Catalog Search Results
Author
Pub. Date
c2021.
Description
"We are living through the most prosperous age in all of human history, yet we are listless, divided, and miserable. Wealth and comfort are unparalleled, but our political landscape is unmoored, and rates of suicide, loneliness, and chronic illness continue to skyrocket. How do we explain the gap between these truths? And how should we respond? For evolutionary biologists Heather Heying and Bret Weinstein, the cause of our troubles is clear: the...
Author
Pub. Date
2018
Description
Is civilization teetering on the edge of a cliff? Or are we just climbing higher than ever? Most people who read the news would tell you that 2017 is one of the worst years in recent memory. We're facing a series of deeply troubling, even existential problems: fascism, terrorism, environmental collapse, racial and economic inequality, and more. Yet this narrative misses something important: by almost every meaningful measure, the modern world is better...
Author
Pub. Date
[2018]
Description
"The roots of modern horror are found in the First World War. It was the most devastating event to occur in the early 1900s, with 38 million dead and 17 million wounded in the most grotesque of ways, owing to the new machines brought to war. If Downton Abbey showed the ripple effect of this catastrophe above stairs, Wasteland reveals how it made its way into the darker corners of our psyche on the bloody battlefield, the screaming asylum, and desolated...
Author
Description
The cacophony of modern life can be deafening, leaving us feeling frazzled and uneasy. In this book, Prem Rawat teaches us how to turn down the noise to "hear ourselves"--to listen to the subtle song of peace that sings inside each of us. Once we learn to truly "hear ourselves" and the voice of peace within, then we can hold on to that as we face all the noise of the world. If we allow ourselves to listen, what we hear is the extraordinary miracle...
Author
Pub. Date
2017.
Description
"Over the past century humankind has managed to do the impossible and rein in famine, plague, and war. This may seem hard to accept, but, as Harari explains in his trademark style--thorough, yet riveting--famine, plague and war have been transformed from incomprehensible and uncontrollable forces of nature into manageable challenges. For the first time ever, more people die from eating too much than from eating too little; more people die from old...
Author
Pub. Date
2019.
Description
Thirty years ago Bill McKibben offered one of the earliest warnings about climate change. Now he broadens the warning: the entire human game, he suggests, has begun to play itself out.
Bill McKibben’s groundbreaking book The End of Nature -- issued in dozens of languages and long regarded as a classic -- was the first book to alert us to global warming. But the danger is broader than that: even as climate change shrinks the space where our civilization...
50) The Renaissance
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: MG - BL: 5.6 - AR Pts: 1
Description
An introduction to the various elements of Renaissance life, including religion, trade, education, food, and clothes.
Author
Pub. Date
2010
Description
"'The Memory Chalet' is a memoir unlike any you have ever read before. Each essay charts some experience or remembrance of the past through the sieve of Tony Judt's prodigious mind. His youthful love of a particular London bus route evolves into a reflection on public civility and interwar urban planning. Memories of the 1968 student riots of Paris meander through the divergent sex politics of Europe, before concluding that his generation 'was a revolutionary...
Author
Pub. Date
[2018]
Description
Is the world really falling apart? Is the ideal of progress obsolete? Cognitive scientist Steven Pinker urges us to step back from the headlines and prophecies of doom and instead follow the data. In seventy-five graphs, he posits that life, health, prosperity, safety, peace, knowledge, and happiness are on the rise, not just in the West, but worldwide. This progress is not the result of some cosmic force. It is a gift of the Enlightenment: the conviction...
Author
Pub. Date
[2017]
Description
This volume, Science and Technology, explores how the advances of World War II led to Cold War competition, and how government-sponsored research helped to send humans to the moon, to harness the atom for good and bad, and to pave the way for the Internet. It also examines how private industry in the West gained from those "Big Science" projects and opened up avenues in biotech and personal computing, among other fields. The last chapters also explore...
Author
Pub. Date
[2015]
Accelerated Reader
IL: MG+ - BL: 10 - AR Pts: 13
Description
Traces three thousand years of Western history to profile influential ideas and setbacks that have shaped the modern world, from the spread of monotheism and the invention of the printing press to the U.S. metric campaign and the smart drink trend.