![]() ![]() ![]() "As if to prove his point, Adam Alter has written a truly addictive book about the rise of addiction. After all, who among us hasn't struggled to ignore the ding of a new email, the next episode in a TV series, or the desire to play a game just one more time? He lays out the options we have to address this problem before it truly consumes us. But more than that, Alter heads the problem off at the pass, letting us know what we can do to step away from the screen. ![]() He takes us inside the human brain at the very moment we score points on a smartphone game, or see that someone has liked a photo we’ve posted on Instagram. Tracing addiction through history, Alter shows that we’re only just beginning to understand the epidemic of behavioral addiction gripping society. They know how to push our buttons, and how to coax us into using their products for hours, days, and weeks on end. Technology companies and marketers have teams of engineers and researchers devoted to keeping us engaged. ![]() These inventions have profound upsides, but their appeal isn’t an accident. People have been addicted to substances for thousands of years, but for the past two decades, we’ve also been hooked on technologies, like Instagram, Netflix, Facebook, Fitbit, Twitter, and email-platforms we’ve adopted because we assume they’ll make our lives better. ![]()
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![]() ![]() The kind of creativity that is rewarded at age fifteen is not always enough to propel someone through life at age thirty not everyone can sustain, in adulthood, what seemed so special in adolescence. In The Interestings, Wolitzer follows these characters from the height of youth through middle age, as their talents, fortunes, and degrees of satisfaction diverge. Decades later the bond remains powerful, but so much else has changed. The summer that Nixon resigns, six teenagers at a summer camp for the arts become inseparable. ![]() ![]() It's everyone's."- Entertainment Weekly (A)įrom Meg Wolitzer, the New York Times–bestselling author of The Female Persuasion, a novel that has been called "genius" ( The Chicago Tribune), “wonderful” ( Vanity Fair), "ambitious" ( San Francisco Chronicle), and a “page-turner” ( Cosmopolitan). But the very human moments in her work hit you harder than the big ideas. She's every bit as literary as Franzen or Eugenides. The Interestings secures Wolitzer's place among the best novelists of her generation. With this book has surpassed herself.”- The New York Times Book Review Named a best book of the year by Entertainment Weekly, Time, and The Chicago Tribune, and named a notable book by The New York Times Book Review and The Washington Post ![]() ![]() ![]() on Medalon "A well-executed fantasy with complex characters and entertaining style."- Kirkus Reviews on Treason Keep "The battles are fierce, the losses heartrending in Fallon's beautifully created world, whose disparate inhabitants are once again completely convincing, making Harshini a chilling, thrilling conclusion to the trilogy."- Booklist on Harshini, "Fallon sets the stage for another lively fantasy saga full of intriguing characters, smart dialogue and twisty plotting."-Publishers Weekly on Wolfblade "A warm and intriguing book with all-too-human characters who draw you in more deeply with each page."-L.E. ![]() ![]() "Fallon sets the stage for another lively fantasy saga full of intriguing characters, smart dialogue and twisty plotting."- Publishers Weekly on Wolfblade "A warm and intriguing book with all-too-human characters who draw you in more deeply with each page."-L.E. ![]() ![]() ![]() They’ll need help from Riley’s London CIA contacts. Doing so, they attract the attention of the terrorist cell and become targets themselves. Not finding the body themselves, the police never believed their story - so Maxine and Riley start their own search. Who took the body and why?Ĭurious as always, they go back to where they first saw the victim and were able to find two left behind clues that the quick clean-up crew had missed. But while they waited for the police to reach the body and file a report – the dead man went missing. There they found a dead body in the stairwell of the South Tower. ![]() So, they detoured and walked over the Tower Bridge instead. Their first tour was cancelled due to an Al-Qaeda attach on the Tower of London fortress. But there was so much reconstruction and new sites being built, they wanted to get an updated feel for London. They had both been there several years in the past. Now paired up with a former friend and active CIA agent (Riley Perkins), together they go to London to get a feel for the city. She had just decided to use London as the location of her next mystery novel. Fiction Author Maxine Hart lived and wrote out of Chicago. ![]() ![]() ![]() It also addresses bullying, regrets, and mental health. ![]() This is a story that addresses a wide variety of family dynamics, including questions about transgender behaviors and feelings. But sometimes it's important to peel back the emotional "onion layers" and see more than what's visible on the surface. They know practically nothing about Patrick, except how gruff he seems. But one day his ability to properly care for them is questioned and so they're eventually sent to live with their Uncle Patrick. After their mother dies they are sent to live with their Uncle Carl, who loves them deeply. And this is particularly the case since Birdie tends to be bullied due to his creative, colorful clothing. Jack is the mature older sister always seeking to protect her little brother. This tenderhearted story is of Jack and Birdie, two siblings who recently lost their mother. ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Īccording to Marla Warren, there is evidence that Crichton had been working on Pirate Latitudes at least since the 1970s to substantiate her position, she quotes a statement by Patrick McGilligan in the March 1979 issue of American Film that Crichton was aiming "to complete a long-standing book project about Caribbean pirates in the seventeenth century.". The story stars the fictional privateer Captain Charles Hunter who, hired by Jamaica's governor Sir James Almont, plots to raid a Spanish galleon for its treasure.Ĭrichton's assistant discovered the manuscript on one of Crichton's computers after his death in 2008, along with an unfinished novel, Micro (2011). ![]() HarperCollins published the book posthumously on November 26, 2009. Pirate Latitudes is an action adventure novel by Michael Crichton, the sixteenth novel to be published under his own name and first to be published after his death, concerning 17th-century piracy in the Caribbean. ![]() ![]() ![]() 200 B.C.E.), or for an agnostic position (that the original writer and date of composition are relatively unknowable). There is little scholarly consensus on its authorship, with some arguing for Confucius, Zengzi (a disciple of Confucius who lived from 505-432 B.C.E.), an unnamed, syncretic redactor from the late Warring States/early Han period (ca. The Da Xue, originally a chapter of the Classic of Rites (Li Ji), was relatively unrecognized as a discrete unit until the Neo-Confucian period, when Sima Kuang (1019-1086 C.E.) "wrote a commentary on it, treating it as a separate work for the first time." After that point, it began to attract ever increasing scholarly attention, until its formal canonization by Zhu Xi (as discussed below). ![]() Prior to this popularization, the Da Xue had previously been a single chapter in the Classic of Rites. ![]() ![]() ![]() Zuboff's comprehensive and moving analysis lays bare the threats to twenty-first century society: a controlled "hive" of total connection that seduces with promises of total certainty for maximum profit - at the expense of democracy, freedom, and our human future. Here is the crucible of an unprecedented form of power marked by extreme concentrations of knowledge and free from democratic oversight. The threat has shifted from a totalitarian Big Brother state to a ubiquitous digital architecture: a "Big Other" operating in the interests of surveillance capital. Vast wealth and power are accumulated in ominous new "behavioral futures markets," where predictions about our behavior are bought and sold, and the production of goods and services is subordinated to a new "means of behavioral modification." Zuboff vividly brings to life the consequences as surveillance capitalism advances from Silicon Valley into every economic sector. The stakes could not be higher: a global architecture of behavior modification threatens human nature in the twenty-first century just as industrial capitalism disfigured the natural world in the twentieth. In this masterwork of original thinking and research, Shoshana Zuboff provides startling insights into the phenomenon that she has named surveillance capitalism. Description The challenges to humanity posed by the digital future, the first detailed examination of the unprecedented form of power called "surveillance capitalism," and the quest by powerful corporations to predict and control our behavior. ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Il ne la divinise pas : elle « n'était ni la grande sainte du royalisme ni la grande « grue » de la Révolution, mais un être moyen, une femme en somme ordinaire ». Zweig s'est penché sur Marie-Antoinette en psychologue. ![]() Quel voyage ! Quelle histoire ! Le monde enchanté et dispendieux de Trianon, la maternité, le début de l'impopularité, l'affaire du collier, la Révolution qui la prit pour cible, la fuite à Varennes, la Conciergerie, l'échafaud. ![]() Qui était Marie-Antoinette faite, l'année de ses quinze ans et par raison d'État, reine de France ? Une débauchée futile ? Une icône pour la Restauration ? Nous la suivons de la chambre de son époux, qu'elle appelait son « nonchalant mari », le falot Louis XVI, jusqu'au lit de la guillotine. L'auteur a fait le ménage dans la documentation, puisant dans la correspondance de Marie-Antoinette avec sa mère, Marie-Thérèse d'Autriche, et dans les papiers de Fersen, grand amour de la reine. Après ses vies de Magellan, de Marie Stuart ou de Fouché, faut-il rappeler le génie de biographe de Stefan Zweig ? Marie-Antoinette (1933) rétablit la courbe et la vérité d'un destin obscurci par la passion ou la honte posthumes. ![]() ![]() ![]() He sees himself as a troll in a book of fairy tales and believes the people in his village dislike and avoid him. Ray is fifty-seven, fearful of social interaction and filled with self-loathing. He proceeds to describe his world and tell his story in first person present to the dog he adopts and names One Eye. The narrator, Ray, describes himself as a hulking man who lives alone in his recently deceased father's house. ![]() The book opens with a dog running wild, his left eye dangling from "some gristly tether."Īnd then we are inside the head of a man peering in the window of a junk shop, noticing an ad from the local shelter seeking a compassionate and tolerant owner. The title is a descriptive word play on the four seasons over which the story takes place, and sets the novel's slightly dark and melancholy tone. Spill Simmer Falter Wither, set in a small seaside town in Ireland, is the story of two outcasts: a socially crippled man and a one-eyed dog, who find - and bring comfort to - each other. Laced with dark undertones, this story about a special human-animal relationship will appeal to many despite its languorous pace. ![]() |