Beata's bookshelf: all

Beata's bookshelf: all en-US Fri, 11 Apr 2025 17:27:16 -0700 60 Beata's bookshelf: all 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg <![CDATA[The Empusium: A Health Resort Horror Story]]> 204316857 The Nobelist's latest masterwork, set in a sanitarium on the eve of World War I, probes the horrors that lie beneath our most hallowed ideas.

In September 1913, Mieczysław, a student suffering from tuberculosis, arrives at Wilhelm Opitz's Guesthouse for Gentlemen, a health resort in��Görbersdorf, what is now western Poland. Every day, its residents gather in the dining room to imbibe the hallucinogenic local liqueur, to obsess over money and status, and to discuss the great issues of the day: Will there be war? Monarchy or democracy? Do devils exist? Are women inherently inferior?

Meanwhile, disturbing things are beginning to happen in the guesthouse and its surroundings. As stories of shocking events in the surrounding highlands reach the men, a sense of dread builds. Someone—or something—seems to be watching them and attempting to infiltrate their world. Little does Mieczysław realize, as he attempts to unravel both the truths within himself and the mystery of the sinister forces beyond, that they have already chosen their next target.

A century after the publication of The Magic Mountain, Tokarczuk revisits Thomas Mann territory and lays claim to it, blending horror story, comedy, folklore, and feminist parable with brilliant storytelling.]]> 320 Olga Tokarczuk 0593712943 Beata 0 to-read 3.66 2022 The Empusium: A Health Resort Horror Story

The Empusium: A Health Resort Horror Story

author: Olga Tokarczuk
name: Beata
average rating: 3.66
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/11
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Big Swiss 60701439
One day, Greta recognizes Big Swiss’s voice in town and they quickly become enmeshed. While Big Swiss is unaware Greta has eavesdropped on her most intimate exchanges, Greta has never been more herself with anyone. Her attraction to Big Swiss overrides her guilt, and she’ll do anything to sustain the relationship…]]> 336 Jen Beagin 1982153083 Beata 5 american 3.69 2023

author: Jen Beagin
name: Beata
average rating: 3.69
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2025/04/11
date added: 2025/04/11
shelves: american
review:
It’s hard to describe how delightful the experience was of reading this.
]]> The Good Soldier Švejk 7629 The Good Soldier Švejk, celebrated Czech writer and anarchist Jaroslav Hašek combined dazzling wordplay and piercing satire in a hilariously subversive depiction of the futility of war.

Good-natured and garrulous, Švejk becomes the Austrian army's most loyal Czech soldier when he is called up on the outbreak of World War I -- although his bumbling attempts to get to the front serve only to prevent him from reaching it. Playing cards and getting drunk, he uses all his cunning and genial subterfuge to deal with the police, clergy, and officers who chivy him toward battle.

Cecil Parrott's vibrant translation conveys the brilliant irreverence of this classic about a hapless Everyman caught in a vast bureaucratic machine.]]> 752 Jaroslav Hašek Beata 0 to-read 4.09 1921 The Good Soldier Švejk

author: Jaroslav Hašek
name: Beata
average rating: 4.09
book published: 1921
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/06
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy]]> 42771901 232 Jenny Odell 1612197493 Beata 0 to-read 3.68 2019

How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy

author: Jenny Odell
name: Beata
average rating: 3.68
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/05
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> In the Café of Lost Youth 31839659 The elegant, haunting story of the forgotten people and places of Paris from the reigning Nobel Laureate.

Four narrators, a student from a café, a private detective hired by an aggrieved husband, the heroine herself and one of her lovers, construct a portrait of Jacqueline Delanque, otherwise known as Louki.

The daughter of a single mother who works in the Moulin Rouge, Louki grows up in poverty in Montmartre. Her one attempt to escape her background fails when she is rejected from the Lycée Jules-Ferry. She meanders on through life, into a cocaine habit, and begins frequenting the Café Condé, whose regulars call her "Louki". She drifts into marriage with a real estate agency director, but finds no satisfaction with him or his friends and so makes the simple decision not to return to him one evening. She turns instead to a young man almost as aimless and adrift as she, but who perhaps loves her all the same.

Ever-present through this story is the city of Paris, almost another character in her own right. This is the Paris of 'no-man's-lands', of lonely journeys on the last metro, or nocturnal walks along empty boulevards; of cafés where the lost youth wander in, searching for meaning, and the older generation sift through their memories of their own long-gone adolescence.]]> 153 Patrick Modiano 0857055267 Beata 0 to-read 3.65 2007 In the Café of Lost Youth

author: Patrick Modiano
name: Beata
average rating: 3.65
book published: 2007
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/28
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> All Fours 197798168
A semifamous artist announces her plan to drive cross-country, from LA to New York. Twenty minutes after leaving her husband and child at home, she spontaneously exits the freeway, beds down in a nondescript motel, and immerses herself in a temporary reinvention that turns out to be the start of an entirely different journey.

Miranda July’s second novel confirms the brilliance of her unique approach to fiction. With July’s wry voice, perfect comic timing, unabashed curiosity about human intimacy, and palpable delight in pushing boundaries, All Fours tells the story of one woman’s quest for a new kind of freedom. Part absurd entertainment, part tender reinvention of the sexual, romantic, and domestic life of a forty-five-year-old female artist, All Fours transcends expectation while excavating our beliefs about life lived as a woman. Once again, July hijacks the familiar and turns it into something new and thrillingly, profoundly alive.]]> 336 Miranda July 0593190262 Beata 0 to-read 3.54 2024 All Fours

author: Miranda July
name: Beata
average rating: 3.54
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/19
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> I Who Have Never Known Men 60811826 Deep underground, forty women live imprisoned in a cage. Watched over by guards, the women have no memory of how they got there, no notion of time, and only a vague recollection of their lives before.

As the burn of electric light merges day into night and numberless years pass, a young girl—the fortieth prisoner—sits alone and outcast in the corner. Soon she will show herself to be the key to the others' escape and survival in the strange world that awaits them above ground.

Jacqueline Harpman was born in Etterbeek, Belgium, in 1929, and fled to Casablanca with her family during WWII. Informed by her background as a psychoanalyst and her youth in exile, I Who Have Never Known Men is a haunting, heartbreaking post-apocalyptic novel of female friendship and intimacy, and the lengths people will go to maintain their humanity in the face of devastation. Back in print for the first time since 1997, Harpman’s modern classic is an important addition to the growing canon of feminist speculative literature.]]> 184 Jacqueline Harpman 1945492600 Beata 0 to-read 4.12 1995 I Who Have Never Known Men

author: Jacqueline Harpman
name: Beata
average rating: 4.12
book published: 1995
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/19
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Sucker Punch: Essays 211003937 The long-awaited follow-up from one of the most original and hilarious voices writing today.

Scaachi Koul’s first book was a collection of raw, perceptive, and hilarious essays reckoning with the issues of race, body image, love, friendship, and growing up the daughter of immigrants. When the time came to start writing her next book, Scaachi assumed she’d be updating her story with essays about her elaborate four-day wedding, settling down to domestic bliss, and continuing her never-ending arguments with her parents. Instead, the Covid pandemic hit, the world went into lockdown, Scaachi’s marriage fell apart, she lost her job, and her mother was diagnosed with cancer.

Sucker Punch is about what happens when the life you thought you’d be living radically changes course, everything you thought you knew about the world and yourself has tilted on its axis, and you have to start forging a new path forward. Scaachi employs her signature humor and fierce intelligence to interrogate her previous belief that fighting is the most effective tool for progress. She examines the fights she’s had—with her parents, her ex-husband, her friends, online strangers, and herself—all in an attempt to understand when a fight is worth having, and when it's better to walk away.]]> 272 Scaachi Koul 1250270502 Beata 0 to-read 4.07 2025 Sucker Punch: Essays

author: Scaachi Koul
name: Beata
average rating: 4.07
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/19
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Strange Pictures 216670080
A pregnant woman’s sketches on a seemingly innocuous blog conceal a chilling warning.

A child’s picture of his home contains a dark secret message.

A sketch made by a murder victim in his final moments leads an amateur sleuth down a rabbit hole that will reveal a horrifying reality.

Structured around these nine childlike drawings, every one holding a disturbing clue, this novel invites readers to piece together the harrowing truth behind each and the overarching backstory that connects them all. Strange Pictures is the bestselling international debut from mystery-horror YouTube sensation Uketsu—an enigmatic masked figure who has become one of Japan's most talked about contemporary authors.]]> 236 Uketsu 0063433087 Beata 1 japanese Bad bad not good 4.05 2022 Strange Pictures

author: Uketsu
name: Beata
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2022
rating: 1
read at: 2025/03/17
date added: 2025/03/17
shelves: japanese
review:
Bad bad not good
]]> <![CDATA[Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren't Growing Up]]> 198332459 350 Abigail Shrier Beata 4 american 3.98 2024

Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren't Growing Up

author: Abigail Shrier
name: Beata
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/18
date added: 2025/02/20
shelves: american
review:
I don’t agree with all conclusions but this is overall a heartening salvo for raising resilient, thriving kids.
]]> The Eighth Life 41071389 Six romances, one revolution, the story of the century.

'That night Stasia took an oath, swearing to learn the recipe by heart and destroy the paper. And when she was lying in her bed again, recalling the taste with all her senses, she was sure that this secret recipe could heal wounds, avert catastrophes, and bring people happiness. But she was wrong.'

At the start of the twentieth century, on the edge of the Russian Empire, a family prospers. It owes its success to a delicious chocolate recipe, passed down the generations with great solemnity and caution. A caution which is justified: this is a recipe for ecstasy that carries a very bitter aftertaste ...

Stasia learns it from her Georgian father and takes it north, following her new husband, Simon, to his posting at the centre of the Russian Revolution in St Petersburg. Stasia's is only the first in a symphony of grand but all too often doomed romances that swirl from sweet to sour in this epic tale of the red century.

Tumbling down the years, and across vast expanses of longing and loss, generation after generation of this compelling family hears echoes and sees reflections. Great characters and greater relationships come and go and come again; the world shakes, and shakes some more, and the reader rejoices to have found at last one of those glorious old books in which you can live and learn, be lost and found, and make indelible new friends.]]> 944 Nino Haratischwili 191161746X Beata 5 currently-reading, georgia 4.47 2014 The Eighth Life

author: Nino Haratischwili
name: Beata
average rating: 4.47
book published: 2014
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2025/02/18
shelves: currently-reading, georgia
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Three-Body Problem (Remembrance of Earth’s Past, #1)]]> 20518872 472 Liu Cixin Beata 5 chinese 4.08 2006

The Three-Body Problem (Remembrance of Earth’s Past, #1)

author: Liu Cixin
name: Beata
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2006
rating: 5
read at: 2025/02/18
date added: 2025/02/18
shelves: chinese
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Buy What You Love Without Going Broke: An Empowering Personal Finance Guide with a Mindful Spending Plan, Take Control of Your Finances Today!]]> 211096511 A relatable personal finance guide that gives a fresh take on how to control your impulse spending so you can stick to a budget and pay off debt, without the guilt and shame of traditional financial advice—from the hosts of the beloved Frugal Friends podcast.

There’s a lot of noise out there about how to spend (and not spend) your hard-earned money. But what if you made financial decisions based on what you value—instead of what others are telling you to value?

This is the empowering approach Jen Smith and Jill Sirianni, hosts of the Frugal Friends podcast, want you to take to improve your spending habits. They believe you can value anything (yes, anything!), whether that’s a daily latte, fancy dinners out, or vacations. But, despite what social media is saying, you don’t value everything.

The Frugal Friends�� wisdom comes from personal experience: Jen paid off $78,000 of debt in two years without a six-figure income, while Jill has a background in social work and downsized to an RV to pay off student loans. Together, their advice is both relatable and actionable.

In their debut book, they share a plan for sifting through what’s not important to find the things you truly love spending money on. You’ll learn how to

Analyze your current spending and identify what you value
Prioritize your values when you can’t afford everything
Identify the root causes of your impulse spending
Make your habit changes stick long-term
From credit card and student loan debt to the rising costs of childcare and homes; it has never been more important to get control of your spending. Jen and Jill show you how to do it in a way that’s healthy, not shameful, while exploring topics like overconsumption, self-worth, and the insidious history behind our consumption-obsessed culture.

If you want to reach your goals and feel good about your finances, Buy What You Love Without Going Broke offers a holistic approach to reshape the way you think about spending money.]]> 208 Jennifer Louise Smith 0063371316 Beata 0 to-read 4.11 2025

Buy What You Love Without Going Broke: An Empowering Personal Finance Guide with a Mindful Spending Plan, Take Control of Your Finances Today!

author: Jennifer Louise Smith
name: Beata
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/20
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Private Revolutions: Four Women Face China's New Social Order]]> 200158232
While serving as the deputy Beijing bureau chief of the Financial Times , Chinese-British journalist Yuan Yang began to notice common threads in the lives of her Chinese peers—women born during China’s turn toward capitalism in the 1980s and 1990s, who, despite the country's enormous economic gains during their lifetimes, were coming up against deeply entrenched barriers as they sought to achieve financial stability.

The product of seven years of intimate, in-depth reporting, this transporting and indelible book traces the journey of four such women as they try to make better lives for themselves and their families in the new Chinese economy. June and Siyue are among the few in their villages to graduate high school. Each makes her way to Beijing, June as a young professional and Siyue an entrepreneur. Like Siyue, Leiya lives with her grandparents in their village while her parents send money home; yearning for a different life than those of the women she sees around her, Leiya soon joins her parents in Shenzhen as an underage factory worker. Born to an urban middle-class family, Sam is outraged when her eyes are opened the poor treatment of workers, and becomes a labor activist, increasingly under threat by the authorities.

As the women grapple with government policies that threaten their businesses, their children's access to education, their choice of where to make a home, and, in Sam’s case, their lives, a vivid, damning, and urgent picture emerges of the previously unseen human cost of China’s rising economic tide—and the courage and perseverance of those caught in the swell.]]> 304 Yuan Yang 0593493907 Beata 0 to-read 4.00 2024 Private Revolutions: Four Women Face China's New Social Order

Private Revolutions: Four Women Face China's New Social Order

author: Yuan Yang
name: Beata
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/20
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Havoc 209594864 In the vein of The Bad Seed comes a twisty, atmospheric psychological suspense about a meddlesome elderly guest at a decadent luxury hotel who believes she has left her problematic past behind, until she decides to interfere in the lives of a young mother and her eight-year-old son, and finally meets her wicked match.

The war between age and youth has never been so vicious.

Eighty-one-year-old widow Maggie Burkhardt came to the Royal Karnak to escape. But not in quite the same way as most other guests who are relaxing at this threadbare luxury hotel on the banks of the Nile. Maggie, a compulsive fixer of other people’s lives, may have found herself in hot water at her last hotel in Switzerland and just might have needed to get out of there fast... But here at the Royal Karnak, under the hot Saharan sun, she has a comfortable suite, a loyal confidante in the hotel manager, Ahmed, and a handful of sympathetic friends, similar “long-termers�� who understand her still-vivid grief for her late husband, Peter. Here, she is merely the sweet old lady in Room 309.

One morning, however, Maggie notices a new arrival at a mournful-looking young mother named Tess and her impish eight-year-old, Otto. Eager to help, Maggie invites them into her world. But it isn’t long before Maggie realizes that in her longing to be a part of their family, she has let in an enemy much stronger than she bargained for. In scrawny, homely Otto, Maggie Burkhardt has finally met her match.]]> 256 Christopher Bollen 0063378892 Beata 0 to-read 3.58 2024 Havoc

author: Christopher Bollen
name: Beata
average rating: 3.58
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/29
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Love Poems 980426 Il Postino), Love Poems embraces the seascapes surrounding the poet, and his love Matilde Urrutia, their waves and shores saturated with a new, yearning eroticism.

And when you appear

all the rivers sound

in my body, bells

shake the sky,

and a hymn fills the world.

        © 1973 by Neruda & Walsh
]]> 90 Pablo Neruda 0811217299 Beata 2 spanish, hispanic 4.20 1952 Love Poems

author: Pablo Neruda
name: Beata
average rating: 4.20
book published: 1952
rating: 2
read at: 2024/12/25
date added: 2024/12/25
shelves: spanish, hispanic
review:
I’m probably not the target audience for this.
]]> Autocracy, Inc. 183932735 224 Anne Applebaum 0241627893 Beata 0 to-read 4.21 2024

author: Anne Applebaum
name: Beata
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/21
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Mars Room 36373648 338 Rachel Kushner 1476756554 Beata 0 to-read 3.41 2018

author: Rachel Kushner
name: Beata
average rating: 3.41
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/21
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Butter 200776812 The cult Japanese bestseller about a female gourmet cook and serial killer and the journalist intent on cracking her case, inspired by a true story.

There are two things that I can simply not tolerate: feminists and margarine.

Gourmet cook Manako Kajii sits in Tokyo Detention Center convicted of the serial murders of lonely businessmen, who she is said to have seduced with her delicious home cooking. The case has captured the nation’s imagination but Kajii refuses to speak with the press, entertaining no visitors. That is, until journalist Rika Machida writes a letter asking for her recipe for beef stew and Kajii can’t resist writing back.

Rika, the only woman in her news office, works late each night, rarely cooking more than ramen. As the visits unfold between her and the steely Kajii, they are closer to a masterclass in food than journalistic research. Rika hopes this gastronomic exchange will help her soften Kajii but it seems that she might be the one changing. With each meal she eats, something is awakening in her body, might she and Kaji have more in common than she once thought?

Inspired by the real case of the convicted con woman and serial killer, "The Konkatsu Killer," Asako Yuzuki’s Butter is a vivid, unsettling exploration of misogyny, obsession, romance and the transgressive pleasures of food in Japan.]]> 464 Asako Yuzuki 0063236400 Beata 0 to-read 3.51 2017 Butter

author: Asako Yuzuki
name: Beata
average rating: 3.51
book published: 2017
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/21
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Three Trapped Tigers 1473512 494 Guillermo Cabrera Infante 0571153704 Beata 0 to-read 3.25 2008

author: Guillermo Cabrera Infante
name: Beata
average rating: 3.25
book published: 2008
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/04
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order: Why Nations Succeed and Fail]]> 52962238
A few years ago, Ray Dalio noticed a confluence of political and economic conditions he hadn’t encountered before. They included huge debts and zero or near-zero interest rates that led to massive printing of money in the world’s three major reserve currencies; big political and social conflicts within countries, especially the US, due to the largest wealth, political, and values disparities in more than 100 years; and the rising of a world power (China) to challenge the existing world power (US) and the existing world order. The last time that this confluence occurred was between 1930 and 1945. This realization sent Dalio on a search for the repeating patterns and cause/effect relationships underlying all major changes in wealth and power over the last 500 years.

In this remarkable and timely addition to his Principles series, Dalio brings readers along for his study of the major empires—including the Dutch, the British, and the American—putting into perspective the “Big Cycle�� that has driven the successes and failures of all the world’s major countries throughout history. He reveals the timeless and universal forces behind these shifts and uses them to look into the future, offering practical principles for positioning oneself for what’s ahead.]]> 576 Ray Dalio 1982160276 Beata 0 to-read 4.26 2021 Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order: Why Nations Succeed and Fail

Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order: Why Nations Succeed and Fail

author: Ray Dalio
name: Beata
average rating: 4.26
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/29
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Fracture Zone: My Return to the Balkans]]> 50910 272 Simon Winchester 0060954949 Beata 0 to-read 3.64 1999

The Fracture Zone: My Return to the Balkans

author: Simon Winchester
name: Beata
average rating: 3.64
book published: 1999
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/16
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Raising Good Humans: A Mindful Guide to Breaking the Cycle of Reactive Parenting and Raising Kind, Confident Kids]]> 43618654 —Tara Brach, author of Radical Acceptance

A kinder, more compassionate world starts with kind and compassionate kids. In Raising Good Humans , you’ll find powerful and practical strategies to break free from “reactive parenting�� habits and raise kind, cooperative, and confident kids. Whether you’re running late for school, trying to get your child to eat their vegetables, or dealing with an epic meltdown in the checkout line at a grocery store—being a parent is hard work! And, as parents, many of us react in times of stress without thinking—often by yelling. But what if, instead of always reacting on autopilot, you could respond thoughtfully in those moments, keep your cool, and get from A to B on time and in one piece? With this book, you’ll find powerful mindfulness skills for calming your own stress response when difficult emotions arise. You’ll also discover strategies for cultivating respectful communication, effective conflict resolution, and reflective listening. In the process, you’ll learn to examine your own unhelpful patterns and ingrained reactions that reflect the generational habits shaped by your parents, so you can break the cycle and respond to your children in more skillful ways. When children experience a parent reacting with kindness and patience, they learn to act with kindness as well—thereby altering generational patterns for a kinder, more compassionate future. With this essential guide, you’ll see how changing your own “autopilot reactions�� can create a lasting positive impact, not just for your kids, but for generations to come.

An essential, must-read for all parents—now more than ever.

“To raise the children we hope to raise, we have to learn to become the person we hoped to be��. This wonderful book will help you handle the ride.��
��—KJ Dell’Antonia, author of How to Be a Happier Parent
��
“Hunter Clarke-Fields shares her wisdom and personal experience to help parents create peaceful families.��
—Joanna Faber and Julie King, coauthors of How to Talk So Little Kids Will Listen
��]]> 184 Hunter Clarke-Fields 1684033888 Beata 0 to-read 3.90 2019 Raising Good Humans: A Mindful Guide to Breaking the Cycle of Reactive Parenting and Raising Kind, Confident Kids

Raising Good Humans: A Mindful Guide to Breaking the Cycle of Reactive Parenting and Raising Kind, Confident Kids

author: Hunter Clarke-Fields
name: Beata
average rating: 3.90
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/16
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism]]> 199760476
Capitalism is dead. Welcome to technofeudalism. The perfect Christmas gift for the political visionaries in your life.

In his boldest and most far-reaching book, the visionary economist and number-one bestselling author Yanis Varoufakis shows how the owners of big tech became the world's feudal overlords �� replacing capitalism with a fundamentally new system that enslaves our minds, defies democracy and rewrite the rules of global power.

But as Varoufakis also reveals, technofeudalism contains new opportunities to thwart and overturn it, bringing into focus more clearly than ever the revolution we need to escape our digital prison.

‘An epochal, once-in-a-millennium shift . . . this isn't just new technology. This is the world grappling with an entirely new economic system and therefore political power�� Observer

‘An urgent demand to seize the means of computation�� CORY DOCTOROW

A FINANCIAL TIMES BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR]]> Yanis Varoufakis Beata 0 to-read 3.73 2023 Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism

author: Yanis Varoufakis
name: Beata
average rating: 3.73
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/10/02
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Chłopki. Opowieść o naszych babkach]]> 137135096 Służących do wszystkiego wraca do tematu wiejskich kobiet, ale tym razem to opowieść zza drugiej strony drzwi chłopskiej chałupy. Podczas, gdy Maryśki i Kaśki wyruszają do miast, by usługiwać w pańskich domach, na wsiach zostają ich siostry i matki: harujące od świtu do nocy gospodynie, folwarczne wyrobnice, mamki, dziewki pracujące w bogatszych gospodarstwach. Marzące o własnym łóżku, butach, szkole i o zostaniu panią. Modlące się o posag, byle "nie wyjść za dziada" i nie zostać wydane za morgi. Dzielące na czworo zapałki, by wyżywić rodzinę. Często analfabetki, bo "babom szkoły nie potrzeba".

Nasze babki i prababki.

Joanna Kuciel-Frydryszak daje wiejskim kobietom głos, by opowiedziały o swoim życiu: codziennym znoju, lękach i marzeniach. Ta mocna, głęboko dotykająca lektura pokazuje siłę kobiet, ich bezgraniczne oddanie rodzinie, ale też pragnienie zmiany i nierówną walkę o siebie w patriarchalnym społeczeństwie.]]> 496 Joanna Kuciel-Frydryszak 8367674316 Beata 0 to-read 4.43 2023 Chłopki. Opowieść o naszych babkach

author: Joanna Kuciel-Frydryszak
name: Beata
average rating: 4.43
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/28
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> �մ�ń 195481664 Kiedy Eichmedien stały się Nakomiadami? Kiedy Rastenburg był Rastemborkiem i kiedy stał się Kętrzynem? Carlshof �� Karolewem, a Groß Stürlack �� Sterławkami?

�մ�ń opowiada losy kilku pokoleń rodziny związanej z dawnymi Prusami Wschodnimi, gdzie od wieków mieszały się tożsamość polska, mazurska, niemiecka i litewska: Historię babki Janki, arystokratki Gudrun i jej ukochanego Maxa �� niemieckiego chirurga, ciotki Gertraud, syna Janki �� Wolfa, i wreszcie Alicji �� najmłodszej z rodziny, antropolożki, która musi zmierzyć się z koniecznością sprzedaży rodzinnej siedziby nad Gubrem �� domu pełnego wspomnień i naznaczonego tajemnicą.

Śledzimy losy bohaterów i bohaterek, począwszy od czasów wojny, katastrofy Königsbergu i Rastenburga, sowieckiej nawałnicy, przez komunistyczną Polskę �� już odmienioną, gdzie o przeszłości nie mówi się wcale lub mówi się szeptem �� aż do czasów współczesnych, w których rozgrywa się nowy uchodźczy dramat.]]> 408 Ishbel Szatrawska 8367121341 Beata 0 currently-reading, polish 4.28 2023 �մ�ń

author: Ishbel Szatrawska
name: Beata
average rating: 4.28
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/09/28
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]]> A Time of Gifts 12225254 This beloved account about an intrepid young Englishman on the first leg of his walk from London to Constantinople is simply one of the best works of travel literature ever written.��At the age of eighteen, Patrick Leigh Fermor set off from the heart of London on an epic journey—to walk to Constantinople. A Time of Gifts is the rich account of his adventures as far as Hungary, after which Between the Woods and the Water continues the story to the Iron Gates that divide the Carpathian and Balkan mountains. Acclaimed for its sweep and intelligence, Leigh Fermor’s book explores a remarkable moment in time. Hitler has just come to power but war is still ahead, as he walks through a Europe soon to be forever changed—through the Lowlands to Mitteleuropa, to Teutonic and Slav heartlands, through the baroque remains of the Holy Roman Empire; up the Rhine, and down to the Danube. At once a memoir of coming-of-age, an account of a journey, and a dazzling exposition of the English language, A Time of Gifts is also a portrait of a continent already showing ominous signs of the holocaust to come.]]> 340 Patrick Leigh Fermor 1590175174 Beata 0 to-read 4.02 1977

author: Patrick Leigh Fermor
name: Beata
average rating: 4.02
book published: 1977
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[In the Woods (Dublin Murder Squad, #1)]]> 237209
Twenty years later, the found boy, Rob Ryan, is a detective on the Dublin Murder Squad and keeps his past a secret. But when a twelve-year-old girl is found murdered in the same woods, he and Detective Cassie Maddox—his partner and closest friend—find themselves investigating a case chillingly similar to the previous unsolved mystery. Now, with only snippets of long-buried memories to guide him, Ryan has the chance to uncover both the mystery of the case before him and that of his own shadowy past.]]> 429 Tana French 0670038601 Beata 3 irish Trudging towards mystery. 3.75 2007 In the Woods (Dublin Murder Squad, #1)

author: Tana French
name: Beata
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2007
rating: 3
read at: 2024/09/14
date added: 2024/09/14
shelves: irish
review:
Trudging towards mystery.
]]> <![CDATA[Toxic: Women, Fame, and the Tabloid 2000s]]> 61783796
Welcome to celebrity culture in the early the reign of Perez Hilton, celebrity sex tapes, and dueling tabloids fed by paparazzi who were willing to do anything to get the shot. It was a time when the Internet was still the Wild West, and when slut-shaming, fat-shaming, and revenge porn were all considered perfectly legitimate. Celebrity was seen as a commodity to be consumed, and for the famous women of this era, they were never as popular—or as vulnerable—as when they were in crisis.

Toxic tells the stories of nine women who defined the hell of celebrity in the 2000s and explores how they were devoured by fame, how they attempted to control their own narratives, and how they succeeded or (more often) failed. These women come from all walks of fame—pop music, acting, reality TV, and WWE wrestling. Some of them you think you know already, and others will be less familiar, but Toxic reveals these women neither as pure victims nor as conniving strategists, but as complex individuals trying to navigate celebrity while under attack from a vicious and fast-changing media. Their portrayal has shaped the way that all women—famous or otherwise—are viewed today, and their experiences preempted the now-universal condition, especially thanks to social media, of living under the public gaze.

In this book, Ditum brings readers back to a time before second chances and redemption arcs, and traces the ripple effects that came in the wake of spending a decade vilifying our idols. We’ll see how these women’s stories intersect with the birth of YouTube, the rise of Internet pornography, and the emergence of Donald Trump as a political force. It’s time to come to terms with how those cultural events shaped the way we see ourselves, our bodies, our relationships, our aspirations, and our presence in the wider world. We are all products of the toxic decade.]]> 352 Sarah Ditum 1419763113 Beata 0 british 3.57 2023 Toxic: Women, Fame, and the Tabloid 2000s

Toxic: Women, Fame, and the Tabloid 2000s

author: Sarah Ditum
name: Beata
average rating: 3.57
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at: 2024/09/08
date added: 2024/09/08
shelves: british
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]]> Small Things Like These 58662236
Already an international bestseller, Small Things Like These is a deeply affecting story of hope, quiet heroism, and empathy from one of our most critically lauded and iconic writers.]]> 128 Claire Keegan 0802158749 Beata 0 irish 4.14 2021

author: Claire Keegan
name: Beata
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at: 2024/09/07
date added: 2024/09/07
shelves: irish
review:

]]> <![CDATA[How to Think Like a Roman Emperor: The Stoic Philosophy of Marcus Aurelius]]> 39863499 The life-changing principles of Stoicism taught through the story of its most famous proponent.

Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius was the final famous Stoic philosopher of the ancient world. The Meditations, his personal journal, survives to this day as one of the most loved self-help and spiritual classics of all time. In How to Think Like a Roman Emperor, cognitive psychotherapist Donald Robertson weaves the life and philosophy of Marcus Aurelius together seamlessly to provide a compelling modern-day guide to the Stoic wisdom followed by countless individuals throughout the centuries as a path to achieving greater fulfillment and emotional resilience.

How to Think Like a Roman Emperor takes readers on a transformative journey along with Marcus, following his progress from a young noble at the court of Hadrian—taken under the wing of some of the finest philosophers of his day—through to his reign as emperor of Rome at the height of its power. Robertson shows how Marcus used philosophical doctrines and therapeutic practices to build emotional resilience and endure tremendous adversity, and guides readers through applying the same methods to their own lives.

Combining remarkable stories from Marcus’s life with insights from modern psychology and the enduring wisdom of his philosophy, How to Think Like a Roman Emperor puts a human face on Stoicism and offers a timeless and essential guide to handling the ethical and psychological challenges we face today.]]> 304 Donald J. Robertson Beata 0 to-read 4.34 2019 How to Think Like a Roman Emperor: The Stoic Philosophy of Marcus Aurelius

How to Think Like a Roman Emperor: The Stoic Philosophy of Marcus Aurelius

author: Donald J. Robertson
name: Beata
average rating: 4.34
book published: 2019
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/09/05
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]]> <![CDATA[Get Out of Your Head: Stopping the Spiral of Toxic Thoughts]]> 52780142 You can choose hope in the midst of chaos. The visionary behind the million-strong IF:Gathering challenges you to exercise your God-given power to shift negative thinking patterns and take back control of your thoughts and emotions.

Are your thoughts holding you captive? I’ll never be good enough. Other people have better lives than I do. God couldn’t really love me. Jennie Allen knows what it’s like to swirl in a spiral of destructive thoughts, but she also knows we don’t have to stay stuck in toxic thinking patterns.

As she discovered in her own life, God built a way for us to escape that downward spiral. Freedom comes when we refuse to be victims to our thoughts and realize we have already been equipped with power from God to fight and win the war for our minds.

In Get Out of Your Head, Jennie inspires and equips us to transform our emotions, our outlook, and even our circumstances by taking control of our thoughts. Our enemy is determined to get in our heads to make us feel helpless, overwhelmed, and incapable of making a difference for the kingdom of God. But when we submit our minds to Christ, the promises and goodness of God flood our lives in remarkable ways.

It starts in your head. And from there, the possibilities are endless.]]> 223 Jennie Allen 1601429649 Beata 0 to-read 4.06 2020 Get Out of Your Head: Stopping the Spiral of Toxic Thoughts

Get Out of Your Head: Stopping the Spiral of Toxic Thoughts

author: Jennie Allen
name: Beata
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2020
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/09/05
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]]> <![CDATA[Our Crumbling Foundation: How We Solve Canada's Housing Crisis]]> 195104435 NATIONAL BESTSELLER

An urgent and illuminating examination of the unrelenting housing crisis Canadians find ourselves facing, by��Balsillie Prize finalist and CBC Radio host Gregor Craigie, Our Crumbling Foundation offers real-life solutions from around the world and hope for new housing innovation in the face of seemingly impossible obstacles.

Canada is experiencing��a housing shortage. Although house prices in major Canadian cities appear to have topped out in early 2023, new housing isn’t coming onto the market quickly enough. Rising interest rates have only tightened the pressure on buyers, and renters, too, as rising mortgage rates cost landlords more, which are passed along to tenants in rent increases. Even with the recent federal budget commitment to bring more housing online by 2030, there will still be a shortfall of 3.5 million homes by 2030.

Gregor Craigie is a CBC journalist in Victoria, one of the highest-priced housing markets in the country. On his daily radio show On The Island he's been talking for over 15 years to local experts and to those across the country about housing. Craigie has travelled to many of the places he profiles in the book, and in his interviews with Canadians he presents the human face of the shortfall as he speaks with renters, owners and homeless people, exploring their varying predicaments and perspectives. He then shows, through comparable profiles of people across the globe, how other North American and international jurisdictions (Tokyo, Paris, Berlin, Helsinki, Singapore, Ireland, to name a few) are housing their citizens��better, faster and with determination—solutions that could be put into practice here.

With passion, knowledge and vigour, Craigie explains how Canada reached this critical impasse and will convince those who may not yet recognize how badly our entire country is in need of change. Our Crumbling Foundation provides hope for finding our way out of the crisis by recommending a number of approaches at all levels of government. The prescription for how we’re going to house ourselves and do so equitably, requires not just a business solution, nor simply a social solution.

]]> 320 Gregor Craigie 1039009395 Beata 0 to-read 4.07 2024 Our Crumbling Foundation: How We Solve Canada's Housing Crisis

author: Gregor Craigie
name: Beata
average rating: 4.07
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/09/02
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]]> <![CDATA[The Peasant Prince: Thaddeus Kosciuszko and the Age of Revolution]]> 6399604
A lifelong champion of the common man and woman, he was ahead of his time in advocating tolerance and standing up for the rights of slaves, Native Americans, women, serfs, and Jews. Following the end of the war, Kosciuszko returned to Poland and was a leading figure in that nation’s Constitutional movement. He became Commander in Chief of the Polish Army and valiantly led a defense against a Russian invasion, and in 1794 he led what was dubbed the Kosciuszko Uprising—a revolt of Polish-Lithuanian forces against the Russian occupiers. Captured during the revolt, he was ultimately pardoned by Russia’s Paul I and lived the remainder of his life as an international celebrity and a vocal proponent for human rights. Thomas Jefferson, with whom Kosciuszko had an ongoing correspondence on the immorality of slaveholding, called him “as pure a son of liberty as I have ever known.�� A lifelong bachelor with a knack for getting involved in doomed relationships, Kosciuszko navigated the tricky worlds of royal intrigue and romance while staying true to his ultimate passion—the pursuit of freedom for all. This definitive and exhaustively researched biography fills a long-standing gap in historical literature with its account of a dashing and inspiring revolutionary figure.]]> 384 Alex Storozynski 0312388020 Beata 0 to-read 4.24 2009 The Peasant Prince: Thaddeus Kosciuszko and the Age of Revolution

The Peasant Prince: Thaddeus Kosciuszko and the Age of Revolution

author: Alex Storozynski
name: Beata
average rating: 4.24
book published: 2009
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/09/02
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]]> <![CDATA[The Shortest History of Israel and Palestine: From Zionism to Intifadas and the Struggle for Peace (The Shortest History Series)]]> 60831870
The ongoing struggle between Israel and Palestine is one of the most bitter conflicts in history, with profound global consequences. In this book, Middle East expert Michael Scott-Baumann succinctly describes its origins and charts its evolution from civil war to the present day. Each chapter offers a lucid explanation of the politics and ends with personal testimony from Palestinians and Israelis whose lives have been impacted by the dispute.�� While presenting competing interpretations, Scott-Baumann examines the key flash points, including the early role of the British, the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, the Six-Day War of 1967, and the Trump administration’s peace plan, pitched as “the deal of the century,�� in 2020. He delineates both the nature of Israeli control over the Palestinian territories and Palestinian resistance—going to the heart of the clashes in recent decades. The result is an indispensable history, including a time line, glossary, and analysis of why efforts to restore peace have continually failed and what it will take to succeed.]]> 288 Michael Scott-Baumann 1615199500 Beata 0 to-read 4.10 2023 The Shortest History of Israel and Palestine: From Zionism to Intifadas and the Struggle for Peace (The Shortest History Series)

The Shortest History of Israel and Palestine: From Zionism to Intifadas and the Struggle for Peace (The Shortest History Series)

author: Michael Scott-Baumann
name: Beata
average rating: 4.10
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/09/02
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]]> Ziele na kraterze 2699074 400 Melchior Wańkowicz 8387080268 Beata 0 to-read 3.66 1957

author: Melchior Wańkowicz
name: Beata
average rating: 3.66
book published: 1957
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything]]> 204236707 From the New York Times bestselling author of The Signal and the Noise, the definitive guide to our era of risk—and the players raising the stakes In the bestselling The Signal and the Noise, Nate Silver showed how forecasting would define the age of Big Data. Now, in this timely and riveting new book, Silver investigates "The River," or those whose mastery of risk allows them to shape—and dominate—so much of modern life.��These professional risk takers—poker players and hedge fund managers, crypto true-believers and blue-chip art collectors—can teach us much about navigating the uncertainty of the 21st��century. By embedding within these worlds, Silver offers insight into a range of issues that affect us all, from the frontiers of finance to the future of AI.The River has increasing amounts of wealth and power in our society, and understanding their mindset—including the flaws in their thinking—is key to understanding what drives technology and the global economy today. There are certain commonalities in this otherwise diverse high tolerance for risk; appreciation of uncertainty; affinity for numbers; skill at de-coupling; self-reliance and a distrust of the conventional wisdom. For the River, complexity is baked in, and the work is how to navigate it, without going beyond the pale.Taking us behind-the-scenes from casinos to venture capital firms to meetings of the effective altruism movement, On the Edge is a deeply-reported, all-access journey into a hidden world of powerbrokers and risk takers.]]> 576 Nate Silver 1594204128 Beata 0 to-read 3.61 2024 On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything

On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything

author: Nate Silver
name: Beata
average rating: 3.61
book published: 2024
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]]> <![CDATA[The Devil at His Elbow: Alex Murdaugh and the Fall of a Southern Dynasty]]> 210454076 Power, privilege, and blood—this is the definitive and thrilling true story of Alex Murdaugh’s violent downfall, from a veteran Wall Street Journal reporter who has become an authority on the case.
��
Alex Murdaugh was a benevolent dictator—the president of the South Carolina trial lawyers�� association, a political boss, a part-time prosecutor, and a partner in his family’s law firm. He was always ready with a favor, a drink, and an invitation to Moselle, his family’s 1,700-acre hunting estate. The Murdaugh name ignited respect—and fear—for a hundred miles.

When he murdered his wife, Maggie, and son Paul at Moselle on a dark summer night, the fragile façade of Alex’s world could no longer hold. His forefathers had covered up a midnight suicide at a remote railroad crossing, a bootlegging ring run from a courthouse, and the attempted murder of a pregnant lover. Alex, too, almost walked away from his unspeakable crimes with his reputation intact, but his downfall was secured by a twist of fate, some stray mistakes, and a fateful decision by an old friend who’d finally seen enough.

Why would a man who had everything kill his wife and grown son? To unwind the roots of Alex’s ruin, award-winning journalist Valerie Bauerlein reported not just from the courthouse every day but also along the backroads and through the tidal marshes of South Carolina’s Lowcountry. When the jurors made their pilgrimage to the crime scene, trying to envision Maggie and Paul’s last moments, she walked right behind them, sensing the ghosts that haunt the Murdaughs�� now-shattered legacy.

Through masterful research and cinematic writing, The Devil at His Elbow is a transporting journey through Alex’s life, the night of the murders, and the investigation that culminated in a trial that held tens of millions spellbound. With her stunning insights and fearless instinct for the truth, Bauerlein uncovers layers of the Murdaugh murder case that have not been told.]]> 480 Valerie Bauerlein 059350058X Beata 0 to-read 4.46 2024 The Devil at His Elbow: Alex Murdaugh and the Fall of a Southern Dynasty

The Devil at His Elbow: Alex Murdaugh and the Fall of a Southern Dynasty

author: Valerie Bauerlein
name: Beata
average rating: 4.46
book published: 2024
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]]> Patriot: A Memoir 210943348
Alexei Navalny began writing Patriot shortly after his near-fatal poisoning in 2020. It is the full story of his life: his youth, his call to activism, his marriage and family, his commitment to challenging a world super-power determined to silence him, and his total conviction that change cannot be resisted—and will come.

In vivid, page-turning detail, including never-before-seen correspondence from prison, Navalny recounts, among other things, his political career, the many attempts on his life, and the lives of the people closest to him, and the relentless campaign he and his team waged against an increasingly dictatorial regime.

Written with the passion, wit, candor, and bravery for which he was justly acclaimed, Patriot is Navalny’s final letter to the world: a moving account of his last years spent in the most brutal prison on earth; a reminder of why the principles of individual freedom matter so deeply; and a rousing call to continue the work for which he sacrificed his life.

“This book is a testament not only to Alexei’s life, but to his unwavering commitment to the fight against dictatorship—a fight he gave everything for, including his life. Through its pages, readers will come to know the man I loved deeply—a man of profound integrity and unyielding courage. Sharing his story will not only honor his memory but also inspire others to stand up for what is right and to never lose sight of the values that truly matter.�� —Yulia Navalnaya]]> 496 Alexei Navalny 0593320964 Beata 0 to-read 4.55 2024 Patriot: A Memoir

author: Alexei Navalny
name: Beata
average rating: 4.55
book published: 2024
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]]> <![CDATA[Olive, Again (Olive Kitteridge, #2)]]> 43984883 San Francisco Chronicle).��The��New Yorker��has said that Elizabeth Strout “animates the ordinary with an astonishing force,�� and she has never done so more clearly than in these pages, where the iconic Olive struggles to understand not only herself and her own life but the lives of those around her in the town of Crosby, Maine. Whether with a teenager coming to terms with the loss of her father, a young woman about to give birth during a hilariously inopportune moment, a nurse who confesses a secret high school crush, or a lawyer who struggles with an inheritance she does not want to accept, the unforgettable Olive will continue to startle us, to move us, and to inspire��us—in Strout’s words—“to bear the burden of the mystery with as much grace as we can.”]]> 289 Elizabeth Strout 0812996542 Beata 0 to-read 4.06 2019 Olive, Again (Olive Kitteridge, #2)

author: Elizabeth Strout
name: Beata
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2019
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/08/18
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]]> <![CDATA[The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Caused an Epidemic of Mental Illness]]> 171681821
A must-read for all parents: the generation-defining investigation into the collapse of youth mental health in the era of smartphones, social media, and big tech—and a plan for a healthier, freer childhood.

“With tenacity and candor, Haidt lays out the consequences that have come with allowing kids to drift further into the virtual world . . . While also offering suggestions and solutions that could help protect a new generation of kids.�� —Shannon Carlin, ,i>TIME, 100 Must-Read Books of 2024

After more than a decade of stability or improvement, the mental health of adolescents plunged in the early 2010s. Rates of depression, anxiety, self-harm, and suicide rose sharply, more than doubling on many measures. Why?

In The Anxious Generation, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt lays out the facts about the epidemic of teen mental illness that hit many countries at the same time. He then investigates the nature of childhood, including why children need play and independent exploration to mature into competent, thriving adults. Haidt shows how the “play-based childhood�� began to decline in the 1980s, and how it was finally wiped out by the arrival of the “phone-based childhood�� in the early 2010s. He presents more than a dozen mechanisms by which this “great rewiring of childhood�� has interfered with children’s social and neurological development, covering everything from sleep deprivation to attention fragmentation, addiction, loneliness, social contagion, social comparison, and perfectionism. He explains why social media damages girls more than boys and why boys have been withdrawing from the real world into the virtual world, with disastrous consequences for themselves, their families, and their societies.

Most important, Haidt issues a clear call to action. He diagnoses the “collective action problems�� that trap us, and then proposes four simple rules that might set us free. He describes steps that parents, teachers, schools, tech companies, and governments can take to end the epidemic of mental illness and restore a more humane childhood.

Haidt has spent his career speaking truth backed by data in the most difficult landscapes—communities polarized by politics and religion, campuses battling culture wars, and now the public health emergency faced by Gen Z. We cannot afford to ignore his findings about protecting our children—and ourselves—from the psychological damage of a phone-based life.]]> 400 Jonathan Haidt 0593655036 Beata 0 currently-reading, american 4.36 2024 The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Caused an Epidemic of Mental Illness

The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Caused an Epidemic of Mental Illness

author: Jonathan Haidt
name: Beata
average rating: 4.36
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/08/12
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]]> <![CDATA[Kilo: Inside the Deadliest Cocaine Cartels—From the Jungles to the Streets]]> 44285788
"Toby Muse’s tautly written account of his intimate prowl through Colombia’s narco world is both compelling and unforgettable. With Kilo, cocaine now has its own Dispatches. Simply kickass.��

�� Jon Lee Anderson, The New Yorker and author of Che A Revolutionary Life

Cocaine is glamour, sex and murder. From the badlands of Colombia, it stretches across the globe, seducing, corrupting and destroying. A product that must be produced, distributed, and protected, it is both a harbinger of violence and a source of immense wealth. Beginning in the jungles and mountains of Colombia, it filters down to countryside villages and the nightclubs of the cities, attracting money, sex, and death. Each step in the life of a kilo reveals a different criminal underworld with its own players, rules, and dangers, ranging from the bizarre to the diabolical. The killers, the drug-lords, all find themselves seduced by cocaine and trapped in her world.

Seasoned war correspondent Toby Muse has witnessed each level of this underworld, fueled by the appetite for cocaine in America and Europe. In this riveting chronicle, he takes the reader inside Colombia’s notorious drug cartels to offer a never before look at the drug trade. Following a kilo of cocaine from its production in a clandestine laboratory to the smugglers who ship it abroad, he reveals the human lives behind the drug’s complicated legacy. Reporting on Colombia for the world’s most prestigious networks and publications, Muse gained unprecedented access to the extraordinary people who survive on the drug trade—farmers, smugglers, assassins—and the drug lords and their lovers controlling these multi-billion dollar enterprises. Uncovering stories of violence, sex, and money, he shows the allure and the madness of cocaine. And how the War on Drugs has been no match for cocaine.

Piercing this veiled world, Kilo is a gripping portrait of a country struggling to end this deadly trade even as the riches flow. A human portrait of criminals and the shocking details of their lives, Kilo is a chilling, unforgettable story that takes you deep into the belly of the beast.

Kilo includes 16 pages of photographs.]]> 320 Toby Muse 0062905317 Beata 0 to-read 4.19 2020 Kilo: Inside the Deadliest Cocaine Cartels—From the Jungles to the Streets

Kilo: Inside the Deadliest Cocaine Cartels—From the Jungles to the Streets

author: Toby Muse
name: Beata
average rating: 4.19
book published: 2020
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/08/10
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]]> Erasure 355862 We's Lives in Da Ghetto, the exploitative debut novel of a young, middle-class black woman who once visited "some relatives in Harlem for a couple of days." Hailed as an authentic representation of the African American experience, the book is a national bestseller and its author feted on the Kenya Dunston television show. The book's success rankles all the more as Monk's own most recent novel has just notched its seventh rejection.

Even as his career as a writer appears to have stalled, Monk finds himself coping with changes in his personal life. In need of distraction from old memories, new responsibilities, and his professional stagnation, Monk composes, in a heat of inspiration and energy, a fierce parody of the sort of exploitative, ghetto wanna-be lit represented by We's Lives in Da Ghetto.

But when his agent sends this literary indictment (included here in its entirety) out to publishers, it is greeted as an authentic new voice of black America. Monk -- or his pseudonymous alter ego, Stagg R. Leigh -- is offered money, fame, success beyond anything he has known. And as demand begins to build for meetings with and appearances by Leigh, Monk is faced with a whole new set of problems.]]> 280 Percival Everett 0786888156 Beata 0 to-read 4.17 2001 Erasure

author: Percival Everett
name: Beata
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2001
rating: 0
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]]> The Years 145625252 Considered by many to be the iconic French memoirist’s defining work and a breakout bestseller when published in France in 2008.

The Years is a personal narrative of the period 1941 to 2006 told through the lens of memory, impressions past and present—even projections into the future—photos, books, songs, radio, television and decades of advertising, headlines, contrasted with intimate conflicts and writing notes from 6 decades of diaries.

Local dialect, words of the times, slogans, brands and names for the ever-proliferating objects, are given voice here. The voice we recognize as the author’s continually dissolves and re-emerges. Ernaux makes the passage of time palpable. Time itself, inexorable, narrates its own course, consigning all other narrators to anonymity. A new kind of autobiography emerges, at once subjective and impersonal, private and collective.

On its 2008 publication in France, The Years came as a surprise. Though Ernaux had for years been hailed as a beloved, bestselling and award-winning author, The Years was in many ways a departure: both an intimate memoir “written�� by entire generations, and a story of generations telling a very personal story. Like the generation before hers, the narrator eschews the “I�� for the “we�� (or “they��, or “one��) as if collective life were inextricably intertwined with a private life that in her parents�� generation ceased to exist. She writes of her parents�� generation (and could be writing of her own book): “From a common fund of hunger and fear, everything was told in the “we�� and impersonal pronouns.”]]> 240 Annie Ernaux 1609807871 Beata 0 to-read 4.22 2008 The Years

author: Annie Ernaux
name: Beata
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2008
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]]> The Plot Against America 703
For one boy growing up in Newark, Lindbergh's election is the first in a series of ruptures that threatens to destroy his small, safe corner of America - and with it, his mother, his father, and his older brother.]]> 391 Philip Roth 1400079497 Beata 0 to-read 3.79 2004 The Plot Against America

author: Philip Roth
name: Beata
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2004
rating: 0
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shelves: to-read
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]]> <![CDATA[Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity]]> 13547504 Far from the Tree is that being exceptional is at the core of the human condition—that difference is what unites us. He writes about families coping with deafness, dwarfism, Down's syndrome, autism, schizophrenia, or multiple severe disabilities; with children who are prodigies, who are conceived in rape, who become criminals, who are transgender. While each of these characteristics is potentially isolating, the experience of difference within families is universal, and Solomon documents triumphs of love over prejudice in every chapter.

All parenting turns on a crucial question: to what extent should parents accept their children for who they are, and to what extent they should help them become their best selves. Drawing on ten years of research and interviews with more than three hundred families, Solomon mines the eloquence of ordinary people facing extreme challenges.

Elegantly reported by a spectacularly original and compassionate thinker, Far from the Tree explores how people who love each other must struggle to accept each other—a theme in every family’s life.]]> 962 Andrew Solomon Beata 0 to-read 4.25 2012 Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity

Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity

author: Andrew Solomon
name: Beata
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2012
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/08/10
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets]]> 30200112
Bringing together dozens of voices in her distinctive documentary style, Secondhand Time is a monument to the collapse of the USSR, charting the decline of Soviet culture and speculating on what will rise from the ashes of Communism.

As in all her books, Alexievich gives voice to women and men whose stories are lost in the official narratives of nation-states, creating a powerful alternative history from the personal and private stories of individuals.]]> 496 Svetlana Alexievich 1922253995 Beata 0 to-read 4.44 2013 Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets

Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets

author: Svetlana Alexievich
name: Beata
average rating: 4.44
book published: 2013
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/08/10
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Around the World in Eighty Days]]> 54479 252 Jules Verne 014044906X Beata 3 children-s, french 3.95 1872

author: Jules Verne
name: Beata
average rating: 3.95
book published: 1872
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2024/08/07
shelves: children-s, french
review:

]]> The Lost Daughter 1058564
But she soon finds herself intrigued by Nina, a young mother on the beach, eventually striking up a conversation with her. After Nina confides a dark secret, one seemingly trivial occurrence leads to events that could destroy Nina’s family.]]> 140 Elena Ferrante 1933372427 Beata 4 3.70 2006 The Lost Daughter

author: Elena Ferrante
name: Beata
average rating: 3.70
book published: 2006
rating: 4
read at: 2020/12/07
date added: 2024/08/07
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review:
Another spellbinding tale woven by Ferrante. How is everything she touches so brutal and miraculous?
]]> <![CDATA[Rogues: True Stories of Grifters, Killers, Rebels and Crooks]]> 59148726 From the prize-winning, New York Times bestselling author of Say Nothing and Empire of Pain, twelve enthralling stories of skulduggery and intrigue by one of the most decorated journalists of our time.

Patrick Radden Keefe has garnered prizes ranging from the National Magazine Award to the Orwell Prize to the National Book Critics Circle Award for his meticulously reported, hypnotically engaging work on the many ways people behave badly. Rogues brings together a dozen of his most celebrated articles from The New Yorker. As Keefe says in his preface, "They reflect on some of my abiding preoccupations: crime and corruption, secrets and lies, the permeable membrane separating licit and illicit worlds, the bonds of family, the power of denial."

Keefe brilliantly explores the intricacies of forging $150,000 vintage wines, examines whether a whistleblower who dared to expose money laundering at a Swiss bank is a hero or a fabulist, spends time in Vietnam with Anthony Bourdain, chronicles the quest to bring down a cheerful international black market arms merchant, and profiles a passionate death penalty attorney who represents the "worst of the worst," among other bravura works of literary journalism.

The appearance of his byline in The New Yorker is always an event, and collected here for the first time readers can see his work forms an always enthralling but deeply human portrait of criminals and rascals, as well as those who stand up against them.]]> 368 Patrick Radden Keefe 0385548516 Beata 3 american 3.5 stars- a mixed bag. 4.00 2022 Rogues: True Stories of Grifters, Killers, Rebels and Crooks

Rogues: True Stories of Grifters, Killers, Rebels and Crooks

author: Patrick Radden Keefe
name: Beata
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2022
rating: 3
read at: 2024/07/19
date added: 2024/07/19
shelves: american
review:
3.5 stars- a mixed bag.
]]> <![CDATA[Morning After the Revolution: Dispatches from the Wrong Side of History]]> 61685983 From former��New York Times��reporter Nellie Bowles, a look at how some of the most educated people in America lost their minds—and how she almost did, too.

As a Hillary voter, a��New York Times��reporter,��and frequent attendee at her local gay bars,��Nellie Bowles fit right in with her San Francisco�� neighbors and friends—until she started questioning�� whether the progressive movement she knew and loved was actually helping people. When her colleagues suggested that asking such questions meant she was “on the wrong side of history,�� Bowles did what any reporter worth her salt would do: she started investigating for herself. The answers she found were stranger—and funnier—than she expected.

In��Morning After the Revolution, Bowles gives readers a front-row seat to the absurd drama of a political movement gone mad. With irreverent accounts of attending a multiday course on “The Toxic Trends of Whiteness,�� following the social justice activists who run “Abolitionist Entertainment LLC,�� and trying to please the��New York Times’s��“disinformation czar,�� she deftly exposes the more comic excesses of a movement that went from a sideshow to the very center of American life.

Deliciously funny and painfully insightful,��Morning After the Revolution��is a moment of collective psychosis preserved in amber. This is an unmissable debut by one of America’s sharpest journalists.

]]> 272 Nellie Bowles 0593420144 Beata 3 american 3.90 2024 Morning After the Revolution: Dispatches from the Wrong Side of History

author: Nellie Bowles
name: Beata
average rating: 3.90
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2024/07/14
date added: 2024/07/14
shelves: american
review:

]]> <![CDATA[A Court of Thorns and Roses (A Court of Thorns and Roses, #1)]]> 50659467
At least, he’s not a beast all the time.

As she adapts to her new home, her feelings for the faerie, Tamlin, transform from icy hostility into a fiery passion that burns through every lie she’s been told about the beautiful, dangerous world of the Fae. But something is not right in the faerie lands. An ancient, wicked shadow is growing, and Feyre must find a way to stop it, or doom Tamlin—and his world—forever.

From bestselling author Sarah J. Maas comes a seductive, breathtaking book that blends romance, adventure, and faerie lore into an unforgettable read.]]> 419 Sarah J. Maas 1635575567 Beata 3 american 4.16 2015 A Court of Thorns and Roses (A Court of Thorns and Roses, #1)

A Court of Thorns and Roses (A Court of Thorns and Roses, #1)

author: Sarah J. Maas
name: Beata
average rating: 4.16
book published: 2015
rating: 3
read at: 2024/07/13
date added: 2024/07/13
shelves: american
review:
3.5 stars. A fun, stupid romp.
]]> <![CDATA[Liberalism and Its Discontents]]> 58837538 The Origins of Political Order.

Classical liberalism is in a state of crisis. Developed in the wake of Europe's wars over religion and nationalism, liberalism is a system for governing diverse societies, which is grounded in fundamental principles of equality and the rule of law. It emphasizes the rights of individuals to pursue their own forms of happiness free from encroachment by government.

It's no secret that liberalism didn't always live up to its own ideals. In America, many people were denied equality before the law. Who counted as full human beings worthy of universal rights was contested for centuries, and only recently has this circle expanded to include women, African Americans, LGBTQ+ people, and others. Conservatives complain that liberalism empties the common life of meaning. As the renowned political philosopher Francis Fukuyama shows in Liberalism and Its Discontents, the principles of liberalism have also, in recent decades, been pushed to new extremes by both the right and the left: neoliberals made a cult of economic freedom, and progressives focused on identity over human universality as central to their political vision. The result, Fukuyama argues, has been a fracturing of our civil society and an increasing peril to our democracy.

In this short, clear account of our current political discontents, Fukuyama offers an essential defense of a revitalized liberalism for the twenty-first century.]]> 178 Francis Fukuyama 0374606714 Beata 0 to-read 3.89 2022 Liberalism and Its Discontents

author: Francis Fukuyama
name: Beata
average rating: 3.89
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/07/10
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]]> <![CDATA[Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers]]> 56769575
For two thousand years, cadavers—some willingly, some unwittingly—have been involved in science’s boldest strides and weirdest undertakings. They’ve tested France’s first guillotines, ridden the NASA Space Shuttle, been crucified in a Parisian laboratory to test the authenticity of the Shroud of Turin, and helped solve the mystery of TWA Flight 800. For every new surgical procedure, from heart transplants to gender confirmation surgery, cadavers have helped make history in their quiet way. Stiff investigates the strange lives of our bodies postmortem and answers the question: What should we do after we die?]]> 320 Mary Roach 0393881725 Beata 0 to-read 4.13 2003 Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers

Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers

author: Mary Roach
name: Beata
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2003
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/07/10
shelves: to-read
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]]> Annie Bot 156023123
She’s learning, too.

Doug says he loves that Annie’s artificial intelligence makes her seem more like a real woman, but the more human Annie becomes, the less perfectly she behaves. As Annie's relationship with Doug grows more intricate and difficult, she starts to wonder whether Doug truly desires what he says he does. In such an impossible paradox, what does Annie owe herself?]]> 231 Sierra Greer 0063312697 Beata 0 to-read 3.81 2024 Annie Bot

author: Sierra Greer
name: Beata
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/07/04
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Beloved (Beloved Trilogy, #1) 6149 Staring unflinchingly into the abyss of slavery, this spellbinding novel transforms history into a story as powerful as Exodus and as intimate as a lullaby.

Sethe, its protagonist, was born a slave and escaped to Ohio, but eighteen years later she is still not free. She has too many memories of Sweet Home, the beautiful farm where so many hideous things happened. And Sethe's new home is haunted by the ghost of her baby, who died nameless and whose tombstone is engraved with a single word: Beloved. Filled with bitter poetry and suspense as taut as a rope, Beloved is a towering achievement by Nobel Prize laureate Toni Morrison.]]> 325 Toni Morrison Beata 5 african-american, favorites Sublime prose. 3.96 1987 Beloved (Beloved Trilogy, #1)

author: Toni Morrison
name: Beata
average rating: 3.96
book published: 1987
rating: 5
read at: 2024/04/28
date added: 2024/05/19
shelves: african-american, favorites
review:
Sublime prose.
]]> <![CDATA[Never Enough: When Achievement Culture Becomes Toxic-and What We Can Do About It]]> 63876547
The definitive book on the rise of “toxic achievement culture�� overtaking our kids' and parents' lives, and a new framework for fighting back

In the ever more competitive race to secure the best possible future, today’s students face unprecedented pressure to succeed. They jam-pack their schedules with AP classes, fill every waking hour with resume-padding activities, and even sabotage relationships with friends to “get ahead.�� Family incomes and schedules are stretched to the breaking point by tutoring fees and athletic schedules. Yet this drive to optimize performance has only resulted in skyrocketing rates of anxiety, depression, and even self-harm in America’s highest achieving schools. Parents, educators, and community leaders are facing the same how can we teach our kids to strive towards excellence without crushing them?

In Never Enough, award-winning reporter Jennifer Breheny Wallace investigates the deep roots of toxic achievement culture, and finds out what we must do to fight back. Drawing on interviews with families, educators, and an original survey of nearly 6,000 parents, she exposes how the pressure to perform is not a matter of parental choice but baked in to our larger society and spurred by increasing income inequality and dwindling opportunities. As a result, children are increasingly absorbing the message that they have no value outside of their accomplishments, a message that is reinforced by the media and greater culture at large.

Through deep research and interviews with today’s leading child psychologists, Wallace shows what kids need from the adults in the room is not more pressure, but to feel like they matter , and have intrinsic self-worth not contingent upon external achievements. Parents and educators who adopt the language and values of mattering help children see themselves as a valuable contributor to a larger community. And in an ironic twist, kids who receive consistent feedback that they matter no matter what are more likely to have the resilience, self-confidence, and psychological security to thrive.

Packed with memorable stories and offering a powerful toolkit for positive change, Never Enough offers an urgent, humane view of the crisis plaguing today’s teens and a practical framework for how to help.]]> 320 Jennifer Breheny Wallace 0593191862 Beata 0 to-read 4.15 2023 Never Enough: When Achievement Culture Becomes Toxic-and What We Can Do About It

Never Enough: When Achievement Culture Becomes Toxic-and What We Can Do About It

author: Jennifer Breheny Wallace
name: Beata
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/05/15
shelves: to-read
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]]> Prophet Song 158875813
On a dark, wet evening in Dublin, scientist and mother-of-four Eilish Stack answers her front door to find the GNSB on her step. Two officers from Ireland’s newly formed secret police are here to interrogate her husband, a trade unionist.

Ireland is falling apart. The country is in the grip of a government turning towards tyranny and Eilish can only watch helplessly as the world she knew disappears. When first her husband and then her eldest son vanish, Eilish finds herself caught within the nightmare logic of a collapsing society.

How far will she go to save her family? And what �� or who �� is she willing to leave behind?

Exhilarating, terrifying and propulsive, Prophet Song is a work of breathtaking originality, offering a devastating vision of a country at war and a deeply human portrait of a mother’s fight to hold her family together.]]> 259 Paul Lynch Beata 0 to-read 4.03 2023 Prophet Song

author: Paul Lynch
name: Beata
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/05/06
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Chess 1220445 76 Stefan Zweig 0141023376 Beata 0 currently-reading 4.16 1942 Chess

author: Stefan Zweig
name: Beata
average rating: 4.16
book published: 1942
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/05/06
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations]]> 56393244 544 Daniel Yergin 0141994630 Beata 0 to-read 4.10 2020

The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations

author: Daniel Yergin
name: Beata
average rating: 4.10
book published: 2020
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/05/01
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Tar Baby 11359 Tar Baby is Toni Morrison’s reinvention of the love story. Jadine Childs is a black fashion model with a white patron, a white boyfriend, and a coat made out of ninety perfect sealskins. Son is a black fugitive who embodies everything she loathes and desires. As Morrison follows their affair, which plays out from the Caribbean to Manhattan and the deep South, she charts all the nuances of obligation and betrayal between blacks and whites, masters and servants, and men and women.]]> 305 Toni Morrison 1400033446 Beata 0 to-read 4.00 1981 Tar Baby

author: Toni Morrison
name: Beata
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1981
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/04/30
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Paradise (Beloved Trilogy, #3)]]> 5198
Founded by the descendants of freed slaves and survivors in exodus from a hostile world, the patriarchal community of Ruby is built on righteousness, rigidly enforced moral law, and fear. But seventeen miles away, another group of exiles has gathered in a promised land of their own. And it is upon these women in flight from death and despair that nine male citizens of Ruby will lay their pain, their terror, and their murderous rage.

In prose that soars with the rhythms, grandeur, and tragic arc of an epic poem, Toni Morrison challenges our most fiercely held beliefs as she weaves folklore and history, memory and myth into an unforgettable meditation of race, religion, gender, and a far-off past that is ever present.]]> 318 Toni Morrison 0452280397 Beata 0 to-read 3.87 1997 Paradise (Beloved Trilogy, #3)

author: Toni Morrison
name: Beata
average rating: 3.87
book published: 1997
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/04/30
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Jazz (Beloved Trilogy, #2) 37398 229 Toni Morrison 0452269652 Beata 0 to-read 3.90 1992

author: Toni Morrison
name: Beata
average rating: 3.90
book published: 1992
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/04/30
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Sula 11346 174 Toni Morrison 0452283868 Beata 0 to-read 4.05 1973 Sula

author: Toni Morrison
name: Beata
average rating: 4.05
book published: 1973
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/04/30
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Ultra-Processed People: Why Do We All Eat Stuff That Isn’t Food �� and Why Can’t We Stop?]]> 60889740 A manifesto to change how you eat and how you think about the human body.

It’s not you, it’s the food.

We have entered a new age of eating. For the first time in human history, most of our calories come from an entirely novel set of substances called Ultra-Processed Food. There’s a long, formal scientific definition, but it can be boiled down to this: if it’s wrapped in plastic and has at least one ingredient that you wouldn’t find in your kitchen, it’s UPF.

These products are specifically engineered to behave as addictive substances, driving excess consumption. They are now linked to the leading cause of early death globally and the number one cause of environmental destruction. Yet almost all our staple foods are ultra-processed. UPF is our food culture and for many people it is the only available and affordable food.

In this book, Chris van Tulleken, father, scientist, doctor, and award-winning BBC broadcaster, marshals the latest evidence to show how governments, scientists, and doctors have allowed transnational food companies to create a pandemic of diet-related disease. The solutions don’t lie in willpower, personal responsibility, or exercise. You’ll find no diet plan in this book―but join Chris as he undertakes a powerful self-experiment that made headlines around the world: under the supervision of colleagues at University College London he spent a month eating a diet of 80 percent UPF, typical for many children and adults in the United States. While his body became the subject of scientific scrutiny, he spoke to the world’s leading experts from academia, agriculture, and―most important―the food industry itself. But more than teaching him about the experience of the food, the diet switched off Chris’s own addiction to UPF.

In a fast-paced and eye-opening narrative he explores the origins, science, and economics of UPF to reveal its catastrophic impact on our bodies and the planet. And he proposes real solutions for doctors, for policy makers, and for all of us who have to eat. A book that won’t only upend the way you shop and eat, Ultra-Processed People will open your eyes to the need for action on a global scale.]]> 376 Chris van Tulleken 1529900050 Beata 4 british 4.42 2023 Ultra-Processed People: Why Do We All Eat Stuff That Isn’t Food … and Why Can’t We Stop?

Ultra-Processed People: Why Do We All Eat Stuff That Isn’t Food … and Why Can’t We Stop?

author: Chris van Tulleken
name: Beata
average rating: 4.42
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2024/04/18
date added: 2024/04/18
shelves: british
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Women Money Power: The Rise and Fall of Economic Equality]]> 195660527
For centuries, women were denied equal access to money and the freedom and power that came with it. They were restricted from owning property or transacting in real estate. Even well into the 20th century, women could not take out their own loans or own bank accounts without their husband’s permission. They could be fired for getting married or pregnant, and if they still had a job, they could be kept from certain roles, restricted from working longer hours, and paid less than men for equal work.

It was a raw deal, and women weren’t happy with it. So they pushed back. In Women Money Power , financial journalist Josie Cox tells the story of women’s fight for financial freedom. This is an inspirational account of brave pioneers who took on social mores and the law, including the “Rosies�� who filled industrial jobs vacated by men and helped win WWII, the heiress whose fortune helped create the birth control pill, the brassy investor who broke into the boys�� club of the New York Stock Exchange, and the namesake of landmark equal pay legislation who refused to accept discrimination.

But as any woman can tell you, the battle for equality—for money and power—is far from over. Cox delves deep into the challenges women face today and the culture and systems that hold them back. This is a fascinating narrative account of progress, women’s lives, and the work still to be done.]]> 336 Josie Cox 1419762982 Beata 0 to-read 4.21 2024 Women Money Power: The Rise and Fall of Economic Equality

Women Money Power: The Rise and Fall of Economic Equality

author: Josie Cox
name: Beata
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/04/08
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Age of Grievance 176443156
The twists and turns of American politics today have become nearly impossible to predict, but the tone is a troubling given. It’s one of grievance. A perilous share of Americans across the full breadth of the political spectrum respond to every big disappointment, every little frustration, every way in which the world doesn’t hew precisely to their liking by deciding that they’ve been wronged, identifying the people responsible for that and raging at the injustice of it all. The blame game is the country’s most popular sport and victimhood its most fashionable garb.

Grievance isn’t always and necessarily bad. It has often done enormous good. The United States is a nation born of grievance, in the revolt of royal subjects unwilling to accept a bad deal, and across the nearly 250 years of our existence as a country, grievance has been the engine of morally urgent change. But what happens when all sorts of grievances—the greater ones, the lesser ones, the authentic, the invented—are jumbled together? When grievances become all-encompassing lenses, all-purpose reflexes, default settings? When people take their grievances to extreme and even violent lengths that they didn’t before?

A violent mob storms the US Capitol, rejecting the results of a presidential election and embracing the fiction that it was rigged. Conspiracy theories flourish. Politicians appeal not to our better angels but to our worst impulses, encouraging selfishness instead of selflessness, trading inspiration for retribution. Fox News, the country’s most watched cable news network, and Tucker Carlson, its sneering star, knowingly peddle lies in the service of profit. The Supreme Court loses touch with the country, overturning Roe v. Wade and shrugging off Clarence Thomas’s transgressions. College students chase away speakers and college administrators dismiss instructors for dissenting from progressive orthodoxy. Will Smith slaps Chris Rock. And there’s a potentially devastating erosion of the civility, common ground and compromise necessary for our democracy to survive.

How did we get here? What does it say about us, and where does it leave us? Timely, important, and enlightening, The Age of Grievance examines these critical questions and charts a path forward for a nation that may be growing tired of outrage.]]> 288 Frank Bruni 1668016435 Beata 0 to-read 4.07 2024

author: Frank Bruni
name: Beata
average rating: 4.07
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/04/08
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space]]> 199798785
On January 28, 1986, just seventy-three seconds into flight, the space shuttle Challenger broke apart over the Atlantic Ocean, killing all seven people on board. Millions of Americans witnessed the tragic deaths of a crew including New Hampshire schoolteacher Christa McAuliffe. Like 9/11 or JFK’s assassination, the Challenger disaster is a defining moment in 20th-century history—yet the details of what took place that day, and why, have largely been forgotten. Until now.

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

Higginbotham reveals the history of the shuttle program, the lives of men and women whose stories have been overshadowed by the disaster as well as the designers, engineers, and test pilots who struggled against the odds to get the first shuttle into space.]]> 576 Adam Higginbotham 198217661X Beata 0 to-read 4.52 2024 Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space

Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space

author: Adam Higginbotham
name: Beata
average rating: 4.52
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/04/08
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Sociopath: A Memoir 176443093
Patric Gagne realized she made others uncomfortable before she started kindergarten. Something about her caused people to react in a way she didn’t understand. She suspected it was because she didn’t feel things the way other kids did. Emotions like fear, guilt, and empathy eluded her. For the most part, she felt nothing. And she didn’t like the way that “nothing�� felt.

She did her best to pretend she was like everyone else, but the constant pressure to conform to a society she knew rejected anyone like her was unbearable. So Patric stole. She lied. She was occasionally violent. She became an expert lock-picker and home-invader. All with the goal of replacing the nothingness with...something.

In college, Patric finally confirmed what she’d long suspected. She was a sociopath. But even though it was the very first personality disorder identified—well over 200 years ago—sociopathy had been neglected by mental health professionals for decades. She was told there was no treatment, no hope for a normal life. She found herself haunted by sociopaths in pop culture, madmen and evil villains who are considered monsters. Her future looked grim.

But when Patric reconnects with an old flame, she gets a glimpse of a future beyond her diagnosis. If she’s capable of love, it must mean that she isn’t a monster. With the help of her sweetheart (and some curious characters she meets along the way) she embarks on a mission to prove that the millions of Americans who share her diagnosis aren’t all monsters either.

This is the inspiring story of her journey to change her fate and how she managed to build a life full of love and hope.]]> 368 Patric Gagne 166800318X Beata 0 to-read 3.74 2024 Sociopath: A Memoir

author: Patric Gagne
name: Beata
average rating: 3.74
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/04/08
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Handover: How We Gave Control of Our Lives to Corporations, States and AIs]]> 77264986 The Handover, Runciman explains our current situation through the history of these “artificial agents�� we created to rescue us from our all-too-human limitations—and demonstrates what this radical new view of our recent past means for our collective future.

From the United States and the United Kingdom to the East India Company, Standard Oil, Facebook, and Alibaba, states and corporations have gradually, and then much more rapidly, taken over the planet. They have helped to conquer poverty and eliminate disease, but also unleashed global wars and environmental degradation. As Runciman demonstrates, states and corporations are the ultimate decision-making machines, defined by their ability to make their own choices and, crucially, to sustain the consequences of what has been chosen. And if the rapid spread of the modern state and corporation has already transformed the conditions of human existence, new AI technology promises the same.

But what happens when AI interacts with other kinds of artificial agents, the inhuman kind represented by states and corporations? Runciman argues that the twenty-first century will be defined by increasingly intense battles between state and corporate power for the fruits of the AI revolution. In the end, it is not our own, human relationship with AI that will determine our future. Rather, humanity’s fate will be shaped by the interactions among states, corporations, and thinking machines.

With clarity and verve, The Handover presents a brilliantly original history of the last three centuries and a new understanding of the immense challenges we now face.]]> 352 David Runciman 1631496948 Beata 0 to-read 3.70 2023 The Handover: How We Gave Control of Our Lives to Corporations, States and AIs

The Handover: How We Gave Control of Our Lives to Corporations, States and AIs

author: David Runciman
name: Beata
average rating: 3.70
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/03/31
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[New Cold Wars: China's Rise, Russia's Invasion, and America's Struggle to Defend the West]]> 195531096
More than thirty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the United States finds itself in a volatile rivalry against the world’s other two great nuclear powers. Yet this era bears very little resemblance to the old Cold War. As Putin and Xi increasingly threaten to team up, this moment grows far more complex—and undeniably more dangerous—than the world of a half century ago.

New Cold Wars —the latest from Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and bestselling author of The Perfect Weapon, David E. Sanger—tells the riveting story of America at a crossroads. At the turn of the millennium, the United States was confident that a democratic Russia and a newly wealthy China could gradually be pulled into the Western-led order. That proved a fantasy. By the time Washington emerged from the age of terrorism, the three nuclear powers were engaged in a new, high-stakes struggle for military, economic, and technological supremacy—with nations around the world forced to take sides.

Based on a remarkable array of interviews with top officials in the United States, foreign leaders, andtech companies thrust onto the front lines, Sanger unfolds a riveting narrative spun around the era’s critical Will the mistakes Putin made in his ill-considered invasion of Ukraine prove his undoing, and will he reach for his nuclear arsenal? Will China strike back at the U.S. chip embargo, or seize Taiwan, the world’s semiconductor capital?

Taking readers from the battlefields of Ukraine—where trench warfare and cyberwarfare are fought side by side—to the back rooms and boardrooms where diplomats, spies, and tech executives jockey for geopolitical advantage, New Cold Wars is a remarkable first draft history chronicling America’s return to superpower conflict, the choices that lie ahead, and what is at stake for the United States and the world.]]> 528 David E. Sanger 0593443594 Beata 0 to-read 4.27 2024 New Cold Wars: China's Rise, Russia's Invasion, and America's Struggle to Defend the West

New Cold Wars: China's Rise, Russia's Invasion, and America's Struggle to Defend the West

author: David E. Sanger
name: Beata
average rating: 4.27
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]]> The Gargoyle 6011275 A young man is fighting for his life.
Into his room walks a bewitching woman who believes she can save him.
Their journey will have you believing in the impossible.

The nameless and beautiful narrator of The Gargoyle is driving along a dark road when he is distracted by what seems to be a flight of arrows. He crashes into a ravine and wakes up in a burns ward, undergoing the tortures of the damned. His life is over - he is now a monster.

But in fact it is only just beginning. One day, Marianne Engel, a wild and compelling sculptress of gargoyles, enters his life and tells him that they were once lovers in medieval Germany. In her telling, he was a badly burned mercenary and she was a nun and a scribe who nursed him back to health in the famed monastery of Engelthal. As she spins her tale, Scheherazade fashion, and relates equally mesmerising stories of deathless love in Japan, Greenland, Italy and England, he finds himself drawn back to life - and, finally, to love.]]> 499 Andrew Davidson 1847671691 Beata 0 to-read 3.90 2008 The Gargoyle

author: Andrew Davidson
name: Beata
average rating: 3.90
book published: 2008
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]]> <![CDATA[One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich]]> 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 Beata 0 to-read 3.98 1962 One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

author: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
name: Beata
average rating: 3.98
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]]> The House of Doors 65215270
The year is 1921. Lesley Hamlyn and her husband, Robert, a lawyer and war veteran, are living at Cassowary House on the Straits Settlement of Penang. When “Willie�� Somerset Maugham, a famed writer and old friend of Robert's, arrives for an extended visit with his secretary Gerald, the pair threatens a rift that could alter more lives than one.

Maugham, one of the great novelists of his day, is beleaguered: Having long hidden his homosexuality, his unhappy and expensive marriage of convenience becomes unbearable after he loses his savings-and the freedom to travel with Gerald. His career deflating, his health failing, Maugham arrives at Cassowary House in desperate need of a subject for his next book. Lesley, too, is enduring a marriage more duplicitous than it first appears. Maugham suspects an affair, and, learning of Lesley's past connection to the Chinese revolutionary, Dr. Sun Yat Sen, decides to probe deeper. But as their friendship grows and Lesley confides in him about life in the Straits, Maugham discovers a far more surprising tale than he imagined, one that involves not only war and scandal but the trial of an Englishwoman charged with murder. It is, to Maugham, a story worthy of fiction.

A mesmerizingly beautiful novel based on real events, The House of Doors traces the fault lines of race, gender, sexuality, and power under empire, and dives deep into the complicated nature of love and friendship in its shadow.]]> 306 Tan Twan Eng 1639731938 Beata 0 to-read 3.98 2023 The House of Doors

author: Tan Twan Eng
name: Beata
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2023
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]]> This Is Your Mind on Plants 56015023 This Is Your Mind on Plants, Michael Pollan dives deep into three plant drugs--opium, caffeine, and mescaline--and throws the fundamental strangeness, and arbitrariness, of our thinking about them into sharp relief. Exploring and participating in the cultures that have grown up around these drugs while consuming (or, in the case of caffeine, trying not to consume) them, Pollan reckons with the powerful human attraction to psychoactive plants. Why do we go to such great lengths to seek these shifts in consciousness, and then why do we fence that universal desire with laws and customs and fraught feelings?]]> 288 Michael Pollan 0593296907 Beata 0 currently-reading, american 3.86 2021 This Is Your Mind on Plants

author: Michael Pollan
name: Beata
average rating: 3.86
book published: 2021
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]]> <![CDATA[Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives]]> 60784614 The revelatory New York Times and Publishers Weekly bestseller, shortlisted for the Financial Times Best Business Book of the Year Award.

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

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

Cobalt is an essential component to every lithium-ion rechargeable battery made today, the batteries that power our smartphones, tablets, laptops, and electric vehicles. Roughly 75 percent of the world’s supply of cobalt is mined in the Congo, often by peasants and children in sub-human conditions. Billions of people in the world cannot conduct their daily lives without participating in a human rights and environmental catastrophe in the Congo. In this stark and crucial book, Kara argues that we must all care about what is happening in the Congo―because we are all implicated.]]> 288 Siddharth Kara 1250284309 Beata 0 to-read 4.36 2023 Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives

Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives

author: Siddharth Kara
name: Beata
average rating: 4.36
book published: 2023
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]]> <![CDATA[Power And Prediction: The Disruptive Economics of Artificial Intelligence]]> 60623908
Banking and finance, pharmaceuticals, automotive, medical technology, retail. Artificial intelligence (AI) has made its way into many industries around the world. But the truth is, it has just begun its odyssey toward cheaper, better, and faster predictions to drive strategic business decisions--powering and accelerating business. When prediction is taken to the max, industries transform. The disruption that comes with such transformation is yet to be felt--but it is coming.

How do businesses prepare? In their bestselling first book, Prediction Machines, eminent economists Ajay Agrawal, Joshua Gans, and Avi Goldfarb explained the simple yet game-changing economics of AI. Now, in Power and Prediction, they go further to reveal AI as a prediction technology directly impacting decision-making and to teach businesses how to identify disruptive opportunities and threats resulting from AI. Their exhaustive study of new developments in artificial intelligence and the past history of how technologies have disrupted industries highlights the striking phase we are now in: after witnessing the power of this new technology and before its widespread adoption--what they call "the Between Times." While there continue to be important opportunities for businesses, there are also threats of disruption. As prediction machines improve, old ways of doing things will be upended. Also, the process by which AI filters into the many systems involved in application is very uneven. That process will have winners and losers. How can businesses leverage, or protect, their positions?

Filled with illuminating insights, rich examples, and practical advice, Power and Prediction is the must-read guide for any business leader or policy maker on how to make the coming AI disruptions work for you rather than against you.]]> 256 Ajay Agrawal 1647824192 Beata 0 to-read 4.23 Power And Prediction: The Disruptive Economics of Artificial Intelligence

Power And Prediction: The Disruptive Economics of Artificial Intelligence

author: Ajay Agrawal
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]]> Cleopatra and Frankenstein 57693262 For readers of Modern Lovers and Conversations with Friends, an addictive, humorous, and poignant debut novel about the shock waves caused by one couple's impulsive marriage.

Twenty-four-year-old British painter Cleo has escaped from England to New York and is still finding her place in the sleepless city when, a few months before her student visa ends, she meets Frank. Twenty years older and a self-made success, Frank's life is full of all the excesses Cleo's lacks. He offers her the chance to be happy, the freedom to paint, and the opportunity to apply for a Green Card. But their impulsive marriage irreversibly changes both their lives, and the lives of those close to them, in ways they never could've predicted.

Each compulsively readable chapter explores the lives of Cleo, Frank, and an unforgettable cast of their closest friends and family as they grow up and grow older. Whether it's Cleo's best friend struggling to embrace his gender queerness in the wake of Cleo's marriage, or Frank's financially dependent sister arranging sugar daddy dates to support herself after being cut off, or Cleo and Frank themselves as they discover the trials of marriage and mental illness, each character is as absorbing, and painfully relatable, as the last.

As hilarious as it is heartbreaking, entertaining as it is deeply moving, Cleopatra and Frankenstein marks the entry of a brilliant and bold new talent.]]> 384 Coco Mellors 1635576814 Beata 0 to-read 3.70 2022

author: Coco Mellors
name: Beata
average rating: 3.70
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]]> Demon Copperhead 60194162 "Anyone will tell you the born of this world are marked from the get-out, win or lose."

Set in the mountains of southern Appalachia, this is the story of a boy born to a teenaged single mother in a single-wide trailer, with no assets beyond his dead father's good looks and copper-colored hair, a caustic wit, and a fierce talent for survival. In a plot that never pauses for breath, relayed in his own unsparing voice, he braves the modern perils of foster care, child labor, derelict schools, athletic success, addiction, disastrous loves, and crushing losses. Through all of it, he reckons with his own invisibility in a popular culture where even the superheroes have abandoned rural people in favor of cities.

Many generations ago, Charles Dickens wrote David Copperfield from his experience as a survivor of institutional poverty and its damages to children in his society. Those problems have yet to be solved in ours. Dickens is not a prerequisite for readers of this novel, but he provided its inspiration. In transposing a Victorian epic novel to the contemporary American South, Barbara Kingsolver enlists Dickens' anger and compassion, and above all, his faith in the transformative powers of a good story. Demon Copperhead speaks for a new generation of lost boys, and all those born into beautiful, cursed places they can't imagine leaving behind.]]> 560 Barbara Kingsolver 0063251922 Beata 4 american 4.46 2022

author: Barbara Kingsolver
name: Beata
average rating: 4.46
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2024/02/19
date added: 2024/02/19
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]]> Middlemarch 19089 "People are almost always better than their neighbours think they are"

George Eliot’s most ambitious novel is a masterly evocation of diverse lives and changing fortunes in a provincial community. Peopling its landscape are Dorothea Brooke, a young idealist whose search for intellectual fulfillment leads her into a disastrous marriage to the pedantic scholar Casaubon; the charming but tactless Dr Lydgate, whose pioneering medical methods, combined with an imprudent marriage to the spendthrift beauty Rosamond, threaten to undermine his career; and the religious hypocrite Bulstrode, hiding scandalous crimes from his past. As their stories interweave, George Eliot creates a richly nuanced and moving drama, hailed by Virginia Woolf as "one of the few English novels written for grown-up people".]]> 912 George Eliot 0451529170 Beata 0 to-read 4.00 1872 Middlemarch

author: George Eliot
name: Beata
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1872
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]]> <![CDATA[The Land of Hope and Fear: Israel's Battle for Its Inner Soul]]> 61609168
Despite Israel's determined staying power in a hostile environment, its military might, and the innovation it fosters in businesses globally, the country is more divided than ever. The old guard—socialist secular elites and idealists—are a dying breed, and the state’s democratic foundations are being challenged. A dynamic and exuberant country of nine million, Israel is now largely comprised of native-born Hebrew speakers, and yet any permanent sense of security and normalcy is elusive.

In The Land of Hope and Fear , we meet Jews and Arabs, religious and secular, Eastern and Western, liberals and zealots—plagued by perennial conflict and existential threats,��citizens who remain deeply polarized politically, socially, and ideologically, even as they undergo generational change and redefine what it is to be an Israeli. Who are these people and to what do they aspire?

In moving narratives and with on-the-ground reporting, Isabel Kershner reveals the core of what holds Israel together and the forces that threaten its future through the lens of real a son of Zionist pioneers, cynical about what is to come and his people’s status in it; a woman in her nineties whose life in a kibbutz has disintegrated; a brilliant poet caught up in the political maelstrom; an Arab gallery owner archiving a lost Palestinian landscape; and a descendant of the Russian aliyah; representing millions of culturally and religiously different Jews, laying bare the question Who is an Israeli? The Land of Hope and Fear decodes Israel today at its seventy-fifth anniversary, examining the ways in which the country has both exceeded and failed the ideals and expectations of its founders.]]> 384 Isabel Kershner 1101946768 Beata 0 to-read 3.99 2023 The Land of Hope and Fear: Israel's Battle for Its Inner Soul

The Land of Hope and Fear: Israel's Battle for Its Inner Soul

author: Isabel Kershner
name: Beata
average rating: 3.99
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]]> The Marriage Portrait 90590095
Florence, the 1550s. Lucrezia, third daughter of the grand duke, is comfortable with her obscure place in the free to wonder at its treasures, observe its clandestine workings, and devote herself to her own artistic pursuits. But when her older sister dies on the eve of her wedding to the ruler of Ferrara, Modena and Reggio, Lucrezia is thrust unwittingly into the the duke is quick to request her hand in marriage, and her father just as quick to accept on her behalf.
��
Having barely left girlhood behind, Lucrezia must now enter an unfamiliar court whose customs are opaque and where her arrival is not universally welcomed. Perhaps most mystifying of all is her new husband himself, Alfonso. Is he the playful sophisticate he appeared to be before their wedding, the aesthete happiest in the company of artists and musicians, or the ruthless politician before whom even his formidable sisters seem to tremble?
��
As Lucrezia sits in constricting finery for a painting intended to preserve her image for centuries to come, one thing becomes worryingly clear. In the court’s eyes, she has one to provide the heir who will shore up the future of the Ferranese dynasty. Until then, for all of her rank and nobility, the new duchess’s future hangs entirely in the balance.
��
Full of the beauty and emotion with which she illuminated the Shakespearean canvas of Hamnet , Maggie O’Farrell turns her talents to Renaissance Italy in an extraordinary portrait of a resilient young woman’s battle for her very survival.]]> 339 Maggie O'Farrell 0593315081 Beata 0 to-read 3.98 2022 The Marriage Portrait

author: Maggie O'Farrell
name: Beata
average rating: 3.98
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]]> <![CDATA[Emperor of Rome: Ruling the Ancient Roman World]]> 128747007
Emperor of Rome is not your usual chronological account of Roman rulers, such as the mad Caligula, the monster Nero, the philosopher Marcus Aurelius. Beard asks bigger questions: What power did emperors actually have? Was the Roman palace really so bloodstained? She tracks down the emperor at home, at the races, on his travels, even on his way to heaven. She introduces his wives and lovers, rivals and slaves, court jesters and soldiers―and the ordinary people who pressed begging letters into his hands.

Emperor of Rome goes directly to the heart of Roman (and our own) fantasies about what it was to be Roman, offering an account of Roman history as it has never been presented before. 160 images; 16-page color insert]]> 493 Mary Beard 0871404222 Beata 0 to-read 4.07 2023 Emperor of Rome: Ruling the Ancient Roman World

Emperor of Rome: Ruling the Ancient Roman World

author: Mary Beard
name: Beata
average rating: 4.07
book published: 2023
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]]> <![CDATA[Empireworld: How British Imperialism Has Shaped the Globe]]> 178813454 Empireland examined imperialism's lasting impact on Britain.
Empireworld traces the legacies of British empire across the globe.

2.6 billion people are inhabitants of former British colonies. The empire's influence upon the quarter of the planet it occupied, and its gravitational influence upon the world outside it, has been from the spread of Christianity by missionaries to nearly 1 in 3 driving on the left side of the road, and even shaping the origins of international law. Yet Britain's idea of its imperial history and the world's experience of it are two very different things.

In Empireworld, award-winning author and journalist, Sathnam Sanghera extends his examination of British imperial legacies beyond Britain. Travelling the globe to trace its international legacies - from Barbados and Mauritius to India and Nigeria and beyond - Sanghera demonstrates just how deeply British imperialism is baked into our world.

And why it's time Britain was finally honest with itself about empire.

PRAISE FOR EMPIRELAND

'Empireland, [a] scorching polemic on the afterburn of empire' Ferdinand Mount, Financial Times

'This book should be on the compulsory reading list of every secondary school in the country' John Simpson

'A compelling and distressing look at how imperialism has defined modern Britain' David Harewood

'I am sold on the larger part of Sanghera's thesis, that the empire could be rotten and we didn't know enough about it . . . The history is on Sanghera's side. The facts speak for themselves' Tim Stanley, Daily Telegraph]]> 464 Sathnam Sanghera 0241997097 Beata 0 to-read 4.00 2024 Empireworld: How British Imperialism Has Shaped the Globe

Empireworld: How British Imperialism Has Shaped the Globe

author: Sathnam Sanghera
name: Beata
average rating: 4.00
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]]> My Dark Vanessa 44890081
2000. Bright, ambitious, and yearning for adulthood, fifteen-year-old Vanessa Wye becomes entangled in an affair with Jacob Strane, her magnetic and guileful forty-two-year-old English teacher.

2017. Amid the rising wave of allegations against powerful men, a reckoning is coming due. Strane has been accused of sexual abuse by a former student, who reaches out to Vanessa, and now Vanessa suddenly finds herself facing an impossible choice: remain silent, firm in the belief that her teenage self willingly engaged in this relationship, or redefine herself and the events of her past. But how can Vanessa reject her first love, the man who fundamentally transformed her and has been a persistent presence in her life? Is it possible that the man she loved as a teenager—and who professed to worship only her—may be far different from what she has always believed?

Alternating between Vanessa’s present and her past, My Dark Vanessa juxtaposes memory and trauma with the breathless excitement of a teenage girl discovering the power her own body can wield. Thought-provoking and impossible to put down, this is a masterful portrayal of troubled adolescence and its repercussions that raises vital questions about agency, consent, complicity, and victimhood. Written with the haunting intimacy of The Girls and the creeping intensity of Room, My Dark Vanessa is an era-defining novel that brilliantly captures and reflects the shifting cultural mores transforming our relationships and society itself.]]> 373 Kate Elizabeth Russell 006294150X Beata 0 to-read 4.09 2020 My Dark Vanessa

author: Kate Elizabeth Russell
name: Beata
average rating: 4.09
book published: 2020
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]]> Study for Obedience 123636870
A young woman moves from the place of her birth to the remote northern country of her forebears to be housekeeper to her brother, whose wife has recently left him.��

Soon after her arrival, a series of inexplicable events occurs - collective bovine hysteria; the demise of a ewe and her nearly born lamb; a local dog's phantom pregnancy; a potato blight. She notices that the local suspicion about incomers in general seems to be directed with some intensity at her and she senses a mounting threat that lies 'just beyond the garden gate.' And as she feels the hostility growing, pressing at the edges of her brother's property, she fears that, should the rumblings in the town gather themselves into a more defined shape, who knows what might happen, what one might be capable of doing.

With a sharp, lyrical voice, Sarah Bernstein powerfully explores questions of complicity and power, displacement and inheritance. Study for Obedience is a finely tuned, unsettling novel that confirms Bernstein as one of the most exciting voices of her generation.]]> 192 Sarah Bernstein 1039009069 Beata 0 to-read 3.02 2023

author: Sarah Bernstein
name: Beata
average rating: 3.02
book published: 2023
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]]> The Woman in White 5890 Librarian note: Alternate covers can be found here and here.

'In one moment, every drop of blood in my body was brought to a stop... There, as if it had that moment sprung out of the earth, stood the figure of a solitary Woman, dressed from head to foot in white'

The Woman in White famously opens with Walter Hartright's eerie encounter on a moonlit London road. Engaged as a drawing master to the beautiful Laura Fairlie, Walter becomes embroiled in the sinister intrigues of Sir Percival Glyde and his 'charming' friend Count Fosco, who has a taste for white mice, vanilla bonbons, and poison. Pursuing questions of identity and insanity along the paths and corridors of English country houses and the madhouse, The Woman in White is the first and most influential of the Victorian genre that combined Gothic horror with psychological realism.

Matthew Sweet's introduction explores the phenomenon of Victorian 'sensation' fiction, and discusses Wilkie Collins's biographical and societal influences. Included in this edition are appendices on theatrical adaptations of the novel and its serialisation history.]]> 672 Wilkie Collins Beata 0 currently-reading, british 4.00 1859 The Woman in White

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name: Beata
average rating: 4.00
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]]> <![CDATA[How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement]]> 101021832 An eye-opening exploration of American policy reform, or lack thereof, in the wake of the murder of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter movement and how the country can do better in the future from Fredrik deBoer, “one of the sharpest and funniest writers on the internet�� (The New York Times).

In 2020, while the Covid-19 pandemic raged, the United States was hit by a ripple of political discontent the likes of which had not been seen since the 1960s. The spark was the viral video of the horrific police murder of an unarmed Black man in Minneapolis. The killings of George Floyd galvanized a nation already reeling from Covid and a toxic political cycle. Tens of thousands poured into the streets to protest. Major corporations and large nonprofit groups—institutions that are usually resolutely apolitical—raced to join in. The fervor for racial justice intersected with the already simmering demands for change from the #MeToo movement and for economic justice from Gen Z. The entire country suddenly seemed to be roaring for change in one voice.

Then nothing much happened.

In How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement, Fredrik deBoer explores why these passionate movements failed and how they could succeed in the future. In the digital age, social movements flare up but then lose steam through a lack of tangible goals, the inherent moderating effects of our established institutions and political parties, and the lack of any real grassroots movement in contemporary America. Hidden beneath the rhetoric of the oppressed and symbolism of the downtrodden lies and the inconvenient fact that those are doing the organizing, messaging, protesting, and campaigning are predominantly drawn from this country’s more upwardly mobile educated classes. Poses are more important than policies.

deBoer lays out an alternative vision for how society’s winners can contribute to social justice movements without taking them over, and how activists and their organizations can become more resistant to the influence of elites, nonprofits, corporations, and political parties. Only by organizing around class rather than empty gestures can we begin the hard work of changing minds and driving policy.]]> 251 Fredrik deBoer 1668016036 Beata 0 3.86 2023 How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement

How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement

author: Fredrik deBoer
name: Beata
average rating: 3.86
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[The Viking Heart: How Scandinavians Conquered the World]]> 53968566
From a New York Times best-selling historian and Pulitzer Prize finalist, a sweeping epic of how the Vikings and their descendants have shaped history and America

Scandinavia has always been a world apart. For millennia Norwegians, Danes, Finns, and Swedes lived a remote and rugged existence among the fjords and peaks of the land of the midnight sun. But when they finally left their homeland in search of opportunity, these wanderers—including the most famous, the Vikings—would reshape Europe and beyond. Their ingenuity, daring, resiliency, and loyalty to family and community would propel them to the gates of Rome, the steppes of Russia, the courts of Constantinople, and the castles of England and Ireland. But nowhere would they leave a deeper mark than across the Atlantic, where the Vikings’��legacy would become the American Dream. In The Viking Heart , Arthur Herman melds a compelling historical narrative with cutting-edge archaeological and DNA research to trace the epic story of this remarkable and diverse people. He shows how the Scandinavian experience has universal meaning, and how we can still be inspired by their indomitable spirit.]]> 512 Arthur Herman 1328595900 Beata 0 to-read 3.61 2021 The Viking Heart: How Scandinavians Conquered the World

The Viking Heart: How Scandinavians Conquered the World

author: Arthur Herman
name: Beata
average rating: 3.61
book published: 2021
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]]> The Tartar Steppe 83017 198 Dino Buzzati 1567923046 Beata 0 to-read 4.25 1940

author: Dino Buzzati
name: Beata
average rating: 4.25
book published: 1940
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[We Don't Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Modern Ireland]]> 56769525 Angela’s Ashes, Fintan O’Toole, one of the Anglophone world’s most consummate stylists, continues the narrative of modern Ireland into our own time. O’Toole was born in the year the revolution began. It was 1958, and the Irish government—in despair, because all the young people were leaving—opened the country to foreign investment. So began a decades-long, ongoing experiment with Irish national identity.

Weaving his own experiences into this account of Irish social, cultural, and economic change, O’Toole shows how Ireland, in just one lifetime, has gone from a Catholic “backwater�� to an almost totally open society. A sympathetic-yet-exacting observer, O’Toole shrewdly weighs more than sixty years of globalization, delving into the violence of the Troubles and depicting, in biting detail, the astonishing collapse of the once-supreme Irish Catholic Church. The result is a stunning work of memoir and national history that reveals how the two modes are inextricable for all of us.]]> 616 Fintan O'Toole 1631496530 Beata 0 to-read 4.31 2021 We Don't Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Modern Ireland

We Don't Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Modern Ireland

author: Fintan O'Toole
name: Beata
average rating: 4.31
book published: 2021
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date added: 2024/01/08
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]]> The Possession 123026409 WINNER OF THE 2022 NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE

“The strangest thing about jealousy is that it can populate an entire city—the whole world—with a person you may never have met.��

These first words set the framework for The Possession, a striking portrait of a woman after a love affair has ended. Annie Ernaux pulls the reader through every step of jealousy, of a woman’s need to know who has replaced her in a lost beloved’s life. Ernaux’s writing, characteristically gorgeous in its precision, depicts the all too familiar human tendency to seek control and certainty after rejection.”]]> 64 Annie Ernaux 1644213559 Beata 4 french 3.90 2002 The Possession

author: Annie Ernaux
name: Beata
average rating: 3.90
book published: 2002
rating: 4
read at: 2024/01/01
date added: 2024/01/01
shelves: french
review:

]]> Happening 129263635
This is the story, written forty years later, of a trauma Ernaux never overcame. In a France where abortion was illegal, she attempted, in vain, to self-administer the abortion with a knitting needle. Fearful and desperate, she finally located an abortionist, and ends up in a hospital emergency ward where she nearly dies.

In Happening, Ernaux sifts through her memories and her journal entries dating from those days. Clearly, cleanly, she gleans the meanings of her experience.

Now an award-winning film by Audrey Diwan

Winner of the Golden Lion at the Venice International Film Festival

Official Selection of the Sundance Film Festival]]> 96 Annie Ernaux 1609809483 Beata 0 to-read 4.36 2000 Happening

author: Annie Ernaux
name: Beata
average rating: 4.36
book published: 2000
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/01/01
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[13 Things Mentally Strong People Don't Do: Take Back Your Power, Embrace Change, Face Your Fears, and Train Your Brain for Happiness and Success]]> 23215490 272 Amy Morin 0062391542 Beata 3 american
This is a three-star book. The book itself is a bit of a slog, with one too many examples of exceptional historical figures overcoming adversity on their way to building iconic American business empires. I would appreciate less anecdotes about exceptional people, which are about as instructive as an inspirational quote on a sachet of oatmeal, and more about ordinary people overcoming challenges that face everyday people.]]> 3.86 2014 13 Things Mentally Strong People Don't Do: Take Back Your Power, Embrace Change, Face Your Fears, and Train Your Brain for Happiness and Success

13 Things Mentally Strong People Don't Do: Take Back Your Power, Embrace Change, Face Your Fears, and Train Your Brain for Happiness and Success

author: Amy Morin
name: Beata
average rating: 3.86
book published: 2014
rating: 3
read at: 2023/12/30
date added: 2023/12/30
shelves: american
review:
The 13 things are rules to live by. The rules themselves have helped shape how I approach living and how I try to face challenges. The 13 rules are a compass for living a productive resilient life. I give the rules themselves 5 stars.

This is a three-star book. The book itself is a bit of a slog, with one too many examples of exceptional historical figures overcoming adversity on their way to building iconic American business empires. I would appreciate less anecdotes about exceptional people, which are about as instructive as an inspirational quote on a sachet of oatmeal, and more about ordinary people overcoming challenges that face everyday people.
]]> <![CDATA[Fifth Sun: A New History of the Aztecs]]> 44244939
For the first time, in Fifth Sun, the history of the Aztecs is offered in all its complexity based solely on the texts written by the indigenous people themselves. Camilla Townsend presents an accessible and humanized depiction of these native Mexicans, rather than seeing them as the exotic, bloody figures of European stereotypes. The conquest, in this work, is neither an apocalyptic moment, nor an origin story launching Mexicans into existence. The Mexica people had a history of their own long before the Europeans arrived and did not simply capitulate to Spanish culture and colonization. Instead, they realigned their political allegiances, accommodated new obligations, adopted new technologies, and endured.

This engaging revisionist history of the Aztecs, told through their own words, explores the experience of a once-powerful people facing the trauma of conquest and finding ways to survive, offering an empathetic interpretation for experts and non-specialists alike.
]]> 336 Camilla Townsend 0190673060 Beata 0 to-read 4.08 2019 Fifth Sun: A New History of the Aztecs

author: Camilla Townsend
name: Beata
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/12/30
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution]]> 75494215 THE REAL ORIGIN OF OUR SPECIES: a myth-busting, eye-opening landmark account of how humans evolved, offering a paradigm shift in our thinking about what the female body is, how it came to be, and how this evolution still shapes all our lives today.

How did the female body drive 200 million years of human evolution?
�� Why do women live longer than men?
�� Why are women more likely to get Alzheimer’s?
�� Why do girls score better at every academic subject than boys until puberty, when suddenly their scores plummet?
�� Is sexism useful for evolution?
�� And why, seriously why, do women have to sweat through our sheets every night when we hit menopause?

These questions are producing some truly exciting science—and in Eve, with boundless curiosity and sharp wit, Cat Bohannon covers the past 200 million years to explain the specific science behind the development of the female sex: "We need a kind of user's manual for the female mammal. A no-nonsense, hard-hitting, seriously researched (but readable) account of what we are. How female bodies evolved, how they work, what it really means to biologically be a woman. Something that would rewrite the story of womanhood. This book is that story. We have to put the female body in the picture. If we don't, it's not just feminism that's compromised. Modern medicine, neurobiology, paleoanthropology, even evolutionary biology all take a hit when we ignore the fact that half of us have breasts. So it's time we talk about breasts. Breasts, and blood, and fat, and vaginas, and wombs—all of it. How they came to be and how we live with them now, no matter how weird or hilarious the truth is."

Eve is not only a sweeping revision of human history, it's an urgent and necessary corrective for a world that has focused primarily on the male body for far too long. Picking up where Sapiens left off, Eve will completely change what you think you know about evolution and why Homo sapiens has become such a successful and dominant species.]]> 624 Cat Bohannon 0385350546 Beata 0 to-read 4.28 2023 Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution

Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution

author: Cat Bohannon
name: Beata
average rating: 4.28
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/12/29
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Simple Passion 58678702 67 Annie Ernaux 1644213575 Beata 4 french 3.98 1991

author: Annie Ernaux
name: Beata
average rating: 3.98
book published: 1991
rating: 4
read at: 2023/12/29
date added: 2023/12/29
shelves: french
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow]]> 58784475 In this exhilarating novel, two friends—often in love, but never lovers—come together as creative partners in the world of video game design, where success brings them fame, joy, tragedy, duplicity, and, ultimately, a kind of immortality.

On a bitter-cold day, in the December of his junior year at Harvard, Sam Masur exits a subway car and sees, amid the hordes of people waiting on the platform, Sadie Green. He calls her name. For a moment, she pretends she hasn't heard him, but then, she turns, and a game begins: a legendary collaboration that will launch them to stardom. These friends, intimates since childhood, borrow money, beg favors, and, before even graduating college, they have created their first blockbuster, Ichigo. Overnight, the world is theirs. Not even twenty-five years old, Sam and Sadie are brilliant, successful, and rich, but these qualities won't protect them from their own creative ambitions or the betrayals of their hearts.

Spanning thirty years, from Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Venice Beach, California, and lands in between and far beyond, Gabrielle Zevin's Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is a dazzling and intricately imagined novel that examines the multifarious nature of identity, disability, failure, the redemptive possibilities in play, and above all, our need to connect: to be loved and to love. Yes, it is a love story, but it is not one you have read before.]]> 401 Gabrielle Zevin 0735243344 Beata 4 american 4.12 2022 Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

author: Gabrielle Zevin
name: Beata
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2023/12/24
date added: 2023/12/24
shelves: american
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Art Thief: A True Story of Love, Crime, and a Dangerous Obsession]]> 62873378 One of the most remarkable true-crime narratives of the twenty-first the story of the world’s most prolific art thief, Stéphane Breitwieser.

In this spellbinding portrait of obsession and flawed genius, the best-selling author of The Stranger in the Woods brings us into Breitwieser’s strange world—unlike most thieves, he never stole for money, keeping all his treasures in a single room where he could admire them.

For centuries, works of art have been stolen in countless ways from all over the world, but no one has been quite as successful at it as the master thief Stéphane Breitwieser. Carrying out more than two hundred heists over nearly eight years—in museums and cathedrals all over Europe—Breitwieser, along with his girlfriend who worked as his lookout, stole more than three hundred objects, until it all fell apart in spectacular fashion.

In The Art Thief, Michael Finkel brings us into Breitwieser’s strange and fascinating world. Unlike most thieves, Breitwieser never stole for money. Instead, he displayed all his treasures in a pair of secret rooms where he could admire them to his heart’s content. Possessed of a remarkable athleticism and an innate ability to circumvent practically any security system, Breitwieser managed to pull off a breathtaking number of audacious thefts. Yet these strange talents bred a growing disregard for risk and an addict’s need to score, leading Breitwieser to ignore his girlfriend’s pleas to stop—until one final act of hubris brought everything crashing down.

This is a riveting story of art, crime, love, and an insatiable hunger to possess beauty at any cost.]]> 224 Michael Finkel 0525657320 Beata 0 to-read 3.92 2023 The Art Thief: A True Story of Love, Crime, and a Dangerous Obsession

The Art Thief: A True Story of Love, Crime, and a Dangerous Obsession

author: Michael Finkel
name: Beata
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/12/23
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Yellowface 62047984
So what if June edits Athena’s novel and sends it to her agent as her own work? So what if she lets her new publisher rebrand her as Juniper Song—complete with an ambiguously ethnic author photo? This piece of history deserve to be told, whoever the teller. That is what June believes, and The New York Times bestseller list agrees.

But June cannot escape Athena’s shadow, and emerging evidence threatens her stolen success. As she races to protect her secret she discovers exactly how far she will go to keep what she thinks she deserves.]]> 319 R.F. Kuang 000853277X Beata 2 american 3.69 2023 Yellowface

author: R.F. Kuang
name: Beata
average rating: 3.69
book published: 2023
rating: 2
read at: 2023/12/03
date added: 2023/12/05
shelves: american
review:
Lumbers unevenly between satire and thriller. The novel works best as a critique (?) of the idiocy and vicissitudes of online outrage culture. Ultimately, it’s not exactly a subtle point that’s being made here and the novel’s main point is undermined by its internal inconsistencies.
]]>