en-US Mon, 24 Mar 2025 15:43:27 -0700 60 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg 360470 137 Franz Kafka 3596200199 Χρήστος Αρμάντο 3 3.87 1912
author: Franz Kafka
name: Χρήστος Αρμάντο
average rating: 3.87
book published: 1912
rating: 3
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]]> 139557430 296 James Wood 6185267705 Χρήστος Αρμάντο 5 Ερωτήματα που επιφανειακά μπορεί κανείς να πει ότι απασχολούν μια μικρή μερίδα
ανθρώπων, κάτι που όμως πολύ απέχει από την αλήθεια. Γιατί η λογοτεχνία, ως
θαύμα κι ως μυστήριο κι αυτή, διαθέτει πολλά γρανάζια που κινούν και την ίδια τη
ζωή. Ακόμη παραπέρα: στις αρχές ενός αιώνα όπου η λογοτεχνία αρχίζει να
γράφεται και από Τεχνητή Νοημοσύνη, η έντεχνη και παθιασμένη εμβάθυνση στους
λόγους για τους οποίους απολαμβάνουμε την πρόσκαιρη οικειοθελή απομόνωση της
ανάγνωσης κρίνεται έως και επαναστατική.]]> 4.36 2008
author: James Wood
name: Χρήστος Αρμάντο
average rating: 4.36
book published: 2008
rating: 5
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Πώς διαβάζουμε λογοτεχνία, πώς την αισθανόμαστε, πώς την ερμηνεύουμε.
Ερωτήματα που επιφανειακά μπορεί κανείς να πει ότι απασχολούν μια μικρή μερίδα
ανθρώπων, κάτι που όμως πολύ απέχει από την αλήθεια. Γιατί η λογοτεχνία, ως
θαύμα κι ως μυστήριο κι αυτή, διαθέτει πολλά γρανάζια που κινούν και την ίδια τη
ζωή. Ακόμη παραπέρα: στις αρχές ενός αιώνα όπου η λογοτεχνία αρχίζει να
γράφεται και από Τεχνητή Νοημοσύνη, η έντεχνη και παθιασμένη εμβάθυνση στους
λόγους για τους οποίους απολαμβάνουμε την πρόσκαιρη οικειοθελή απομόνωση της
ανάγνωσης κρίνεται έως και επαναστατική.
]]> 58985601 The world's leading economist of inequality presents a short but sweeping and surprisingly optimistic history of human progress toward equality despite crises, disasters, and backsliding. A perfect introduction to the ideas developed in his monumental earlier books.

It's easy to be pessimistic about inequality. We know it has increased dramatically in many parts of the world over the past two generations. No one has done more to reveal the problem than Thomas Piketty. Now, in this surprising and powerful new work, Piketty reminds us that the grand sweep of history gives us reasons to be optimistic. Over the centuries, he shows, we have been moving toward greater equality.

Piketty guides us with elegance and concision through the great movements that have made the modern world for better and worse: the growth of capitalism, revolutions, imperialism, slavery, wars, and the building of the welfare state. It's a history of violence and social struggle, punctuated by regression and disaster. But through it all, Piketty shows, human societies have moved fitfully toward a more just distribution of income and assets, a reduction of racial and gender inequalities, and greater access to health care, education, and the rights of citizenship. Our rough march forward is political and ideological, an endless fight against injustice. To keep moving, Piketty argues, we need to learn and commit to what works, to institutional, legal, social, fiscal, and educational systems that can make equality a lasting reality. At the same time, we need to resist historical amnesia and the temptations of cultural separatism and intellectual compartmentalization. At stake is the quality of life for billions of people. We know we can do better, Piketty concludes. The past shows us how. The future is up to us.]]> 288 Thomas Piketty 0674273559 Χρήστος Αρμάντο 0 to-read 3.95 2021
author: Thomas Piketty
name: Χρήστος Αρμάντο
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2021
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date added: 2024/11/11
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]]> 218674002 Περιστατικό στη γέφυρα του Άουλ Κρικ είναι ένα από τα πιο διάσημα διηγήματα της αμερικανικής λογοτεχνίας. Παρακολουθεί τις τελευταίες στιγμές ενός πλούσιου γαιοκτήμονα και δουλοκτήτη, υποστηρικτή της Συνομοσπονδίας, που πρόκειται να εκτελεστεί με απαγχονισμό σε μια σιδηροδρομική γέφυρα της Αλαμπάμα από τους στρατιώτες της Ένωσης κατά τη διάρκεια του Αμερικανικού εμφυλίου. Σκέψεις απόδρασης, αναδρομή στο παρελθόν και στα γεγονότα που οδήγησαν στη σύλληψή του, μια τελική φαντασίωση σωτηρίας και επανόδου στην οικογενειακή εστία συνιστούν αυτό το ιδιοφυώς δομημένο αφήγημα, διάσημο για την ακανόνιστη χρονική αλληλουχία της πλοκής και το ανατρεπτικό τέλος του. Μια αντιπολεμική ιστορία που αναδεικνύει αριστοτεχνικά την υποκειμενικότητα της ροής του χρόνου και την παρείσφρηση του ασυνείδητου στην πραγματική ζωή και εγκαθιστά τον συγγραφέα σε περίοπτη θέση ανάμεσα στους πρωτοπόρους του μοντερνισμού.

«Πιστεύω ότι είναι ανόητος όποιος δεν έχει διαβάσει το σπουδαιότερο αμερικανικό διήγημα Περιστατικό στη γέφυρα του Άουλ Κρικ του Ambrose Bierce».
Kurt Vonnegut]]> 48 Ambrose Bierce 6185617404 Χρήστος Αρμάντο 0 currently-reading 5.00 1890
author: Ambrose Bierce
name: Χρήστος Αρμάντο
average rating: 5.00
book published: 1890
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/09/10
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]]> 58599798
Με ειρωνεία ή με χιούμορ, με τρυφερότητα ή σαρκασμό, κινούμενη από το ρεαλιστικό ως το φανταστικό, αλλά και στο παραμυθένιο, η κομψή πρόζα του Ριγκόνι υπογραμμίζει διαρκώς πως τίποτα δεν είναι έτσι καθώς φαίνεται, όπως εύγλωττα υπαινίσσεται και ο τίτλος της παρούσας ανθολογίας διηγημάτων, Η σκοτεινή όψη των πραγμάτων.

Εν πλω
Στα γόνατά μου
Γράμμα σε μια ευγενική δεσποινίδα
Το αλλού
Όνειρα δόξας
Ο άντρας στο αναπηρικό καροτσάκι
Στην άλλη μεριά
��ήθη
Κόλαση
Όπως τα δέντρα - Μια ιστορία του 1943
Ακόμα μια μέρα
Γωνιακό τραπεζάκι
Το εξομολογητήριο
Tristesse
Ο άντρας του παρελθόντος
Στη χλόη
Μια οποιαδήποτε μέρα
Ένα παραμύθι: Η πληγή του Κάλεμπ
ΜΑΤΕΟ ΜΑΡΚΕΖΙΝΙ: Υποδειγματικές ιστορίες]]> 147 Mario Andrea Rigoni 6188474442 Χρήστος Αρμάντο 3 3.77
author: Mario Andrea Rigoni
name: Χρήστος Αρμάντο
average rating: 3.77
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rating: 3
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]]> 139400713 Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr! is a paean to how we spend our lives seeking meaning—in faith, art, ourselves, others—in which a newly sober, orphaned son of Iranian immigrants, guided by the voices of artists, poets, and kings, embarks on a search that leads him to a terminally ill painter living out her final days in the Brooklyn Museum.

Cyrus Shams is a young man grappling with an inheritance of violence and loss: his mother’s plane was shot down over the skies of Tehran in a senseless accident; and his father’s life in America was circumscribed by his work killing chickens at a factory farm in the Midwest. Cyrus is a drunk, an addict, and a poet, whose obsession with martyrs leads him to examine the mysteries of his past—toward an uncle who rode through Iranian battlefields dressed as the Angel of death to inspire and comfort the dying, and toward his mother, through a painting discovered in a Brooklyn art gallery that suggests she may not have been who or what she seemed.

Electrifying, funny, wholly original, and profound, Martyr! heralds the arrival of a blazing and essential new voice in contemporary fiction.]]> 331 Kaveh Akbar 0593537610 Χρήστος Αρμάντο 0 currently-reading 4.22 2024
author: Kaveh Akbar
name: Χρήστος Αρμάντο
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2024
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]]> 24074539 81 Franz Kafka 9609530915 Χρήστος Αρμάντο 0 3.87 1913
author: Franz Kafka
name: Χρήστος Αρμάντο
average rating: 3.87
book published: 1913
rating: 0
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]]> 163716
A true classic of wonder for all ages.]]> 144 Oscar Wilde 1934169579 Χρήστος Αρμάντο 5 4.35 1888
author: Oscar Wilde
name: Χρήστος Αρμάντο
average rating: 4.35
book published: 1888
rating: 5
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date added: 2024/08/07
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]]> 64666
Through these extraordinary people, Sacks explores what it is to feel, to sense, to remember - to be, ultimately, a coherent self in the world.]]> 318 Oliver Sacks 0330343475 Χρήστος Αρμάντο 0 to-read 4.16 1995
author: Oliver Sacks
name: Χρήστος Αρμάντο
average rating: 4.16
book published: 1995
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date added: 2024/08/03
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]]> 1830603 184 John Fante 2264013257 Χρήστος Αρμάντο 3 3.61
author: John Fante
name: Χρήστος Αρμάντο
average rating: 3.61
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rating: 3
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]]> 67196 239 Mario Benedetti 9684293380 Χρήστος Αρμάντο 0 to-read 4.18 1982
author: Mario Benedetti
name: Χρήστος Αρμάντο
average rating: 4.18
book published: 1982
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]]> 125876 Memory, History, Forgetting examines this reciprocal relationship between remembering and forgetting, showing how it affects both the perception of historical experience and the production of historical narrative.

Memory, History, Forgetting, like its title, is divided into three major sections. Ricoeur first takes a phenomenological approach to memory and mnemonical devices. The underlying question here is how a memory of present can be of something absent, the past. The second section addresses recent work by historians by reopening the question of the nature and truth of historical knowledge. Ricoeur explores whether historians, who can write a history of memory, can truly break with all dependence on memory, including memories that resist representation. The third and final section is a profound meditation on the necessity of forgetting as a condition for the possibility of remembering, and whether there can be something like happy forgetting in parallel to happy memory. Throughout the book there are careful and close readings of the texts of Aristotle and Plato, of Descartes and Kant, and of Halbwachs and Pierre Nora.

A momentous achievement in the career of one of the most significant philosophers of our age, Memory, History, Forgetting provides the crucial link between Ricoeur's Time and Narrative and Oneself as Another and his recent reflections on ethics and the problems of responsibility and representation.

“His success in revealing the internal relations between recalling and forgetting, and how this dynamic becomes problematic in light of events once present but now past, will inspire academic dialogue and response but also holds great appeal to educated general readers in search of both method for and insight from considering the ethical ramifications of modern events. . . . It is indeed a master work, not only in Ricoeur’s own vita but also in contemporary European philosophy.”��Library Journal��

“Ricoeur writes the best kind of philosophy—critical, economical, and clear.”�� New York Times Book Review

]]> 624 Paul Ricœur 0226713423 Χρήστος Αρμάντο 0 to-read 4.08 2000
author: Paul Ricœur
name: Χρήστος Αρμάντο
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2000
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]]> 58999261
In Time Shelter, an enigmatic flâneur named Gaustine opens a “clinic for the past�� that offers a promising treatment for Alzheimer’s sufferers: each floor reproduces a decade in minute detail, transporting patients back in time. As Gaustine’s assistant, the unnamed narrator is tasked with collecting the flotsam and jetsam of the past, from 1960s furniture and 1940s shirt buttons to scents and even afternoon light. But as the rooms become more convincing, an increasing number of healthy people seek out the clinic as a “time shelter”—a development that results in an unexpected conundrum when the past begins to invade the present. Intricately crafted, and eloquently translated by Angela Rodel, Time Shelter announces Gospodinov to American readers as an essential voice in international literature.]]> 304 Georgi Gospodinov 1324090952 Χρήστος Αρμάντο 0 3.59 2020
author: Georgi Gospodinov
name: Χρήστος Αρμάντο
average rating: 3.59
book published: 2020
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Βολικά αποσπασματική δομή που επιτρέπει στον συγγραφέα να παραθέτει κεφάλαια με στομφώδη φιλοσοφίζουσα διάθεση, άνευρη γραφή και μεγαλόστομες κοινοτοπίες.
]]> 88442 Austerlitz, the internationally acclaimed masterpiece by “one of the most gripping writers imaginable�� (The New York Review of Books), is the story of a man’s search for the answer to his life’s central riddle. A small child when he comes to England on a Kindertransport in the summer of 1939, one Jacques Austerlitz is told nothing of his real family by the Welsh Methodist minister and his wife who raise him. When he is a much older man, the fleeting memories return to him, and obeying an instinct he only dimly understands, he follows their trail back to the world he left behind a half century before. There, faced with the void at the heart of twentieth-century Europe, he struggles to rescue his heritage from oblivion.]]> 415 W.G. Sebald 0140297995 Χρήστος Αρμάντο 4 3.97 2001
author: W.G. Sebald
name: Χρήστος Αρμάντο
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2001
rating: 4
read at: 2013/10/22
date added: 2024/06/30
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]]> 25489025
Celebrated by critics around the world, The Vegetarian is a darkly allegorical, Kafka-esque tale of power, obsession, and one woman’s struggle to break free from the violence both without and within her.]]> 188 Han Kang 0553448188 Χρήστος Αρμάντο 3 3.61 2007
author: Han Kang
name: Χρήστος Αρμάντο
average rating: 3.61
book published: 2007
rating: 3
read at: 2024/06/30
date added: 2024/06/30
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]]> 30408033 The award-winning and internationally acclaimed author of the To the End of the Land now gives us a searing short novel about the life of a stand-up comic, as revealed in the course of one evening's performance. In the dance between comic and audience, with barbs flying back and forth, a deeper story begins to take shape--one that will alter the lives of many of those in attendance.

In a little dive in a small Israeli city, Dov Greenstein, a comedian a bit past his prime, is doing a night of stand-up. In the audience is a district court justice, Avishai Lazar, whom Dov knew as a boy, along with a few others who remember Dov as an awkward, scrawny kid who walked on his hands to confound the neighborhood bullies.

Gradually, as it teeters between hilarity and hysteria, Dov's patter becomes a kind of memoir, taking us back into the terrors of his childhood: we meet his beautiful flower of a mother, a Holocaust survivor in need of constant monitoring, and his punishing father, a striver who had little understanding of his creative son. Finally, recalling his week at a military camp for youth--where Lazar witnessed what would become the central event of Dov's childhood--Dov describes the indescribable while Lazar wrestles with his own part in the comedian's story of loss and survival.

Continuing his investigations into how people confront life's capricious battering, and how art may blossom from it, Grossman delivers a stunning performance in this memorable one-night engagement (jokes in questionable taste included).]]> 208 David Grossman 0451493974 Χρήστος Αρμάντο 0 to-read 3.47 2014
author: David Grossman
name: Χρήστος Αρμάντο
average rating: 3.47
book published: 2014
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]]> 600349

Contents
xi �� Foreword: Year 2002 (Dangerous Visions 35th Anniversary Edition) �� (2002) �� essay by Michael Moorcock
xiii �� Introduction: Year 2002 (Dangerous Visions 35th Anniversary Edition �� (2002) �� essay by Harlan Ellison
xxiii �� Foreword 1-The Second Revolution �� (1967) �� essay by Isaac Asimov
xxxiii �� Introduction: Thirty-Two Soothsayers �� (1967) �� essay by Harlan Ellison (variant of Thirty-Two Soothsayers)
xxxix �� Foreword 2-Harlan and I �� (1967) �� essay by Isaac Asimov
1 �� Evensong �� (1967) �� shortstory by Lester del Rey
9 �� Flies �� (1967) �� shortstory by Robert Silverberg
21 �� The Day After the Day the Martians Came �� (1967) �� shortstory by Frederik Pohl (variant of The Day the Martians Came)
30 �� Riders of the Purple Wage �� (1967) �� novella by Philip José Farmer
105 �� The Malley System �� (1967) �� shortstory by Miriam Allen deFord
115 �� A Toy for Juliette �� (1967) �� shortstory by Robert Bloch
128 �� The Prowler in the City at the Edge of the World �� (1967) �� novelette by Harlan Ellison
154 �� The Night That All Time Broke Out �� (1967) �� shortstory by Brian W. Aldiss
169 �� The Man Who Went to the Moon - Twice �� (1967) �� shortstory by Howard Rodman
181 �� Faith of Our Fathers �� (1967) �� novelette by Philip K. Dick
216 �� The Jigsaw Man �� [Known Space] �� (1967) �� shortstory by Larry Niven
231 �� Gonna Roll the Bones �� (1967) �� novelette by Fritz Leiber
256 �� Lord Randy, My Son �� (1967) �� shortstory by Joe L. Hensley
272 �� Eutopia �� (1967) �� novelette by Poul Anderson
295 �� Incident in Moderan �� [Moderan] �� (1967) �� shortstory by David R. Bunch
299 �� The Escaping �� (1967) �� shortstory by David R. Bunch
305 �� The Doll-House �� (1967) �� shortstory by James Cross
326 �� Sex and/or Mr. Morrison �� (1967) �� shortstory by Carol Emshwiller
338 �� Shall the Dust Praise Thee? �� (1967) �� shortstory by Damon Knight
344 �� If All Men Were Brothers, Would You Let One Marry Your Sister? �� (1967) �� novella by Theodore Sturgeon
390 �� What Happened to Auguste Clarot? �� (1967) �� shortstory by Larry Eisenberg
396 �� Ersatz �� (1967) �� shortstory by Henry Slesar
404 �� Go, Go, Go, Said the Bird �� (1967) �� shortstory by Sonya Dorman
412 �� The Happy Breed �� (1967) �� shortstory by John Sladek [as by John T. Sladek ]
433 �� Encounter with a Hick �� (1967) �� shortstory by Jonathan Brand
439 �� From the Government Printing Office �� (1967) �� shortstory by Kris Neville
447 �� Land of the Great Horses �� (1967) �� shortstory by R. A. Lafferty
458 �� The Recognition �� (1967) �� shortstory by J. G. Ballard
472 �� Judas �� (1967) �� shortstory by John Brunner
483 �� Test to Destruction �� (1967) �� novelette by Keith Laumer
510 �� Carcinoma Angels �� (1967) �� shortstory by Norman Spinrad
523 �� Auto-da-Fé �� (1967) �� shortstory by Roger Zelazny
532 �� Aye, and Gomorrah . . . �� (1967) �� shortstory by Samuel R. Delany

]]> 592 Harlan Ellison 0743452615 Χρήστος Αρμάντο 0 to-read 4.18 1967
author: Harlan Ellison
name: Χρήστος Αρμάντο
average rating: 4.18
book published: 1967
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/06/22
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]]> 16073298 232 Terry Eagleton 0300190964 Χρήστος Αρμάντο 0 to-read 3.70 2013
author: Terry Eagleton
name: Χρήστος Αρμάντο
average rating: 3.70
book published: 2013
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/06/14
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]]> 210060625
Μέσα από αναφορές σε πολιτικά γεγονότα και με στοιχεία επιστημονικής φαντασίας, ο Ρίτσαρντ Πάουερς (γενν. Ιλινόις 1957, βραβείο Pulitzer και Εθνικό Βραβείο Λογοτεχνίας ΗΠΑ) υφαίνει μια ιστορία «τεκμηριωμένη επιστημονικά, αλλά και βαθιά συγκινητική» (The Guardian), που «κατακτά το μυαλό και την καρδιά του αναγνώστη» (The Economist).]]> 455 Richard Powers 9600124965 Χρήστος Αρμάντο 0 to-read 4.18 2021
author: Richard Powers
name: Χρήστος Αρμάντο
average rating: 4.18
book published: 2021
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/06/02
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]]> 16093522 What happens in a recession? How does money work? Why do we pay taxes? Economics affects every aspect of our lives, from how we get to work to where we spend our money-and big economic ideas continue to shape the world.

Written in plain English, The Economics Book is packed with short, pity explanations that cut through the jargon, step-by-step diagrams that untangle knotty theories, classic quotes that make economics memorable, and witty illustrations that enhance and play with our understanding of economics.

Whether you're a beginner, and avid student, or an armchair expert, you'll find plenty to stimulate you within this book.

--book jacket]]> 352 Niall Kishtainy 0756698278 Χρήστος Αρμάντο 0 to-read 4.04 2012
author: Niall Kishtainy
name: Χρήστος Αρμάντο
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2012
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/06/02
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]]> 32622193 256 Niall Kishtainy 0300206364 Χρήστος Αρμάντο 5 4.07
author: Niall Kishtainy
name: Χρήστος Αρμάντο
average rating: 4.07
book published:
rating: 5
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date added: 2024/06/02
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]]> 285423
In this ground breaking book, Peter Heather proproses a stunning new solution to one of the greatest mysteries of history. Mixing authoratative analysis with thrilling narrative, he brings fresh insight into the panorama of the empire's end, from the bejewelled splendour of the imperial court to the dripping forests of "Barbaricum". He examines the extraordinary success story that was the Roman Empire and uses a new understanding of its continued strength and enduring limitations to show how Europe's barbarians, transformed by centuries of contact with Rome, eventually pulled it apart.]]> 572 Peter Heather 0195325419 Χρήστος Αρμάντο 0 to-read 4.16 2005
author: Peter Heather
name: Χρήστος Αρμάντο
average rating: 4.16
book published: 2005
rating: 0
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]]> 33917 Interpreter of Maladies established this young writer as one the most brilliant of her generation. Her stories are one of the very few debut works -- and only a handful of collections -- to have won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Among the many other awards and honors it received were the New Yorker Debut of the Year award, the PEN/Hemingway Award, and the highest critical praise for its grace, acuity, and compassion in detailing lives transported from India to America.

In The Namesake, Lahiri enriches the themes that made her collection an international bestseller: the immigrant experience, the clash of cultures, the conflicts of assimilation, and, most poignantly, the tangled ties between generations. Here again Lahiri displays her deft touch for the perfect detail �� the fleeting moment, the turn of phrase �� that opens whole worlds of emotion.

The Namesake takes the Ganguli family from their tradition-bound life in Calcutta through their fraught transformation into Americans. On the heels of their arranged wedding, Ashoke and Ashima Ganguli settle together in Cambridge, Massachusetts. An engineer by training, Ashoke adapts far less warily than his wife, who resists all things American and pines for her family. When their son is born, the task of naming him betrays the vexed results of bringing old ways to the new world. Named for a Russian writer by his Indian parents in memory of a catastrophe years before, Gogol Ganguli knows only that he suffers the burden of his heritage as well as his odd, antic name.

Lahiri brings great empathy to Gogol as he stumbles along the first-generation path, strewn with conflicting loyalties, comic detours, and wrenching love affairs. With penetrating insight, she reveals not only the defining power of the names and expectations bestowed upon us by our parents, but also the means by which we slowly, sometimes painfully, come to define ourselves.]]> 304 Jhumpa Lahiri 0618485228 Χρήστος Αρμάντο 0 to-read 4.01 2003
author: Jhumpa Lahiri
name: Χρήστος Αρμάντο
average rating: 4.01
book published: 2003
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/05/25
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]]> 596986
Italo Calvino, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Alberto Moravia all considered That Awful Mess on the Via Merulana to be the great modern Italian novel. Unquestionably, it is a work of universal significance and protean genius: a rich social novel, a comic opera, an act of political resistance, a blazing feat of baroque wordplay, and a haunting story of life and death in the Eternal City.]]> 388 Carlo Emilio Gadda 1590172221 Χρήστος Αρμάντο 0 to-read 3.62 1957
author: Carlo Emilio Gadda
name: Χρήστος Αρμάντο
average rating: 3.62
book published: 1957
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/05/25
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]]> 55120630
But could our sheltered, temperature-controlled, overfed, underchallenged lives actually be the leading cause of many our most urgent physical and mental health issues? In this gripping investigation, award-winning journalist Michael Easter seeks out off-the-grid visionaries, disruptive genius researchers, and mind-body conditioning trailblazers who are unlocking the life-enhancing secrets of a counterintuitive solution: discomfort.

Easter’s journey to understand our evolutionary need to be challenged takes him to meet the NBA’s top exercise scientist, who uses an ancient Japanese practice to build championship athletes; to the mystical country of Bhutan, where an Oxford economist and Buddhist leader are showing the world what death can teach us about happiness; to the outdoor lab of a young neuroscientist who’s found that nature tests our physical and mental endurance in ways that expand creativity while taming burnout and anxiety; to the remote Alaskan backcountry on a demanding thirty-three-day hunting expedition to experience the rewilding secrets of one of the last rugged places on Earth; and more.

Along the way, Easter uncovers a blueprint for leveraging the power of discomfort that will dramatically improve our health and happiness, and perhaps even help us understand what it means to be human. The Comfort Crisis is a bold call to break out of your comfort zone and explore the wild within yourself.]]> 304 Michael Easter 0593138767 Χρήστος Αρμάντο 0 to-read 4.21 2021
author: Michael Easter
name: Χρήστος Αρμάντο
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2021
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/05/09
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]]> 55697389 272 Pavel Kohout 9600366950 Χρήστος Αρμάντο 3 3.36 1970
author: Pavel Kohout
name: Χρήστος Αρμάντο
average rating: 3.36
book published: 1970
rating: 3
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date added: 2024/05/08
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]]> 13503109
In prose that is endlessly energetic, inventive, tender, and funny, the stories in This Is How You Lose Her lay bare the infinite longing and inevitable weakness of the human heart. They remind us that passion always triumphs over experience, and that “the half-life of love is forever.”]]> 217 Junot Díaz 1594487367 Χρήστος Αρμάντο 0 currently-reading 3.74 2010
author: Junot Díaz
name: Χρήστος Αρμάντο
average rating: 3.74
book published: 2010
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/05/07
shelves: currently-reading
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]]> 53993435
Written with his usual clarity and wit, these pieces range widely across time and space: from Newton's alchemy to Einstein's mistakes, from Nabokov's butterflies to Dante's cosmology, from travels in Africa to the consciousness of an octopus, from mind-altering psychedelic substances to the meaning of atheism.

Charming, pithy and elegant, this book is the perfect gateway to the universe of one of the most influential scientists of our age.]]> 224 Carlo Rovelli Χρήστος Αρμάντο 4 4.03 2018
author: Carlo Rovelli
name: Χρήστος Αρμάντο
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2018
rating: 4
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date added: 2024/04/28
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]]> 46917 Rabbit, Run, John Updike resumes the spiritual quest of his anxious Everyman, Harry “Rabbit�� Angstrom. Ten years have passed; the impulsive former athlete has become a paunchy thirty-six-year-old conservative, and Eisenhower’s becalmed America has become 1969’s lurid turmoil of technology, fantasy, drugs, and violence. Rabbit is abandoned by his family, his home invaded by a runaway and a radical, his past reduced to a ruined inner landscape; still he clings to semblances of decency and responsibility, and yearns to belong and to believe.]]> 440 John Updike 0449911934 Χρήστος Αρμάντο 2 3.81 1971
author: John Updike
name: Χρήστος Αρμάντο
average rating: 3.81
book published: 1971
rating: 2
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date added: 2024/04/27
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]]> 56696339
Delivered with Marshall’s trademark wit and insight, this is a lucid and gripping exploration of the power of geography to shape humanity’s past, present �� and future.

‘Another outstanding guide to the modern world. Marshall is a master at explaining what you need to know and why.�� Peter Frankopan]]> 360 Tim Marshall 1783965371 Χρήστος Αρμάντο 3 4.18 2021
author: Tim Marshall
name: Χρήστος Αρμάντο
average rating: 4.18
book published: 2021
rating: 3
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date added: 2024/04/25
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]]> 399136
Anderson explores the processes that created these communities: the territorialization of religious faiths, the decline of antique kingship, the interaction between capitalism and print, the development of vernacular languages-of-state, and changing conceptions of time. He shows how an originary nationalism born in the Americas was modularly adopted by popular movements in Europe, by the imperialist powers, and by the anti-imperialist resistances in Asia and Africa.

This revised edition includes two new chapters, one of which discusses the complex role of the colonialist state's mindset in the develpment of Third World nationalism, while the other analyses the processes by which, all over the world, nations came to imagine themselves as old.]]> 224 Benedict Anderson 0860915468 Χρήστος Αρμάντο 3 4.13 1983
author: Benedict Anderson
name: Χρήστος Αρμάντο
average rating: 4.13
book published: 1983
rating: 3
read at: 2024/04/11
date added: 2024/04/11
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]]> 646175 A provocative and enlightening look at spiritual unease and its contribution to the void in modern civilization

Considered by many to be one of the most important books in the field of psychology, Modern Man in Search of a Soul is a comprehensive introduction to the thought of Carl Gustav Jung. In this book, Jung examines some of the most contested and crucial areas in the field of analytical psychology, including dream analysis, the primitive unconscious, and the relationship between psychology and religion. Additionally, Jung looks at the differences between his theories and those of Sigmund Freud, providing a valuable basis for anyone interested in the fundamentals of psychoanalysis.
]]> 244 C.G. Jung 0156612062 Χρήστος Αρμάντο 5 4.20 1931
author: C.G. Jung
name: Χρήστος Αρμάντο
average rating: 4.20
book published: 1931
rating: 5
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date added: 2024/04/07
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]]> 9051
While the topics of historiography and historical methodology have become increasingly popular, Bloch remains an authority. He argues that history is a whole; no period and no topic can be understood except in relation to other periods and topics. And what is unique about Bloch is that he puts his theories into practice; for example, calling upon both his experience serving in WWI as well as his many years spent in peaceful study and reflection. He also argues that written records are not enough; a historian must draw upon maps, place-names, ancient tools, aerial surveys, folklore, and everything that is available.

This is a work that argues constantly for a wider, more human history. For a history that describes how and why people live and work together. There is a living, breathing connection between the past and the present and it is the historian’s responsibility to do it justice.]]> 197 Marc Bloch 0394705122 Χρήστος Αρμάντο 0 to-read 4.05 1949
author: Marc Bloch
name: Χρήστος Αρμάντο
average rating: 4.05
book published: 1949
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/04/03
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]]> 85391
Ten years after Rabbit Redux, Harry Angstrom has come to enjoy prosperity as the Chief Sales Representative of Springer Motors. The rest of the world may be falling to pieces, but Harry's doing all right. That is, until his son returns from the West, and the image of an old love pays a visit to his lot....]]> 480 John Updike 0140249435 Χρήστος Αρμάντο 0 to-read 3.92 1981
author: John Updike
name: Χρήστος Αρμάντο
average rating: 3.92
book published: 1981
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/04/02
shelves: to-read
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]]> 11976774 Human, Michael S. Gazzaniga has been called the “father of cognitive neuroscience.�� In his remarkable book, Who’s in Charge?, he makes a powerful and provocative argument that counters the common wisdom that our lives are wholly determined by physical processes we cannot control. His well-reasoned case against the idea that we live in a “determined�� world is fascinating and liberating, solidifying his place among the likes of Oliver Sacks, Antonio Damasio, V.S. Ramachandran, and other bestselling science authors exploring the mysteries of the human brain]]> 260 Michael S. Gazzaniga 0061906107 Χρήστος Αρμάντο 4 3.98 2011
author: Michael S. Gazzaniga
name: Χρήστος Αρμάντο
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2011
rating: 4
read at: 2024/04/01
date added: 2024/04/01
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]]> 366524 Call It Sleep, his first novel, in 1934, it was greeted with critical acclaim. But in that dark Depression year, books were hard to sell, and the novel quickly dropped out of sight, as did its twenty-eight-year-old author. Only with its paperback publication in 1964 did the novel receive the recognition it deserves. Call It Sleep was the first paperback ever to be reviewed on the front page of The New York Times Book Review, and it proceeded to sell millions of copies both in the United States and around the world.

Call It Sleep is the magnificent story of David Schearl, the “dangerously imaginative�� child coming of age in the slums of New York.]]> 462 Henry Roth 0374522928 Χρήστος Αρμάντο 0 to-read 3.82 1934
author: Henry Roth
name: Χρήστος Αρμάντο
average rating: 3.82
book published: 1934
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/03/20
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]]> 17125 The only English translation authorized by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

First published in the Soviet journal Novy Mir in 1962, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich stands as a classic of contemporary literature. The story of labor-camp inmate Ivan Denisovich Shukhov, it graphically describes his struggle to maintain his dignity in the face of communist oppression. An unforgettable portrait of the entire world of Stalin's forced work camps, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is one of the most extraordinary literary documents to have emerged from the Soviet Union and confirms Solzhenitsyn's stature as "a literary genius whose talent matches that of Dosotevsky, Turgenev, Tolstoy"--Harrison Salisbury

This unexpurgated 1991 translation by H. T. Willetts is the only authorized edition available, and fully captures the power and beauty of the original Russian.]]> 182 Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Χρήστος Αρμάντο 4 3.5 / 5 3.98 1962
author: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
name: Χρήστος Αρμάντο
average rating: 3.98
book published: 1962
rating: 4
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date added: 2024/03/15
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3.5 / 5
]]> 48328 355 Richard Yates Χρήστος Αρμάντο 0 to-read 3.92 1961
author: Richard Yates
name: Χρήστος Αρμάντο
average rating: 3.92
book published: 1961
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/03/12
shelves: to-read
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]]> 12158480 Brilliant and engagingly written, Why Nations Fail answers the question that has stumped the experts for centuries: Why are some nations rich and others poor, divided by wealth and poverty, health and sickness, food and famine?

Is it culture, the weather, geography? Perhaps ignorance of what the right policies are?

Simply, no. None of these factors is either definitive or destiny. Otherwise, how to explain why Botswana has become one of the fastest growing countries in the world, while other African nations, such as Zimbabwe, the Congo, and Sierra Leone, are mired in poverty and violence?

Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson conclusively show that it is man-made political and economic institutions that underlie economic success (or lack of it). Korea, to take just one of their fascinating examples, is a remarkably homogeneous nation, yet the people of North Korea are among the poorest on earth while their brothers and sisters in South Korea are among the richest. The south forged a society that created incentives, rewarded innovation, and allowed everyone to participate in economic opportunities. The economic success thus spurred was sustained because the government became accountable and responsive to citizens and the great mass of people. Sadly, the people of the north have endured decades of famine, political repression, and very different economic institutions—with no end in sight. The differences between the Koreas is due to the politics that created these completely different institutional trajectories.

Based on fifteen years of original research Acemoglu and Robinson marshall extraordinary historical evidence from the Roman Empire, the Mayan city-states, medieval Venice, the Soviet Union, Latin America, England, Europe, the United States, and Africa to build a new theory of political economy with great relevance for the big questions of today, including:

���� - China has built an authoritarian growth machine. Will it continue to grow at such high speed and��overwhelm the West?
���� - Are America’s best days behind it? Are we moving from a virtuous circle in which efforts by elites to aggrandize power are resisted to a vicious one that enriches and empowers a small minority?
���� - What is the most effective way to help move billions of people from the rut of poverty to prosperity? More
philanthropy from the wealthy nations of the West? Or learning the hard-won lessons of Acemoglu and Robinson’s breakthrough ideas on the interplay between inclusive political and economic institutions?

Why Nations Fail will change the way you look at—and understand—the world.]]> 529 Daron Acemoğlu 0307719219 Χρήστος Αρμάντο 3 4.06 2012
author: Daron Acemoğlu
name: Χρήστος Αρμάντο
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2012
rating: 3
read at: 2024/03/11
date added: 2024/03/11
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]]> 672376 Rashomon, tells the chilling story of the killing of a samurai through the testimony of witnesses, including the spirit of the murdered man. The fable-like "Yam Gruel" is an account of desire and humiliation, but one in which the reader's sympathy is thoroughly unsettled. And in "The Martyr," a beloved orphan raised by Jesuit priests is exiled when he refuses to admit that he made a local girl pregnant. He regains their love and respect only at the price of his life. All six tales in the collection show Akutagawa as a master storyteller and an exciting voice of modern Japanese literature.]]> 110 Ryūnosuke Akutagawa 0871401738 Χρήστος Αρμάντο 4 4.04 1915
author: Ryūnosuke Akutagawa
name: Χρήστος Αρμάντο
average rating: 4.04
book published: 1915
rating: 4
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date added: 2024/03/11
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]]> 722367 Falconer tells the story of a man named Farragut, his crime and punishment, and his struggle to remain a man in a universe bent on beating him backwards into childhood. Only John Cheever could deliver these grand themes with the irony, unforced eloquence, and exhilarating humor that make Falconer such a triumphant work of the moral imagination.]]> 211 John Cheever 0679737863 Χρήστος Αρμάντο 0 to-read 3.67 1977
author: John Cheever
name: Χρήστος Αρμάντο
average rating: 3.67
book published: 1977
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/03/09
shelves: to-read
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]]> 11494 487 Saul Bellow 0140189440 Χρήστος Αρμάντο 0 to-read 3.86 1975
author: Saul Bellow
name: Χρήστος Αρμάντο
average rating: 3.86
book published: 1975
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/03/06
shelves: to-read
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]]> 14029 The successful writer Oki has reached middle age and is filled with regrets. He returns to Kyoto to find Otoko, a young woman with whom he had a terrible affair many years before.

Otoko is now a painter, living with a younger woman as her lover. Otoko has continued to love Oki and has never forgotten him, but his return unsettles not only her but also her young lover.

This is a work of strange beauty, with a tender touch of nostalgia and a heartbreaking sensitivity to those things lost forever.]]> 206 Yasunari Kawabata 0679761055 Χρήστος Αρμάντο 5 3.88 1964
author: Yasunari Kawabata
name: Χρήστος Αρμάντο
average rating: 3.88
book published: 1964
rating: 5
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date added: 2024/03/03
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]]> 16032127 Yoko Ogawa.

An aspiring writer moves into a new apartment and discovers that her landlady has murdered her husband. Years later, the writer’s stepson reflects upon his stepmother and the strange stories she used to tell him. Meanwhile, a surgeon’s lover vows to kill him if he does not leave his wife. Before she can follow-through on her crime of passion, though, the surgeon will cross paths with another remarkable woman, a cabaret singer whose heart beats delicately outside of her body. But when the surgeon promises to repair her condition, he sparks the jealousy of another man who would like to preserve the heart in a custom tailored bag. Murderers and mourners, mothers and children, lovers and innocent bystanders—their fates converge in a darkly beautiful web that they are each powerless to escape.

Macabre, fiendishly clever, and with a touch of the supernatural, Yoko Ogawa’s Revenge creates a haunting tapestry of death—and the afterlife of the living.]]> 162 Yōko Ogawa Χρήστος Αρμάντο 2 3.91 1998
author: Yōko Ogawa
name: Χρήστος Αρμάντο
average rating: 3.91
book published: 1998
rating: 2
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date added: 2024/03/03
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]]> 92575
"Certain books—few—assert literary importance instantly, profoundly. This new novel by the internationally praised but not widely known Austrian writer is one of those—a book of mysterious dark beauty . . . . [It] is overwhelming; one wants to read it again, immediately, to re-experience its intricate innovations, not to let go of this masterful work."—John Rechy, Los Angeles Times

"Rudolph is not obstructed by some malfunctions in part of his being—his being itself is a knot. And as Bernhard's narrative proceeds, we begin to register the dimensions of his crisis, its self-consuming circularity . . . . Where rage of this intensity is directed outward, we often find the sociopath; where inward, the suicide. Where it breaks out laterally, onto the page, we sometimes find a most unsettling artistic vision."—Sven Birkerts, The New Republic]]> 156 Thomas Bernhard 0226043983 Χρήστος Αρμάντο 5 4.13 1982
author: Thomas Bernhard
name: Χρήστος Αρμάντο
average rating: 4.13
book published: 1982
rating: 5
read at: 2014/10/18
date added: 2024/02/13
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]]> 13589124
David Foster Wallace was the leading literary light of his era, a man who not only captivated readers with his prose but also mesmerized them with his brilliant mind. In this, the first biography of the writer, D. T. Max sets out to chart Wallace’s tormented, anguished and often triumphant battle to succeed as a novelist as he fights off depression and addiction to emerge with his masterpiece, Infinite Jest.

Since his untimely death by suicide at the age of forty-six in 2008, Wallace has become more than the quintessential writer for his time—he has become a symbol of sincerity and honesty in an inauthentic age.�� In the end, as Max shows us, what is most interesting about Wallace is not just what he wrote but how he taught us all to live. Written with the cooperation of Wallace’s family and friends and with access to hundreds of his unpublished letters, manuscripts, and audio tapes, this portrait of an extraordinarily gifted writer is as fresh as news, as intimate as a love note, as painful as a goodbye.]]> 356 D.T. Max 0670025925 Χρήστος Αρμάντο 0 to-read 3.73 2012
author: D.T. Max
name: Χρήστος Αρμάντο
average rating: 3.73
book published: 2012
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/02/09
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]]> 173961
Freedom, Sen argues, is both the end and most efficient means of sustaining economic life and the key to securing the general welfare of the world's entire population. Releasing the idea of individual freedom from association with any particular historical, intellectual, political, or religious tradition, Sen clearly demonstrates its current applicability and possibilities. In the new global economy, where, despite unprecedented increases in overall opulence, the contemporary world denies elementary freedoms to vast numbers—perhaps even the majority of people—he concludes, it is still possible to practically and optimistically regain a sense of social accountability. Development as Freedom is essential reading.]]> 366 Amartya Sen 0385720270 Χρήστος Αρμάντο 0 to-read 4.11 1999
author: Amartya Sen
name: Χρήστος Αρμάντο
average rating: 4.11
book published: 1999
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/01/28
shelves: to-read
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]]> 7766914 ��
Antonio Damasio has spent the past thirty years studying and writing about how the brain operates, and his work has garnered acclaim for its singular melding of the scientific and the humanistic. In Self Comes to Mind, he goes against the long-standing idea that consciousness is somehow separate from the body, presenting compelling new scientific evidence that consciousness—what we think of as a mind with a self—is to begin with a biological process created by a living organism. Besides the three traditional perspectives used to study the mind (the introspective, the behavioral, and the neurological), Damasio introduces an evolutionary perspective that entails a radical change in the way the history of conscious minds is viewed and told. He also advances a radical hypothesis regarding the origins and varieties of feelings, which is central to his framework for the biological construction of consciousness: feelings are grounded in a near fusion of body and brain networks, and first emerge from the historically old and humble brain stem rather than from the modern cerebral cortex.
��
Damasio suggests that the brain’s development of a human self becomes a challenge to nature’s indifference and opens the way for the appearance of culture, a radical break in the course of evolution and the source of a new level of life regulation—sociocultural homeostasis. He leaves no doubt that the blueprint for the work-in-progress he calls sociocultural homeostasis is the genetically well-established basic homeostasis, the curator of value that has been present in simple life-forms for billions of years. Self Comes to Mind is a groundbreaking journey into the neurobiological foundations of mind and self.]]> 384 António Damásio 0307378756 Χρήστος Αρμάντο 3 3.95 2010
author: António Damásio
name: Χρήστος Αρμάντο
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2010
rating: 3
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date added: 2024/01/11
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]]> 30833 The Death and Life of Great American Cities has, since its first publication in 1961, become the standard against which all endeavors in that field are measured. In prose of outstanding immediacy, Jane Jacobs writes about what makes streets safe or unsafe; about what constitutes a neighborhood, and what function it serves within the larger organism of the city; about why some neighborhoods remain impoverished while others regenerate themselves. She writes about the salutary role of funeral parlors and tenement windows, the dangers of too much development money and too little diversity. Compassionate, bracingly indignant, and always keenly detailed, Jane Jacobs's monumental work provides an essential framework for assessing the vitality of all cities.]]> 472 Jane Jacobs 0375508732 Χρήστος Αρμάντο 0 to-read 4.30 1961
author: Jane Jacobs
name: Χρήστος Αρμάντο
average rating: 4.30
book published: 1961
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/01/10
shelves: to-read
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]]> 6713015
In a crumbling seaside hotel on the coast of Japan, quiet seventeen-year-old Mari works the front desk as her mother tends to the off-season customers. When one night they are forced to expel a middle-aged man and a prostitute from their room, Mari finds herself drawn to the man's voice, in what will become the first gesture of a single long seduction. In spite of her provincial surroundings, and her cool but controlling mother, Mari is a sophisticated observer of human desire, and she sees in this man something she has long been looking for.

The man is a proud if threadbare translator living on an island off the coast. A widower, there are whispers around town that he may have murdered his wife. Mari begins to visit him on his island, and he soon initiates her into a dark realm of both pain and pleasure, a place in which she finds herself more at ease even than the translator. As Mari's mother begins to close in on the affair, Mari's sense of what is suitable and what is desirable are recklessly engaged.

Hotel Iris is a stirring novel about the sometimes violent ways in which we express intimacy and about the untranslatable essence of love.]]> 164 Yōko Ogawa 0312425244 Χρήστος Αρμάντο 4 3.32 1996
author: Yōko Ogawa
name: Χρήστος Αρμάντο
average rating: 3.32
book published: 1996
rating: 4
read at: 2023/12/29
date added: 2023/12/29
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]]> 662564
Readers opening the pages of Nostalgia should brace themselves for a verbal tidal wave of the imagination that will wash away previous ideas of what a novel is or ought to be. Although each of its five chapters is separate and stands alone, a thematic, even mesmeric harmony finds itself in children's games, the music of the spheres, humankind's primordial myth-making, the origins of the universe, and in the dilapidated tenement blocks of an apocalyptic Bucharest during the years of communist dictatorship.]]> 361 Mircea Cărtărescu 0811215881 Χρήστος Αρμάντο 0 4.25 1989
author: Mircea Cărtărescu
name: Χρήστος Αρμάντο
average rating: 4.25
book published: 1989
rating: 0
read at: 2023/12/27
date added: 2023/12/27
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]]> 58470825 This thoughtfully curated, deftly translated selection of Farrokhzad’s poems includes work from her whole writing life, early to late. Readers will thoroughly treasure this expansive poet of the quotidian; of longing, loss, and desire; of classical reinvention; of lexical variation and sonic beauty; of terrifying wisdom, hope, and grief.]]> 128 Forugh Farrokhzad 0811231658 Χρήστος Αρμάντο 0 to-read 4.25 1963
author: Forugh Farrokhzad
name: Χρήστος Αρμάντο
average rating: 4.25
book published: 1963
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/12/18
shelves: to-read
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]]> 11761
Underworld opens with a breathlessly graceful prologue set during the final game of the Giants-Dodgers pennant race in 1951. Written in what DeLillo calls "super-omniscience" the sentences sweep from young Cotter Martin as he jumps the gate to the press box, soars over the radio waves, runs out to the diamond, slides in on a fast ball, pops into the stands where J. Edgar Hoover is sitting with a drunken Jackie Gleason and a splenetic Frank Sinatra, and learns of the Soviet Union's second detonation of a nuclear bomb. It's an absolutely thrilling literary moment. When Bobby Thomson hits Branca's pitch into the outstretched hand of Cotter—the "shot heard around the world"—and Jackie Gleason pukes on Sinatra's shoes, the events of the next few decades are set in motion, all threaded together by the baseball as it passes from hand to hand.

"It's all falling indelibly into the past," writes DeLillo, a past that he carefully recalls and reconstructs with acute grace. Jump from Giants Stadium to the Nevada desert in 1992, where Nick Shay, who now owns the baseball, reunites with the artist Kara Sax. They had been brief and unlikely lovers 40 years before, and it is largely through the events, spinoffs, and coincidental encounters of their pasts that DeLillo filters the Cold War experience. He believes that "global events may alter how we live in the smallest ways," and as the book steps back in time to 1951, over the following 800-odd pages, we see just how those events alter lives. This reverse narrative allows the author to strip away the detritus of history and pop culture until we get to the story's pure elements: the bomb, the baseball, and the Bronx. In an epilogue as breathless and stunning as the prologue, DeLillo fast-forwards to a near future in which ruthless capitalism, the Internet, and a new, hushed faith have replaced the Cold War's blend of dread and euphoria.

Through fragments and interlaced stories—including those of highway killers, artists, celebrities, conspiracists, gangsters, nuns, and sundry others—DeLillo creates a fragile web of connected experience, a communal Zeitgeist that encompasses the messy whole of five decades of American life, wonderfully distilled.]]> 827 Don DeLillo 0330369954 Χρήστος Αρμάντο 5 3.95 1997
author: Don DeLillo
name: Χρήστος Αρμάντο
average rating: 3.95
book published: 1997
rating: 5
read at: 2023/12/10
date added: 2023/12/10
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]]> 2784 John Berger’s Classic Text on Art

Ways of Seeing is one of the most stimulating and the most influential books on art in any language. First published in 1972, it was based on the BBC television series about which the (London) Sunday Times a critic commented: "This is an eye-opener in more ways than one: by concentrating on how we look at paintings . . . he will almost certainly change the way you look at pictures." By now he has.

"Berger has the ability to cut right through the mystification of the professional art critics . . . He is a liberator of images: and once we have allowed the paintings to work on us directly, we are in a much better position to make a meaningful evaluation" —Peter Fuller, Arts Review

"The influence of the series and the book . . . was enormous . . . It opened up for general attention to areas of cultural study that are now commonplace" —Geoff Dyer in Ways of Telling.]]> 176 John Berger 0140135154 Χρήστος Αρμάντο 4 3.93 1972
author: John Berger
name: Χρήστος Αρμάντο
average rating: 3.93
book published: 1972
rating: 4
read at: 2023/11/12
date added: 2023/11/12
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]]> 6612711 171 Fyodor Dostoevsky 9608359260 Χρήστος Αρμάντο 4 3.81 1866
author: Fyodor Dostoevsky
name: Χρήστος Αρμάντο
average rating: 3.81
book published: 1866
rating: 4
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]]> 11654 Winner of the National Book Award for Fiction

Sabbath's Theater is a comic creation of epic proportions, and Mickey Sabbath is its gargantuan hero. At sixty-four Sabbath is still defiantly antagonistic and exceedingly libidinous; sex is an obsession and a principle, an instrument of perpetual misrule in his daily existence. But after the death of his long-time mistress - an erotic free spirit whose great taste for the impermissible matches his own - Sabbath embarks on a turbulent journey into his past. Bereft and grieving, tormented by the ghosts of those who loved and hated him, he contrives a succession of farcical disasters that take him to the brink of madness and extinction.]]> 451 Philip Roth 0679772596 Χρήστος Αρμάντο 3 3.88 1995
author: Philip Roth
name: Χρήστος Αρμάντο
average rating: 3.88
book published: 1995
rating: 3
read at: 2023/11/11
date added: 2023/11/11
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Προβληματίστηκα πολύ με αυτό το βιβλίο: μεγαλειώδες και συγκλονιστικό σε κάποια σημεία, κοινότοπο σε πολλά άλλα (ίσως στα περισσότερα), ενώ τη δομή του τη βρήκα κάπως άτεχνη Ο κεντρικός ήρωας είναι ένα συμπίλημα των συνήθων χαρακτήρων του Ροθ κι αυτό εμένα προσωπικά με έκανε να βαριέμαι συχνά. Ίσως ενδείκνυται για ανάγνωση πριν τη γνωριμία με τα κορυφαία μυθιστορήματα του συγγραφέα.
]]> 54542416
Η γραφή αποτέλεσε για τον Μπλέχερ αντιστάθμισμα και, σε μεγάλο βαθμό, θρίαμβο επί της προσωπικής του τραγωδίας. Με τη δημοσίευση των Πε��ιστατικών κέρδισε τον κριτικό έπαινο του "δύστροπου" Ιονέσκο, ενώ υπήρξε δεινός επιστολογράφος-συνομιλητής του Μπρετόν, του Ζιντ και του Χάιντεγκερ.

Τα τελευταία χρόνια το έργο του ανακαλύφθηκε εκ νέου και έχει μεταφραστεί στις κυριότερες ευρωπαϊκές γλώσσες. Ο δε συγγραφέας θεωρείται σήμερα μείζον σημείο αναφοράς στον νεωτερικό "κανόνα" της Ρουμανίας.]]> 176 Max Blecher 618847440X Χρήστος Αρμάντο 0 to-read 4.18 1936
author: Max Blecher
name: Χρήστος Αρμάντο
average rating: 4.18
book published: 1936
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/11/08
shelves: to-read
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]]> 20527133 Superintelligence asks the questions: what happens when machines surpass humans in general intelligence? Will artificial agents save or destroy us? Nick Bostrom lays the foundation for understanding the future of humanity and intelligent life.

The human brain has some capabilities that the brains of other animals lack. It is to these distinctive capabilities that our species owes its dominant position. If machine brains surpassed human brains in general intelligence, then this new superintelligence could become extremely powerful—possibly beyond our control. As the fate of the gorillas now depends more on humans than on the species itself, so would the fate of humankind depend on the actions of the machine superintelligence.

But we have one advantage: we get to make the first move. Will it be possible to construct a seed Artificial Intelligence, to engineer initial conditions so as to make an intelligence explosion survivable? How could one achieve a controlled detonation?]]> 352 Nick Bostrom 0199678111 Χρήστος Αρμάντο 0 to-read 3.86 2014
author: Nick Bostrom
name: Χρήστος Αρμάντο
average rating: 3.86
book published: 2014
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/11/06
shelves: to-read
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]]> 25135194 Geography shapes not only our history, but where we're headed...

All leaders are constrained by geography. Their choices are limited by mountains, rivers, seas and concrete. Yes, to follow world events you need to understand people, ideas and movements - but if you don't know geography, you'll never have the full picture.

If you've ever wondered why Putin is so obsessed with Crimea, why the USA was destined to become a global superpower, or why China's power base continues to expand ever outwards, the answers are all here.

In ten chapters and ten maps, Prisoners of Geography looks at the past, present and future to offer an essential insight into one of the major factors that determines world history.

It's time to put the 'geo' back into geopolitics.

Ten maps; ten chapters:

Russia * China * United States of America * Latin America * the Middle East * Africa * India and Pakistan * Europe * Japan and Korea * the Arctic]]> 256 Tim Marshall 1783961414 Χρήστος Αρμάντο 4 4.18 2015
author: Tim Marshall
name: Χρήστος Αρμάντο
average rating: 4.18
book published: 2015
rating: 4
read at: 2023/10/27
date added: 2023/10/27
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Good but, what the heck, needed more actual maps through the pages.
]]> 16180681 264 Yasunari Kawabata 960600113X Χρήστος Αρμάντο 3 4.02 1971
author: Yasunari Kawabata
name: Χρήστος Αρμάντο
average rating: 4.02
book published: 1971
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2023/10/23
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]]> 38820046 In Sapiens, he explored our past. In Homo Deus, he looked to our future. Now, one of the most innovative thinkers on the planet turns to the present to make sense of today's most pressing issues.

How do computers and robots change the meaning of being human? How do we deal with the epidemic of fake news? Are nations and religions still relevant? What should we teach our children?

Yuval Noah Harari's 21 Lessons for the 21st Century is a probing and visionary investigation into today's most urgent issues as we move into the uncharted territory of the future. As technology advances faster than our understanding of it, hacking becomes a tactic of war, and the world feels more polarized than ever, Harari addresses the challenge of navigating life in the face of constant and disorienting change and raises the important questions we need to ask ourselves in order to survive.

In twenty-one accessible chapters that are both provocative and profound, Harari builds on the ideas explored in his previous books, untangling political, technological, social, and existential issues and offering advice on how to prepare for a very different future from the world we now live in: How can we retain freedom of choice when Big Data is watching us? What will the future workforce look like, and how should we ready ourselves for it? How should we deal with the threat of terrorism? Why is liberal democracy in crisis?

Harari's unique ability to make sense of where we have come from and where we are going has captured the imaginations of millions of readers. Here he invites us to consider values, meaning, and personal engagement in a world full of noise and uncertainty. When we are deluged with irrelevant information, clarity is power. Presenting complex contemporary challenges clearly and accessibly, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century is essential reading.]]> 372 Yuval Noah Harari 0525512179 Χρήστος Αρμάντο 3
Ο συγγραφέας, έχοντας "καταρρίψει" όλες τις ανθρώπινες αφηγήσεις περί θρησκείας, ζωής, έθνους, αγάπης, καταλήγει ξάφνου ότι το μόνο στο οποίο μπορεί να καταφύγει ο Homo Sapiens είναι ο...διαλογισμός.

Πέρα από απρόσμενα αφελές, το βρίσκω και εξωφρενικά προσβλητικό όταν καθημερινά γύρω μας ερχόμαστε αντιμέτωποι με ένα ατέλειωτο σπιράλ κρίσεων και προκλήσεων. (Την ειρωνεία ειδικά σε σχέση με τις τελευταίες εξελίξεις στο Παλαιστινιακό δεν την αγγίζω καν)

Χειρότερο μόνο το κάνει ο εμφανής ναρκισσισμός του συγγραφέα, ο οποιος κατά τη διατύπωση των ιδεών του φανερώνει μια ακλόνητη βεβαιότητα που φλερτάρει με την απάθεια �� κάτι στο οποίο, εδώ που τα λέμε, ίσως να έχει κάνει καλή δουλειά ο διαλογισμός.]]> 4.16 2018
author: Yuval Noah Harari
name: Χρήστος Αρμάντο
average rating: 4.16
book published: 2018
rating: 3
read at: 2023/10/11
date added: 2023/10/11
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Τελείωσα το τελευταίο βιβλίο του Ισραηλινού ιστορικού και, ενώ συνόψισε αρκετές ενδιαφέρουσες ιδέες, στο φινάλε με απογοήτευσε.

Ο συγγραφέας, έχοντας "καταρρίψει" όλες τις ανθρώπινες αφηγήσεις περί θρησκείας, ζωής, έθνους, αγάπης, καταλήγει ξάφνου ότι το μόνο στο οποίο μπορεί να καταφύγει ο Homo Sapiens είναι ο...διαλογισμός.

Πέρα από απρόσμενα αφελές, το βρίσκω και εξωφρενικά προσβλητικό όταν καθημερινά γύρω μας ερχόμαστε αντιμέτωποι με ένα ατέλειωτο σπιράλ κρίσεων και προκλήσεων. (Την ειρωνεία ειδικά σε σχέση με τις τελευταίες εξελίξεις στο Παλαιστινιακό δεν την αγγίζω καν)

Χειρότερο μόνο το κάνει ο εμφανής ναρκισσισμός του συγγραφέα, ο οποιος κατά τη διατύπωση των ιδεών του φανερώνει μια ακλόνητη βεβαιότητα που φλερτάρει με την απάθεια �� κάτι στο οποίο, εδώ που τα λέμε, ίσως να έχει κάνει καλή δουλειά ο διαλογισμός.
]]> 194746 No Longer Human, this leading postwar Japanese writer's second novel, tells the poignant and fascinating story of a young man who is caught between the breakup of the traditions of a northern Japanese aristocratic family and the impact of Western ideas. In consequence, he feels himself "disqualified from being human" (a literal translation of the Japanese title).

Donald Keene, who translated this and Dazai's first novel, The Setting Sun, has said of the author's work: "His world �� suggests Chekhov or possibly postwar France, �� but there is a Japanese sensibility in the choice and presentation of the material. A Dazai novel is at once immediately intelligible in Western terms and quite unlike any Western book." His writing is in some ways reminiscent of Rimbaud, while he himself has often been called a forerunner of Yukio Mishima.

Cover painting by Noe Nojechowiz, from the collection of John and Barbara Duncan; design by Gertrude Huston]]> 176 Osamu Dazai Χρήστος Αρμάντο 3 3.99 1948
author: Osamu Dazai
name: Χρήστος Αρμάντο
average rating: 3.99
book published: 1948
rating: 3
read at: 2023/09/26
date added: 2023/09/26
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]]> 34890015 Factfulness: The stress-reducing habit of only carrying opinions for which you have strong supporting facts.

When asked simple questions about global trends��what percentage of the world’s population live in poverty; why the world’s population is increasing; how many girls finish school—we systematically get the answers wrong. So wrong that a chimpanzee choosing answers at random will consistently outguess teachers, journalists, Nobel laureates, and investment bankers.

In Factfulness, Professor of International Health and global TED phenomenon Hans Rosling, together with his two long-time collaborators, Anna and Ola, offers a radical new explanation of why this happens. They reveal the ten instincts that distort our perspective—from our tendency to divide the world into two camps (usually some version of us and them) to the way we consume media (where fear rules) to how we perceive progress (believing that most things are getting worse).

Our problem is that we don’t know what we don’t know, and even our guesses are informed by unconscious and predictable biases.

It turns out that the world, for all its imperfections, is in a much better state than we might think. That doesn’t mean there aren’t real concerns. But when we worry about everything all the time instead of embracing a worldview based on facts, we can lose our ability to focus on the things that threaten us most.

Inspiring and revelatory, filled with lively anecdotes and moving stories, Factfulness is an urgent and essential book that will change the way you see the world and empower you to respond to the crises and opportunities of the future. ]]> 342 Hans Rosling 1473637465 Χρήστος Αρμάντο 0 to-read 4.34 2018
author: Hans Rosling
name: Χρήστος Αρμάντο
average rating: 4.34
book published: 2018
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/09/16
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]]> 20821140 World Order a deep meditation on the roots of international harmony and global disorder. Drawing on his experience as one of the foremost statesmen of the modern era—advising presidents, traveling the world, observing and shaping the central foreign policy events of recent decades—Kissinger now reveals his analysis of the ultimate challenge for the twenty-first century: how to build a shared international order in a world of divergent historical perspectives, violent conflict, proliferating technology, and ideological extremism.

There has never been a true “world order,�� Kissinger observes. For most of history, civilizations defined their own concepts of order. Each considered itself the center of the world and envisioned its distinct principles as universally relevant. China conceived of a global cultural hierarchy with the Emperor at its pinnacle. In Europe, Rome imagined itself surrounded by barbarians; when Rome fragmented, European peoples refined a concept of an equilibrium of sovereign states and sought to export it across the world. Islam, in its early centuries, considered itself the world’s sole legitimate political unit, destined to expand indefinitely until the world was brought into harmony by religious principles. The United States was born of a conviction about the universal applicability of democracy—a conviction that has guided its policies ever since.

Now international affairs take place on a global basis, and these historical concepts of world order are meeting. Every region participates in questions of high policy in every other, often instantaneously. Yet there is no consensus among the major actors about the rules and limits guiding this process, or its ultimate destination. The result is mounting tension.

Grounded in Kissinger’s deep study of history and his experience as National Security Advisor and Secretary of State, World Order guides readers through crucial episodes in recent world history. Kissinger offers a unique glimpse into the inner deliberations of the Nixon administration’s negotiations with Hanoi over the end of the Vietnam War, as well as Ronald Reagan’s tense debates with Soviet Premier Gorbachev in Reykjavík. He offers compelling insights into the future of U.S.–China relations and the evolution of the European Union, and examines lessons of the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. Taking readers from his analysis of nuclear negotiations with Iran through the West’s response to the Arab Spring and tensions with Russia over Ukraine, World Order anchors Kissinger’s historical analysis in the decisive events of our time.

Provocative and articulate, blending historical insight with geopolitical prognostication, World Order is a unique work that could come only from a lifelong policymaker and diplomat.]]> 420 Henry Kissinger 1594206147 Χρήστος Αρμάντο 0 to-read 4.04 2014
author: Henry Kissinger
name: Χρήστος Αρμάντο
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2014
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/09/16
shelves: to-read
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]]> 36442813
With his extraordinary charm and sense of wonder, bringing together science, philosophy and art, Carlo Rovelli unravels this mystery, inviting us to imagine a world where time is in us and we are not in time.]]> 224 Carlo Rovelli 073521610X Χρήστος Αρμάντο 5 4.14 2017
author: Carlo Rovelli
name: Χρήστος Αρμάντο
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2017
rating: 5
read at: 2023/08/15
date added: 2023/08/15
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]]> 35187183 Your Brain Is a Time Machine reveals that the brain’s ultimate purpose may be to predict the future, and thus that your brain is a time machine.]]> 304 Dean Buonomano 0393355608 Χρήστος Αρμάντο 0 to-read 3.88 2017
author: Dean Buonomano
name: Χρήστος Αρμάντο
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2017
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/08/13
shelves: to-read
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]]> 57751566
Using a wealth of studies, interviews with experts, and detailed analysis, Dr James Davies argues that this is because we have fundamentally mischaracterised the problem. Rather than viewing most mental distress as an understandable reaction to wider societal problems, we have embraced a medical model which situates the problem solely within the sufferer and their brain.

Urgent and persuasive, Sedated systematically examines why this individualistic view of mental illness has been promoted by successive governments and big business �� and why it is so misplaced and dangerous.]]> 400 James Davies 1786499843 Χρήστος Αρμάντο 3 4.24 2021
author: James Davies
name: Χρήστος Αρμάντο
average rating: 4.24
book published: 2021
rating: 3
read at: 2023/08/12
date added: 2023/08/12
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]]> 12850670 Η πλοκή στην "Πλατφό��μα" είναι εξαιρετικά απλή: Μετά το θάνατο του πατέρα του, κι έχοντας κληρονομήσει την περιουσία του, ο σαραντάχρονος Μισέλ ξεκινάει για τουρισμό στην Ταϊλάνδη. Με το ίδιο γκρουπ ταξιδεύει η νεαρή Βαλερί, στέλεχος μεγάλου τουριστικού ομίλου, τις επιχειρηματικές κινήσεις του οποίου θα παρακολουθήσουμε με κάθε λεπτομέρεια. Από αυτόν τον υποτυπώδη ιστό ο Ουελμπέκ θα κεντήσει μια ολόκληρη σύνθεση του σύγχρονου κόσμου.
Συνταρακτικά γεγονότα -έρωτες και θάνατοι, όπως πάντα- μέσα στη χαοτική ζωή του σημερινού δυτικού ανθρώπου, λίγο ως πολύ τη δική μας ζωή, μας παρασύρουν σε μια δίνη που μας θυμίζει τις μαγικές στιγμές των παιδικών μας αναγνώσεων· τότε, που όπως και τώρα, βυθιζόμασταν στο βιβλίο για να μην συνέλθουμε ποτέ από αυτό που διαβάσαμε.]]> 335 Michel Houellebecq 9600510296 Χρήστος Αρμάντο 5 Ο πιο ανθρώπινος Ουελμπέκ. 3.83 2001
author: Michel Houellebecq
name: Χρήστος Αρμάντο
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2001
rating: 5
read at: 2023/08/08
date added: 2023/08/08
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Ο πιο ανθρώπινος Ουελμπέκ.
]]> 76778
The Martian Chronicles tells the story of humanity’s repeated attempts to colonize the red planet. The first men were few. Most succumbed to a disease they called the Great Loneliness when they saw their home planet dwindle to the size of a fist. They felt they had never been born. Those few that survived found no welcome on Mars. The shape-changing Martians thought they were native lunatics and duly locked them up.

But more rockets arrived from Earth, and more, piercing the hallucinations projected by the Martians. People brought their old prejudices with them �� and their desires and fantasies, tainted dreams. These were soon inhabited by the strange native beings, with their caged flowers and birds of flame.

Contents:
Rocket Summer
Ylla
The Summer Night
The Earth Men
The Taxpayer
The Third Expedition
-And the Moon Be Still As Bright
The Settlers
The Green Morning
The Locusts
Night Meeting
The Shore
Interim
The Musicians
Way in the Middle of the Air
The Naming of Names
Usher II
The Old Ones
The Martian
The Luggage Store
The Off Season
The Watchers
The Silent Towns
The Long Years
There Will Come Soft Rains
The Million Year Picnic]]> 182 Ray Bradbury 0553278223 Χρήστος Αρμάντο 4 4.16 1950
author: Ray Bradbury
name: Χρήστος Αρμάντο
average rating: 4.16
book published: 1950
rating: 4
read at: 2023/08/06
date added: 2023/08/06
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]]> 26150770
In short chapters filled with intriguing historical anecdotes, personal asides, and rigorous exposition, readers learn the difference between how the world works at the quantum level, the cosmic level, and the human level--and then how each connects to the other. ��Carroll's presentation of the principles that have guided the scientific revolution from Darwin and Einstein to the origins of life, consciousness, and the universe is dazzlingly unique.

Carroll shows how an avalanche of discoveries in the past few hundred years has changed our world and what really matters to us. Our lives are dwarfed like never before by the immensity of space and time, but they are redeemed by our capacity to comprehend it and give it meaning.

The Big Picture is an unprecedented scientific worldview, a tour de force that will sit on shelves alongside the works of Stephen Hawking, Carl Sagan, Daniel Dennett, and E. O. Wilson for years to come.]]> 480 Sean Carroll 0525954821 Χρήστος Αρμάντο 0 to-read 4.18 2016
author: Sean Carroll
name: Χρήστος Αρμάντο
average rating: 4.18
book published: 2016
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/07/10
shelves: to-read
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]]> 44065062
Sean Carroll, theoretical physicist and one of this world’s most celebrated writers on science, rewrites the history of 20th century physics. Already hailed as a masterpiece, Something Deeply Hidden shows for the first time that facing up to the essential puzzle of quantum mechanics utterly transforms how we think about space and time. His reconciling of quantum mechanics with Einstein’s theory of relativity changes, well, everything.

Most physicists haven’t even recognized the uncomfortable truth: physics has been in crisis since 1927. Quantum mechanics has always had obvious gaps—which have come to be simply ignored. Science popularizers keep telling us how weird it is, how impossible it is to understand. Academics discourage students from working on the "dead end" of quantum foundations. Putting his professional reputation on the line with this audacious yet entirely reasonable book, Carroll says that the crisis can now come to an end. We just have to accept that there is more than one of us in the universe. There are many, many Sean Carrolls. Many of every one of us.

Copies of you are generated thousands of times per second. The "many worlds theory" of quantum behavior says that every time there is a quantum event, a world splits off with everything in it the same, except in that other world the quantum event didn't happen. Step by step in Carroll's uniquely lucid way, he tackles the major objections to this otherworldly revelation until his case is inescapably established.

Rarely does a book so fully reorganize how we think about our place in the universe. We are on the threshold of a new understanding—of where we are in the cosmos, and what we are made of.]]> 347 Sean Carroll 1524743011 Χρήστος Αρμάντο 0 to-read 4.06 2019
author: Sean Carroll
name: Χρήστος Αρμάντο
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2019
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/07/10
shelves: to-read
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]]> 59695048
“An informed and entertaining guide to what science can and cannot tell us.�� �� The Wall Street Journal

“Stimulating . . . encourage[s] readers to push past well-trod assumptions […] and have fun doing so.�� �� Science Magazine

From renowned physicist and creator of the YouTube series “Science without the Gobbledygook,�� a book that takes a no-nonsense approach to life’s biggest questions, and wrestles with what physics really says about the human condition

Not only can we not currently explain the origin of the universe, it is questionable we will ever be able to explain it. The notion that there are universes within particles, or that particles are conscious, is ascientific, as is the hypothesis that our universe is a computer simulation.�� On the other hand, the idea that the universe itself is conscious is difficult to rule out entirely.��
��
According to Sabine Hossenfelder, it is not a coincidence that quantum entanglement and vacuum energy have become the go-to explanations of alternative healers, or that people believe their deceased grandmother is still alive because of quantum mechanics. Science and religion have the same roots, and they still tackle some of the same Where do we come from? Where do we go to? How much can we know? The area of science that is closest to answering these questions is physics. Over the last century, physicists have learned a lot about which spiritual ideas are still compatible with the laws of nature. Not always, though, have they stayed on the scientific side of the debate.

In this lively, thought-provoking book, Hossenfelder takes on the biggest questions in Does the past still exist? Do particles think? Was the universe made for us? Has physics ruled out free will? Will we ever have a theory of everything? She lays out how far physicists are on the way to answering these questions, where the current limits are, and what questions might well remain unanswerable forever. Her book offers a no-nonsense yet entertaining take on some of the toughest riddles in existence, and will give the reader a solid grasp on what we know—and what we don’t know.]]> 269 Sabine Hossenfelder Χρήστος Αρμάντο 3 3.89 2022
author: Sabine Hossenfelder
name: Χρήστος Αρμάντο
average rating: 3.89
book published: 2022
rating: 3
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date added: 2023/07/05
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]]> 10638 The Road to Reality carefully explores the movement of the smallest atomic particles and reaches into the vastness of intergalactic space. Here, Penrose examines the mathematical foundations of the physical universe, exposing the underlying beauty of physics and giving us one the most important works in modern science writing.]]> 1099 Roger Penrose 0679776311 Χρήστος Αρμάντο 0 to-read 4.16 2004
author: Roger Penrose
name: Χρήστος Αρμάντο
average rating: 4.16
book published: 2004
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/07/02
shelves: to-read
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]]> 10483171
In our search for truth, how far have we advanced? This uniquely human quest for good explanations has driven amazing improvements in everything from scientific understanding and technology to politics, moral values and human welfare. But will progress end, either in catastrophe or completion - or will it continue infinitely?

In this profound and seminal book, David Deutsch explores the furthest reaches of our current understanding, taking in the Infinity Hotel, supernovae and the nature of optimism, to instill in all of us a wonder at what we have achieved - and the fact that this is only the beginning of humanity's infinite possibility.

'This is Deutsch at his most ambitious, seeking to understand the implications of our scientific explanations of the world ... I enthusiastically recommend this rich, wide-ranging and elegantly written exposition of the unique insights of one of our most original intellectuals' Michael Berry, Times Higher Education Supplement

'Bold ... profound ... provocative and persuasive' Economist

'David Deutsch may well go down in history as one of the great scientists of our age' Scotsman]]> 487 David Deutsch 0670022756 Χρήστος Αρμάντο 0 to-read 4.16 2011
author: David Deutsch
name: Χρήστος Αρμάντο
average rating: 4.16
book published: 2011
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/06/29
shelves: to-read
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]]> 25859963 116 Erri De Luca 6188059054 Χρήστος Αρμάντο 4
Τα 4 αστέρια κυρίως για τις τελευταίες 10 σελίδες, που ήταν υπέροχες. Το υπόλοιπο είχε στιγμές που μου φάνηκαν αδύναμες και γλώσσα που με έβγαζε για λίγο έξω. ]]> 3.79 2009
author: Erri De Luca
name: Χρήστος Αρμάντο
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2009
rating: 4
read at: 2016/07/16
date added: 2023/06/04
shelves:
review:
3.5+

Τα 4 αστέρια κυρίως για τις τελευταίες 10 σελίδες, που ήταν υπέροχες. Το υπόλοιπο είχε στιγμές που μου φάνηκαν αδύναμες και γλώσσα που με έβγαζε για λίγο έξω.
]]> 157076 The Most Dangerous Game features a big-game hunter from New York who becomes shipwrecked on an isolated island in the Caribbean and is hunted by a Russian aristocrat.]]> 48 Richard Connell 1599869691 Χρήστος Αρμάντο 0 to-read 3.93 1924
author: Richard Connell
name: Χρήστος Αρμάντο
average rating: 3.93
book published: 1924
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/05/21
shelves: to-read
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]]> 819954 130 Annie Ernaux 2070419231 Χρήστος Αρμάντο 4 4.36 2000
author: Annie Ernaux
name: Χρήστος Αρμάντο
average rating: 4.36
book published: 2000
rating: 4
read at: 2023/05/17
date added: 2023/05/17
shelves:
review:

]]> 24830 The Illustrated Man has remained in print since being published in 1951 is fair testimony to the universal appeal of Ray Bradbury's work. Only his second collection (the first was Dark Carnival, later reworked into The October Country), it is a marvelous, if mostly dark, quilt of science fiction, fantasy, and horror. In an ingenious framework to open and close the book, Bradbury presents himself as a nameless narrator who meets the Illustrated Man--a wanderer whose entire body is a living canvas of exotic tattoos. What's even more remarkable, and increasingly disturbing, is that the illustrations are themselves magically alive, and each proceeds to unfold its own story, such as "The Veldt," wherein rowdy children take a game of virtual reality way over the edge. Or "Kaleidoscope," a heartbreaking portrait of stranded astronauts about to reenter our atmosphere--without the benefit of a spaceship. Or "Zero Hour," in which invading aliens have discovered a most logical ally--our own children. Even though most were written in the 1940s and 1950s, these 18 classic stories will be just as chillingly effective 50 years from now. --Stanley Wiater

Contents:

· Prologue: The Illustrated Man · ss *
· The Veldt [“The World the Children Made”] · ss The Saturday Evening Post Sep 23 ��50
· Kaleidoscope · ss Thrilling Wonder Stories Oct ��49
· The Other Foot · ss New Story Magazine Mar ��51
· The Highway [as by Leonard Spalding] · ss Copy Spr ��50
· The Man · ss Thrilling Wonder Stories Feb ��49
· The Long Rain [“Death-by-Rain”] · ss Planet Stories Sum ��50
· The Rocket Man · ss Maclean’s Mar 1 ��51
· The Fire Balloons [“‘In This Sign...’”] · ss Imagination Apr ��51
· The Last Night of the World · ss Esquire Feb ��51
· The Exiles [“The Mad Wizards of Mars”] · ss Maclean’s Sep 15 ��49; F&SF Win ��50
· No Particular Night or Morning · ss *
· The Fox and the Forest [“To the Future”] · ss Colliers May 13 ��50
· The Visitor · ss Startling Stories Nov ��48
· The Concrete Mixer · ss Thrilling Wonder Stories Apr ��49
· Marionettes, Inc. [Marionettes, Inc.] · ss Startling Stories Mar ��49
· The City [“Purpose”] · ss Startling Stories Jul ��50
· Zero Hour · ss Planet Stories Fll ��47
· The Rocket [“Outcast of the Stars”] · ss Super Science Stories Mar ��50
· Epilogue · aw *]]> 186 Ray Bradbury 000712774X Χρήστος Αρμάντο 4 4.14 1951
author: Ray Bradbury
name: Χρήστος Αρμάντο
average rating: 4.14
book published: 1951
rating: 4
read at: 2023/05/03
date added: 2023/05/03
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]]> 101299
When he falls ill on his way home from school, fifteen-year-old Michael Berg is rescued by Hanna, a woman twice his age. In time she becomes his lover—then she inexplicably disappears. When Michael next sees her, he is a young law student, and she is on trial for a hideous crime. As he watches her refuse to defend her innocence, Michael gradually realizes that Hanna may be guarding a secret she considers more shameful than murder.]]> 216 Bernhard Schlink 0375408266 Χρήστος Αρμάντο 3 3.78 1995
author: Bernhard Schlink
name: Χρήστος Αρμάντο
average rating: 3.78
book published: 1995
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2023/05/03
shelves:
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]]> 3869
Told in language we all can understand, A Brief History of Time plunges into the exotic realms of black holes and quarks, of antimatter and “arrows of time,�� of the big bang and a bigger God—where the possibilities are wondrous and unexpected. With exciting images and profound imagination, Stephen Hawking brings us closer to the ultimate secrets at the very heart of creation.]]> 226 Stephen Hawking 0553380168 Χρήστος Αρμάντο 5 4.22 1988
author: Stephen Hawking
name: Χρήστος Αρμάντο
average rating: 4.22
book published: 1988
rating: 5
read at: 2023/05/03
date added: 2023/05/03
shelves:
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]]> 54650835
Beginning with that most fundamental of questions �� “Do we really want what we say we want?�� �� Fisher explores the relationship between desire and capitalism, and wonders what new forms of desire we might still excavate from the past, present, and future. From the emergence and failure of the counterculture in the 1970s to the continued development of his left-accelerationist line of thinking, this volume charts a tragically interrupted course for thinking about the raising of a new kind of consciousness, and the cultural and political implications of doing so.

For Fisher, this process of consciousness raising was always, fundamentally, psychedelic �� just not in the way that we might think…]]> 211 Mark Fisher Χρήστος Αρμάντο 0 to-read 4.26 2020
author: Mark Fisher
name: Χρήστος Αρμάντο
average rating: 4.26
book published: 2020
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/04/24
shelves: to-read
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]]> 36696533 “New Dark Age��is among the most unsettling and illuminating books I’ve read about the Internet, which is to say that it is among the most unsettling and illuminating books I’ve read about contemporary life.”����–��New YorkerAs the world around us increases in technological complexity, our understanding of it diminishes. Underlying this trend is a single the belief that our existence is understandable through computation, and more data is enough to help us build a better world. In reality, we are lost in a sea of information, increasingly divided by fundamentalism, simplistic narratives, conspiracy theories, and post-factual politics. Meanwhile, those in power use our lack of understanding to further their own interests. Despite the apparent accessibility of information, we’re living in a new Dark Age. From rogue financial systems to shopping algorithms, from artificial intelligence to state secrecy, we no longer understand how our world is governed or presented to us. The media is filled with unverifiable speculation, much of it generated by anonymous software, while companies dominate their employees through surveillance and the threat of automation. In his brilliant new work, leading artist and writer James Bridle surveys the history of art, technology, and information systems, and reveals the dark clouds that gather over our dreams of the digital sublime.]]> 357 James Bridle 178663550X Χρήστος Αρμάντο 4 4.05 2018
author: James Bridle
name: Χρήστος Αρμάντο
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2018
rating: 4
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date added: 2023/04/23
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]]> 18242515
"Υποθέτω ότι θα μπορούσε κανείς να χαρακτηρίσει αυτά τα διηγήματα τσεχοφικά, αν μη τι άλλο λόγω της ικανότητας του Τσέχοφ να καταγράφει σημαντικές στιγμές σε συνηθισμένες ζωές με χιουμοριστική συμπόνια και χωρίς συγκατάβαση, αλλά και λόγω της ικανότητας του Τσίβερ να γράφει μια υπέροχη, ελεγειακή τελευταία παράγραφο που περικλείει μέσα της ολόκληρο το διήγημα αλλά ταυτόχρονα το υπερβαίνει, λες και το όλο πράγμα τελικά τινάζεται στον αέρα σαν ένα είδος διονυσιακής τελετής. Θα μπορούσε επίσης κανείς να πει ότι ο Τσίβερ είναι λιγότερο ζοφερός από τον Κάρβερ και περισσότερο ευρύς, ειρωνικός και παιχνιδιάρης από τον Χέμινγουεϊ. Τελικά όμως είναι σχεδόν πάντοτε ο εαυτός του, με κάθε πρόταση καλοζυγισμένη και ισορροπημένη ώστε να λέει το σωστό πράγμα και συχνά ακόμη περισσότερα, ώστε να εξυψώνεται στο σημείο που ενώνει το καθημερινό τρένο με τον ευρύτερο πολιτικό σιδηρόδρομο".

Χανίφ Κιουρέισι]]> 224 John Cheever 9600355789 Χρήστος Αρμάντο 4 4.5 4.23 1964
author: John Cheever
name: Χρήστος Αρμάντο
average rating: 4.23
book published: 1964
rating: 4
read at: 2015/04/16
date added: 2023/04/16
shelves:
review:
4.5
]]> 21 544 Bill Bryson 076790818X Χρήστος Αρμάντο 0 to-read 4.21 2003
author: Bill Bryson
name: Χρήστος Αρμάντο
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2003
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/04/08
shelves: to-read
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]]> 56269264
For generations, our remote ancestors have been cast as primitive and childlike—either free and equal innocents, or thuggish and warlike. Civilization, we are told, could be achieved only by sacrificing those original freedoms or, alternatively, by taming our baser instincts. David Graeber and David Wengrow show how such theories first emerged in the eighteenth century as a conservative reaction to powerful critiques of European society posed by Indigenous observers and intellectuals. Revisiting this encounter has startling implications for how we make sense of human history today, including the origins of farming, property, cities, democracy, slavery, and civilization itself.

Drawing on pathbreaking research in archaeology and anthropology, the authors show how history becomes a far more interesting place once we learn to throw off our conceptual shackles and perceive what’s really there. If humans did not spend 95 percent of their evolutionary past in tiny bands of hunter-gatherers, what were they doing all that time? If agriculture, and cities, did not mean a plunge into hierarchy and domination, then what kinds of social and economic organization did they lead to? The answers are often unexpected, and suggest that the course of human history may be less set in stone, and more full of playful, hopeful possibilities, than we tend to assume.

The Dawn of Everything fundamentally transforms our understanding of the human past and offers a path toward imagining new forms of freedom, new ways of organizing society. This is a monumental book of formidable intellectual range, animated by curiosity, moral vision, and a faith in the power of direct action.]]> 692 David Graeber 0374157359 Χρήστος Αρμάντο 0 to-read 4.20 2021
author: David Graeber
name: Χρήστος Αρμάντο
average rating: 4.20
book published: 2021
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/03/24
shelves: to-read
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]]> 22747912
What do we mean when we say that someone is a writer? Is he or she an entertainer? A high priest of the god of Art? An improver of readers' minds and morals? Looking back on her own childhood and the development of her writing career, Margaret Atwood addresses the riddle of her own art.

Her wide-ranging reference to other writers, living and dead, is accompanied by personal anecdotes from her own experiences as a writer. The lightness of her touch is offset by a seriousness about the purpose and the pleasures of writing. Wise, candid, informative, and engaging, On Writers and Writing provides an insider's view of the writer's universe, written by one of the most celebrated writers of our time.]]> 256 Margaret Atwood 0771007728 Χρήστος Αρμάντο 0 to-read 3.83 2002
author: Margaret Atwood
name: Χρήστος Αρμάντο
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2002
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/03/17
shelves: to-read
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]]> 161037 560 Alasdair Gray 184195120X Χρήστος Αρμάντο 0 to-read 4.12 1981
author: Alasdair Gray
name: Χρήστος Αρμάντο
average rating: 4.12
book published: 1981
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/03/06
shelves: to-read
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]]> 72252
A compulsively readable and thoroughly researched exploration of social deviance and the application of what is known as "labeling theory" to the studies of deviance. With particular research into drug culture, Outsiders analyzes unconventional individuals and their place in normal society.]]> 224 Howard S. Becker 0684836351 Χρήστος Αρμάντο 0 to-read 3.98 1963
author: Howard S. Becker
name: Χρήστος Αρμάντο
average rating: 3.98
book published: 1963
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/03/02
shelves: to-read
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]]> 931986
Stigma is an illuminating excursion into the situation of persons who are unable to conform to standards that society calls normal. Disqualified from full social acceptance, they are stigmatized individuals. Physically deformed people, ex-mental patients, drug addicts, prostitutes, or those ostracized for other reasons must constantly strive to adjust to their precarious social identities. Their image of themselves must daily confront and be affronted by the image which others reflect back to them.

Drawing extensively on autobiographies and case studies, sociologist Erving Goffman analyzes the stigmatized person’s feelings about himself and his relationship to “normals�� He explores the variety of strategies stigmatized individuals employ to deal with the rejection of others, and the complex sorts of information about themselves they project. In Stigma the interplay of alternatives the stigmatized individual must face every day is brilliantly examined by one of America’s leading social analysts.]]> 168 Erving Goffman 0671622447 Χρήστος Αρμάντο 0 to-read 3.99 1963
author: Erving Goffman
name: Χρήστος Αρμάντο
average rating: 3.99
book published: 1963
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/03/02
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 43565344 A concise but wide-ranging personal history of the internet from—for the first time—the point of view of the user

In a shockingly short amount of time, the internet has bound people around the world together and torn us apart and changed not just the way we communicate but who we are and who we can be. It has created a new, unprecedented cultural space that we are all a part of—even if we don’t participate, that is how we participate—but by which we’re continually surprised, betrayed, enriched, befuddled. We have churned through platforms and technologies and in turn been churned by them. And yet, the internet is us and always has been.

In Lurking, Joanne McNeil digs deep and identifies the primary (if sometimes contradictory) concerns of people online: searching, safety, privacy, identity, community, anonymity, and visibility. She charts what it is that brought people online and what keeps us here even as the social equations of digital life—what we’re made to trade, knowingly or otherwise, for the benefits of the internet—have shifted radically beneath us. It is a story we are accustomed to hearing as tales of entrepreneurs and visionaries and dynamic and powerful corporations, but there is a more profound, intimate story that hasn’t yet been told.

Long one of the most incisive, ferociously intelligent, and widely respected cultural critics online, McNeil here establishes a singular vision of who we are now, tells the stories of how we became us, and helps us start to figure out what we do now.]]> 304 Joanne McNeil 0374194335 Χρήστος Αρμάντο 0 to-read 3.75 2020
author: Joanne McNeil
name: Χρήστος Αρμάντο
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2020
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/03/01
shelves: to-read
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]]> 3079197
Tout révèle le désir de poser comme les stars dans Cinémonde ou la publicité d'Ambre solaire, d'échapper à son corps humiliant et sans importance de petite fille. Les cuisses plus claires, ainsi que le haut des bras, dessinent la forme d'une robe et indiquent le caractère exceptionnel, pour cette enfant, d'un séjour ou d'une sortie à la mer. La plage est déserte. Au dos : août 1949, Sotte ville-sur-Mer".

Au travers de photos et de souvenirs laissés par les événements, les mots et les choses, Annie Ernaux donne à ressentir le passage des années, de l'après-guerre à aujourd'hui. En même temps, elle inscrit l'existence dans une forme nouvelle d'autobiographie, impersonnelle et collective.]]> 256 Annie Ernaux Χρήστος Αρμάντο 5 4.17 2008
author: Annie Ernaux
name: Χρήστος Αρμάντο
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2008
rating: 5
read at: 2023/02/28
date added: 2023/02/28
shelves:
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]]> 3985 639 Michael Chabon 0312282990 Χρήστος Αρμάντο 0 to-read 4.18 2000
author: Michael Chabon
name: Χρήστος Αρμάντο
average rating: 4.18
book published: 2000
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/02/14
shelves: to-read
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]]> 17332207
Our first glimpse of Marie is as a child: a girl in glasses waiting on a Brooklyn stoop for her beloved father to come home from work. A seemingly innocuous encounter with a young woman named Pegeen sets the bittersweet tone of this remarkable novel. Pegeen describes herself as an "amadan," a fool; indeed, soon after her chat with Marie, Pegeen tumbles down her own basement stairs. The magic of McDermott's novel lies in how it reveals us all as fools for this or that, in one way or another.

Marie's first heartbreak and her eventual marriage; her brother's brief stint as a Catholic priest, subsequent loss of faith, and eventual breakdown; the Second World War; her parents' deaths; the births and lives of Marie's children; the changing world of her Irish-American enclave in Brooklyn - McDermott sketches all of it with sympathy and insight. This is a novel that speaks of life as it is daily lived; a crowning achievement by one of the finest American writers at work today.

Membership]]> 232 Alice McDermott 0374281092 Χρήστος Αρμάντο 0 to-read 3.77 2013
author: Alice McDermott
name: Χρήστος Αρμάντο
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2013
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/02/14
shelves: to-read
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]]> 187020
Miles Roby has been slinging burgers at the Empire Grill for 20 years, a job that cost him his college education and much of his self-respect. What keeps him there? It could be his bright, sensitive daughter Tick, who needs all his help surviving the local high school. Or maybe it’s Janine, Miles�� soon-to-be ex-wife, who’s taken up with a noxiously vain health-club proprietor. Or perhaps it’s the imperious Francine Whiting, who owns everything in town–and seems to believe that “everything�� includes Miles himself. In Empire Falls Richard Russo delves deep into the blue-collar heart of America in a work that overflows with hilarity, heartache, and grace]]> 483 Richard Russo 0375726403 Χρήστος Αρμάντο 0 to-read 3.93 2001
author: Richard Russo
name: Χρήστος Αρμάντο
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2001
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/02/14
shelves: to-read
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]]> 32920226 Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9781501126062

In Jesmyn Ward’s first novel since her National Book Award–winning Salvage the Bones, this singular American writer brings the archetypal road novel into rural twenty-first-century America. Drawing on Morrison and Faulkner, The Odyssey and the Old Testament, Ward gives us an epochal story, a journey through Mississippi’s past and present that is both an intimate portrait of a family and an epic tale of hope and struggle. Ward is a major American writer, multiply awarded and universally lauded, and in Sing, Unburied, Sing she is at the height of her powers.

Jojo and his toddler sister, Kayla, live with their grandparents, Mam and Pop, and the occasional presence of their drug-addicted mother, Leonie, on a farm on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi. Leonie is simultaneously tormented and comforted by visions of her dead brother, which only come to her when she’s high; Mam is dying of cancer; and quiet, steady Pop tries to run the household and teach Jojo how to be a man. When the white father of Leonie’s children is released from prison, she packs her kids and a friend into her car and sets out across the state for Parchman farm, the Mississippi State Penitentiary, on a journey rife with danger and promise.

Sing, Unburied, Sing grapples with the ugly truths at the heart of the American story and the power, and limitations, of the bonds of family. Rich with Ward’s distinctive, musical language, Sing, Unburied, Sing is a majestic new work and an essential contribution to American literature.]]> 285 Jesmyn Ward Χρήστος Αρμάντο 0 to-read 4.00 2017
author: Jesmyn Ward
name: Χρήστος Αρμάντο
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2017
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/02/14
shelves: to-read
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]]> 42270835 Author of The Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead brilliantly dramatizes another strand of American history through the story of two boys sentenced to a hellish reform school in 1960s Florida.

Elwood Curtis has taken the words of Dr Martin Luther King to heart: he is as good as anyone. Abandoned by his parents, brought up by his loving, strict and clear-sighted grandmother, Elwood is about to enroll in the local black college. But given the time and the place, one innocent mistake is enough to destroy his future, and so Elwood arrives at The Nickel Academy, which claims to provide 'physical, intellectual and moral training' which will equip its inmates to become 'honorable and honest men'.

In reality, the Nickel Academy is a chamber of horrors, where physical, emotional and sexual abuse is rife, where corrupt officials and tradesmen do a brisk trade in supplies intended for the school, and where any boy who resists is likely to disappear 'out back'. Stunned to find himself in this vicious environment, Elwood tries to hold on to Dr King's ringing assertion, 'Throw us in jail, and we will still love you.' But Elwood's fellow inmate and new friend Turner thinks Elwood is naive and worse; the world is crooked, and the only way to survive is to emulate the cruelty and cynicism of their oppressors.

The tension between Elwood's idealism and Turner's skepticism leads to a decision which will have decades-long repercussions.

Based on the history of a real reform school in Florida that operated for one hundred and eleven years and warped and destroyed the lives of thousands of children, The Nickel Boys is a devastating, driven narrative by a great American novelist whose work is essential to understanding the current reality of the United States.]]> 213 Colson Whitehead Χρήστος Αρμάντο 0 to-read 4.25 2019
author: Colson Whitehead
name: Χρήστος Αρμάντο
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/02/14
shelves: to-read
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]]> 50485582
If all goes well, human history is just beginning. Our species could survive for billions of years - enough time to end disease, poverty, and injustice, and to flourish in ways unimaginable today. But this vast future is at risk. With the advent of nuclear weapons, humanity entered a new age, where we face existential catastrophes - those from which we could never come back. Since then, these dangers have only multiplied, from climate change to engineered pathogens and artificial intelligence. If we do not act fast to reach a place of safety, it will soon be too late.

Drawing on over a decade of research, The Precipice explores the cutting-edge science behind the risks we face. It puts them in the context of the greater story of humanity: showing how ending these risks is among the most pressing moral issues of our time. And it points the way forward, to the actions and strategies that can safeguard humanity.

An Oxford philosopher committed to putting ideas into action, Toby Ord has advised the US National Intelligence Council, the UK Prime Minister's Office, and the World Bank on the biggest questions facing humanity. In The Precipice, he offers a startling reassessment of human history, the future we are failing to protect, and the steps we must take to ensure that our generation is not the last.]]> 480 Toby Ord 1526600218 Χρήστος Αρμάντο 0 to-read 3.99 2020
author: Toby Ord
name: Χρήστος Αρμάντο
average rating: 3.99
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/02/14
shelves: to-read
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]]> 95558
When Kris Kelvin arrives at the planet Solaris to study the ocean that covers its surface, he finds a painful, hitherto unconscious memory embodied in the living physical likeness of a long-dead lover. Others examining the planet, Kelvin learns, are plagued with their own repressed and newly corporeal memories. The Solaris ocean may be a massive brain that creates these incarnate memories, though its purpose in doing so is unknown, forcing the scientists to shift the focus of their quest and wonder if they can truly understand the universe without first understanding what lies within their hearts.]]> 204 Stanisław Lem Χρήστος Αρμάντο 5 4.00 1961
author: Stanisław Lem
name: Χρήστος Αρμάντο
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1961
rating: 5
read at: 2016/05/18
date added: 2023/02/14
shelves:
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Εκπληκτική κεντρική ιδέα, με πανανθρωπινες ψυχολογικές προεκτάσεις και φιλοσοφικό εκτοπισμα. Κάποιες αφηγηματικές ασυνταξιες, σε ορισμένες περιπτώσεις ξερή γραφή και πλημμελώς δομημενοι χαρακτήρες-τυποι.
]]> 45026557 "Στο σπίτι μας το χρήμα πήγαινε καβάλα στ�� άλογο ενώ εμείς πηγαίναμε με τα πόδια. Έτσι, κάθε φορά που ερχόταν στον οικισμό μας καμιά ταινία που ο πατέρας μου τη θεωρούσε καλή –μ�� μοναδικό κριτήριο το όνομα του πρωταγωνιστή ή της πρωταγωνίστριας�� μάζευαν τα κέρματα ένα ένα, όσα ακριβώς χρειάζονταν για ένα εισιτήριο, και έστελναν εμένα να τη δω. Και μετά, μόλις γυρνούσα από το σινεμά, έπρεπε να αφηγηθώ την ταινία στην οικογένεια που είχε συγκεντρωθεί και περίμενε σύσσωμη στο σαλονάκι μας."

Σ' ένα μικρό χωριό στην έρημο Ατακάμα της Χιλής, όπου οι περισσότεροι κάτοικοι δουλεύουν στα ορυχεία του νίτρου, ένα χαρισματικό κορίτσι αποκτά απρόσμενα το ρόλο της αφηγήτριας ταινιών.

Οι άνθρωποι προτιμούν να ακούν εκείνη να αφηγείται και να ζωντανεύει μπροστά τους τις ταινίες παρά να τις βλέπουν στο σινεμά του οικισμού, και στριμώχνονται στο σπίτι της για να παρακολουθήσουν τις αυτοσχέδιες παραστάσεις της.
Μέσα από την πορεία της μικρής αφηγήτριας, μεταφερόμαστε στο άνυδρο τοπίο της πάμπας, όπου η ζωή είναι σκληρή και απογυμνωμένη από κάθε κίνητρο να τη ζήσεις.]]> 100 Hernán Rivera Letelier 618526725X Χρήστος Αρμάντο 4 4.05 2009
author: Hernán Rivera Letelier
name: Χρήστος Αρμάντο
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2009
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2023/02/13
shelves:
review:

]]> 69510 175 Miguel Delibes 8408020471 Χρήστος Αρμάντο 0 4.15 1981
author: Miguel Delibes
name: Χρήστος Αρμάντο
average rating: 4.15
book published: 1981
rating: 0
read at: 2023/02/13
date added: 2023/02/13
shelves:
review:

]]>