night City who, like Gaspery himself, has glimpsed the chance to do something extraordinary that will disrupt the timeline of the universe.

A virtuoso performance that is as human and tender as it is intellectually playful, Sea of Tranquility is a novel of time travel and metaphysics that precisely captures the reality of our current moment.]]> 259 Emily St. John Mandel 0593321448 Danny 0 to-read 4.04 2022
author: Emily St. John Mandel
name: Danny
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2022
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]]> 60384070
Breathless is a “gripping� ( The Atlantic ) but “clear-eyed analysis� ( Time ) of SARs-CoV-2 and its fierce journey through the human population, as seen by the scientists who study its origin, its ever-changing nature, and its capacity to kill us. David Quammen expertly shows how strange new viruses emerge from animals into humans as we disrupt wild ecosystems and how those viruses adapt to their human hosts, sometimes causing global catastrophe. He explains why this coronavirus will probably be a “forever virus,� destined to circulate among humans and bedevil us endlessly, in one variant form or another. As scientists labor to catch it, comprehend it, and control it, with their high-tech tools and methods, the virus finds ways of escape.

Based on interviews with nearly one hundred scientists, including leading virologists in China and around the world, Quammen explains
-Infectious disease experts saw this pandemic coming
-Some scientists, for more than two decades, warned that “the next big one� would be caused by a changeable new virus—very possibly a coronavirus—but such warnings were ignored for political or economic reasons
-The precise origins of this virus may not be known for years, but some clues are compelling, and some suppositions can be dismissed
-And much more

Written by “one of our finest explainers of the natural world for decades� ( Chicago Tribune ), This “compelling and terrifying� ( The New York Times ) account is an unparalleled look inside the frantic international race to understand and control SARS-CoV-2—and what it might mean for the next potential global health crisis.]]> 416 David Quammen 1982164360 Danny 0 science, currently-reading 4.16 2022
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name: Danny
average rating: 4.16
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]]> 59575939 A grand tour through the hidden realms of animal senses that will transform the way you perceive the world --from the Pulitzer Prize-winning, New York Times bestselling author of I Contain Multitudes.

The Earth teems with sights and textures, sounds and vibrations, smells and tastes, electric and magnetic fields. But every animal is enclosed within its own unique sensory bubble, perceiving but a tiny sliver of an immense world. This book welcomes us into a previously unfathomable dimension--the world as it is truly perceived by other animals.

We encounter beetles that are drawn to fires, turtles that can track the Earth's magnetic fields, fish that fill rivers with electrical messages, and humans that wield sonar like bats. We discover that a crocodile's scaly face is as sensitive as a lover's fingertips, that the eyes of a giant squid evolved to see sparkling whales, that plants thrum with the inaudible songs of courting bugs, and that even simple scallops have complex vision. We learn what bees see in flowers, what songbirds hear in their tunes, and what dogs smell on the street. We listen to stories of pivotal discoveries in the field, while looking ahead at the many mysteries which lie unsolved.

In An Immense World, author and acclaimed science journalist Ed Yong coaxes us beyond the confines of our own senses, allowing us to perceive the skeins of scent, waves of electromagnetism, and pulses of pressure that surround us. Because in order to understand our world we don't need to travel to other places; we need to see through other eyes.]]> 464 Ed Yong Danny 0 to-read 4.46 2022
author: Ed Yong
name: Danny
average rating: 4.46
book published: 2022
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]]> 59366259
From decorated Green Beret sniper, UFC headliner, and all around badass, Tim Kennedy, a rollicking, inspirational memoir offering lessons in how to embrace failure and weather storms, in order to unlock the strongest version of yourself.

Tim Kennedy has a problem; he only feels alive right before he’s about to die. Kennedy, a Green Beret, decorated Army sniper, and UFC headliner, has tackled a bull with his bare hands, jumped out of airplanes, dove to the depths of the ocean, and traveled the world hunting poachers, human traffickers, and the Taliban.

But he’s also the same man who got kicked out of the police department, fire department, and as an EMT, before getting two women pregnant four days apart, and finally, been beaten up by his Special Forces colleagues for, quite simply, “being a selfish asshole.�

In Scars and Stripes , Kennedy describes how these failures shaped him into the successful businessman and devoted husband and father he is today. Through unbelievably vivid, wild anecdotes Kennedy reveals all the dumb, violent, embarrassing, and undeniably heroic things he’s done in his life, including multiple combat missions in Afghanistan, building a school in Texas for elementary kids, and creating two-multimillion-dollar businesses. You will learn that failure isn’t the end—rather it’s the first step towards unearthing the best version of yourself and finding success, no matter how overwhelming the setbacks may feel.]]> 416 Tim Kennedy 1982190914 Danny 0 to-read 4.49
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average rating: 4.49
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]]> 58777696 From the New York Times bestselling author of RIVER OF DOUBT and DESTINY OF THE REPUBLIC, the stirring story of one of the great feats of exploration of all time, and its complicated legacy

The Nile River is the longest in the world. Its fertile floodplain allowed for rise to the great civilization of ancient Egypt, but for millennia the location of its headwaters was shrouded in mystery. Pharaonic and Roman attempts to find it were stymied by a giant labyrinthine swamp, and subsequent expeditions got no further. In the 19th century, the discovery and translation of the Rosetta Stone set off a frenzy of interest in ancient Egypt. At the same time, European powers sent off waves of explorations intended to map the unknown corners of the globe - and extend their colonial empires.

Two British men - Richard Burton and John Hanning Speke - were sent by the Royal Geographical Society to claim the prize for England. Burton was already famous for being the first non-Muslim to travel to Mecca, disguised as an Arab chieftain. He spoke twenty-nine languages, was a decorated soldier, and literally wrote the book on sword-fighting techniques for the British Army. He was also mercurial, subtle, and an iconoclastic atheist. Speke was a young aristocrat and Army officer determined to make his mark, passionate about hunting, Burton's opposite in temperament and beliefs.

From the start the two men clashed, Speke chafing under Burton's command and Burton disapproving of Speke's ignorance of the people whose lands through which they traveled. They would endure tremendous hardships, illness, and constant setbacks. Two years in, deep in the African interior, Burton became too sick to press on, but Speke did, and claimed he found the source in a great lake that he christened Lake Victoria. When they returned to England, Speke rushed to take credit, disparaging Burton. Burton disputed his claim, and Speke launched another expedition to Africa to prove it. The two became venomous enemies, with the public siding with the more charismatic Burton, to Speke's great envy. The day before they were to publicly debate, Speke shot himself.

Yet there was a third man on both expeditions, his name obscured by imperial annals, whose exploits were even more extraordinary. This was Sidi Mubarak Bombay, who was enslaved and shipped from his home village in East Africa to India. When the man who purchased him died, he made his way into the local Sultan's army, and eventually traveled back to Africa, where he used his resourcefulness, linguistic prowess and raw courage to forge a living as a guide. Without his talents, it is likely that neither Englishman would have come close to the headwaters of the Nile, or perhaps even survived.

In RIVER OF THE GODS Candice Millard has written another peerless story of courage and adventure, set against the backdrop of the race to exploit Africa by the colonial powers.
]]> 349 Candice Millard 052552407X Danny 0 to-read 3.77 2022
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]]> 57800384 Lost & Found, she weaves the story of those relationships into a brilliant exploration of the role that loss and discovery play in all of our lives. The resulting book is part memoir, part guidebook to living in a world that is simultaneously full of wonder and joy and wretchedness and suffering--a world that always demands both our gratitude and our grief. A staff writer at The New Yorker and winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Schulz writes with curiosity, tenderness, erudition, and wit about our finite yet infinitely complicated lives. Lost & Found is an enduring account of love in all its many forms from one of the great writers of our time.]]> 256 Kathryn Schulz 0525512462 Danny 0 to-read 4.08 2022
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name: Danny
average rating: 4.08
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]]> 58734811 In her new masterpiece, the author of the bestselling phenomenon Quiet reveals the power of a bittersweet outlook on life, and why we’ve been so blind to its value.

With Quiet, Susan Cain urged our society to cultivate space for the undervalued, indispensable introverts among us, thereby revealing an untapped power hidden in plain sight. Now she employs the same mix of research, storytelling, and memoir to explore why we experience sorrow and longing, and the surprising lessons these states of mind teach us about creativity, compassion, leadership, spirituality, mortality, and love.

Bittersweetness is a tendency to states of longing, poignancy, and sorrow; an acute awareness of passing time; and a curiously piercing joy when beholding beauty. It recognizes that light and dark, birth and death—bitter and sweet—are forever paired. A song in a minor key, an elegiac poem, or even a touching television commercial all can bring us to this sublime, even holy, state of mind—and, ultimately, to greater kinship with our fellow humans.

But bittersweetness is not, as we tend to think, just a momentary feeling or event. It’s also a way of being, a storied heritage. Our artistic and spiritual traditions—amplified by recent scientific and management research—teach us its power.

Cain shows how a bittersweet state of mind is the quiet force that helps us transcend our personal and collective pain. If we don’t acknowledge our own sorrows and longings, she says, we can end up inflicting them on others via abuse, domination, or neglect. But if we realize that all humans know—or will know—loss and suffering, we can turn toward each other. And we can learn to transform our own pain into creativity, transcendence, and connection.

At a time of profound discord and personal anxiety, Bittersweet brings us together in deep and unexpected ways.]]> 310 Susan Cain 0451499786 Danny 0 to-read 3.96 2022
author: Susan Cain
name: Danny
average rating: 3.96
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]]> 58684290
In beautiful, compassionate prose, Lee elegantly offers wisdom about what it means to authentically and defiantly claim space for grief’s complicated feelings and emotions. And Lee is no stranger to grief herself, she shares her journey after losing her mother, a pregnancy, and, most recently, a cousin to the COVID-19 pandemic. These losses transformed her life and led her to question what grief really is and what healing actually looks like.ĚýIn this book, she also explores the unique impact of grief on Black people and reveals the key factors that proper healing requires: permission, care, feeling, grace and more.

The transformation we each undergo after loss is the indelible imprint of the people we love on our lives, which is the true definition of legacy. At its core,Ěý Ěýexplores what comes after death, and shows us that if we are able to own and honor what we’ve lost, we can experience a beautiful and joyful life in the midst of grief.Ěý]]> 178 Marisa Renee Lee 0306926024 Danny 0 to-read 4.14
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name: Danny
average rating: 4.14
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]]> 56269214 An inspiring and moving memoir of the author's turbulent life with 600 rescue animals.

Laurie Zaleski never aspired to run an animal rescue; that was her mother Annie's dream. But from girlhood, Laurie was determined to make the dream come true. Thirty years later as a successful businesswoman, she did it, buying a 15-acre farm deep in the Pinelands of South Jersey. She was planning to relocate Annie and her caravan of ragtag rescues—horses and goats, dogs and cats, chickens and pigs—when Annie died, just two weeks before moving day. In her heartbreak, Laurie resolved to make her mother's dream her own. In 2001, she established the Funny Farm Animal Rescue outside Mays Landing, New Jersey. Today, she carries on Annie's mission to save abused and neglected animals.

Funny Farm is Laurie's story: of promises kept, dreams fulfilled, and animals lost and found. It's the story of Annie McNulty, who fled a nightmarish marriage with few skills, no money and no resources, dragging three kids behind her, and accumulating hundreds of cast-off animals on the way. And lastly, it's the story of the brave, incredible, and adorable animals that were rescued.]]> 256 Laurie Zaleski 1250272831 Danny 0 to-read 4.24 2022
author: Laurie Zaleski
name: Danny
average rating: 4.24
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]]> 48721389 The first biography of this great and tragic poet that takes advantage of a wealth of new material, this is an unusually balanced, comprehensive and definitive life of Sylvia Plath.

*A BOOK OF THE YEAR IN THE DAILY TELEGRAPH AND THE TIMES*

Determined not to read Plath's work as if her every act, from childhood on, was a harbinger of her tragic fate, Clark presents new materials about Plath's scientist father, her juvenile writings, and her psychiatric treatment, and evokes a culture in transition in the mid-twentieth century, in the shadow of the atom bomb and the Holocaust, as she explores Sylvia's world: her early relationships and determination not to become a conventional woman and wife; her conflicted ties to her well-meaning, widowed mother; her troubles at the hands of an unenlightened mental-health industry; and her Cambridge years and thunderclap meeting with Ted Hughes, a true marriage of minds that would change the course of poetry in English.

Clark's clear-eyed sympathy for Hughes, his lover Assia Wevill, and other demonized players in the arena of Plath's suicide promotes a deeper understanding of her final days, with their outpouring of first-rate poems. Along with illuminating readings of the poems themselves, Clark's meticulous, compassionate research brings us closer than ever to the spirited woman and visionary artist who blazed a trail that still lights the way for women poets the world over.]]> 1154 Heather Clark 1473579236 Danny 0 to-read 4.56 2020
author: Heather Clark
name: Danny
average rating: 4.56
book published: 2020
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]]> 166562
One of the most extraordinary survival stories ever told -- Aron Ralston's searing account of his six days trapped in one of the most remote spots in America, and how one inspired act of bravery brought him home.

It started out as a simple hike in the Utah canyonlands on a warm Saturday afternoon. For Aron Ralston, a twenty-seven-year-old mountaineer and outdoorsman, a walk into the remote Blue John Canyon was a chance to get a break from a winter of solo climbing Colorado's highest and toughest peaks. He'd earned this weekend vacation, and though he met two charming women along the way, by early afternoon he finally found himself in his element: alone, with just the beauty of the natural world all around him.

It was 2:41 P.M. Eight miles from his truck, in a deep and narrow slot canyon, Aron was climbing down off a wedged boulder when the rock suddenly, and terrifyingly, came loose. Before he could get out of the way, the falling stone pinned his right hand and wrist against the canyon wall.

And so began six days of hell for Aron Ralston. With scant water and little food, no jacket for the painfully cold nights, and the terrible knowledge that he'd told no one where he was headed, he found himself facing a lingering death -- trapped by an 800-pound boulder 100 feet down in the bottom of a canyon. As he eliminated his escape options one by one through the days, Aron faced the full horror of his predicament: By the time any possible search and rescue effort would begin, he'd most probably have died of dehydration, if a flash flood didn't drown him before that.

What does one do in the face of almost certain death? Using the video camera from his pack, Aron began recording his grateful good-byes to his family and friends all over the country, thinking back over a life filled with adventure, and documenting a last will and testament with the hope that someone would find it. (For their part, his family and friends had instigated a major search for Aron, the amazing details of which are also documented here for the first time.) The knowledge of their love kept Aron Ralston alive, until a divine inspiration on Thursday morning solved the riddle of the boulder. Aron then committed the most extreme act imaginable to save himself.

Between a Rock and a Hard Place -- a brilliantly written, funny, honest, inspiring, and downright astonishing report from the line where death meets life -- will surely take its place in the annals of classic adventure stories.]]> 354 Aron Ralston 074349282X Danny 0 biographies, to-read 3.86 2004
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name: Danny
average rating: 3.86
book published: 2004
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]]> 58009109
Named a Best Book of 2022 by The Economist

“A gripping fly-on-the-wall story of the rise of this unique and important industry based on extensive interviews with some of the most successful venture capitalists.� - Daniel Rasmussen, Wall Street Journal

“A must-read for anyone seeking to understand modern-day Silicon Valley and even our economy writ large.� -Bethany McLean, The Washington Post

"A rare and unsettling look inside aĚýsubculture of unparalleled influence.â€� —Jane Mayer

"A classic...A book of exceptional reporting, analysis and storytelling.� —Charles Duhigg

From the New York Times bestselling author of More Money Than God comes the astonishingly frank and intimate story of Silicon Valley’s dominant venture-capital firms—and how their strategies and fates have shaped the path of innovation and the global economy

Innovations rarely come from “experts.� Elon Musk was not an “electric car person� before he started Tesla. When it comes to improbable innovations, a legendary tech VC told Sebastian Mallaby, the future cannot be predicted , it can only be discovered . It is the nature of the venture-capital game that most attempts at discovery fail, but a very few succeed at such a scale that they more than make up for everything else. That extreme ratio of success and failure is the power law that drives the VC business, all of Silicon Valley, the wider tech sector, and, by extension, the world.
ĚýĚý
In The Power Law , Sebastian Mallaby has parlayed unprecedented access to the most celebrated venture capitalists of all time—the key figures at Sequoia, Kleiner Perkins, Accel, Benchmark, and Andreessen Horowitz, as well as Chinese partnerships such as Qiming and Capital Today—into a riveting blend of storytelling and analysis that unfurls the history of tech incubation, in the Valley and ultimately worldwide. We learn the unvarnished truth, often for the first time, about some of the most iconic triumphs and infamous disasters in Valley history, from the comedy of errors at the birth of Apple to the avalanche of venture money that fostered hubris at WeWork and Uber.
Ěý
VCs� relentless search for grand slams brews an obsession with the ideal of the lone entrepreneur-genius, and companies seen as potential “unicorns� are given intoxicating amounts of power, with sometimes disastrous results. On a more systemic level, the need to make outsized bets on unproven talent reinforces bias, with women and minorities still represented at woefully low levels. This does not just have social justice as Mallaby relates, China’s homegrown VC sector, having learned at the Valley’s feet, is exploding and now has more women VC luminaries than America has ever had. Still, Silicon Valley VC remains the top incubator of business innovation anywhere—it is not where ideas come from so much as where they go to become the products and companies that create the future. By taking us so deeply into the VCs� game, The Power Law helps us think about our own future through their eyes.]]> 496 Sebastian Mallaby 052555999X Danny 0 to-read 4.41 2022
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name: Danny
average rating: 4.41
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]]> 8163993
Today, however, the stories are admired for their intense and masterly dissection of "dear dirty Dublin," and for the economy and grace with which Joyce invested this youthful fiction. From "The Sisters," the first story, illuminating a young boy's initial encounter with death, through the final piece, "The Dead," considered a masterpiece of the form, these tales represent, as Joyce himself explained, a chapter in the moral history of Ireland that would give the Irish "one good look at themselves." But in the end the stories are not just about the Irish; they represent moments of revelation common to all people.]]> 181 James Joyce Danny 0 currently-reading 4.11 1914
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name: Danny
average rating: 4.11
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]]> 58485511 The New York Times bestseller from business journalist Christopher Leonard infiltrates one of America’s most mysterious institutions—the Federal Reserve—to show how its policies spearheaded by Chairman Jerome Powell over the past ten years have accelerated income inequality and put our country’s economic stability at risk.

If you asked most people what forces led to today’s unprecedented income inequality and financial crashes, no one would say the Federal Reserve. For most of its history, the Fed has enjoyed the fawning adoration of the press. When the economy grew, it was credited to the Fed. When the economy imploded in 2008, the Fed got credit for rescuing us.

But here, for the first time, is the inside story of how the Fed has reshaped the American economy for the worse. It all started on November 3, 2010, when the Fed began a radical intervention called quantitative easing. In just a few short years, the Fed more than quadrupled the money supply with one to encourage banks and other investors to extend more risky debt. Leaders at the Fed knew that they were undertaking a bold experiment that would produce few real jobs, with long-term risks that were hard to measure. But the Fed proceeded anyway…and then found itself trapped. Once it printed all that money, there was no way to withdraw it from circulation. The Fed tried several times, only to see the market start to crash, at which point the Fed turned the money spigot back on. That’s what it did when COVID hit, printing 300 years� worth of money in a few short months.

Which brings us to Ten years on, the gap between the rich and poor has grown dramatically, inflation is raging, and the stock market is driven by boom, busts, and bailouts. Middle-class Americans seem stuck in a stage of permanent stagnation, with wage gains wiped out by high prices even as they remain buried under credit card debt, car loan debt, and student debt. Meanwhile, the “too big to fail� banks remain bigger and more powerful than ever while the richest Americans enjoy the gains of a hyper-charged financial system.

The Lords of Easy Money “skillfully� (The Wall Street Journal) tells the “fascinating� (The New York Times) tale of how quantitative easing is imperiling the American economy through the story of the one man who tried to warn us. This is the first inside story of how we really got here—and why our economy rests on such unstable ground.]]> Christopher Leonard 1797135546 Danny 0 to-read 4.29 2022
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name: Danny
average rating: 4.29
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]]> 57800575 A remarkable exploration of the therapeutic relationship, Dr. Mark Epstein reflects on one year's worth of therapy sessions with his patients to observe how his training in Western psychotherapy and his equally long investigation into Buddhism, in tandem, led to greater awareness - for his patients, and for himself.

For years, Dr. Mark Epstein kept his beliefs as a Buddhist separate from his work as a psychiatrist. Content to use his training in mindfulness as a private resource, he trusted that the Buddhist influence could, and should, remain invisible. But as he became more forthcoming with his patients about his personal spiritual leanings, he was surprised to learn how many were eager to learn more. The divisions between the psychological, emotional, and the spiritual, he soon realized, were not as distinct as one might think.

In The Zen of Therapy, Dr. Epstein reflects on a year's worth of selected sessions with his patients and observes how, in the incidental details of a given hour, his Buddhist background influences the way he works. Meditation and psychotherapy each encourage a willingness to face life's difficulties with courage that can be hard to otherwise muster, and in this cross-section of life in his office, he emphasizes how therapy, an element of Western medicine, can in fact be considered a two-person meditation. Mindfulness, too, much like a good therapist, can "hold" our awareness for us--and allow us to come to our senses and find inner peace.

Throughout this deeply personal inquiry, one which weaves together the wisdom of two worlds, Dr. Epstein illuminates the therapy relationship as spiritual friendship, and reveals how a therapist can help patients cultivate the sense that there is something magical, something wonderful, and something to trust running through our lives, no matter how fraught they have been or might become. For when we realize how readily we have misinterpreted our selves, when we stop clinging to our falsely conceived constructs, when we touch the ground of being, we come home.]]> 320 Mark Epstein 0593296613 Danny 0 to-read 3.89 2022
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name: Danny
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]]> 50743767
In the summer after graduating from college, Suleika Jaouad was preparing, as they say in commencement speeches, to enter "the real world". She had fallen in love and moved to Paris to pursue her dream of becoming a war correspondent. The real world she found, however, would take her into a very different kind of conflict zone.

It started with an itch - first on her feet, then up her legs, like 1,000 invisible mosquito bites. Next came the exhaustion, and the six-hour naps that only deepened her fatigue. Then a trip to the doctor and, a few weeks shy of her 23rd birthday, a diagnosis: leukemia, with a 35 percent chance of survival. Just like that, the life she had imagined for herself had gone up in flames. By the time Jaouad flew home to New York, she had lost her job, her apartment, and her independence. She would spend much of the next four years in a hospital bed, fighting for her life and chronicling the saga in a column for The New York Times.

When Jaouad finally walked out of the cancer ward - after three and a half years of chemo, a clinical trial, and a bone marrow transplant - she was, according to the doctors, cured. But as she would soon learn, a cure is not where the work of healing ends; it’s where it begins. She had spent the past 1,500 days in desperate pursuit of one goal - to survive. And now that she’d done so, she realized that she had no idea how to live.

How would she reenter the world and live again? How could she reclaim what had been lost? Jaouad embarked - with her new best friend, Oscar, a scruffy terrier mutt - on a 100-day, 15,000-mile road trip across the country. She set out to meet some of the strangers who had written to her during her years in the hospital: a teenage girl in Florida also recovering from cancer; a teacher in California grieving the death of her son; a death-row inmate in Texas who’d spent his own years confined to a room. What she learned on this trip is that the divide between sick and well is porous, that the vast majority of us will travel back and forth between these realms throughout our lives. Between Two Kingdoms is a profound chronicle of survivorship and a fierce, tender, and inspiring exploration of what it means to begin again.]]> 352 Suleika Jaouad 0399588582 Danny 0 to-read 4.40 2021
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name: Danny
average rating: 4.40
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]]> 42291479 A bold new book that proves our bodies and surroundings know more than our brains do

For centuries, we've believed that our thoughts happen entirely inside our brains. But in the last decade, new research has revealed that our bodies, our gestures, and our surroundings dramatically impact our intelligence and mental health. For example, did you know that closing your eyes makes you smarter, that half an hour among trees is as effective as a dose of Ritalin at controlling ADHD, that certain hand gestures aid memory, and that negotiators win an average of 80 percent more value when on their own turf? Indeed, as Annie Murphy Paul shows, we are constantly thinking outside our brains.

Like Howard Gardner's Multiple Intelligences or Daniel Goleman's Emotional Intelligence, Thinking Outside the Brain offers a dramatic new view of how our minds work, full of practical advice on how to think--and feel--better.]]> 352 Annie Murphy Paul 0544947584 Danny 0 to-read 4.04 2021
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name: Danny
average rating: 4.04
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]]> 37941599 Since their discovery more than 160 years ago, Neanderthals have metamorphosed from the losers of the human family tree to A-list hominins.

In Kindred, Rebecca Wragg Sykes uses her experience at the cutting-edge of Palaeolithic research to share our new understanding of Neanderthals, shoving aside clichés of rag-clad brutes in an icy wasteland. She reveals them to be curious, clever connoisseurs of their world, technologically inventive and ecologically adaptable. Above all, they were successful survivors for more than 300,000 years, during times of massive climatic upheaval.

At a time when our species has never faced greater threats, we’re obsessed with what makes us special. But, much of what defines us was also in Neanderthals, and their DNA is still inside us. Planning, co-operation, altruism, craftsmanship, aesthetic sense, imagination... perhaps even a desire for transcendence beyond mortality.

It is only by understanding them, that we can truly understand ourselves.

]]> 400 Rebecca Wragg Sykes 147293749X Danny 0 to-read 4.01 2020
author: Rebecca Wragg Sykes
name: Danny
average rating: 4.01
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]]> 53376379 For readers of Helen Macdonald and Elizabeth Alexander, an intimate and haunting portrait of grief and the search for meaning from a singular new talent as told through the prism of three generations of her Chinese American family.

Born two years after her parents' only son died just hours after his birth, Kat Chow became unusually fixated with death. She worried constantly about her parents dying -- especially her mother. One morning, when Kat was nine, her mother, a vivacious and mischievous woman, casually made a morbid joke: When she eventually dies, she said laughing, she'd like to be stuffed and displayed in Kat's future apartment in order to always watch over her.

Four years later when her mother dies unexpectedly from cancer, Kat, her two older sisters, and their father are plunged into a debilitating, lonely grief. With a distinct voice that is wry and heartfelt, Kat weaves together what is part ghost story and part excavation of her family's history of loss spanning three generations and their immigration from China and Hong Kong to America and Cuba. This redemptive coming-of-age story uncovers the uncanny parallels in Kat's lineage, including the strength of sisterhood and the complicated duty of looking after parents, even after death.

Seeing Ghosts asks what it means to claim and tell your family's story: Is writing an exorcism or is it its own form of preservation? What do we owe to our families in our grief, and how does it shape us? In order to answer these questions and to understand her family's ghosts, Kat unearths their sorrow and challenges the power structures of race, class, and gender. The result is an extraordinary new contribution to the literature of grief and the American family, and a provocative and transformative meditation on who we become under the specter of loss.]]> 368 Kat Chow 1538716321 Danny 0 to-read 3.92 2021
author: Kat Chow
name: Danny
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2021
rating: 0
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date added: 2022/01/16
shelves: to-read
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]]> 56620849 Money Magic’s most powerful act is transforming your financial thinking, explaining not just what to do, but why to do it. Get ready to discover the economics approach to financial planning—the fruit of a century’s worth of research by thousands of cloistered economic wizards whose now-accessible collective findings turn conventional financial advice on its head. Kotlikoff uses his soft heart, hard nose, dry wit, and flashing wand to cast a powerful spell, leaving you eager to accomplish what you formerly dreaded: financial planning.]]> 320 Laurence J. Kotlikoff 0316541958 Danny 0 to-read 3.47
author: Laurence J. Kotlikoff
name: Danny
average rating: 3.47
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2022/01/06
shelves: to-read
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]]> 29473517 337 Jason Morgan 1784295477 Danny 0 to-read 4.45 2016
author: Jason Morgan
name: Danny
average rating: 4.45
book published: 2016
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2022/01/04
shelves: to-read
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]]> 59836223 SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE - A young man journeys into Sri Lanka's war-torn north in this searing novel of longing, loss, and the legacy of war from the author of The Story of a Brief Marriage.

"A novel of tragic power and uncommon beauty."--Anthony Marra
"One of the most individual minds of their generation."--Financial Times

A Passage North begins with a message from out of the blue: a telephone call informing Krishan that his grandmother's caretaker, Rani, has died under unexpected circumstances--found at the bottom of a well in her village in the north, her neck broken by the fall. The news arrives on the heels of an email from Anjum, an impassioned yet aloof activist Krishnan fell in love with years before while living in Delhi, stirring old memories and desires from a world he left behind.

As Krishan makes the long journey by train from Colombo into the war-torn Northern Province for Rani's funeral, so begins an astonishing passage into the innermost reaches of a country. At once a powerful meditation on absence and longing, as well as an unsparing account of the legacy of Sri Lanka's thirty-year civil war, this procession to a pyre "at the end of the earth" lays bare the imprints of an island's past, the unattainable distances between who we are and what we seek.

Written with precision and grace, Anuk Arudpragasam's masterful novel is an attempt to come to terms with life in the wake of devastation, and a poignant memorial for those lost and those still living.]]> 304 Anuk Arudpragasam 0593230728 Danny 0 to-read 3.84 2021
author: Anuk Arudpragasam
name: Danny
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2021
rating: 0
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date added: 2021/12/31
shelves: to-read
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]]> 56015023 This Is Your Mind on Plants, Michael Pollan dives deep into three plant drugs--opium, caffeine, and mescaline--and throws the fundamental strangeness, and arbitrariness, of our thinking about them into sharp relief. Exploring and participating in the cultures that have grown up around these drugs while consuming (or, in the case of caffeine, trying not to consume) them, Pollan reckons with the powerful human attraction to psychoactive plants. Why do we go to such great lengths to seek these shifts in consciousness, and then why do we fence that universal desire with laws and customs and fraught feelings?]]> 288 Michael Pollan 0593296907 Danny 0 to-read 3.86 2021
author: Michael Pollan
name: Danny
average rating: 3.86
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2021/12/28
shelves: to-read
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]]> 56268863
Looking at the headlines--a global pandemic, the worsening climate crisis, political upheaval--it can be hard to feel optimistic. And yet hope has never been more desperately needed.

In this urgent book, Jane Goodall, the world's most famous living naturalist and Doug Abrams, internationally-bestselling author, explore--through intimate and thought-provoking dialogue--one of the most sought after and least understood elements of human nature: hope. In The Book of Hope, Jane focuses on her “Four Reasons for Hope�: The Amazing Human Intellect, The Resilience of Nature, The Power of Young People, and The Indomitable Human Spirit.

Told through stories from a remarkable career and fascinating research, The Book of Hope touches on vital questions including: How do we stay hopeful when everything seems hopeless? How do we cultivate hope in our children? Filled with engaging dialogue and pictures from Jane’s storied career, The Book of Hope is a deeply personal conversation with one of the most beloved figures in today’s world.

And for the first time, Jane tells the story of how she became a messenger of hope: from living through World War II, to her years in Gombe, to realizing she had to leave the forest to travel the world in her role as an advocate for environmental justice. She details the forces that shaped her hopeful worldview, her thoughts on her past, and her revelations about her next--and perhaps final--adventure.

There is still hope, and this book will help guide us to it.]]> 272 Jane Goodall 1250784093 Danny 0 to-read 4.19 2021
author: Jane Goodall
name: Danny
average rating: 4.19
book published: 2021
rating: 0
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date added: 2021/12/28
shelves: to-read
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]]> 55539565 Think Again is a book about the benefit of doubt, and about how we can get better at embracing the unknown and the joy of being wrong. Evidence has shown that creative geniuses are not attached to one identity, but constantly willing to rethink their stances and that leaders who admit they don't know something and seek critical feedback lead more productive and innovative teams.

New evidence shows us that as a mindset and a skilllset, rethinking can be taught and Grant explains how to develop the necessary qualities to do it. Section 1 explores why we struggle to think again and how we can learn to do it as individuals, arguing that 'grit' alone can actually be counterproductive. Section 2 discusses how we can help others think again through learning about 'argument literacy'. And the final section 3 looks at how schools, businesses and governments fall short in building cultures that encourage rethinking.

In the end, learning to rethink may be the secret skill to give you the edge in a world changing faster than ever.]]> 307 Adam M. Grant 1984878107 Danny 0 currently-reading 4.12 2021
author: Adam M. Grant
name: Danny
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2021
rating: 0
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date added: 2021/12/28
shelves: currently-reading
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]]> 58437521 From one of the most dazzling and iconic writers of our time and winner of the Pulitzer Prize, an electrifying, deeply moving novel about the quest for authenticity, privacy, and meaning in a world where our memories are no longer our own—featuring characters from A Visit from the Goon Squad.

It’s 2010. Staggeringly successful and brilliant tech entrepreneur Bix Bouton is desperate for a new idea. He’s forty, with four kids, and restless when he stumbles into a conversation with mostly Columbia professors, one of whom is experimenting with downloading or “externalizing� memory. Within a decade, Bix’s new technology, Own Your Unconscious—that allows you access to every memory you’ve ever had, and to share every memory in exchange for access to the memories of others—has seduced multitudes. But not everyone.

In spellbinding linked narratives, Egan spins out the consequences of Own Your Unconscious through the lives of multiple characters whose paths intersect over several decades. Egan introduces these characters in an astonishing array of styles—from omniscient to first person plural to a duet of voices, an epistolary chapter, and a chapter of tweets. In the world of Egan’s spectacular imagination, there are “counters� who track and exploit desires and there are “eluders,� those who understand the price of taking a bite of the Candy House.

Intellectually dazzling and extraordinarily moving, The Candy House is a bold, brilliant imagining of a world that is moments away. With a focus on social media, gaming, and alternate worlds, you can almost experience moving among dimensions in a role-playing game.� Egan delivers a fierce and exhilarating testament to the tenacity and transcendence of human longing for real connection, love, family, privacy and redemption.]]> 352 Jennifer Egan 1476716765 Danny 0 to-read 3.61 2022
author: Jennifer Egan
name: Danny
average rating: 3.61
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2021/12/28
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]]> 54493401
Except that right now, he doesn’t know that. He can’t even remember his own name, let alone the nature of his assignment or how to complete it.

All he knows is that he’s been asleep for a very, very long time. And he’s just been awakened to find himself millions of miles from home, with nothing but two corpses for company.

His crewmates dead, his memories fuzzily returning, Ryland realizes that an impossible task now confronts him. Hurtling through space on this tiny ship, it’s up to him to puzzle out an impossible scientific mystery—and conquer an extinction-level threat to our species.

And with the clock ticking down and the nearest human being light-years away, he’s got to do it all alone.

Or does he?]]> 476 Andy Weir 0593135202 Danny 0 to-read 4.49 2021
author: Andy Weir
name: Danny
average rating: 4.49
book published: 2021
rating: 0
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date added: 2021/12/28
shelves: to-read
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]]> 57799745
Above them all, a huge star suddenly appears in the sky. No one, not even the astronomers, knows for sure what kind of phenomenon it is. Is there a star burning itself out? Why then has no one seen it before? Or is it a brand new star? Slowly the interest in the news subsides, and life goes on, but not quite as before, for unusual phenomena begin to occur on the fringes of human existence.

Over these days in August, the characters the novel follows will each understand what is happening differently, and all face new struggles in their own lives.]]> 666 Karl Ove KnausgĂĄrd 0399563423 Danny 0 to-read 3.89 2020
author: Karl Ove KnausgĂĄrd
name: Danny
average rating: 3.89
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2021/11/28
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 57341968 Timely and profound philosophical meditations on how great figures in history, literature, music, and art searched for solace while facing tragedies and crises, from the internationally renowned historian of ideas and Booker Prize-finalist Michael Ignatieff.

When someone we love dies, when we suffer loss or defeat, when catastrophe strikes--war, famine, pandemic--we go in search of consolation. Once the province of priests and philosophers, the language of consolation has largely vanished from our modern vocabulary, and the places where it was offered, houses of religion, are often empty. Rejecting the solace of ancient religious texts, humanity since the sixteenth century has increasingly placed its faith in science, ideology, and the therapeutic.

How do we console each other and ourselves in an age of unbelief? In a series of lapidary meditations on writers, artists, musicians, and their works--from the books of Job and Psalms to Albert Camus, Anna Akhmatova, Elisabeth Kubler-Ross and Primo Levi--esteemed writer and historian Michael Ignatieff shows how men and women in extremity have looked to each other across time to recover hope and resilience. Recreating the moments when great figures found the courage to confront their fate and the determination to continue unafraid, On Consolation takes those stories into the present, movingly contending that we can revive these traditions of consolation to meet the anguish and uncertainties of our precarious twenty-first century.]]> 304 Michael Ignatieff 0735281998 Danny 0 to-read 3.94
author: Michael Ignatieff
name: Danny
average rating: 3.94
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2021/11/17
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]]> 49150952 “Both poetic and practical and celebrates the diversity of garden design throughout the West.â€�Ěý—Sunset

From windswept deserts to misty seaside hills and verdant valleys, the natural landscapes of the American West offer an astounding variety of climates for gardens. Under Western Skies reveals thirty-six of the most innovative designs—all embracing and celebrating the very soul of the land on which they grow. For the gardeners featured here, nature is the ultimate inspiration rather than something to be dominated, and Under Western Skies shows the strong connection each garden has with its place. Packed with Atkinson’s stunning photographs and illuminated by Jewell’s deep interest in the relationships between people and the spaces they inhabit, Under Western Skies offers page after page of encouraging ingenuity and inventive design for passionate gardeners who call the West home.
Ěý]]> 412 Jennifer Jewell 160469999X Danny 0 to-read 4.45
author: Jennifer Jewell
name: Danny
average rating: 4.45
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2021/11/12
shelves: to-read
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]]> 54633172 The Promise , winner of the 2021 Booker Prize, charts the crash and burn of a white South African family, living on a farm outside Pretoria. The Swarts are gathering for Ma's funeral. The younger generation, Anton and Amor, detest everything the family stand for -- not least the failed promise to the Black woman who has worked for them her whole life. After years of service, Salome was promised her own house, her own land... yet somehow, as each decade passes, that promise remains unfulfilled.

The narrator's eye shifts and blinks: moving fluidly between characters, flying into their dreams; deliciously lethal in its observation. And as the country moves from old deep divisions to its new so-called fairer society, the lost promise of more than just one family hovers behind the novel's title.

In this story of a diminished family, sharp and tender emotional truths hit home. Confident, deft and quietly powerful, The Promise is literary fiction at its finest.]]> 293 Damon Galgut 1784744069 Danny 0 to-read 3.81 2021
author: Damon Galgut
name: Danny
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2021/11/12
shelves: to-read
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]]> 14936858 Timely and profound philosophical meditations on how great figures in history, literature, music, and art searched for solace while facing tragedies and crises, from the internationally renowned historian of ideas and Booker Prize finalist Michael Ignatieff

When we lose someone we love, when we suffer loss or defeat, when catastrophe strikes—war, famine, pandemic—we go in search of consolation. Once the province of priests and philosophers, the language of consolation has largely vanished from our modern vocabulary, and the places where it was offered, houses of religion, are often empty. Rejecting the solace of ancient religious texts, humanity since the sixteenth century has increasingly placed its faith in science, ideology, and the therapeutic.

How do we console each other and ourselves in an age of unbelief? In a series of lapidary meditations on writers, artists, musicians, and their works—from the books of Job and Psalms to Albert Camus, Anna Akhmatova, and Primo Levi—esteemed writer and historian Michael Ignatieff shows how men and women in extremity have looked to each other across time to recover hope and resilience. Recreating the moments when great figures found the courage to confront their fate and the determination to continue unafraid, On Consolation takes those stories into the present, movingly contending that we can revive these traditions of consolation to meet the anguish and uncertainties of our precarious twenty-first century.]]> 304 Michael Ignatieff 0805055215 Danny 0 to-read 3.90
author: Michael Ignatieff
name: Danny
average rating: 3.90
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2021/11/12
shelves: to-read
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]]> 56222198
Roger Federer has often made it look astonishingly easy through the carving backhands, gliding to forehands, leaping for overheads and, in his most gravity-defying act, remaining high on a pedestal in a world of sports rightfully flooded with cynicism. But his path from temperamental, bleach-blond teenager with dubious style sense to one of the greatest, most self-possessed and elegant of competitors has been a long-running act of will, not destiny. He not only had a great gift. He had grit.

Christopher Clarey, one of the top international sportswriters working today, has covered Federer since the beginning of his professional career. He was in Paris on the Suzanne Lenglen Court for Federer's first Grand Slam match and has interviewed him exclusively more than any other journalist since his rise to prominence. Here, Clarey focuses on the pivotal people, places, and moments in Federer's long and rich reporting from South Africa, South America, the Middle East, four Grand Slam tournaments, and Federer's native Switzerland. It has been a journey like no other player's, rife with victories and a few crushing defeats, one that has redefined enduring excellence and made Federer a sentimental favorite worldwide.

The Master tells the story of Federer's life and career on both an intimate and grand scale, in a way no one else could possibly do.]]> 432 Christopher Clarey 1538719266 Danny 0 to-read 4.13 2021
author: Christopher Clarey
name: Danny
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2021
rating: 0
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date added: 2021/09/05
shelves: to-read
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]]> 55881796 Jonathan Franzen's gift for wedding depth and vividness of character with breadth of social vision has never been more dazzlingly evident than in Crossroads.

It's December 23, 1971, and heavy weather is forecast for Chicago. Russ Hildebrandt, the associate pastor of a liberal suburban church, is on the brink of breaking free of a marriage he finds joyless--unless his wife, Marion, who has her own secret life, beats him to it. Their eldest child, Clem, is coming home from college on fire with moral absolutism, having taken an action that will shatter his father. Clem's sister, Becky, long the social queen of her high-school class, has sharply veered into the counterculture, while their brilliant younger brother Perry, who's been selling drugs to seventh graders, has resolved to be a better person. Each of the Hildebrandts seeks a freedom that each of the others threatens to complicate.

Jonathan Franzen's novels are celebrated for their unforgettably vivid characters and for their keen-eyed take on contemporary America. Now, in Crossroads, Franzen ventures back into the past and explores the history of two generations. With characteristic humor and complexity, and with even greater warmth, he conjures a world that resonates powerfully with our own.

A tour de force of interwoven perspectives and sustained suspense, its action largely unfolding on a single winter day, Crossroads is the story of a Midwestern family at a pivotal moment of moral crisis. Jonathan Franzen's gift for melding the small picture and the big picture has never been more dazzlingly evident.]]> 592 Jonathan Franzen 0374181179 Danny 0 to-read 4.05 2021
author: Jonathan Franzen
name: Danny
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2021
rating: 0
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date added: 2021/08/14
shelves: to-read
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]]> 34740837
A seasoned war correspondent, Jeffrey Gettleman has covered every major conflict over the past twenty years, from Afghanistan to Iraq to the Congo. For the past decade, he has served as the East Africa bureau chief for the New York Times, fulfilling a teenage dream.

At nineteen, Gettleman fell in love, twice. On a do-it-yourself community service trip in college, he went to East Africa—a terrifying, exciting, dreamlike part of the world in the throes of change that imprinted itself on his imagination and on his heart.

But around that same time he also fell in love with a fellow Cornell student—the brightest, classiest, most principled woman he’d ever met. To say they were opposites was an understatement. She became a criminal lawyer in America; he hungered to return to Africa. For the next decade he would be torn between these two abiding passions.

A sensually rendered coming-of-age story in the tradition of Barbarian Days, Love, Africa is a tale of passion, violence, far-flung adventure, tortuous long-distance relationships, screwing up, forgiveness, parenthood, and happiness that explores the power of finding yourself in the most unexpected of places.]]> 369 Jeffrey Gettleman 0062284118 Danny 4 4.28 2017
author: Jeffrey Gettleman
name: Danny
average rating: 4.28
book published: 2017
rating: 4
read at: 2020/10/10
date added: 2021/08/01
shelves:
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]]> 34466851
What do such disparate figures have in common? Why do their extraordinary stories continue to amaze and inspire? In her “enthralling…fascinating look at a varied group of heroes� ( Publishers Weekly ), Nancy Koehn offers a remarkable template by which to measure our aspirations and, also, to judge those in our time to whom we've given our trust.

Featuring “five stand-alone case studies that are well-written and interesting� ( The New York Times ), Koehn begins each section by showing her protagonist on the precipice of a great Shackleton marooned on an Antarctic ice floe; Lincoln on the verge of seeing the Union collapse; escaped slave Douglass facing possible capture; Bonhoeffer agonizing over how to counter absolute evil with faith; Carson racing against the cancer ravaging her in a bid to save the planet. Readers then learn about each person’s childhood and see the individual growing—step by step—into the person he or she will ultimately become. Significantly, as we follow each leader’s against-all-odds journey, we begin to glean an essential leaders are not born but made . In a book dense with epiphanies, the most galvanizing one may be that the power and courage to lead resides in each of us.

Providing both great insight and exceptionally rendered human drama, Forged in Crisis is “a highly engaging (and well documented)…book that quietly surpasses many so-called leadership tomes� ( Booklist , starred review).]]> 528 Nancy F. Koehn 1501174444 Danny 3 4.04 2013
author: Nancy F. Koehn
name: Danny
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2013
rating: 3
read at: 2020/04/30
date added: 2021/08/01
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]]> 54705911 The national bestseller

From the author of the bestselling More Beautiful Than Before comes an inspiring book about loss based on his most popular sermon.

As the senior rabbi of one of the largest synagogues in the world, Steve Leder has learned over and over again the many ways death teaches us how to live and love more deeply by showing us not only what is gone but also the beauty of what remains.

This inspiring and comforting book takes us on a journey through the experience of loss that is fundamental to everyone. Yet even after having sat beside thousands of deathbeds, Steve Leder the rabbi was not fully prepared for the loss of his own father. It was only then that Steve Leder the son truly learned how loss makes life beautiful by giving it meaning and touching us with love that we had not felt before.

Enriched by Rabbi Leder's irreverence, vulnerability, and wicked sense of humor, this heartfelt narrative is filled with laughter and tears, the wisdom of millennia and modernity, and, most of all, an unfolding of the profound and simple truth that in loss we gain more than we ever imagined.]]> 240 Steve Leder 0593187555 Danny 0 currently-reading 4.43 2021
author: Steve Leder
name: Danny
average rating: 4.43
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2021/08/01
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> 54120408
In Klara and the Sun, Kazuo Ishiguro looks at our rapidly changing modern world through the eyes of an unforgettable narrator to explore a fundamental question: what does it mean to love?]]> 303 Kazuo Ishiguro 059331817X Danny 0 to-read 3.71 2021
author: Kazuo Ishiguro
name: Danny
average rating: 3.71
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2021/07/27
shelves: to-read
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]]> 55873262 The Story of a Brief Marriage.

A Passage North begins with a message from out of the blue: a telephone call informing Krishan that his grandmother's caretaker, Rani, has died under unexpected circumstances--found at the bottom of a well in her village in the north, her neck broken by the fall. The news arrives on the heels of an email from Anjum, an impassioned yet aloof activist Krishnan fell in love with years before while living in Delhi, stirring old memories and desires from a world he left behind.

As Krishan makes the long journey by train from Colombo into the war-torn Northern Province for Rani's funeral, so begins an astonishing passage into the innermost reaches of a country. At once a powerful meditation on absence and longing, as well as an unsparing account of the legacy of Sri Lanka's thirty-year civil war, this procession to a pyre "at the end of the earth" lays bare the imprints of an island's past, the unattainable distances between who we are and what we seek.

Written with precision and grace, Anuk Arudpragasam's masterful new novel is an attempt to come to terms with life in the wake of devastation, and a poignant memorial for those lost and those still alive.
]]> 304 Anuk Arudpragasam 0593230701 Danny 0 to-read 3.71 2021
author: Anuk Arudpragasam
name: Danny
average rating: 3.71
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2021/07/27
shelves: to-read
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]]> 56470423 Award-winning New York Times reporters Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang unveil the tech story of our times in a riveting, behind-the-scenes exposé that offers the definitive account of Facebook’s fall from grace.

Once one of Silicon Valley’s greatest success stories, Facebook has been under constant fire for the past five years, roiled by controversies and crises. It turns out that while the tech giant was connecting the world, they were also mishandling users� data, spreading fake news, and amplifying dangerous, polarizing hate speech.

The company, many said, had simply lost its way. But the truth is far more complex. Leadership decisions enabled, and then attempted to deflect attention from, the crises. Time after time, Facebook’s engineers were instructed to create tools that encouraged people to spend as much time on the platform as possible, even as those same tools boosted inflammatory rhetoric, conspiracy theories, and partisan filter bubbles. And while consumers and lawmakers focused their outrage on privacy breaches and misinformation, Facebook solidified its role as the world’s most voracious data-mining machine, posting record profits, and shoring up its dominance via aggressive lobbying efforts.

Drawing on their unrivaled sources, Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang take readers inside the complex court politics, alliances and rivalries within the company to shine a light on the fatal cracks in the architecture of the tech behemoth. Their explosive, exclusive reporting led them to a shocking conclusion: The missteps of the last five years were not an anomaly but an inevitability—this is how Facebook was built to perform. In a period of great upheaval, growth has remained the one constant under the leadership of Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg. Both have been held up as archetypes of uniquely 21st century executives—he the tech “boy genius� turned billionaire, she the ultimate woman in business, an inspiration to millions through her books and speeches. But sealed off in tight circles of advisers and hobbled by their own ambition and hubris, each has stood by as their technology is coopted by hate-mongers, criminals and corrupt political regimes across the globe, with devastating consequences. In An Ugly Truth, they are at last held accountable.]]> 352 Sheera Frenkel 0063136740 Danny 0 to-read 3.94 2021
author: Sheera Frenkel
name: Danny
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2021/06/25
shelves: to-read
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]]> 52557132 A wondrous debut from an extraordinary new voice in nonfiction, Why Fish Don’t Exist is a dark and astonishing tale of love, chaos, scientific obsession, and—possibly—even murder.

David Starr Jordan was a taxonomist, a man possessed with bringing order to the natural world. In time, he would be credited with discovering nearly a fifth of the fish known to humans in his day. But the more of the hidden blueprint of life he uncovered, the harder the universe seemed to try to thwart him. His specimen collections were demolished by lightning, by fire, and eventually by the 1906 San Francisco earthquake—which sent more than a thousand of his discoveries, housed in fragile glass jars, plummeting to the floor. In an instant, his life’s work was shattered.

Many might have given up, given in to despair. But Jordan? He surveyed the wreckage at his feet, found the first fish he recognized, and confidently began to rebuild his collection. And this time, he introduced one clever innovation that he believed would at last protect his work against the chaos of the world.

When NPR reporter Lulu Miller first heard this anecdote in passing, she took Jordan for a fool�a cautionary tale in hubris, or denial. But as her own life slowly unraveled, she began to wonder about him. Perhaps instead he was a model for how to go on when all seemed lost. What she would unearth about his life would transform her understanding of history, morality, and the world beneath her feet.

Part biography, part memoir, part scientific adventure, Why Fish Don’t Exist reads like a fable about how to persevere in a world where chaos will always prevail.]]> 240 Lulu Miller Danny 0 to-read 4.18 2020
author: Lulu Miller
name: Danny
average rating: 4.18
book published: 2020
rating: 0
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date added: 2021/03/11
shelves: to-read
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]]> 48930288
In late 2017, scientists at a Hawaiian observatory glimpsed an object soaring through our inner solar system, moving so quickly that it could only have come from another star. Avi Loeb, Harvard’s top astronomer, showed it was not an asteroid; it was moving too fast along a strange orbit, and left no trail of gas or debris in its wake. There was only one conceivable explanation: the object was a piece of advanced technology created by a distant alien civilization.
Ěý
In Extraterrestrial, Loeb takes readers inside the thrilling story of the first interstellar visitor to be spotted in our solar system. He outlines his controversial theoryĚýand its profound implications: for science, for religion, and for the future of our species and our planet. A mind-bending journey through the furthest reaches of science, space-time, and the human imagination, Extraterrestrial challenges readers to aim for the stars—and to think critically about what’s out there, no matter how strange it seems.]]> 240 Avi Loeb 0358278147 Danny 0 to-read 3.74 2021
author: Avi Loeb
name: Danny
average rating: 3.74
book published: 2021
rating: 0
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date added: 2021/02/08
shelves: to-read
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]]> 10516883 In the insightful narrative tradition of Oliver Sacks, Monkey Mind is an uplifting, smart, and very funny memoir of life with anxiety—America’s most common psychological complaint.

Daniel Smith’s Monkey Mind is the stunning articulation of what it is like to live with anxiety. As he travels through anxiety’s demonic layers, Smith defangs the disorder with great humor and evocatively expresses its self-destructive absurdities and painful internal coherence. Aaron Beck, the most influential doctor in modern psychotherapy, says that �Monkey Mind does for anxiety what William Styron’s Darkness Visible did for depression.� Neurologist and bestselling writer Oliver Sacks says, “I read Monkey Mind with admiration for its bravery and clarity�.I broke out into explosive laughter again and again.� Here, finally, comes relief and recognition to all those who want someone to put what they feel, or what their loved ones feel, into words.]]> 212 Daniel B. Smith 1439177309 Danny 0 currently-reading 3.23 2012
author: Daniel B. Smith
name: Danny
average rating: 3.23
book published: 2012
rating: 0
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]]> 15792605
Lojong is the Tibetan Buddhist practice of working with short phrases (called "slogans") to generateĚý bodhichitta , the heart and mind of enlightened compassion. With roots tracing back to the 900 A.D., the practice has gained more Western adherents over the past two decades, partly due to the influence of American Buddhist teachers like Pema Chödrön. Its effectiveness and accessibility have moved the practice out of its Buddhist context and into the lives of non-Buddhists across the world.

It's in this spirit that Norman Fischer offers his unique, Zen-based commentary on the Lojong. Though traditionally a practice of Tibetan Buddhism, the power of the Lojong extends to other Buddhist traditions—and even to other spiritual traditions as well. As Fischer explores the 59 slogans through a Zen lens, he shows how people from a range of faiths and backgrounds can use Lojong to generate the insight, resilience, and compassion they seek.]]> 176 Norman Fischer 1611800404 Danny 0 to-read 4.46 2013
author: Norman Fischer
name: Danny
average rating: 4.46
book published: 2013
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]]> 50887097 A wondrous debut from an extraordinary new voice in nonfiction, Why Fish Don’t Exist is a dark and astonishing tale of love, chaos, scientific obsession, and—possibly—even murder.

David Starr Jordan was a taxonomist, a man possessed with bringing order to the natural world. In time, he would be credited with discovering nearly a fifth of the fish known to humans in his day. But the more of the hidden blueprint of life he uncovered, the harder the universe seemed to try to thwart him. His specimen collections were demolished by lightning, by fire, and eventually by the 1906 San Francisco earthquake—which sent more than a thousand of his discoveries, housed in fragile glass jars, plummeting to the floor. In an instant, his life’s work was shattered.

Many might have given up, given in to despair. But Jordan? He surveyed the wreckage at his feet, found the first fish he recognized, and confidently began to rebuild his collection. And this time, he introduced one clever innovation that he believed would at last protect his work against the chaos of the world.

When NPR reporter Lulu Miller first heard this anecdote in passing, she took Jordan for a fool�a cautionary tale in hubris, or denial. But as her own life slowly unraveled, she began to wonder about him. Perhaps instead he was a model for how to go on when all seemed lost. What she would unearth about his life would transform her understanding of history, morality, and the world beneath her feet.

Part biography, part memoir, part scientific adventure, Why Fish Don’t Exist reads like a fable about how to persevere in a world where chaos will always prevail.]]> 225 Lulu Miller Danny 0 to-read 4.15 2020
author: Lulu Miller
name: Danny
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2020
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]]> 50772888 Award-winning reporter Sarah Frier reveals an inside, never-before-told, behind-the-scenes look at how Instagram defied the odds to become one of the most culturally defining apps of the decade.

Since its creation in 2010, Instagram’s fun and simple interface has captured our collective imagination, swiftly becoming a way of life. In No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram, technology reporter Sarah Frier explains how Instagram’s founders married art and technology to overcome skeptics and to hook the public on visual storytelling. At first, Instagram initially attracted artisans, but then the platform exploded in popularity among the masses, creating an entire industry of digital influencers that’s now worth tens of billions of dollars.

Eighteen months after Instagram’s launch and explosive growth, the founders—Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger—made the gut-wrenching decision to sell the company to Facebook. For most companies, that would be the end of the story; but for Instagram, it was only the beginning. Instagram borrowed some lessons from Facebook and rejected others, until eventually its success stirred tension with Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg, just as Facebook became embroiled in a string of public crises. Frier unearths the details that led to the cofounders� departure, bringing to light dramatic moments unknown to the public until now.

At its heart, No Filter draws on unprecedented exclusive access—from the founders of Instagram, as well as employees, executives, and competitors; hedge fund billionaire Ray Dalio; Anna Wintour of Vogue; Kris Jenner of the Kardashian-Jenner empire; and a plethora of influencers, from fashionistas with millions of followers to owners of famous dogs worldwide—to show how Instagram has fundamentally changed the way we communicate, shop, eat, and travel. The book brings readers inside users� strategies to craft their personal image and fame, explaining how the company’s product decisions have affected the structure of our society. From teenagers to the pope, No Filter tells the captivating story of how Instagram not only created a new industry but also changed our lives.]]> 352 Sarah Frier 1982126809 Danny 0 currently-reading 4.10 2020
author: Sarah Frier
name: Danny
average rating: 4.10
book published: 2020
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]]> 52767659
We know the universe had a beginning. With the Big Bang, it went from a state of unimaginable density to an all-encompassing cosmic fireball to a simmering fluid of matter and energy, laying down the seeds for everything from dark matter to black holes to one rocky planet orbiting a star near the edge of a spiral galaxy that happened to develop life. But what happens at the end of the story? In billions of years, humanity could still exist in some unrecognizable form, venturing out to distant space, finding new homes and building new civilizations. But the death of the universe is final. What might such a cataclysm look like? And what does it mean for us?

Dr. Katie Mack has been contemplating these questions since she was eighteen, when her astronomy professor first informed her the universe could end at any moment, setting her on the path toward theoretical astrophysics. Now, with lively wit and humor, she unpacks them in The End of Everything, taking us on a mind-bending tour through each of the cosmos� possible finales: the Big Crunch; the Heat Death; Vacuum Decay; the Big Rip; and the Bounce. In the tradition of Neil DeGrasse’s bestseller Astrophysics for People in a Hurry, Mack guides us through major concepts in quantum mechanics, cosmology, string theory, and much more, in a wildly fun, surprisingly upbeat ride to the farthest reaches of everything we know.]]> 226 Katie Mack 198210354X Danny 0 to-read 4.24 2020
author: Katie Mack
name: Danny
average rating: 4.24
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]]> 52578297
When Nora Seed finds herself in the Midnight Library, she has a chance to make things right. Up until now, her life has been full of misery and regret. She feels she has let everyone down, including herself. But things are about to change.

The books in the Midnight Library enable Nora to live as if she had done things differently. With the help of an old friend, she can now undo every one of her regrets as she tries to work out her perfect life. But things aren't always what she imagined they'd be, and soon her choices place the library and herself in extreme danger.

Before time runs out, she must answer the ultimate question: what is the best way to live?]]> 288 Matt Haig 0525559477 Danny 0 to-read 3.96 2020
author: Matt Haig
name: Danny
average rating: 3.96
book published: 2020
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]]> 52686687 choose to stop doing. It feels like something we're wired to do, something we just can't escape. But is it?

Anne Bogel's answer is no. Not only can you overcome negative thought patterns that are repetitive, unhealthy, and unhelpful, you can replace them with positive thought patterns that will bring more peace, joy, and love into your life. In Don't Overthink It, you'll find actionable strategies that can make an immediate and lasting difference in how you deal with questions both small--Should I buy these flowers?--and large--What am I doing with my life? More than a book about making good decisions, Don't Overthink It offers you a framework for making choices you'll be comfortable with, using an appropriate amount of energy, freeing you to focus on all the other stuff that matters in life.]]> 224 Anne Bogel 1540901106 Danny 0 to-read 3.59 2020
author: Anne Bogel
name: Danny
average rating: 3.59
book published: 2020
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]]> 48890486
There is nothing more essential to our health and well-being than breathing: take air in, let it out, repeat twenty-five thousand times a day. Yet, as a species, humans have lost the ability to breathe correctly, with grave consequences.

Journalist James Nestor travels the world to figure out what went wrong and how to fix it. The answers aren't found in pulmonology labs, as we might expect, but in the muddy digs of ancient burial sites, secret Soviet facilities, New Jersey choir schools, and the smoggy streets of Sao Paulo. Nestor tracks down men and women exploring the hidden science behind ancient breathing practices like Pranayama, Sudarshan Kriya, and Tummo and teams up with pulmonary tinkerers to scientifically test long-held beliefs about how we breathe.

Modern research is showing us that making even slight adjustments to the way we inhale and exhale can jump-start athletic performance; rejuvenate internal organs; halt snoring, asthma, and autoimmune disease; and even straighten scoliotic spines. None of this should be possible, and yet it is.

Drawing on thousands of years of medical texts and recent cutting-edge studies in pulmonology, psychology, biochemistry, and human physiology, Breath turns the conventional wisdom of what we thought we knew about our most basic biological function on its head. You will never breathe the same again.]]> 280 James Nestor 0735213615 Danny 0 currently-reading 4.13 2020
author: James Nestor
name: Danny
average rating: 4.13
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]]> 43685238 From the world-renowned physicist and bestselling author of The Elegant Universe and The Fabric of the Cosmos, a captivating exploration of deep time and humanity's search for purpose

In both time and space, the cosmos is astoundingly vast, and yet is governed by simple, elegant, universal mathematical laws.

On this cosmic timeline, our human era is spectacular but fleeting. Someday, we know, we will all die. And, we know, so too will the universe itself.

Until the End of Time is Brian Greene's breathtaking new exploration of the cosmos and our quest to understand it. Greene takes us on a journey across time, from our most refined understanding of the universe's beginning, to the closest science can take us to the very end. He explores how life and mind emerged from the initial chaos, and how our minds, in coming to understand their own impermanence, seek in different ways to give meaning to experience: in story, myth, religion, creative expression, science, the quest for truth, and our longing for the timeless, or eternal. Through a series of nested stories that explain distinct but interwoven layers of reality-from the quantum mechanics to consciousness to black holes-Greene provides us with a clearer sense of how we came to be, a finer picture of where we are now, and a firmer understanding of where we are headed.

Yet all this understanding, which arose with the emergence of life, will dissolve with its conclusion. Which leaves us with one realization: during our brief moment in the sun, we are tasked with the charge of finding our own meaning.

Let us embark.]]> 384 Brian Greene Danny 0 to-read 4.01 2020
author: Brian Greene
name: Danny
average rating: 4.01
book published: 2020
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]]> 51542211
I saw my first Blakiston’s fish owl in the Russian province of Primorye, a coastal talon of land hooking south into the belly of Northeast Asia . . . No scientist had seen a Blakiston’s fish owl so far south in a hundred years . . .

When he was just a fledgling birdwatcher, Jonathan C. Slaght had a chance encounter with one of the most mysterious birds on Earth. Bigger than any owl he knew, it looked like a small bear with decorative feathers. He snapped a quick photo and shared it with experts. Soon he was on a five-year journey, searching for this enormous, enigmatic creature in the lush, remote forests of eastern Russia. That first sighting set his calling as a scientist.

Despite a wingspan of six feet and a height of over two feet, the Blakiston’s fish owl is highly elusive. They are easiest to find in winter, when their tracks mark the snowy banks of the rivers where they feed. They are also endangered. And so, as Slaght and his devoted team set out to locate the owls, they aim to craft a conservation plan that helps ensure the species� survival. This quest sends them on all-night monitoring missions in freezing tents, mad dashes across thawing rivers, and free-climbs up rotting trees to check nests for precious eggs. They use cutting-edge tracking technology and improvise ingenious traps. And all along, they must keep watch against a run-in with a bear or an Amur tiger. At the heart of Slaght’s story are the fish owls themselves: cunning hunters, devoted parents, singers of eerie duets, and survivors in a harsh and shrinking habitat.

Through this rare glimpse into the everyday life of a field scientist and conservationist, Owls of the Eastern Ice testifies to the determination and creativity essential to scientific advancement and serves as a powerful reminder of the beauty, strength, and vulnerability of the natural world.]]> 368 Jonathan C. Slaght 0374228485 Danny 0 to-read 4.18 2020
author: Jonathan C. Slaght
name: Danny
average rating: 4.18
book published: 2020
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]]> 45450120 240 Alison Morris 0714874841 Danny 5 design 4.67
author: Alison Morris
name: Danny
average rating: 4.67
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rating: 5
read at: 2020/11/02
date added: 2020/11/02
shelves: design
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