Sheena's bookshelf: all en-US Sat, 15 Feb 2025 03:31:55 -0800 60 Sheena's bookshelf: all 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg Prima Facie 60913708
After several acclaimed productions in Australia and winning the Australian Writers' Guild Award for Drama, the play received its European premiere at the Harold Pinter Theatre in London's West End in April 2022.]]> 98 Suzie Miller 1839040645 Sheena 0 to-read 4.67 Prima Facie
author: Suzie Miller
name: Sheena
average rating: 4.67
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date added: 2025/02/15
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]]> <![CDATA[The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet]]> 55145261 A deeply moving and mind-expanding collection of personal essays in the first ever work of non-fiction from #1 internationally bestselling author John Green

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

Complex and rich with detail, the Anthropocene's reviews have been praised as 'observations that double as exercises in memoiristic empathy', with over 10 million lifetime downloads. John Green's gift for storytelling shines throughout this artfully curated collection about the shared human experience; it includes beloved essays along with six all-new pieces exclusive to the book.]]> 304 John Green 0525555218 Sheena 0 to-read 4.37 2021 The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet
author: John Green
name: Sheena
average rating: 4.37
book published: 2021
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/27
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]]> Oppenheimer 38310558
Sruggling to cast off his radical past and thrust into a position of power and authority, the ambitious and charismatic J Robert Oppenheimer races to win the ¡®battle of the laboratories¡¯ and create a weapon so devastating that it would bring about an end not just to the Second World War but to all war.

Tom Morton-Smith¡¯s new play takes us into the heart of the Manhattan Project, revealing the personal cost of making history.]]> 112 Tom Morton-Smith Sheena 0 to-read 4.33 2004 Oppenheimer
author: Tom Morton-Smith
name: Sheena
average rating: 4.33
book published: 2004
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/07
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]]> <![CDATA[Six Days in August: The Story of Stockholm Syndrome]]> 54666125

As policemen and reporters encircled the bank, the crime-in-progress turned into a high-stakes thriller broadcast on live television. Inside the building, meanwhile, complicated emotional relationships developed between captors and captives that would launch a remarkable new concept into the realm of psychology, hostage negotiation, and popular culture.


Based on a wealth of previously unpublished sources, including rare film footage and unprecedented access to the main participants, Six Days in August captures the surreal events in their entirety, on an almost minute-by-minute basis. It is a rich human drama that blurs the lines between loyalty and betrayal, obedience and defiance, fear and attraction¡ªand a groundbreaking work of nonfiction that forces us to consider "Stockholm syndrome" in an entirely new light.]]> 298 David King 0393635090 Sheena 0 to-read 3.89 2020 Six Days in August: The Story of Stockholm Syndrome
author: David King
name: Sheena
average rating: 3.89
book published: 2020
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/09/23
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]]> These Violent Delights 53549678 The Secret History meets Call Me by Your Name in Micah Nemerever's compulsively enjoyable debut novel - a feverishly taut Hitchcockian story about two college students, each with his own troubled past, whose escalating obsession with one another leads to an act of unspeakable violence.

When Paul and Julian meet as university freshmen in early 1970s Pittsburgh, they are immediately drawn to one another. A talented artist, Paul is sensitive and agonizingly insecure, incomprehensible to his working-class family, and desolate with grief over his father's recent death. Paul sees his wealthy, effortlessly charming Julian as his sole intellectual equal - an ally against the conventional world he finds so suffocating. He idolizes his friend for his magnetic confidence. But as charismatic as he can choose to be, Julian also is volatile and capriciously cruel. An admiration isn't the same as trust.

As their friendship spirals into an all-consuming intimacy, Paul is desperate to protect their precarious bond, even as it becomes clear that pressures from the outside world are nothing compared with the brutality they are capable of inflicting on one another. Separation is out of the question. But as their orbit compresses and their grip on one another tightens, they are drawn to an act of irrevocable violence that will force the young men to confront a shattering truth at the core of their relationship.

Exquisitely plotted, unfolding with propulsive ferocity, These Violent Delights is a novel of escalating dread and an excavation of the unsettling depths of human desire.]]> 463 Micah Nemerever Sheena 0 to-read 3.83 2020 These Violent Delights
author: Micah Nemerever
name: Sheena
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2020
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/09/21
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]]> <![CDATA[So You've Been Publicly Shamed]]> 24585982 Now a? New York Times ?bestseller and from the author of The Psychopath Test, a captivating and brilliant exploration of one of our world's most underappreciated shame.
?
'It's about the terror, isn't it?'
?
'The terror of what?' I said.
?
'The terror of being found out.'
?
For the past three years, Jon Ronson has travelled the world meeting recipients of high-profile public shamings. The shamed are people like us - people who, say, made a joke on social media that came out badly, or made a mistake at work. Once their transgression is revealed, collective outrage circles with the force of a hurricane and the next thing they know they're being torn apart by an angry mob, jeered at, demonized, sometimes even fired from their job.
?
A great renaissance of public shaming is sweeping our land. Justice has been democratized. The silent majority are getting a voice. But what are we doing with our voice? We are mercilessly finding people's faults. We are defining the boundaries of normality by ruining the lives of those outside it. We are using shame as a form of social control.
?
Simultaneously powerful and hilarious in the way only Jon Ronson can be,?So You've Been Publicly Shamed?is a deeply honest book about modern life, full of eye-opening truths about the escalating war on human flaws - and the very scary part we all play in it.]]> 288 Jon Ronson 1743536755 Sheena 0 to-read 4.14 2015 So You've Been Publicly Shamed
author: Jon Ronson
name: Sheena
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2015
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/07/30
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]]> <![CDATA[Pretty City London : Discovering London¡¯s Beautiful Places]]> 55920999 224 Siobhan Ferguson Sheena 0 to-read 4.10 2018 Pretty City London : Discovering London¡¯s Beautiful Places
author: Siobhan Ferguson
name: Sheena
average rating: 4.10
book published: 2018
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/07/13
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]]> The Physicists 1990794 94 Friedrich D¨¹rrenmatt 0394172469 Sheena 0 to-read 3.91 1962 The Physicists
author: Friedrich D¨¹rrenmatt
name: Sheena
average rating: 3.91
book published: 1962
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/06/16
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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 Sheena 3 3.98 1962 One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
author: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
name: Sheena
average rating: 3.98
book published: 1962
rating: 3
read at: 2021/04/04
date added: 2024/03/15
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]]> <![CDATA[Omd - Pretending to See the Future]]> 51268211 514 Richard Houghton 1916115624 Sheena 0 to-read 4.10 Omd - Pretending to See the Future
author: Richard Houghton
name: Sheena
average rating: 4.10
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]]> The Tartar Steppe 83017 198 Dino Buzzati 1567923046 Sheena 4 4.24 1940 The Tartar Steppe
author: Dino Buzzati
name: Sheena
average rating: 4.24
book published: 1940
rating: 4
read at: 2021/02/23
date added: 2024/01/10
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]]> The Poltergeist 56899651
But now he serves in a stationers, and no one's even heard of him¡­ what went wrong?

Philip Ridley's darkly comic new play is about art, family, memory, and being haunted by the life we never lived.

This edition was published to coincide with the world premiere performance at London's Southwark Playhouse, which was performed live and live-streamed around the world in November 2020.]]> 64 Philip Ridley 1350241172 Sheena 0 to-read 4.00 The Poltergeist
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]]> Beowulf 41940267 Beowulf by the author of The Mere Wife.

Nearly twenty years after Seamus Heaney¡¯s translation of Beowulf ¡ª and fifty years after the translation that continues to torment high-school students around the world ¡ª there is a radical new verse translation of the epic poem by Maria Dahvana Headley, which brings to light elements never before translated into English.

A man seeks to prove himself as a hero. A monster seeks silence in his territory. A warrior seeks to avenge her murdered son. A dragon ends it all. These familiar components of the epic poem are seen with a novelist¡¯s eye toward gender, genre, and history. Beowulf has always been a tale of entitlement and encroachment ¡ª of powerful men seeking to become more powerful and one woman seeking justice for her child ¡ª but this version brings new context to an old story. While crafting her contemporary adaptation, Headley unearthed significant shifts lost over centuries of translation; her Beowulf is one for the twenty-first century.]]> 140 Unknown 0374110034 Sheena 0 to-read 4.10 1000 Beowulf
author: Unknown
name: Sheena
average rating: 4.10
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]]> Scabby Queen 49872159
To Neil, she was his great unrequited love. He'd known it since their days on picket lines as teenagers. Now she's a sentence in his email inbox: Remember me well.

The media had loved her as a sexy young starlet, but laughed her off as a ranting spinster as she aged. But with news of her suicide, Clio Campbell is transformed into a posthumous heroine for politically chaotic times.

Stretching over five decades, taking in the miners' strikes to Brexit and beyond; hopping between a tiny Scottish island, a Brixton anarchist squat, the bloody Genoa G8 protests, the poll tax riots and Top of the Pops, Scabby Queen is a portrait of a woman who refuses to compromise, told by her friends and lovers, enemies and fans.

As word spreads of what Clio has done, half a century of memories, of pain and of joy are wrenched to the surface. Those who loved her, those who hated her, and those that felt both ways at once, are forced to ask one question: Who was Clio Campbell?]]> 400 Kirstin Innes 0008342296 Sheena 0 to-read 3.68 2020 Scabby Queen
author: Kirstin Innes
name: Sheena
average rating: 3.68
book published: 2020
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/07/29
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]]> A Fugitive Crosses his Tracks 17335537 414 Aksel Sandemose Sheena 0 to-read 3.82 1933 A Fugitive Crosses his Tracks
author: Aksel Sandemose
name: Sheena
average rating: 3.82
book published: 1933
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[Scarred For Life Volume Two: Television in the 1980s]]> 56583783 540 Stephen Brotherstone Sheena 0 to-read 4.66 2020 Scarred For Life Volume Two: Television in the 1980s
author: Stephen Brotherstone
name: Sheena
average rating: 4.66
book published: 2020
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/07/13
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]]> My Struggle (3 Book Series) 39323821 From Book 1: My Struggle: Book One introduces American readers to the audacious, addictive, and profoundly surprising international literary sensation that is the provocative and brilliant six-volume autobiographical novel by Karl Ove Knausgaard. It has already been anointed a Proustian masterpiece and is the rare work of dazzling literary originality that is intensely, irresistibly readable. Unafraid of the big issues¡ªdeath, love, art, fear¡ªand yet committed to the intimate details of life as it is lived, My Struggle is an essential work of contemporary literature.]]> Karl Ove Knausg?rd Sheena 0 to-read 4.24 2009 My Struggle (3 Book Series)
author: Karl Ove Knausg?rd
name: Sheena
average rating: 4.24
book published: 2009
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/05/16
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]]> Camp Damascus 61884782 A searing and earnest horror debut about the demons the queer community faces in America, the price of keeping secrets, and finding the courage to burn it all down.

They¡¯ll scare you straight to hell.

Welcome to Neverton, Montana: home to a God-fearing community with a heart of gold.

Nestled high up in the mountains is Camp Damascus, the self-proclaimed ¡°most effective¡± gay conversion camp in the country. Here, a life free from sin awaits. But the secret behind that success is anything but holy.]]> 246 Chuck Tingle 1250874629 Sheena 0 to-read 3.90 2023 Camp Damascus
author: Chuck Tingle
name: Sheena
average rating: 3.90
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/01/26
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]]> Love Me Tender 50371656
Constance Debr¨¦ poursuit sa qu¨ºte entam¨¦e avec Play Boy, celle du sens, de la vie juste, de la vie bonne. Apr¨¨s la question de l¡¯identit¨¦ se pose la question de l¡¯autre et de l¡¯amour sous toutes ses formes, de l¡¯amour maternel aux variations amoureuses. Faut-il, pour ¨ºtre libre, accueillir tout ce qui nous arrive ? Faut-il tout embrasser, jusqu¡¯¨¤ nos propres d¨¦faites ? Peut-on renverser le chagrin ?]]> 122 Constance Debr¨¦ 2081471922 Sheena 0 to-read 3.84 2020 Love Me Tender
author: Constance Debr¨¦
name: Sheena
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2020
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]]> Play Boy 37791748 187 Constance Debr¨¦ 2234084296 Sheena 0 to-read 3.24 2018 Play Boy
author: Constance Debr¨¦
name: Sheena
average rating: 3.24
book published: 2018
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/01/14
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]]> Holes (Holes, #1) 38709
It doesn¡¯t take long for Stanley to realize there¡¯s more than character improvement going on at Camp Green Lake. The boys are digging holes because the warden is looking for something. But what could be buried under a dried-up lake? Stanley tries to dig up the truth in this inventive and darkly humorous tale of crime and punishment¡ªand redemption.]]> 272 Louis Sachar 0439244196 Sheena 0 to-read 4.01 1998 Holes (Holes, #1)
author: Louis Sachar
name: Sheena
average rating: 4.01
book published: 1998
rating: 0
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date added: 2022/12/16
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]]> The Werewolf 844318 ??? Over the novel broods the symbol of the Werewolf, which for Sandemose represents all the forces hostile to a full, free life¡ªthe thirst for power over others¡¯ lives, the lust to destroy what cannot be possessed or controlled. In their private encounters with the Werewolf, few can claim total victory. Sandemose¡¯s characters all bear the scars of lost battles.]]> 374 Aksel Sandemose 0299037444 Sheena 0 to-read 3.94 1958 The Werewolf
author: Aksel Sandemose
name: Sheena
average rating: 3.94
book published: 1958
rating: 0
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date added: 2022/12/05
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]]> Girl Meets Boy 40847246 164 Ali Smith 1786892472 Sheena 0 to-read 3.84 Girl Meets Boy
author: Ali Smith
name: Sheena
average rating: 3.84
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date added: 2022/12/04
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]]> The Social Lives of Animals 60532093
Insightful,?engaging, and often hilarious,?The Social Lives of Animals?demonstrates?that you?can?learn more about animals by studying how they work together than by?how they?compete.??]]> 406 Ashley Ward Sheena 0 to-read 4.39 2022 The Social Lives of Animals
author: Ashley Ward
name: Sheena
average rating: 4.39
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2022/12/04
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]]> Dykette 60784651 Named one of the Best LGBTQ+ Books of 2023 (So Far) by Vogue ? Named a Best Book of 2023 (So Far) by Cosmopolitan ? Named a Best Book of Spring 2023 by Esquire ? Named a Most Anticipated LGBTQ+ Book of 2023 by BuzzFeed, Electric Literature, and Them

An addictive, absurd, and darkly hilarious debut novel about a young woman who embarks on a ten-day getaway with her partner and two other queer couples

Sasha and Jesse are professionally creative, erotically adventurous, and passionately dysfunctional twentysomethings making a life together in Brooklyn. When a pair of older, richer lesbians¡ªprominent news host Jules Todd and her psychotherapist partner, Miranda¡ªinvites Sasha and Jesse to their country home for the holidays, they¡¯re quick to accept. Even if the trip includes a third couple¡ªJesse¡¯s best friend, Lou, and their cool-girl flame, Darcy¡ªwhose It-queer clout Sasha ridicules yet desperately wants.

As the late December afternoons blur together in a haze of debaucherous homecooked feasts and sweaty sauna confessions, so too do the guests¡¯ secret and shifting motivations. When Jesse and Darcy collaborate an ill-fated livestream performance, a complex web of infatuation and jealousy emerges, sending Sasha down a spiral of destructive rage that threatens each couple¡¯s future.

Unfolding over ten heady days, Dykette is an unforgettable love story at the crossroads of queer nonconformity and seductive normativity. With propulsive plotting and sexy, wickedly entertaining prose, Jenny Fran Davis captures the vagaries of desire and the many devastating places in which we seek recognition.]]> 320 Jenny Fran Davis 1250843138 Sheena 0 to-read 2.93 2023 Dykette
author: Jenny Fran Davis
name: Sheena
average rating: 2.93
book published: 2023
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]]> <![CDATA[The Fall of N¨²menor: and Other Tales from the Second Age of Middle-earth]]> 61331094
Íжû½ð¶ÔÕâ×ùµºÓìµÄ´´Ôì¼°Æä×îÖÕÃüÔ˵ÄÃÔÁµ£¬²¿·ÖÔ´×ÔÒ»¸ö·´¸´³öÏÖµÄجÃΣ¬Ëü´ÓËûµÄÓ×Ä꿪ʼ£¬Ò»Ö±ÑÓÐøµ½³ÉÄê¡£ËûÃμûÎÞ´ÓÌӱܵľÞÀË£¬»òÊÇ´Óƽ¾²µÄº£ÉÏÓ¿ÏÖ£¬»òÊÇÌÏÌì¾íÆð£¬ÆËÏòÇàÂ̵ÄÄÚ½¡£ÓÚÊÇËûÒÔд×÷À´ÅŽ⣬²¢Ïë´´×÷¡°Ð°æµÄÑÇÌØÀ¼Ìá˹´«Ëµ¡±¡£±Õ±Õ> 352 J.R.R. Tolkien 0008537836 Sheena 0 to-read 4.31 2022 The Fall of N¨²menor: and Other Tales from the Second Age of Middle-earth
author: J.R.R. Tolkien
name: Sheena
average rating: 4.31
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[White Feminism: From the Suffragettes to Influencers and Who They Leave Behind]]> 54238294 JOURNALIST KOA BECK¡¯S AMBITIOUS HARVARD RESEARCH-BASED DEEP DIVE INTI HOW FEMINISM HAS BEEN COMMODIFIED AND RACIALIZED¡ªAND THE REVOLUTIONARY WAY OF THINKING THAT COULD DRIVE A NEW MOVEMENT

Fourth-wave feminism preaches empowerment for women, centering an intersectionality that has been missing from the start. Long before the Lean In phenomenon and branded empowerment conferences, women have been encouraged to ¡°find their power¡± and to ¡°know their value¡± when combatting institutional sexism. But we¡¯ve also funded patriarchal institutions that have cashed in on ¡°feminism¡± without actually making a real difference in the lives of the women they supposedly uplift.

From the formation of the suffragette movement over a century ago to the Women¡¯s March in 2017, mainstream feminism has been defined by parameters dictated and sanctioned by the white women they most benefit. In White Feminism, Koa Beck details the conventions that marginalized genders have needed to adopt in order to be recognized and exposes how Indigenous, Black, brown, transgender, disabled, and undocumented women, among other disenfranchised peoples, have been overlooked in order to champion a different feminist narrative. With insights spanning from the rise of girl bosses to widespread civil unrest during a global pandemic, Beck illuminates how white feminism adheres to a political strategy that commercializes struggle and reinforces white Western supremacy.

Combining her quick-witted, cutting commentary with methodical historical research, Beck pulls from years of experience in the media industry to highlight the extent of racial prejudice, elitism, and privilege that fuels the dominant feminist discourse. She delivers a call to action that urges readers to reinvent the narrow feminist ideas that have become staples in modern gender politics, asking readers to join her in scrutinizing the capitalist, individualist, and heteronormative paradigms under which white feminism operates. In this wide-ranging analysis of the dangers of homogenizing the global feminist experience, Beck advocates for a new landscape that accounts for visibility and inclusivity.]]> 300 Koa Beck 1982134410 Sheena 0 to-read 4.26 2021 White Feminism: From the Suffragettes to Influencers and Who They Leave Behind
author: Koa Beck
name: Sheena
average rating: 4.26
book published: 2021
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]]> <![CDATA[The Book of Phobias and Manias]]> 60210032 256 Kate Summerscale 180081335X Sheena 0 to-read 3.58 2022 The Book of Phobias and Manias
author: Kate Summerscale
name: Sheena
average rating: 3.58
book published: 2022
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]]> The English Understand Wool 59468833 Maman was exigeante¡ªthere is no English word¨Cand I had the benefit of her training. Others may not be so fortunate. If some other young girl, with two million dollars at stake, finds this of use I shall count myself justified.

Raised in Marrakech by a French mother and English father, a 17-year-old girl has learned above all to avoid mauvais ton ("bad taste" loses something in the translation). One should not ask servants to wait on one during Ramadan: they must have paid leave while one spends the holy month abroad. One must play the piano; if staying at Claridge¡¯s, one must regrettably install a Clavinova in the suite, so that the necessary hours of practice will not be inflicted on fellow guests. One should cultivate weavers of tweed in the Outer Hebrides but have the cloth made up in London; one should buy linen in Ireland but have it made up by a Thai seamstress in Paris (whose genius has been supported by purchase of suitable premises). All this and much more she has learned, governed by a parent of ferociously lofty standards. But at 17, during the annual Ramadan travels, she finds all assumptions overturned. Will she be able to fend for herself? Will the dictates of good taste suffice when she must deal, singlehanded, with the sharks of New York?]]> 69 Helen DeWitt 0811230074 Sheena 0 to-read 4.06 2022 The English Understand Wool
author: Helen DeWitt
name: Sheena
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2022
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]]> <![CDATA[Catching Breath: The Making and Unmaking of Tuberculosis (Bloomsbury Sigma)]]> 31450526
The organism responsible, Mycobacterium tuberculosis, has had plenty of time to adapt to its chosen habitat--human lungs--and has learned through natural selection to be an almost perfect pathogen. Using our own immune cells as a Trojan Horse to aid its spread, it¡¯s come up with clever ways to avoid being killed by antibiotics. But patience has been its biggest lesson--it can enter into a latent state when times are tough, only to come back to life when a host¡¯s immune system is compromised. Today, more than one million people die of the disease every year and around one-third of the world¡¯s population are believed to be infected. That¡¯s more than two billion people. Throw in the compounding problems of drug resistance, the HIV epidemic, and poverty, and it¡¯s clear that tuberculosis remains one of the most serious problems in world medicine.

Catching Breath follows the history of TB through the ages, from its time as an infection of hunter-gatherers to the first human villages, which set it up with everything it needed to become the monstrous disease it is today, through to the perils of industrialization and urbanization. It goes on to look at the latest research in fighting the disease, with stories of modern scientific research, interviews with doctors on the TB frontline, and the personal experiences of those affected by the disease.]]> 272 Kathryn Lougheed 1472930339 Sheena 0 3.76 2017 Catching Breath: The Making and Unmaking of Tuberculosis (Bloomsbury Sigma)
author: Kathryn Lougheed
name: Sheena
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2017
rating: 0
read at: 2022/12/03
date added: 2022/12/03
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]]> The Awakening 58345 The Awakening shocked readers with its honest treatment of female marital infidelity. Audiences accustomed to the pieties of late Victorian romantic fiction were taken aback by Chopin's daring portrayal of a woman trapped in a stifling marriage, who seeks and finds passionate physical love outside the confines of her domestic situation.

Aside from its unusually frank treatment of a then-controversial subject, the novel is widely admired today for its literary qualities. Edmund Wilson characterized it as a work "quite uninhibited and beautifully written, which anticipates D. H. Lawrence in its treatment of infidelity." Although the theme of marital infidelity no longer shocks, few novels have plumbed the psychology of a woman involved in an illicit relationship with the perception, artistry, and honesty that Kate Chopin brought to The Awakening.]]> 195 Kate Chopin 0543898083 Sheena 0 to-read 3.69 1899 The Awakening
author: Kate Chopin
name: Sheena
average rating: 3.69
book published: 1899
rating: 0
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]]> Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont 643062 Librarian Note: An alternative cover for this ISBN can be found here

On a rainy Sunday in January, the recently widowed Mrs. Palfrey arrives at the Claremont Hotel where she will spend her remaining days. Her fellow residents are magnificently eccentric and endlessly curious, living off crumbs of affection and snippets of gossip. Together, upper lips stiffened, they fight off their twin enemies¡ªboredom and the Grim Reaper. Then one day Mrs. Palfrey strikes up an unexpected friendship with Ludo, a handsome young writer, and learns that even the old can fall in love.]]> 206 Elizabeth Taylor 1844083217 Sheena 0 to-read 3.99 1971 Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont
author: Elizabeth Taylor
name: Sheena
average rating: 3.99
book published: 1971
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[Maggie the Mechanic (Locas, #1)]]> 144173 272 Jaime Hern¨¢ndez 1560977841 Sheena 0 to-read 4.11 2006 Maggie the Mechanic (Locas, #1)
author: Jaime Hern¨¢ndez
name: Sheena
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2006
rating: 0
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date added: 2022/12/03
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]]> The Outsiders 231804 The Outsiders is about two weeks in the life of a 14-year-old boy. The novel tells the story of Ponyboy Curtis and his struggles with right and wrong in a society in which he believes that he is an outsider. According to Ponyboy, there are two kinds of people in the world: greasers and socs. A soc (short for "social") has money, can get away with just about anything, and has an attitude longer than a limousine. A greaser, on the other hand, always lives on the outside and needs to watch his back. Ponyboy is a greaser, and he's always been proud of it, even willing to rumble against a gang of socs for the sake of his fellow greasers--until one terrible night when his friend Johnny kills a soc. The murder gets under Ponyboy's skin, causing his bifurcated world to crumble and teaching him that pain feels the same whether a soc or a greaser.

Librarian note: This record is for one of the three editions published with different covers and with ISBN 0-140-38572-X / 978-0-14-038572-4. The records are for the 1988 cover (this record), the 1995 cover, and the 2008 cover which is also the current in-print cover.]]> 208 S.E. Hinton 0670532576 Sheena 0 to-read 4.13 1967 The Outsiders
author: S.E. Hinton
name: Sheena
average rating: 4.13
book published: 1967
rating: 0
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date added: 2022/12/03
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]]> <![CDATA[My Brilliant Friend (Neapolitan Novels, #1)]]> 35036409 My Brilliant Friend is a rich, intense and generous-hearted story about two friends, Elena and Lila. Ferrante¡¯s inimitable style lends itself perfectly to a meticulous portrait of these two women that is also the story of a nation and a touching meditation on the nature of friendship. Through the lives of these two women, Ferrante tells the story of a neighbourhood, a city and a country as it is transformed in ways that, in turn, also transform the relationship between her two protagonists.]]> 331 Elena Ferrante Sheena 0 to-read 4.08 2011 My Brilliant Friend (Neapolitan Novels, #1)
author: Elena Ferrante
name: Sheena
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2011
rating: 0
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date added: 2022/12/03
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]]> Animal People 12605635
On a stiflingly hot December day, Stephen has decided it¡¯s time to break up with his girlfriend Fiona. He¡¯s 39, aimless and unfulfilled, he¡¯s without a clue working out how to make his life better. All he has are his instincts ¨C and unfortunately they might just be his downfall . . .

As he makes his way through the pitiless city and the hours of a single day, Stephen must fend off his demanding family, endure another shift of his dead-end job at the zoo (including an excruciating teambuilding event), face up to Fiona¡¯s aggressive ex-husband and the hysteria of a children¡¯s birthday party that goes terribly wrong. As an ordinary day develops into an existential crisis, Stephen begins to understand ¨C perhaps too late ¨C that love is not a trap, and only he can free himself.

Hilarious, tender and heartbreaking, Animal People is a portrait of urban life, a meditation on the conflicted nature of human-animal relationships, and a masterpiece of storytelling.

Animal People invites readers to question the way we think about animals ¨C what makes an ¡®animal person¡¯? What value do we, as a society, place on the lives of creatures? Do we brutalise our pets even as we love them? What¡¯s wrong with anthropomorphism anyway? Filled with challenging ideas and shocks of recognition and revelation, Animal People shows a writer of great depth and compassion at work.]]> 272 Charlotte Wood 1742376851 Sheena 0 to-read 3.63 2011 Animal People
author: Charlotte Wood
name: Sheena
average rating: 3.63
book published: 2011
rating: 0
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date added: 2022/11/29
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]]> <![CDATA[Trauma: My Life as an Emergency Surgeon]]> 11499514 In this pulse-pounding medical memoir, trauma surgeon James Cole takes readers straight into the ER, where anything can and does happen.

 TRAUMA is Dr. Cole's harrowing account of his life spent in the ER and on the battlegrounds, fighting to save lives. In addition to his gripping stories of treating?victims?of gunshot wounds, stabbings, attempted suicides, flesh-eating bacteria, car crashes, industrial accidents, murder, and war, the book also covers the years during Cole's residency training when he was faced with 120-hour work weeks, excessive sleep deprivation, and the pressures of?having to manage people dying of traumatic injury, often with little support.
?
Unlike the authors of other medical memoirs, Cole trained to be a surgeon in the military and?served as a physician member of a Marine Corps reconnaissance unit, United States Special Operations Command (USSOCOM), and on a Navy Reserve SEAL team.? From treating war casualties in Afghanistan and Iraq to?his?experiences as a civilian trauma surgeon treating alcoholics, drug addicts, criminals, and the mentally deranged, TRAUMA is an intense look at?one man's commitment to his country and to those most desperately in need of aid.]]> 336 James Cole 031255222X Sheena 0 to-read 3.95 2011 Trauma: My Life as an Emergency Surgeon
author: James Cole
name: Sheena
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2011
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[Charles Dickens Supernatural Short Stories]]> 52882049 480 Charles Dickens 1839641932 Sheena 0 to-read 3.50 Charles Dickens Supernatural Short Stories
author: Charles Dickens
name: Sheena
average rating: 3.50
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date added: 2022/11/26
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]]> <![CDATA[Ancestors: A History of Britain in Seven Burials]]> 57002292
We often think of Britain springing from nowhere with the arrival of the Romans. But in Ancestors, pre-eminent archaeologist, broadcaster and academic Professor Alice Roberts explores what we can learn about the very earliest Britons - from their burial sites. Although we have very little evidence of what life was like in prehistorical times, here their stories are told through the bones and funerary offerings left behind, preserved in the ground for thousands of years.

Told through seven fascinating burial sites, this groundbreaking prehistory of Britain teaches us more about ourselves and our history: how people came and went; how we came to be on this island.]]> 400 Alice Roberts 1471188019 Sheena 0 to-read 4.08 2021 Ancestors: A History of Britain in Seven Burials
author: Alice Roberts
name: Sheena
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2021
rating: 0
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date added: 2022/11/26
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]]> <![CDATA[My Desperate Love Diary (Diaries of Kelly Ann, #1)]]> 901026 320 Liz Rettig 0552553328 Sheena 4 3.67 2005 My Desperate Love Diary (Diaries of Kelly Ann, #1)
author: Liz Rettig
name: Sheena
average rating: 3.67
book published: 2005
rating: 4
read at: 2022/11/24
date added: 2022/11/24
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My copy was given to me by a friend, who wrote, "This is the funniest parody of teenage angst I have ever read. I hope you get as many laughs out of it as I did." I agree with her succinct review.
]]> Life Ceremony 59793324 Life Ceremony, the incomparable Sayaka Murata is back with her first collection of short stories ever to be translated into English. In Japan, Murata is particularly admired for her short stories, which are sometimes sweet, sometimes shocking, and always imbued with an otherworldly imagination and uncanniness.

In these twelve stories, Murata mixes an unusual cocktail of humor and horror to portray both the loners and outcasts as well as turning the norms and traditions of society on their head to better question them. Whether the stories take place in modern-day Japan, the future, or an alternate reality is left to the reader¡¯s interpretation, as the characters often seem strange in their normality in a frighteningly abnormal world. In ¡°A First-Rate Material¡±, Nana and Naoki are happily engaged, but Naoki can¡¯t stand the conventional use of deceased people¡¯s bodies for clothing, accessories, and furniture, and a disagreement around this threatens to derail their perfect wedding day. ¡°Lovers on the Breeze¡± is told from the perspective of a curtain in a child¡¯s bedroom that jealously watches the young girl Naoko as she has her first kiss with a boy from her class and does its best to stop her. ¡°Eating the City¡± explores the strange norms around food and foraging, while ¡°Hatchling¡± closes the collection with an extraordinary depiction of the fractured personality of someone who tries too hard to fit in.

In these strange and wonderful stories of family and friendship, sex and intimacy, belonging and individuality, Murata asks above all what it means to be a human in our world and offers answers that surprise and linger.]]> 256 Sayaka Murata 0802159583 Sheena 0 3.76 2019 Life Ceremony
author: Sayaka Murata
name: Sheena
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2019
rating: 0
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]]> Heart of a Dog 113205 123 Mikhail Bulgakov 0802150594 Sheena 4 4.15 1925 Heart of a Dog
author: Mikhail Bulgakov
name: Sheena
average rating: 4.15
book published: 1925
rating: 4
read at: 2022/11/23
date added: 2022/11/23
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]]> <![CDATA[Self-Made Man: One Woman's Journey Into Manhood and Back Again]]> 29434
A journalist's provocative, spellbinding account of her eighteen months spent undercover will transform the way we think about what it means to be a man

Following in the tradition of John Howard Griffin (Black Like Me) and Barbara Ehrenreich (Nickel and Dimed), Norah Vincent absorbed a cultural experience and reported back on what she observed incognito. For more than a year and a half she ventured into the world as Ned, with an ever-present five o'clock shadow, a crew cut, wire-rim glasses, and her own size 11 1/2 shoes¡ªa perfect disguise that enabled her to observe the world of men as an insider. The result is a sympathetic, shrewd, and thrilling tour de force of immersion journalism that's destined to challenge preconceptions and attract enormous attention.

With her buddies on the bowling league she enjoyed the rough and rewarding embrace of male camaraderie undetectable to an outsider. A stint in a high-octane sales job taught her the gut-wrenching pressures endured by men who would do anything to succeed. She frequented sex clubs, dated women hungry for love but bitter about men, and infiltrated all-male communities as hermetically sealed as a men's therapy group, and even a monastery. Narrated in her utterly captivating prose style and with exquisite insight, humor, empathy, nuance, and at great personal cost, Norah uses her intimate firsthand experience to explore the many remarkable mysteries of gender identity as well as who men are apart from and in relation to women. Far from becoming bitter or outraged, Vincent ended her journey astounded¡ªand exhausted¡ªby the rigid codes and rituals of masculinity. Having gone where no woman (who wasn't an aspiring or actual transsexual) has gone for any significant length of time, let alone eighteen months, Norah Vincent's surprising account is an enthralling reading experience and a revelatory piece of anecdotally based gender analysis that is sure to spark fierce and fascinating conversation.]]> 290 Norah Vincent 0670034665 Sheena 3 3.39 2006 Self-Made Man: One Woman's Journey Into Manhood and Back Again
author: Norah Vincent
name: Sheena
average rating: 3.39
book published: 2006
rating: 3
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]]> <![CDATA[The English Language and Linguistics Companion (Macmillan Student Companions Series, 4)]]> 5756829
A one-stop resource, this practical and highly accessible
- Provides a comprehensive overview of contemporary approaches to the study of language and outlines the contribution of significant scholars to the development of the field.
- Introduces the core topics and concepts of linguistics and the study of language and summarizes key issues in applied linguistics.
- Defines and illustrates the key terms and concepts in the discipline of linguistics.
- Offers practical advice on the skills required when studying linguistics and suggests a range of possible career pathways.
- Illustrates approaches to linguistic research and recommends resources for linguistic inquiry and the study of language.

Packed full of information and guidance, this is an essential resource for prospective linguistics students and anyone with an interest in the study of language.]]> 384 Keith Allan 1403989710 Sheena 0 to-read 3.17 2009 The English Language and Linguistics Companion (Macmillan Student Companions Series, 4)
author: Keith Allan
name: Sheena
average rating: 3.17
book published: 2009
rating: 0
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]]> All the Living and the Dead 58724737
We are surrounded by death. It is in our news, our nursery rhymes, our true-crime podcasts. Yet from a young age, we are told that death is something to be feared. How are we supposed to know what we¡¯re so afraid of, when we are never given the chance to look?

Fueled by a childhood fascination with death, journalist Hayley Campbell searches for answers in the people who make a living by working with the dead. Along the way, she encounters mass fatality investigators, embalmers, and a former executioner who is responsible for ending sixty-two lives. She meets gravediggers who have already dug their own graves, visits a cryonics facility in Michigan, goes for late-night Chinese with a homicide detective, and questions a man whose job it is to make crime scenes disappear.

Through Campbell¡¯s incisive and candid interviews with these people who see death every day, she Why would someone choose this kind of life? Does it change you as a person? And are we missing something vital by letting death remain hidden? A dazzling work of cultural criticism, All the Living and the Dead weaves together reportage with memoir, history, and philosophy, to offer readers a fascinating look into the psychology of Western death.]]> 288 Hayley Campbell 1250281849 Sheena 0 to-read 4.25 2022 All the Living and the Dead
author: Hayley Campbell
name: Sheena
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2022/11/20
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]]> <![CDATA[The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin (World of Beatrix Potter, #2)]]> 885497 Beatrix Potter's famous tale of a naughty squirrel who loses his tail is as popular today as it was when it was first published over 100 years ago.

Join Nutkin, his brother Twinkleberry & all his cousins as they traverse to Owl Island to gather nuts. See what happens when Old Brown, the terrifying owl guardian of the island decides he has had it with silly Nutkin's cheekiness! Ouch!!

Beatrix Potter is still regarded as one of the world's best-loved children's authors of all time. From her first book, 'The Tale of Peter Rabbit', published by Frederick Warne in 1902, she went on to create a series of stories based around animal characters including Mrs. Tiggy-winkle, Benjamin Bunny, Jemima Puddle-duck, Mr. Jeremy Fisher and Tom Kitten.

Her humorous, lively tales and beautiful illustrations have become a natural part of childhood. With revenue from the sales of her books, Beatrix Potter bought a farm¡ªHill Top¡ªin the English Lake District, where she later became a farmer and prize-winning sheep breeder.

Today, Beatrix Potter's original 23 tales are still published by Frederick Warne. 'The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin' is number two in Beatrix Potter's series of 23 little books.

Age Rating: 3¨C12+ / Preschool - 2+ / Lexile Measure 1040L]]> 58 Beatrix Potter 0723247714 Sheena 0 3.98 1903 The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin (World of Beatrix Potter, #2)
author: Beatrix Potter
name: Sheena
average rating: 3.98
book published: 1903
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[Quantum Physics: Science Explained for Our Little Ones]]> 52756885 Discover the mystery of science with Future Geniuses!

Join Valentia, the little scientist, and her cat, Plank, as they learn why Plank can never seem to catch the laser he loves to play with.

To do this, they must shrink down to the smallest size imaginable. Once they¡¯re tiny, they easily learn about quantum physics, discovering secrets that are invisible to those of us who are full sized!

Valentina teaches plank all about molecules, atoms, particles, photons, and matter. And she answers all of his questions about solids, liquids, and gasses, as well as fusion and fission.

Future Geniuses is a collection that will help families spend a lot of time reading and learning together. Through simple text and fun illustrations, author and scientist Carlos Pazos makes the subjects of quantum physics approachable and easy to understand for even the smallest scientists.]]> 24 Carlos Pazos 1510754377 Sheena 0 to-read 4.20 Quantum Physics: Science Explained for Our Little Ones
author: Carlos Pazos
name: Sheena
average rating: 4.20
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]]> <![CDATA[Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century]]> 58476152 Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century, the strange is made familiar and the familiar strange, such that a girl growing wings on her legs feels like an ordinary rite of passage, while a bug-infested house becomes an impossible, Kafkaesque nightmare. Each story builds a new world all its own: a group of children steal a haunted doll; a runaway bride encounters a sea monster; a vendor sells toy boxes that seemingly control the passage of time; an insomniac is seduced by the Sandman. These visions of modern life wrestle with themes of death and technological consequence, guilt and sexuality, and unmask the contradictions that exist within all of us.??

Mesmerizing, electric, and wholly original, Kim Fu¡¯s Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century blurs the boundaries of the real and fantastic, offering intricate and surprising insights into human nature.]]> 232 Kim Fu 1951142993 Sheena 0 to-read 3.84 2022 Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century
author: Kim Fu
name: Sheena
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2022/11/18
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]]> <![CDATA[I'm a Therapist, and My Patient is Going to be the Next School Shooter: 6 Patient Files That Will Keep You Up At Night (Dr. Harper Therapy, #1)]]> 43799186 120 Dr. Harper Sheena 0 to-read 3.54 2019 I'm a Therapist, and My Patient is Going to be the Next School Shooter: 6 Patient Files That Will Keep You Up At Night (Dr. Harper Therapy, #1)
author: Dr. Harper
name: Sheena
average rating: 3.54
book published: 2019
rating: 0
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date added: 2022/11/18
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]]> <![CDATA[Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America]]> 53056522 From the author of the New York Times bestseller So You Want to Talk About Race, a history of white male America and a scathing indictment of what it has cost us socially, economically, and politically

After the election of Donald Trump, and the escalation of white male rage and increased hostility toward immigrants that came with him, New York Times-bestselling author Ijeoma Oluo found herself in conversation with Americans around the country, pondering one central question: How did we get here?

In this ambitious survey of the last century of American history, Oluo answers that question by pinpointing white men's deliberate efforts to subvert women, people of color, and the disenfranchised. Through research, interviews, and the powerful, personal writing for which she is celebrated, Oluo investigates the backstory of America's growth, from immigrant migration to our national ethos around ingenuity, from the shaping of economic policy to the protection of sociopolitical movements that fortify male power. In the end, she shows how white men have long maintained a stranglehold on leadership and sorely undermined the pursuit of happiness for all.]]> 278 Ijeoma Oluo 1580059511 Sheena 0 4.40 2020 Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America
author: Ijeoma Oluo
name: Sheena
average rating: 4.40
book published: 2020
rating: 0
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date added: 2022/09/22
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]]> <![CDATA[The Collected Stories of Guy de Maupassant]]> 887495 1003 Guy de Maupassant 0517457512 Sheena 0 to-read 4.25 The Collected Stories of Guy de Maupassant
author: Guy de Maupassant
name: Sheena
average rating: 4.25
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]]> <![CDATA[Dirty Old London: The Victorian Fight Against Filth]]> 21945078
Through thematic chapters, Jackson describes how Victorian reformers met with both triumph and disaster. Full of individual stories and overlooked details¡ªfrom the dustmen who grew rich from recycling, to the peculiar history of the public toilet¡ªthis riveting book gives us a fresh insight into the minutiae of daily life and the wider challenges posed by the unprecedented growth of the Victorian capital.]]> 293 Lee Jackson 0300192053 Sheena 0 to-read 3.76 2014 Dirty Old London: The Victorian Fight Against Filth
author: Lee Jackson
name: Sheena
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2014
rating: 0
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date added: 2022/09/20
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]]> Shit Cassandra Saw 57797983
Cassandra may have seen the future, but it doesn't mean she's resigned to telling the Trojans everything she knows. In this ebullient collection, virgins escape from being sacrificed, witches refuse to be burned, whores aren't ashamed, and every woman gets a chance to be a radioactive cockroach warrior who snaps back at catcallers. Gwen E. Kirby experiments with found structures--a Yelp review, a WikiHow article--which her fierce, irreverent narrators push against, showing how creativity within an enclosed space undermines and deconstructs the constraints themselves. When these women tell the stories of their triumphs as well as their pain, they emerge as funny, angry, loud, horny, lonely, strong protagonists who refuse be secondary characters a moment longer. From "The Best and Only Whore of Cym Hyfryd, 1886" to the "Midwestern Girl [who] is Tired of Appearing in Your Short Stories," Kirby is playing and laughing with the women who have come before her and they are telling her, we have always been this way. You just had to know where to look.]]> 274 Gwen E. Kirby 0143136623 Sheena 0 3.82 2022 Shit Cassandra Saw
author: Gwen E. Kirby
name: Sheena
average rating: 3.82
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[Your Inner Fish: a Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body]]> 1662160
Neil Shubin, a leading paleontologist and professor of anatomy who discovered Tiktaalik-the "missing link" that made headlines around the world in April 2006-tells the story of evolution by tracing the organs of the human body back millions of years, long before the first creatures walked the earth. By examining fossils and DNA, Shubin shows us that our hands actually resemble fish fins, our head is organized like that of a long-extinct jawless fish, and major parts of our genome look and function like those of worms and bacteria.

Shubin makes us see ourselves and our world in a completely new light. Your Inner Fish is science writing at its finest-enlightening, accessible, and told with irresistible enthusiasm.]]> 229 Neil Shubin 0375424474 Sheena 0 to-read 4.02 2008 Your Inner Fish: a Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body
author: Neil Shubin
name: Sheena
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2008
rating: 0
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date added: 2022/09/05
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]]> Chandelier: An Original Story 60914044
It brings me such joy to celebrate the important work of independent bookstores and share "Chandelier" with you." - Mieko Kawakami]]> 48 Mieko Kawakami 1609457811 Sheena 0 to-read 4.12 2017 Chandelier: An Original Story
author: Mieko Kawakami
name: Sheena
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2017
rating: 0
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date added: 2022/08/31
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]]> Lighthousekeeping 15052
One of the most original and extraordinary writers of her generation, Jeanette Winterson has created a modern fable about the transformative power of storytelling.]]> 232 Jeanette Winterson 0156032899 Sheena 0 to-read 3.89 1997 Lighthousekeeping
author: Jeanette Winterson
name: Sheena
average rating: 3.89
book published: 1997
rating: 0
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]]> The People of the Abyss 113250 208 Jack London 1598189735 Sheena 0 to-read 4.06 1903 The People of the Abyss
author: Jack London
name: Sheena
average rating: 4.06
book published: 1903
rating: 0
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date added: 2022/08/21
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]]> The Road to Wigan Pier 30553 215 George Orwell Sheena 0 to-read 3.92 1937 The Road to Wigan Pier
author: George Orwell
name: Sheena
average rating: 3.92
book published: 1937
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[A Fortunate Man: The Story of a Country Doctor]]> 52943


"In contemporary letters John Berger seems to me peerless; not since Lawrence has there been a writer who offers such attentiveness to the sensual world with responsiveness to the imperatives of conscience." --Susan Sontag]]> 168 John Berger 067973726X Sheena 0 to-read 3.95 1967 A Fortunate Man: The Story of a Country Doctor
author: John Berger
name: Sheena
average rating: 3.95
book published: 1967
rating: 0
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date added: 2022/08/16
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]]> <![CDATA[A Fortunate Woman: A Country Doctor's Story]]> 60713379
Polly Morland was clearing her late mother¡¯s house when she found a battered paperback fallen behind the family bookshelf. Opening it, she was astonished to see an old photograph of the remote, wooded valley in which she lives. The book was A Fortunate Man, John Berger¡¯s classic account of a country doctor working in the same valley more than half a century earlier. This chance discovery led Morland to the remarkable doctor who serves that valley community today, a woman whose own medical vocation was inspired by reading the very same book as a teenager.

A Fortunate Woman tells her compelling, true story, and how the tale of the old doctor has threaded through her own life in magical ways. Working within a community she loves, she is a rarity in contemporary medicine: a modern doctor who knows her patients inside out, the lives of this ancient, wild place entwined with her own.

Revisiting Berger¡¯s story after half a century of seismic change, both in our society and in the ways in which medicine is practised, A Fortunate Woman sheds light on what it means to be a doctor in today¡¯s complex and challenging world. Interweaving the doctor¡¯s story with those of her patients, reflecting on the relationship between landscape and community, and upon the wider role of medicine in society, a unique portrait of a twenty-first century family doctor emerges.

Illustrated throughout with photographs by Richard Baker.]]> Polly Morland 1529071135 Sheena 0 to-read 4.23 2022 A Fortunate Woman: A Country Doctor's Story
author: Polly Morland
name: Sheena
average rating: 4.23
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2022/08/15
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]]> Laurinda 22603951
Entering this world of wealth and secrets is Lucy Lam, a scholarship girl with sharp eyes and a shaky sense of self. As she watches The Cabinet in action, and is courted by them ¨C as she learns about power and repression ¨C Lucy finds herself in a battle for her identity and integrity.]]> 352 Alice Pung 1863956921 Sheena 0 to-read 3.80 2014 Laurinda
author: Alice Pung
name: Sheena
average rating: 3.80
book published: 2014
rating: 0
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date added: 2022/08/14
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]]> <![CDATA[The Plague and I (Betty MacDonald Memoirs, #2)]]> 37199 254 Betty MacDonald Sheena 0 to-read 4.19 1948 The Plague and I (Betty MacDonald Memoirs, #2)
author: Betty MacDonald
name: Sheena
average rating: 4.19
book published: 1948
rating: 0
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date added: 2022/08/11
shelves: to-read
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]]> <![CDATA[Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention¡ª and How to Think Deeply Again]]> 57933306 Our ability to pay attention is collapsing. From the New York Times bestselling author of Chasing the Scream and Lost Connections comes a groundbreaking examination of why this is happening--and how to get our attention back.

In the United States, teenagers can focus on one task for only sixty-five seconds at a time, and office workers average only three minutes. Like so many of us, Johann Hari was finding that constantly switching from device to device and tab to tab was a diminishing and depressing way to live. He tried all sorts of self-help solutions--even abandoning his phone for three months--but nothing seemed to work. So Hari went on an epic journey across the world to interview the leading experts on human attention--and he discovered that everything we think we know about this crisis is wrong.

We think our inability to focus is a personal failure to exert enough willpower over our devices. The truth is even more disturbing: our focus has been stolen by powerful external forces that have left us uniquely vulnerable to corporations determined to raid our attention for profit. Hari found that there are twelve deep causes of this crisis, from the decline of mind-wandering to rising pollution, all of which have robbed some of our attention. In Stolen Focus, he introduces readers to Silicon Valley dissidents who learned to hack human attention, and veterinarians who diagnose dogs with ADHD. He explores a favela in Rio de Janeiro where everyone lost their attention in a particularly surreal way, and an office in New Zealand that discovered a remarkable technique to restore workers' productivity.

Crucially, Hari learned how we can reclaim our focus--as individuals, and as a society--if we are determined to fight for it. Stolen Focus will transform the debate about attention and finally show us how to get it back.]]> 357 Johann Hari 0593138511 Sheena 0 to-read 4.22 2022 Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention¡ª and How to Think Deeply Again
author: Johann Hari
name: Sheena
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2022/08/11
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]]> If We Were Villains 30319086
As one of seven young actors studying Shakespeare at an elite arts college, Oliver and his friends play the same roles onstage and off: hero, villain, tyrant, temptress, ingenue, extra. But when the casting changes, and the secondary characters usurp the stars, the plays spill dangerously over into life, and one of them is found dead. The rest face their greatest acting challenge yet: convincing the police, and themselves, that they are blameless.]]> 354 M.L. Rio 125009528X Sheena 0 to-read 4.11 2017 If We Were Villains
author: M.L. Rio
name: Sheena
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2017
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]]> The Interpretation of Dreams 229231 The Interpretation of Dreams, the turn-of-the-century tour de force that outlined his theory of unconscious forces in the context of dream analysis. Introducing the id, the superego, and their problem child, the ego, Freud advanced scientific understanding of the mind immeasurably by exposing motivations normally invisible to our consciousness. While there's no question that his own biases and neuroses influenced his observations, the details are less important than the paradigm shift as a whole. After Freud, our interior lives became richer and vastly more mysterious.

These mysteries clearly bothered him--he went to great (often absurd) lengths to explain dream imagery in terms of childhood sexual trauma, a component of his theory jettisoned mid-century, though now popular among recovered-memory therapists. His dispassionate analyses of his own dreams are excellent studies for cognitive scientists wishing to learn how to sacrifice their vanities for the cause of learning. Freud said of the work contained in The Interpretation of Dreams, "Insight such as this falls to one's lot but once in a lifetime." One would have to feel quite fortunate to shake the world even once. --Rob Lightner

]]> 452 Sigmund Freud Sheena 0 3.54 1899 The Interpretation of Dreams
author: Sigmund Freud
name: Sheena
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]]> We Play Ourselves 54899574 After a humiliating scandal, a young writer flees to the West Coast to start over, where she is drawn into the morally-ambiguous orbit of a charismatic filmmaker and the teenage girls who are her next subjects.

Not too long ago, Cass was a promising young playwright in New York, hailed as "a fierce new voice" and "queer, feminist, and ready to spill the tea." But at the height of all this attention, Cass finds herself at the center of a searing public shaming, and flees to Los Angeles to escape--and reinvent herself. There she meets her next-door neighbor Caroline, a magnetic filmmaker on the rise, as well as the pack of teenage girls who hang around her house. They are the subjects of Caroline's next semidocumentary movie, which follows the girls' clandestine after-school activity: a Fight Club inspired by the violent classic.

As Cass is drawn into the film's orbit, she is awed by Caroline's drive and confidence. But over time, she becomes troubled by how deeply Caroline is manipulating the teens in the name of art--especially as the consequences become increasingly disturbing. With her past proving hard to shake and her future one she's no longer sure she wants, Cass is forced to reckon with her own ambitions and confront what she has come to believe about the steep price of success.]]> 336 Jen Silverman Sheena 0 to-read 3.81 2021 We Play Ourselves
author: Jen Silverman
name: Sheena
average rating: 3.81
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]]> <![CDATA[A Hunger Artist (Short Prose of Franz Kafka)]]> 141352 A Hunger Artist (1924) explores many of the themes that were close to him: spiritual poverty, asceticism, futility, and the alienation of the modern artist.

He edited the manuscript just before his death, and these four stories are some of his best known and most powerful work, marking his maturity as a writer. In addition to "First Sorrow," "A Little Woman," and "Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse People" is the title story, "A Hunger Artist," which has been called by the critic Heinz Politzer "a perfection, a fatal fulfillment that expresses Kafka's desire for permanence."

The three volumes Twisted Spoon Press has published: Contemplation, A Country Doctor, and A Hunger Artist are the collections of stories that Kafka had published during his lifetime. Though each volume has its own distinctive character, they have most often appeared in English in collected editions. They are presented here as separate editions, in new translations by Kevin Blahut, each with its own illustrator from the Prague community.]]> 84 Franz Kafka 8090217117 Sheena 0 to-read 4.15 1924 A Hunger Artist (Short Prose of Franz Kafka)
author: Franz Kafka
name: Sheena
average rating: 4.15
book published: 1924
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]]> <![CDATA[Twelve Patients: Life and Death at Bellevue Hospital]]> 13529059 The inspiration for the NBC drama New Amsterdam and in the spirit of Oliver Sacks, this intensely involving memoir from a former medical director of a major NYC hospital looks poignantly at patients' lives and reveals the author's own battle with cancer.

Dr. Manheimer describes the plights of twelve very different patients--from dignitaries at the nearby UN, to supermax prisoners at Riker's Island, to illegal immigrants, and Wall Street tycoons.


Manheimer was not only the medical director of the country's oldest public hospital for over 13 years, but he was also a patient. As the book unfolds, the narrator is diagnosed with cancer, and he is forced to wrestle with the end of his own life even as he struggles to save the lives of others.]]> 355 Eric Manheimer 1455503886 Sheena 0 to-read 3.57 2012 Twelve Patients: Life and Death at Bellevue Hospital
author: Eric Manheimer
name: Sheena
average rating: 3.57
book published: 2012
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]]> Polluted Sex 60566402
A fractious intimate relationship develops between an Irish woman, an English man, and her girlfriend.

Two ungendered characters contest the same female body.

A deserted wife takes a lover but remains unsatisfied.

Lauren Foley¡¯s debut collection of dramatic short stories, Polluted Sex, is fearless in its depiction of women¡¯s bodies and sexuality, offering an unflinching window into Irish girl and womanhood.]]> 240 Lauren Foley 1910312916 Sheena 0 to-read 3.64 2022 Polluted Sex
author: Lauren Foley
name: Sheena
average rating: 3.64
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]]> <![CDATA[How Civil Wars Start: And How to Stop Them]]> 58369678 Civil wars are the biggest danger to world peace today - this book shows us why they happen, and how to avoid them.

Most of us don't know it, but we are living in the world's greatest era of civil wars. While violence has declined worldwide, civil wars have increased. This is a new phenomenon. With the exception of a handful of cases - the American and English civil wars, the French Revolution - historically it has been rare for people to organise and fight their governments.

This has changed. Since 1946, over 250 armed conflicts have broken out around the world, a number that continues to rise. Major civil wars are now being fought in countries including Iraq, Syria and Libya. Smaller civil wars are being fought in Ukraine, India, and Malaysia. Even countries we thought could never experience another civil war - such as the USA, Sweden and Ireland - are showing signs of unrest.

In How Civil Wars Start, acclaimed expert Barbara F. Walter, who has advised on political violence everywhere from the CIA to the U.S. Senate to the United Nations, explains the rise of civil war and the conditions that create it. As democracies across the world backslide and citizens become more polarised, civil wars will become even more widespread and last longer than they have in the past. This urgent and important book shows us a path back toward peace.]]> 320 Barbara F. Walter 0593137787 Sheena 0 to-read 4.21 2022 How Civil Wars Start: And How to Stop Them
author: Barbara F. Walter
name: Sheena
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]]> They Never Learn 50892240
Every year, she searches for the worst man at Gorman University and plots his well-deserved demise. Thanks to her meticulous planning, she¡¯s avoided drawing attention to herself¡ªbut as she¡¯s preparing for her biggest kill yet, the school starts probing into the growing body count on campus. Determined to keep her enemies close, Scarlett insinuates herself into the investigation and charms the woman in charge, Dr. Mina Pierce. Everything¡¯s going according to her master plan¡­ until she loses control with her latest victim, putting her secret life at risk of exposure.

Meanwhile, Gorman student Carly Schiller is just trying to survive her freshman year. Finally free of her emotionally abusive father, all Carly wants is to focus on her studies and fade into the background. Her new roommate has other ideas. Allison Hadley is cool and confident¡ªeverything Carly wishes she could be¡ªand the two girls quickly form an intense friendship. So when Allison is sexually assaulted at a party, Carly becomes obsessed with making the attacker pay... and turning her fantasies about revenge into a reality.]]> 378 Layne Fargo 1982132027 Sheena 0 to-read 3.95 2020 They Never Learn
author: Layne Fargo
name: Sheena
average rating: 3.95
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]]> <![CDATA[Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain]]> 882444 448 Judith Flanders 0007172958 Sheena 0 to-read 3.89 2006 Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain
author: Judith Flanders
name: Sheena
average rating: 3.89
book published: 2006
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]]> Gothic Tales 30008336
This collection brings together over thirty of Conan Doyle's best "Gothic Tales," in a scholarly edition for the first time. Darryl Jones's introduction discusses the contradictions in Conan Doyle's very public life - as a medical doctor who became obsessed with the spirit world, or a British imperialist drawn to support Irish Home Rule - and shows the ways in which these found articulation in that most anxious of all literary forms, the Gothic.]]> 592 Arthur Conan Doyle 0198734298 Sheena 0 currently-reading 3.94 Gothic Tales
author: Arthur Conan Doyle
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]]> John Keats 3268243
Contents:
Foreword
Prologue to Biography
Apprentice Years
Years of Trial
The Living Year
The Last Year
Epilogue to Life
Appendices:
The Jennings & Sweetinburgh Families
Keats' Father
Keats & Venereal Disease
Keats' Use of Bawdy
Index]]> 669 Robert Gittings 0140051147 Sheena 4 4.25 1969 John Keats
author: Robert Gittings
name: Sheena
average rating: 4.25
book published: 1969
rating: 4
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]]> <![CDATA[A Class Act: Life as a Working-Class Man in a Middle-Class World]]> 57810956

In this hilarious exploration of class, Rob compares his life growing up as a working-class kid to the life he lives now, trying to understand where he truly belongs.


Will he always be that fat kid who was told he¡¯d never be a high-flyer? Why does he feel ashamed if he does anything vaguely middle class? Will he ever favour craft beer over lager? What happens if you eat 50 olives and drink two bottles of champagne? Why is ¡®boner¡¯ such a funny word?


In search of answers, Rob relives the moments in his life when the class divide couldn¡¯t be more obvious. Whether it¡¯s the gig for rich bankers that was worse than Matt Hancock hosting the GQ Men of the Year Awards, turning up at a swanky celebrity house party with a blue bag of cans from the offy or identifying the root of his ambition as a childhood incident involving soiled pants and Jurassic Park, Rob digs deep.


A Class Act is his funny, candid and often moving account of what it feels like to be an outsider and the valuable (sometimes humiliating) life lessons he¡¯s learned along the way.]]> 288 Rob Beckett 0008468184 Sheena 0 to-read 4.03 2021 A Class Act: Life as a Working-Class Man in a Middle-Class World
author: Rob Beckett
name: Sheena
average rating: 4.03
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]]> <![CDATA[Defending the Indefensible: The Global Asbestos Industry and its Fight for Survival]]> 4389251
Yet the bulk of the world's asbestos was mined after 1960. Asbestos usage in many countries continued unabated.

This is the first global history of how the asbestos industry and its allies in government, insurance, and medicine defended the product throughout the twentieth century. It explains how mining and manufacture could continue despite overwhelming medical evidence as to the risks. The argument advanced in this book is that asbestos has proved so enduring because the industry was able to mount a successful defense strategy for the mineral--a strategy that still operates in some parts of the world. This defence involved the shaping of the public debate by censoring, and sometimes corrupting, scientific research, nurturing scientific uncertainty, and using allies in government, insurance, and medicine.

The book also discusses the problems of asbestos in the environment, compensating victims, and the continued use of asbestos in the developing world. Its global focus shows how asbestos can be seen as a model for many occupational diseases--indeed for a whole range of hazards produced by industrial societies. The book is based on a wealth of documentary material gained from legal discovery, supplemented by evidence from the authors' visits and researches in the US, the UK, Canada, Kazakhstan, Zimbabwe, Australia, Swaziland, and South Africa.]]> 338 Jock McCulloch 0199534853 Sheena 0 to-read 4.00 2008 Defending the Indefensible: The Global Asbestos Industry and its Fight for Survival
author: Jock McCulloch
name: Sheena
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2008
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]]> <![CDATA[Fabric: The Hidden History of the Material World]]> 59365412
A New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice

How is a handmade fabric helping save an ancient forest?
Why is a famous fabric pattern from India best known by the name of a Scottish town?
How is a Chinese dragon robe a diagram of the whole universe?
What is the difference between how the Greek Fates and the Viking Norns used threads to tell our destiny?

In Fabric , bestselling author Victoria Finlay spins us round the globe, weaving stories of our relationship with cloth and asking how and why people through the ages have made it, worn it, invented it, and made symbols out of it. And sometimes why they have fought for it.

She beats the inner bark of trees into cloth in Papua New Guinea, fails to handspin cotton in Guatemala, visits tweed weavers at their homes in Harris, and has lessons in patchwork-making in Gee's Bend, Alabama - where in the 1930s, deprived of almost everything they owned, a community of women turned quilting into an art form.

She began her research just after the deaths of both her parents ¡ªand entwined in the threads she found her personal story too. Fabric is not just a material history of our world, but Finlay's own journey through grief and recovery.]]> 528 Victoria Finlay 1639361634 Sheena 0 to-read 4.06 2021 Fabric: The Hidden History of the Material World
author: Victoria Finlay
name: Sheena
average rating: 4.06
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]]> <![CDATA[The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary]]> 25019 The Professor and the Madman, masterfully researched and eloquently written, is an extraordinary tale of madness, genius, and the incredible obsessions of two remarkable men that led to the making of the Oxford English Dictionary -- and literary history. The compilation of the OED, begun in 1857, was one of the most ambitious projects ever undertaken. As definitions were collected, the overseeing committee, led by Professor James Murray, discovered that one man, Dr. W. C. Minor, had submitted more than ten thousand. When the committee insisted on honoring him, a shocking truth came to light: Dr. Minor, an American Civil War veteran, was also an inmate at an asylum for the criminally insane.]]> 242 Simon Winchester 0060839783 Sheena 4 3.84 1998 The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary
author: Simon Winchester
name: Sheena
average rating: 3.84
book published: 1998
rating: 4
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]]> The Essays: A Selection 30741 The Essays: A Selection collects some of Michel de Montaigne's most startling and original works, translated from the French and edited with an introduction and notes by M.A. Screech in Penguin Classics.

To overcome a crisis of melancholy after the death of his father, Montaigne withdrew to his country estates and began to write, and in the highly original essays that resulted he discussed themes such as fathers and children, conscience and cowardice, coaches and cannibals, and, above all, himself. On Some Lines of Virgil opens out into a frank discussion of sexuality and makes a revolutionary case for the equality of the sexes. In On Experience he superbly propounds his thoughts on the right way to live, while other essays touch on issues of an age struggling with religious and intellectual strife, with France torn apart by civil war. These diverse subjects are united by Montaigne's distinctive voice - that of a tolerant man, sceptical, humane, often humorous and utterly honest in his pursuit of the truth.

M.A. Screech's distinguished translation fully retains the light-hearted and inquiring nature of the essays. In his introduction, he examines Montaigne's life and times, and the remarkable self-portrait that emerges from his works.

Michel de Montaigne (1533-1586) studied law and spent a number of years working as a counsellor before devoting his life to reading, writing and reflection.

If you enjoyed The Essays: A Selection, you might like Francis Bacon's The Essays, also available in Penguin Classics.

Alternate cover edition here.]]> 480 M.A. Screech 0140446028 Sheena 0 to-read 4.05 2011 The Essays: A Selection
author: M.A. Screech
name: Sheena
average rating: 4.05
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]]> <![CDATA[The Extended Phenotype: The Long Reach of the Gene (Popular Science)]]> 61538
Dawkins makes a convincing case that considering one¡¯s body, personality, and environment as a field of combat in a kind of ¡°arms race¡± between genes fighting to express themselves on a strand of DNA can clarify and extend the idea of survival of the fittest. This influential and controversial book illuminates the complex world of genetics in an engaging, lively manner.]]> 336 Richard Dawkins 0192880519 Sheena 0 to-read 4.11 1982 The Extended Phenotype: The Long Reach of the Gene (Popular Science)
author: Richard Dawkins
name: Sheena
average rating: 4.11
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]]> <![CDATA[The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time]]> 324494 The Great Plague is one of the most compelling events in human history, even more so now, when the notion of plague¡ªbe it animal or human¡ªhas never loomed larger as a contemporary public concern

The plague that devastated Asia and Europe in the 14th century has been of never-ending interest to both scholarly and general readers. Many books on the plague rely on statistics to tell the story: how many people died; how farm output and trade declined. But statistics can¡¯t convey what it was like to sit in Siena or Avignon and hear that a thousand people a day are dying two towns away. Or to have to chose between your own life and your duty to a mortally ill child or spouse. Or to live in a society where the bonds of blood and sentiment and law have lost all meaning, where anyone can murder or rape or plunder anyone else without fear of consequence.

In The Great Mortality, author John Kelly lends an air of immediacy and intimacy to his telling of the journey of the plague as it traveled from the steppes of Russia, across Europe, and into England, killing 75 million people¡ªone third of the known population¡ªbefore it vanished.]]> 364 John Kelly 0060006935 Sheena 0 to-read 3.87 2005 The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time
author: John Kelly
name: Sheena
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2005
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]]> <![CDATA[Against White Feminism: Notes on Disruption]]> 55298403 Against White Feminism, centering women of color in this transformative overview and counter-manifesto to white feminism¡¯s global, long-standing affinity with colonial, patriarchal, and white supremacist ideals.

Covering such ground as the legacy of the British feminist imperialist savior complex and ¡°the colonial thesis that all reform comes from the West¡± to the condescension of the white feminist¨Cled ¡°aid industrial complex¡± and the conflation of sexual liberation as the ¡°sum total of empowerment,¡± Zakaria follows in the tradition of intersectional feminist forebears Kimberl¨¦ Crenshaw, Adrienne Rich, and Audre Lorde. Zakaria ultimately refutes and reimagines the apolitical aspirations of white feminist empowerment in this staggering, radical critique, with Black and Brown feminist thought at the forefront.]]> 272 Rafia Zakaria 1324006617 Sheena 0 to-read 4.31 2021 Against White Feminism: Notes on Disruption
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name: Sheena
average rating: 4.31
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]]> <![CDATA[Climate Change Is Racist: Race, Privilege and the Struggle for Climate Justice]]> 58158486
In this eye-opening book, writer and environmental activist Jeremy Williams takes us on a short, urgent journey across the globe ¨C from Kenya to India, the USA to Australia ¨C to understand how White privilege and climate change overlap. We¡¯ll look at the environmental facts, hear the experiences of the people most affected on our planet and learn from the activists leading the change.

It¡¯s time for each of us to find our place in the global struggle for justice.]]> 128 Jeremy Williams 1785787756 Sheena 0 to-read 4.30 2021 Climate Change Is Racist: Race, Privilege and the Struggle for Climate Justice
author: Jeremy Williams
name: Sheena
average rating: 4.30
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]]> <![CDATA[Life on the Edge: The Coming of Age of Quantum Biology]]> 24040194 ? ? ??
Like Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene, which provided a new perspective on how evolution works, Life on the Edge alters our understanding of our world's fundamental dynamics. Bringing together first-hand experience at the cutting edge of science with unparalleled gifts of explanation, Jim Al-Khalili and Johnjoe Macfadden reveal that missing ingredient to be quantum mechanics; the phenomena that lie at the heart of this most mysterious of sciences.?

Drawing on recent ground-breaking experiments around the world, each chapter in Life on the Edge engages by illustrating one of life's puzzles: How do migrating birds know where to go? How do we really smell the scent of a rose? How do our genes copy themselves with such precision? Life on the Edge accessibly reveals how quantum mechanics can answer these probing questions of the universe.

Guiding the reader through the rapidly unfolding discoveries of the last few years, Al-Khalili and McFadden communicate the excitement of the explosive new field of quantum biology and its potentially revolutionary applications, while offering insights into the biggest puzzle of all: what is life? As they brilliantly demonstrate in these groundbreaking pages, life exists on the quantum edge.]]> 368 Johnjoe McFadden 0307986810 Sheena 0 to-read 4.08 2014 Life on the Edge: The Coming of Age of Quantum Biology
author: Johnjoe McFadden
name: Sheena
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2014
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]]> <![CDATA[Super Fly: The Unexpected Lives of the World's Most Successful Insects]]> 52668827 Winner of the National Outdoor Book Award for Natural History and a New York Times Editors Choice Pick

After reading Super Fly, you will never take a fly for granted again. Thank you, Jonathan Balcombe, for reminding us of the infinite marvels of everyday creatures.
--Sy Montgomery, Author of How to Be a Good Creature

From an expert in animal consciousness, a book that will turn the fly on the wall into the elephant in the room.

For most of us, the only thing we know about flies is that they're annoying, and our usual reaction is to try to kill them. In Super Fly, the myth-busting biologist Jonathan Balcombe shows the order Diptera in all of its diversity, illustrating the essential role that flies play in every ecosystem in the world as pollinators, waste-disposers, predators, and food source; and how flies continue to reshape our understanding of evolution. Along the way, he reintroduces us to familiar foes like the fruit fly and mosquito, and gives us the chance to meet their lesser-known cousins like the Petroleum Fly (the only animal in the world that breeds in crude oil) and the Chocolate Midge (the sole pollinator of the Cacao tree). No matter your outlook on our tiny buzzing neighbors, Super Fly will change the way you look at flies forever.

Jonathan Balcombe is the author of four books on animal sentience, including the New York Times bestselling What A Fish Knows, which was nominated for the PEN/E.O. Wilson Award for Science Writing. He has worked for years as a researcher and educator with the Humane society to show us the consciousness of other creatures, and here he takes us to the farthest reaches of the animal kingdom.]]> 340 Jonathan Balcombe 0143134272 Sheena 0 to-read 4.15 2021 Super Fly: The Unexpected Lives of the World's Most Successful Insects
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name: Sheena
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]]> <![CDATA[Super Simple Chemistry: The Ultimate Bitesize Study Guide (DK Super Simple)]]> 49357983
Each topic is fully illustrated to support the information, make the facts crystal clear, and bring the science to life. A large central image explains the idea visually and each topic is summed up on a single page, helping children to quickly get up to speed and really understand how chemistry works.

Information boxes explain the theory with the help of simple graphics and for further studying, a handy "Key Facts" box provides a simple summary you can check back on later.

With clear, concise coverage of all the core topics, Super Simple Chemistry is the perfect accessible guide to chemistry for children, supporting classwork, and making studying for exams the easiest it's ever been.]]> 288 D.K. Publishing 1465493239 Sheena 4 4.35 Super Simple Chemistry: The Ultimate Bitesize Study Guide (DK Super Simple)
author: D.K. Publishing
name: Sheena
average rating: 4.35
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rating: 4
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]]> <![CDATA[Retromania: Pop Culture's Addiction to Its Own Past]]> 9854239
We live in a pop age gone loco for retro and crazy for commemoration. Band re-formations and reunion tours, expanded reissues of classic albums and outtake-crammed box sets, remakes and sequels, tribute albums and mash-ups . . . But what happens when we run out of past? Are we heading toward a sort of culturalecological catastrophe where the archival stream of pop history has been exhausted?

Simon Reynolds, one of the finest music writers of his generation, argues that we have indeed reached a tipping point, and that although earlier eras had their own obsessions with antiquity¨Dthe Renaissance with its admiration for Roman and Greek classicism, the Gothic movement's invocations of medievalism¨Dnever has there been a society so obsessed with the cultural artifacts of its own immediate past. Retromania is the first book to examine the retro industry and ask the Is this retromania a death knell for any originality and distinctiveness of our own?]]> 458 Simon Reynolds 0865479941 Sheena 0 to-read 3.83 2010 Retromania: Pop Culture's Addiction to Its Own Past
author: Simon Reynolds
name: Sheena
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2010
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]]> 101 Sonnets 745350 160 Don Paterson 0571215572 Sheena 5 3.85 1999 101 Sonnets
author: Don Paterson
name: Sheena
average rating: 3.85
book published: 1999
rating: 5
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]]> <![CDATA[The Faber Book of Nonsense Verse]]> 1617925 352 Geoffrey Grigson 0571117872 Sheena 4 3.95 1979 The Faber Book of Nonsense Verse
author: Geoffrey Grigson
name: Sheena
average rating: 3.95
book published: 1979
rating: 4
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]]> The Rattle Bag 574889
Moreover, Heaney and Hughes have elected to list their favorites not by theme or by author but simply by title (or by first line, when no title is given). As they explain in their "We hope that our decision to impose an arbitrary alphabetical order allows the contents [of this book] to discover themselves as we ourselves gradually discovered them--each poem full of its singular appeal, transmitting its own signals, taking its chances in a big, voluble world."

With undisputed masterpieces and rare discoveries, with both classics and surprises galore, The Rattle Bag includes the work of such key poets as William Shakespeare, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Lewis Carroll, Dylan Thomas, Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Bishop, and Sylvia Plath among its hundreds of poems. A helpful Glossary as well as an Index of Poets and Works are offered at the conclusion of this hefty, unorthodox, diverse, inspired, and inspiring collection of poetry.]]> 512 Seamus Heaney 057111976X Sheena 4 4.27 1982 The Rattle Bag
author: Seamus Heaney
name: Sheena
average rating: 4.27
book published: 1982
rating: 4
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]]> <![CDATA[Jurassic Park (Jurassic Park, #1)]]> 40604658
Until something goes wrong. . . .

In Jurassic Park, Michael Crichton taps all his mesmerizing talent and scientific brilliance to create his most electrifying technothriller.]]> 450 Michael Crichton 0307763056 Sheena 4 4.38 1990 Jurassic Park (Jurassic Park, #1)
author: Michael Crichton
name: Sheena
average rating: 4.38
book published: 1990
rating: 4
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]]> <![CDATA[The Steampunk Megapack: 26 Modern and Classic Steampunk Stories]]> 17304010

MIDNIGHT AT VALDOSTA'S, by Jay Lake

THE CASE OF THE PECULIAR SAFECRACKER, by G. D. Falksen

THE ACQUISITION OF MANDRAKES AND ASSISTANTS, by Jillian Venters

THE WHISPERER IN DARKNESS, by H. P. Lovecraft

THE BRASS GOGGLE FACTORY WORKER, by John Leavitt

THE PATH OF PROGRESS, by Brian Stableford

THE TAILED MEN, by Arthur O. Friel

THE IMPOSSIBLE MISTER LAPIN INVESTIGATES: THE AFFAIR OF THE TERRIBLE BOAR, by Peter Wordworth

THE WAR EFFORT, by Austin H. Williams

HERBERT WEST: REANIMATOR, by H. P. Lovecraft

A CONNECTICUT YANKEE IN KING ARTHUR¡¯S COURT, by Mark Twain

THE TRUMPETER, by Arthur O. Friel

THE MACHINE STOPS by E. M. Forster

THE UNPARALLELED ADVENTURES OF ONE HANS PFAAL, by Edgar Allan Poe

THE LOST WORLD, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

THE GATEWAY OF THE MONSTER, by William Hope Hodgson

A PRINCESS OF MARS, by Edgar Rice Burroughs

THE MID-WATCH TRAGEDY, by Vincent Starrett

MUSTERED OUT, by H. Bedford-Jones

PAYABLE TO BEARER, by Talbot Mundy

THE DEVIL¡¯S HEIRLOOM by Anthony M. Rud
DOCTOR OX'S EXPERIMENT, by Jules Verne

THE TRIAL FOR MURDER, by Charles Dickens

ANGEL OF THE REVOLUTION, by George Griffith

THE MAN WHO WAS THURSDAY, by G. K. Chesterton

THE HORROR OF THE HEIGHTS, by Arthur Conan Doyle]]> 1543 G.D. Falksen 143444743X Sheena 0 to-read 3.45 2013 The Steampunk Megapack: 26 Modern and Classic Steampunk Stories
author: G.D. Falksen
name: Sheena
average rating: 3.45
book published: 2013
rating: 0
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date added: 2022/07/10
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]]> <![CDATA[The Secret Life of Kitty Granger]]> 49295578
Kitty's first mission draws her into a fascist conspiracy led by a prominent politician--who's also an unreformed Nazi sympathizer. With help from her team, Kitty must use her wits, training, and instincts to get out alive. And she might as well save the country while she's at it.]]> 280 G.D. Falksen 1541597966 Sheena 0 to-read 3.77 2021 The Secret Life of Kitty Granger
author: G.D. Falksen
name: Sheena
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2021
rating: 0
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date added: 2022/07/10
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]]> A Cats Steampunk Alphabet 13589913 36 G.D. Falksen 1434440761 Sheena 0 to-read 3.86 2012 A Cats Steampunk Alphabet
author: G.D. Falksen
name: Sheena
average rating: 3.86
book published: 2012
rating: 0
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date added: 2022/07/10
shelves: to-read
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]]> <![CDATA[Billy No-Mates: How I Realised Men Have a Friendship Problem]]> 60614476
Men are, on average, more isolated and lonelier than women. Countless studies have affirmed this peculiarity, and there is a staggering worldwide inequality consistently recorded between the sexes in respect to suicide rates. Dickins' disarmingly honest and witty interrogation of traditional masculinity is a personal quest borne of inner crisis, providing a platform to intelligently explore the connection between widespread male loneliness and isolation and the recently christened social phenomenon of toxic masculinity.

Join Max on his journey to find a best man, as he learns that perhaps what he and others like him really need is a best friend.]]> 336 Max Dickins 1838853510 Sheena 0 to-read 4.15 2022 Billy No-Mates: How I Realised Men Have a Friendship Problem
author: Max Dickins
name: Sheena
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2022/07/09
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]]> The History of England 31694 60 Jane Austen 1565120558 Sheena 4 3.90 1791 The History of England
author: Jane Austen
name: Sheena
average rating: 3.90
book published: 1791
rating: 4
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date added: 2022/07/08
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]]> <![CDATA[Dear NHS: 100 Stories to Say Thank You]]> 53199074
All profits from this book will go to NHS Charities Together to fund vital research and projects and the Lullaby Trust which supports parents bereaved of babies and young children.

The NHS is our single greatest achievement as a country. No matter who you are, no matter what your health needs are and no matter how much money you have, the NHS is there for you. In 'DEAR NHS', 100 inspirational people come together to share their stories of how the National Health Service has been there for them and changed their lives in the process. By turns deeply moving, hilarious, hopeful and impassioned, these stories together become a love letter to the NHS and the 1.4 million people who go above and beyond the call of duty every single day - selflessly, generously, putting others before themselves, never more so than now.

They are all heroes, and this book is our way of saying thank you.

This audiobook features readings by: Mary Beard, Bill Bryson, Lee Child, Richard Coles, Tanni Grey-Thompson, Mark Haddon, Naomie Harris, Si King, Joanna Lumley, Alexander McCall Smith, Trevor McDonald, Michael Palin, Kate Tempest, Stanley Tucci, K.T. Tunstall, Jack Whitehall, Jacqueline Wilson, Benjamin Zephaniah and many more.

A minimum of ?1.61 from the sale of each book will be paid to NHS Charities Together and ?0.08 will be paid to the Lullaby Trust.




RUNNING TIME ? 5hrs.

?2020 Orion Publishing Group (P)2020 Orion Publishing Group]]> 408 Adam Kay 1398701181 Sheena 0 to-read 4.22 2020 Dear NHS: 100 Stories to Say Thank You
author: Adam Kay
name: Sheena
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2020
rating: 0
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date added: 2022/07/08
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]]> What Just Happened?! 60308655 Relive the delusional fever-dream of the modern era.

No other writer is more suited to chronicling the absurd times in which we live.

In What Just Happened?! Marina Hyde slashes her way through the hellscape of post-referendum politics, where the chaos never stops. Clamber aboard as we relive every inspirational moment of magic, from David Cameron to Theresa May to Boris Johnson. Marvel at the sights, from Trumpian WTF-ery to celebrity twattery. And boggle at the cast of characters: Hollywood sex offenders, populists, sporting heroes (and villains), dastardly dukes, media barons, movie stars, reality TV monsters, billionaires, police officers, various princes and princesses, wicked advisers, philanthropists, fauxlanthropists, telly chefs, and (naturally) Gwyneth Paltrow. It's the full state banquet of crazy - and you're most cordially invited.

Drawn from her spectacularly funny Guardian columns, What Just Happened?! is a welcome blast of humour and sanity in a world where reality has become stranger than fiction.]]> 472 Marina Hyde 1783352590 Sheena 0 to-read 4.14 2022 What Just Happened?!
author: Marina Hyde
name: Sheena
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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]]> Ghosts 374188 Ghosts is a three-act tragedy that explores uncomfortable, even forbidden themes. It is also a highly critical commentary on the morality of the day. The play centers around the widow of a prominent Norwegian sea captain whose son returns home and, with tragic consequences, revives the ghosts of the past that she has long labored to put to rest.

Ghosts immediately became a source of controversy for its inclusion of topics like venereal disease, incest, and euthanasia, and it was banned from being performed in England for many years. Its arrival signals a shift in the nature of theatre and, despite negative criticism, it was translated into other languages and performed in Sweden, Germany, and New York within a few years of its debut. It stands now as one of the works considered to have ushered in the era of modern drama.]]> 48 Henrik Ibsen 1420927957 Sheena 4 3.5, rounded up. 3.83 1881 Ghosts
author: Henrik Ibsen
name: Sheena
average rating: 3.83
book published: 1881
rating: 4
read at: 2022/06/03
date added: 2022/07/08
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3.5, rounded up.
]]> <![CDATA[Chemistry: The Central Science]]> 17412 1152 Theodore L. Brown 0130669970 Sheena 5 4.01 1977 Chemistry: The Central Science
author: Theodore L. Brown
name: Sheena
average rating: 4.01
book published: 1977
rating: 5
read at: 2022/07/08
date added: 2022/07/08
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review:
4.5, rounded up. An absolute gem of a textbook, describing even the most complex concepts in a simple yet detailed manner that even *I* could understand. I would have liked it to have more practice questions, but otherwise it was excellent.
]]>