Reading
I started this reading list at the beginning of 2019. It includes books I've started or completed since the beginning of that year.
I prefer to read analog books, but I increasingly listen to audiobooks. Audiobooks are marked with 🎧.
In 2024, I added my rating for each book. These ratings are marked with ★s. As you might expect, the ratings are from one to five. I'll likely revise the ratings as I continue to reflect on a given book.
Book cover art is displayed only for the current year.
2024
81 books-
A Rotten Crowd: America, Wealth, and One-Hundred Years of The Great Gatsby
“One century ago, F. Scott Fitzgerald invited us into the lives of the “rotten crowd,” Jazz Age Americans with far more money than morals. In A Rotten Crowd: America, Wealth, and One Hundred Years of The Great Gatsby, John Marsh welcomes us back to Fitzgerald’s world to examine the rich and their reckless approach to human relationships, their poor taste in friends, and the harm they cause. As we move between 2025 and 1925 to consider how much—or little—has changed in the interim, A Rotten Crowd helps us discover what we can do about the obscene concentration of wealth in America today.”
Beloved Beasts: Fighting for Life in an Age of Extinction
“In the late nineteenth century, as humans came to realize that our rapidly industrializing and globalizing societies were driving other animal species to extinction, a movement to protect and conserve them was born. In Beloved Beasts, acclaimed science journalist Michelle Nijhuis traces the movement’s history: from early battles to save charismatic species such as the American bison and bald eagle to today’s global effort to defend life on a larger scale.”
Bone of the Bone: Essays on America by a Daughter of the Working Class
“In Bone of the Bone, Sarah Smarsh brings her graceful storytelling and incisive critique to the challenges that define our times—class division, political fissures, gender inequality, environmental crisis, media bias, the rural-urban gulf. Smarsh, a journalist who grew up on a wheat farm in Kansas and was the first in her family to graduate from college, has long focused on cultural dissonance that many in her industry neglected until recently.”
The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World
“As indigenous scientist and author of Braiding Sweetgrass Robin Wall Kimmerer harvests serviceberries alongside the birds, she considers the ethic of reciprocity that lies at the heart of the gift economy. How, she asks, can we learn from indigenous wisdom and the plant world to reimagine what we value most? Our economy is rooted in scarcity, competition, and the hoarding of resources, and we have surrendered our values to a system that actively harms what we love. Meanwhile, the serviceberry’s relationship with the natural world is an embodiment of reciprocity, interconnectedness, and gratitude. The tree distributes its wealth—its abundance of sweet, juicy berries—to meet the needs of its natural community. And this distribution insures its own survival.”
The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good?
“These are dangerous times for democracy. We live in an age of winners and losers, where the odds are stacked in favour of the already fortunate. Stalled social mobility and entrenched inequality give the lie to the promise that ‘you can make it if you try’. And the consequence is a brew of anger and frustration that has fuelled populist protest, with the triumph of Brexit and election of Donald Trump.”
Set Boundaries, Find Peace: A Guide to Reclaiming Yourself
“Healthy boundaries. We all know we should have them–in order to achieve work/life balance, cope with toxic people, and enjoy rewarding relationships with partners, friends, and family. But what do “healthy boundaries” really mean–and how can we successfully express our needs, say “no,” and be assertive without offending others?”
Collision of Power: Trump, Bezos, and THE WASHINGTON POST
“Marty Baron took charge of The Washington Post newsroom in 2013, after nearly a dozen years leading The Boston Globe. Just seven months into his new job, Baron received explosive news: Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, would buy the Post, marking a sudden end to control by the venerated family that had presided over the paper for 80 years. Just over two years later, Donald Trump won the presidency.”
Eight Bears: Mythic Past and Imperiled Future
“A global exploration of the eight remaining species of bears―and the dangers they face. Bears have always held a central place in our collective memory, from Indigenous folklore and Greek mythology to nineteenth-century fairytales and the modern toy shop. But as humans and bears come into ever-closer contact, our relationship nears a tipping point. Today, most of the eight remaining bear species are threatened with extinction. Some, such as the panda bear and the polar bear, are icons of the natural world; others, such as the spectacled bear and the sloth bear, are far less known.”
Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI
“For the last 100,000 years, we Sapiens have accumulated enormous power. But despite all our discoveries, inventions and conquests, we now find ourselves in an existential crisis. The world is on the verge of ecological collapse. Misinformation abounds. And we are rushing headlong into the age of AI – a new information network that threatens to annihilate us. If we are so wise, why are we so self-destructive?”
Lucky Loser: How Donald Trump Squandered His Father’s Fortune and Created the Illusion of Success
“For decades he squandered his fortunes on money-losing businesses only to be saved yet again by financial serendipity. He tacked his name on every building while taking out huge loans he’d never repay. He obsessed over appearances while ignoring threats to the bottom line and mounting costly lawsuits against city officials. He tarnished the value of his name by allowing anyone with a big enough check to use it, and he cheated the television producer who not only rescued him from bankruptcy but also cast him as a business savant—the public image that carried Trump to the White House.”
The Age of Deer: Trouble and Kinship with our Wild Neighbors
“Deer have been an important part of the world that humans occupy for millennia. They’re one of the only large animals that can thrive in our presence. In the 21st century, our relationship is full of contradictions: We hunt and protect them; we cull them from suburbs while making them an icon of wilderness; we see them both as victims and as pests. But there is no doubt that we have a connection to deer: in mythology and story, in ecosystems biological and digital, in cities and in forests.”
Exploring Oregon’s History
“Recounted in a fresh style that’s fun for armchair travelers and hikers alike, this guidebook tells the stories behind 57 of Oregon’s most scenic historic sites. Come follow Lewis and Clark’s trail across Tillamook Head. Ride with Chief Joseph on his tragic retreat through Hells Canyon. Discover paths to fire lookouts, lighthouses, and abandoned gold mines. Relive legends, discoveries, scandals, and triumphs that rocked the West.”
Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times
“Sometimes you slip through the cracks: unforeseen circumstances like an abrupt illness, the death of a loved one, a break up, or a job loss can derail a life. These periods of dislocation can be lonely and unexpected. For May, her husband fell ill, her son stopped attending school, and her own medical issues led her to leave a demanding job. Wintering explores how she not only endured this painful time, but embraced the singular opportunities it offered. A moving personal narrative shot through with lessons from literature, mythology, and the natural world, May’s story offers instruction on the transformative power of rest and retreat.”
The Old Man
“To all appearances, Dan Chase is a harmless retiree in Vermont with two big mutts and a grown daughter he keeps in touch with by phone. But most sixty-year-old widowers don’t have multiple driver’s licenses, savings stockpiled in banks across the country, and a bugout kit with two Beretta Nanos stashed in the spare bedroom closet. Most have not spent decades on the run. Thirty-five years ago, as a young hotshot in army intelligence, Chase was sent to Libya to covertly assist a rebel army. When the plan turned sour, Chase reacted according to his own ideas of right and wrong, triggering consequences he could never have anticipated. And someone still wants him dead because of them.”
Deadliest Sea: The Untold Story Behind the Greatest Rescue in Coast Guard History
“Deadliest Sea by Kalee Thompson is the spellbinding true story of the greatest rescue in U.S. Coast Guard history. Recounting the tragic sinking of the fishing trawler, Alaska Ranger, in the Bering Sea and its remarkable aftermath in March 2008, Deadliest Sea is real life action and adventure at its finest. The full story of an amazing rescue—where extraordinary courage, ingenuity, will, and technology combined in one of the most remarkable maritime feats ever recorded—has never been told before now.”
Slough House #1: Slow Horses
“London, England: Slough House is where washed-up MI5 spies go to while away what’s left of their failed careers. The “slow horses,” as they’re called, have all disgraced themselves in some way to get relegated there. Maybe they botched an Op so badly they can’t be trusted anymore. Maybe they got in the way of an ambitious colleague and had the rug yanked out from under them. Maybe they just got too dependent on the bottle—not unusual in this line of work. One thing they have in common, though, is they want to be back in the action. And most of them would do anything to get there─even if it means having to collaborate with one another.”
Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the End of a Civilization
“Our world is changing. Rising seas, spiking temperatures, and extreme weather imperil global infrastructure, crops, and water supplies. Conflict, famine, plagues, and riots menace from every quarter. From war-stricken Baghdad to the melting Arctic, human-caused climate change poses a danger not only to political and economic stability, but to civilization itself . . . and to what it means to be human. Our greatest enemy, it turns out, is ourselves. Plato argued that to philosophize is to learn to die. If that’s true, says Scranton, then we have entered humanity’s most philosophical age—or this is precisely the problem of the Anthropocene. The trouble now is that we must learn to die not as individuals, but as a civilization.”
Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis
“An epic, heartbreaking, and deeply reported history of the disastrous humanitarian crisis at the southern border told through the lives of the migrants forced to risk everything and the policymakers who determine their fate, by New Yorker staff writer Jonathan Blitzer. Everyone who makes the journey faces an impossible choice. They may have already been deported from the United States, but it remains their only hope for safety and prosperity. Their homes have become uninhabitable. They will take their chances.”
Still Alive: A Wild Life of Rediscovery
“Very few individuals can truthfully say that their work impacts every person on earth. Forrest Galante is one of them. As a wildlife biologist and conservationist, Galante devotes his life to studying, rediscovering, and protecting our planet’s amazing lifeforms. Part memoir, part biological adventure, Still Alive celebrates the beauty and determined resiliency of our world, as well as the brave conservationists fighting to save it.”
Mapping Middle-earth: Environmental and Political Narratives in J. R. R. Tolkien’s Cartographies
“In this cutting-edge study of Tolkien’s most critically neglected maps, Anahit Behrooz examines how cartography has traditionally been bound up in facilitating power. Far more than just illustrations to aid understanding of the story, Tolkien’s corpus of maps are crucial to understanding the broader narratives between humans and their political and environmental landscapes within his legendarium. Undertaking a diegetic literary analysis of the maps as examples of Middle-earth’s own cultural output, Behrooz reveals a sub-created tradition of cartography that articulates specific power dynamics between mapmaker, map reader, and what is being mapped, as well as the human/nonhuman binary that represents human’s control over the natural world.”
Orwell’s Ghosts: Wisdom and Warnings for the Twenty-First Century
“George Orwell devoted his career to exposing social injustice and political duplicity, urging his readers to face hard truths about Western society and politics. Now, the uncanny parallels between the interwar era and our own—rising inequality, censorship, and challenges to traditional social hierarchies—make his writing even more of the moment. In Orwell’s Ghosts, historian Laura Beers considers Orwell’s full body of work—his six novels, three nonfiction works, as well as his brilliant essays—to examine what “Orwellian” means and to take it out of the hands of political pundits.”
Otherlands: A Journey Through Earth’s Extinct Worlds
“The past is past, but it does leave clues, and Thomas Halliday has used cutting-edge science to decipher them more completely than ever before. In Otherlands, Halliday makes sixteen fossil sites burst to life on the page. This book is an exploration of the Earth as it used to exist, the changes that have occurred during its history, and the ways that life has found to adapt―or not.”
The Maps of Middle-Earth
“J.R.R. Tolkien once wrote: “I wisely started with a map, and made the story fit.” The Maps of Middle-earth presents four of Tolkien’s iconic maps, reimagined and newly updated for this edition by acclaimed Tolkien artist, John Howe, and richly decorated with scenes from the books. The maps are accompanied by an authoritative text written by Brian Sibley, which tells the stories behind The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion, and gives accounts of how the original maps came into being.”
Cartographic Relief Presentation
“Eduard Imhof’s classic book Cartographic Relief Presentation is once again available. Within the discipline of cartography, few works are considered classics in the sense of retaining their interest, relevance, and inspiration with the passage of time. One such work is Imhof’s masterpiece on relief representation. As a unique display of analysis and portrayal, this is an outstanding example of the need for cartography to combine intellect and graphics in solving map design problems. The range, detail, and scientific artistry of his solutions are presented in a teaching context that puts this work in a class by itself, with universal significance.”
A Field Guide to Climate Anxiety: How to Keep Your Cool on a Warming Planet
“Drawing on a decade of experience leading and teaching in college environmental studies programs, Sarah Jaquette Ray has created an “existential tool kit” for the climate generation. Combining insights from psychology, sociology, social movements, mindfulness, and the environmental humanities, Ray explains why and how we need to let go of eco-guilt, resist burnout, and cultivate resilience while advocating for climate justice. A Field Guide to Climate Anxiety is the essential guidebook for the climate generation—and perhaps the rest of us—as we confront the greatest environmental threat of our time.”
The Hour of Land: A Personal Topography of America’s National Parks
“America’s national parks are breathing spaces in a world in which such spaces are steadily disappearing, which is why more than 300 million people visit the parks each year. Now Terry Tempest Williams, the author of the environmental classic Refuge and the beloved memoir When Women Were Birds, returns with The Hour of Land, a literary celebration of our national parks, an exploration of what they mean to us and what we mean to them.”
Star Circle: The Bighorn Medicine Wheel
“In this book, Dr. Merriot takes her readers into the night Sky above the Bighorn Medicine Wheel to explore the scientific and supernatural elements of this National Historic Landmark and Sacred Site. Written for the adventurous, Ivy relates cultural and scientific stories, adding personal experiences and new findings from her own research based on Indigenous and Western Science astronomies. She concludes that the Wheel is a spectacularly designed and fitting ‘Place’ to study the cosmos and encourages her readers to take a personal trip to the Bighorn Medicine Wheel and embark upon their own adventure with the stars.”
This Is How You Lose the Time War
“Among the ashes of a dying world, an agent of the Commandant finds a letter. It reads: Burn before reading. Thus begins an unlikely correspondence between two rival agents hellbent on securing the best possible future for their warring factions. Now, what began as a taunt, a battlefield boast, grows into something more. Something epic. Something romantic. Something that could change the past and the future. Except the discovery of their bond would mean death for each of them. There’s still a war going on, after all. And someone has to win that war.”
Walking It Off: A Veteran’s Chronicle of War and Wilderness
“When he wrote The Monkey Wrench Gang in 1975, Edward Abbey became the spokesperson for a generation of Americans angered by the unthinking destruction of our natural heritage. Without consultation, Abbey based the central character of eco-guerilla George Washington Hayduke on his friend Doug Peacock. Since then Peacock has become an articulate environmental individualist writing about the West’s abundant wildscapes. Abbey and Peacock had an at times stormy, almost father-and-son relationship that was peacefully resolved in Abbey’s last days before his death in 1989. This rich recollection of their relationship and the dry places they explored are recalled in Peacock’s honest and heartfelt style in this poignant memoir.”
The Prince of Evolution: Peter Kropotkin’s Adventures in Science and Politics
“In The Prince of Evolution, Lee Alan Dugatkin introduces the reader to Russian Prince Peter Kropotkin — one of the world’s first international celebrities. In England, Kropotkin was known as a brilliant scientist, famous for his work on animal and human cooperation, but Kropotkin’s fame in continental Europe centered more on his role as a founder of anarchism. In the United States, he pursued both passions. Tens of thousands of people followed Prince Peter during two speaking tours that took him around America. His overarching goal was to understand cooperation in nature, so that he could promote cooperation in humans.”
A Light through the Cracks: A Climber’s Story
“Renowned rock climber Beth Rodden’s inspiring memoir about overcoming devastating trauma, refusing to be held hostage by fear, and taking a leap toward healing. Beth Rodden is twenty years old and already an elite rock climber when a climbing excursion in Kyrgyzstan escalates into a nightmare. Beth, her boyfriend, and two other climbers are kidnapped by militant rebels. After six harrowing days of hiding, marching, and dodging gunfire, they miraculously escape captivity. But fear follows Beth home, and pushing past it becomes a fixation.”
A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life
“For the last twenty years, George Saunders has been teaching a class on the Russian short story to his MFA students at Syracuse University. In A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, he shares a version of that class with us, offering some of what he and his students have discovered together over the years. Paired with iconic short stories by Chekhov, Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Gogol, the seven essays in this book are intended for anyone interested in how fiction works and why it’s more relevant than ever in these turbulent times.”
Just Add Water: My Swimming Life
“Katie Ledecky has won more individual Olympic races than any female swimmer in history. She is a three-time Olympian, a seven-time gold medalist, a twenty-one-time world champion, eight-time NCAA Champion, and a world record-holder in individual swimming events. Time and again, the question is posed to her family, her coaches, and to her—what makes her a champion? Now, for the first time, she shares what it takes to compete at an elite level.”
The Playbook: A Story of Theater, Democracy, and the Making of a Culture War
“A brilliant and daring account of a culture war over the place of theater in American democracy in the 1930s, one that anticipates our current divide, by the acclaimed Shakespeare scholar James Shapiro. From 1935 to 1939, the Federal Theatre Project staged over a thousand productions in 29 states that were seen by thirty million (or nearly one in four) Americans, two thirds of whom had never seen a play before. At its helm was an unassuming theater professor, Hallie Flanagan. It employed, at its peak, over twelve thousand struggling artists, some of whom, like Orson Welles and Arthur Miller, would soon be famous, but most of whom were just ordinary people eager to work again at their craft.”
Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution
“In this cornerstone of modern liberal social theory, Peter Kropotkin states that the most effective human and animal communities are essentially cooperative, rather than competitive. Kropotkin based this classic on his observations of natural phenomena and history, forming a work of stunning and well-reasoned scholarship. Essential to the understanding of human evolution as well as social organization, it offers a powerful counterpoint to the tenets of Social Darwinism.”
Finish What We Started: The MAGA Movement’s Ground War to End Democracy
“The immersive, captivating untold story of the mass radicalization of the Republican Party in the aftermath of January 6, 2021, entrenching the political power of a radical right-wing movement dedicated to dismantling democracy itself. Inspired by Donald Trump’s election lies, a growing movement of grassroots activists mobilized around the country to pick up where the insurrection left off, laying the groundwork to succeed next time where Trump had failed to keep himself in power.”
First Frost
“It’s the summer of 1964, and recent college graduates Walt Longmire and Henry Standing Bear read the writing on the wall and enlist to serve in the Vietnam War. As they catch a few final waves in California before reporting for duty, a sudden storm assaults the shores and capsizes a nearby cargo boat. Walt and Henry jump to action, but it’s soon revealed by the police who greet them ashore that the sunken boat carried valuable contraband from underground sources. Back in the present day, Walt is forced to speak before a Judge following the fatal events of The Longmire Defense.”
Sweet in Tooth and Claw: Stories of Generosity and Cooperation in the Natural World
“A follow-up to Ohlson’s previous book, The Soil Will Save Us (Rodale 2014), Sweet in Tooth and Claw extends the concept of cooperation in nature to the life-affirming connections among microbes, plants, fungi, insects, birds, and animals—including humans—in ecosystems around the globe.”
Go as a River
“On a cool autumn day in 1948, Victoria Nash delivers late-season peaches from her family’s farm set amid the wild beauty of Colorado. As she heads into her village, a disheveled stranger stops to ask her the way. How she chooses to answer will unknowingly alter the course of both their young lives. So begins the mesmerizing story of split-second choices and courageous acts that propel Victoria away from the only home she has ever known and towards a reckoning with loss, hope and her own untapped strength.”
Worn: A People’s History of Clothing
“A sweeping and captivatingly told history of clothing and the stuff it is made of—an unparalleled deep-dive into how everyday garments have transformed our lives, our societies, and our planet.”
A Forest Journey: The Role of Trees in the Fate of Civilization
“Ancient writers observed that forests always recede as civilizations develop and grow. The great Roman poet Ovid wrote that before civilization began, “even the pine tree stood on its own very hills” but when civilization took over, “the mountain oak, the pine were felled.” This happened for a simple reason: trees have been the principal fuel and building material of every society over the millennia, from the time urban areas were settled until the middle of the nineteenth century. To this day trees still fulfill these roles for a good portion of the world’s population.”
A Short Walk Through a Wide World
“The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue meets Life of Pi in this dazzlingly epic debut that charts the incredible, adventurous life of one woman as she journeys the globe trying to outrun a mysterious curse that will destroy her if she stops moving. Fiercely independent and hopeful, yet full of longing, Aubry Tourvel is an unforgettable character fighting her way through a world of wonders to find a place she can call home. A spellbinding and inspiring story about discovering meaning in a life that seems otherwise impossible, A Short Walk Through a Wide World reminds us that it’s not the destination, but rather the journey—no matter how long it lasts—that makes us who we are.”
Mean Girl: Ayn Rand and the Culture of Greed
“Ayn Rand’s complicated notoriety as popular writer, leader of a political and philosophical cult, reviled intellectual, and ostentatious public figure endured beyond her death in 1982. In the twenty-first century, she has been resurrected as a serious reference point for mainstream figures, especially those on the political right from Paul Ryan to Donald Trump. Mean Girl follows Rand’s trail through the twentieth century from the Russian Revolution to the Cold War and traces her posthumous appeal and the influence of her novels via her cruel, surly, sexy heroes. Outlining the impact of Rand’s philosophy of selfishness, Mean Girl illuminates the Randian shape of our neoliberal, contemporary culture of greed and the dilemmas we face in our political present.”
Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth
“Two thousand years ago, an itinerant Jewish preacher and miracle worker walked across the Galilee, gathering followers to establish what he called the “Kingdom of God.” The revolutionary movement he launched was so threatening to the established order that he was captured, tortured, and executed as a state criminal. Within decades after his shameful death, his followers would call him God. Sifting through centuries of mythmaking, Reza Aslan sheds new light on one of history’s most influential and enigmatic characters by examining Jesus through the lens of the tumultuous era in which he lived: first-century Palestine, an age awash in apocalyptic fervor.”
Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present
“Ours is the age of authoritarian rulers: self-proclaimed saviors of the nation who evade accountability while robbing their people of resources and corroding or destroying democracy. Ruth Ben-Ghiat covers a century of authoritarianism to explain why strongman rulers in Africa, Europe, and Latin America, drawing from a common playbook of machismo, propaganda, violence, and corruption, have found popular support even as they bring ruin to their countries. The fruit of decades of research, Strongmen gives readers insight into how such rulers think, who and what they depend on, and how they can be opposed.”
Arctic Traverse: A Thousand-Mile Summer of Trekking the Brooks Range
“From the award-winning author of Ice Bear: The Cultural History of an Arctic Icon comes an intimate exploration of Alaska’s northernmost mountain range with observations on Indigenous cultures, conservation, and intense cross-country travel, all shaped by respect for the land. A trained anthropologist, Engelhard evokes classic writers like Edward Abbey, Barry Lopez, and Ellen Meloy with profound dives into human and natural history and vivid meditations on Alaskan wildlife, flora, and geology.”
The Great Alone
“Ernt Allbright, a former POW, comes home from the Vietnam war a changed and volatile man. When he loses yet another job, he makes an impulsive decision: he will move his family north, to Alaska, where they will live off the grid in America’s last true frontier. Thirteen-year-old Leni, a girl coming of age in a tumultuous time, caught in the riptide of her parents’ passionate, stormy relationship, dares to hope that a new land will lead to a better future for her family. She is desperate for a place to belong. Her mother, Cora, will do anything and go anywhere for the man she loves, even if it means following him into the unknown.”
2020: One City, Seven People, and the Year Everything Changed
“For the acclaimed sociologist Eric Klinenberg, “2020” refers to both a pivotal year in world history and the opportunity it created for seeing ourselves more clearly. The Covid-19 pandemic did not distort reality; instead, it revealed and accentuated dividing lines that have long splintered societies around the world, and proved especially destructive in the United States. Against the backdrop of a high-stakes presidential election, a surge of misinformation, rising distrust, and raging protests, 2020 is a piercing account of how the U.S. and other nations handled the extraordinary challenges of that seminal year.”
Fen, Bog and Swamp: A Short History of Peatland Destruction and Its Role in the Climate Crisis
“A lifelong acolyte of the natural world, Annie Proulx brings her witness and research to the subject of wetlands and the vitally important role they play in preserving the environment—by storing the carbon emissions that accelerate climate change. Fens, bogs, swamps, and marine estuaries are crucial to the earth’s survival, and in four illuminating parts, Proulx documents their systemic destruction in pursuit of profit.”
The Exvangelicals: Loving, Living, and Leaving the White Evangelical Church
“The first definitive book that names the massive social movement of people leaving the white evangelical church—the exvangelicals. Growing up in a deeply evangelical family in the Midwest in the ‘80s and ‘90s, Sarah McCammon was strictly taught to fear God, obey him, and not question the faith. Persistently worried that her gay grandfather would go to hell unless she could reach him, or that her Muslim friend would need to be converted, and that she, too, would go to hell if she did not believe fervently enough, McCammon was a rule-follower and—most of the time—a true believer. But through it all, she was increasingly plagued by fears and deep questions as the belief system she’d been carefully taught clashed with her expanding understanding of the outside world.”
Walt Longmire #9.5: Spirit of Steamboat
“Sheriff Walt Longmire is in his office reading A Christmas Carol when he is interrupted by a ghost of Christmas a young woman with a hairline scar and more than a few questions about his predecessor, Lucian Connally. With his daughter Cady and undersherrif Moretti otherwise engaged, Walt’s on his own this Christmas Eve, so he agrees to help her.”
Walt Longmire #19: The Longmire Defense
“Deep in the heart of the Wyoming countryside, Sheriff of Absaroka County, Walt Longmire, is called to a crime scene like few others that he has seen. This crime brings up issues that go back to Walt’s grandfather’s time in Wyoming, as the revelations he learns about his grandfather come back to offer clues and motives for Walt’s investigation. Filled with back-country action, and with the great cast of characters that readers have come to love with the Longmire series, this new book will be sure to satisfy both long-time readers and those new to the series.”
The Women
Women can be heroes. When twenty-year-old nursing student Frances “Frankie” McGrath hears these words, it is a revelation. Raised in the sun-drenched, idyllic world of Southern California and sheltered by her conservative parents, she has always prided herself on doing the right thing. But in 1965, the world is changing, and she suddenly dares to imagine a different future for herself. When her brother ships out to serve in Vietnam, she joins the Army Nurse Corps and follows his path.
Walt Longmire #18: Hell and Back
“Picking up where Daughter of the Morning Star left off, the next Longmire novel finds the sheriff digging further into the mysteries of the wandering without—a mythical all-knowing spiritual being that devours souls. Walt thinks he might find the answers he’s looking for among the ruins of an old Native American boarding school—an institution designed to strip Native children of their heritage. He has been haunted by the image of the Fort Pratt Industrial Indian Training School ever since he first saw a faded postcard picturing a hundred boys in uniform, in front of a large, ominous building—a postcard that was given to him by Jimmy Lane, the father of Jeanie One Moon. After Walt’s initial investigation into Jeanie’s disappearance yielded no satisfying conclusions, Walt has to confront the fact that he may be dealing with an adversary unlike any he has ever faced before.”
All Over the Map: A Cartographic Odyssey
“Created for map lovers by map lovers, this rich book explores the intriguing stories behind maps across history and illuminates how the art of cartography thrives today. In this visually stunning book, award-winning journalists Betsy Mason and Greg Miller—authors of the National Geographic cartography blog ‘All Over the Map’—explore the intriguing stories behind maps from a wide variety of cultures, civilizations, and time periods. Based on interviews with scores of leading cartographers, curators, historians, and scholars, this is a remarkable selection of fascinating and unusual maps.”
Writings of the Luddites
“An invaluable collection of texts written between 1811 and 1816 by members of the Luddite movement and their sympathizers. Named for their probably mythical leader, Ned Ludd, the Luddites were a group of social agitators in nineteenth-century Britain who tried to prevent the mechanization of cloth factories, which they blamed for increased unemployment, poverty, and hunger in industrial centers. Though famous for their often violent protests, the Luddites also engaged in literary resistance in the form of poems, proclamations, petitions, songs, and letters.”
Remembrance of Earth’s Past #1: The Three-Body Problem
“Set against the backdrop of China’s Cultural Revolution, a secret military project sends signals into space to establish contact with aliens. An alien civilization on the brink of destruction captures the signal and plans to invade Earth. Meanwhile, on Earth, different camps start forming, planning to either welcome the superior beings and help them take over a world seen as corrupt, or to fight against the invasion.”
White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy
“A searing portrait and damning takedown of America’s proudest citizens — who are also the least likely to defend its core principles. White rural voters hold the greatest electoral sway of any demographic group in the United States, yet rural communities suffer from poor healthcare access, failing infrastructure, and severe manufacturing and farming job losses. Rural voters believe our nation has betrayed them, and to some degree, they’re right. In White Rural Rage, Tom Schaller and Paul Waldman explore why rural Whites have failed to reap the benefits from their outsize political power and why, as a result, they are the most likely group to abandon democratic norms and traditions. Their rage—stoked daily by Republican politicians and the conservative media—now poses an existential threat to the United States.”
Oregon Search & Rescue: Answering the Call
“Oregon’s long tradition of volunteer search and rescue dates back to the territorial days, when Good Samaritans and mountain men came to aid those in need. On the coast, surfmen of the U.S. Life-Saving Service protected mariners traversing the ‘Graveyard of the Pacific.’ In the early twentieth century, outdoor clubs like the Mazamas, the Skyliners and the Obsidians served as informal search and rescue units, keeping Oregonians safe in the mountains, rivers and wilderness areas. After World War II, Oregon’s volunteer teams began to professionalize and became some of the most effective units in the country. Join author Glenn Voelz as he recounts the history of Oregon search and rescue.”
Walt Longmire #17: Daughter of the Morning Star
“When Lolo Long’s niece Jaya begins receiving death threats, Tribal Police Chief Long calls on Absaroka County Sheriff Walt Longmire along with Henry Standing Bear as lethal backup. Jaya Longshot Long is the phenom of the Lame Deer Lady Stars High School basketball team and is following in the steps of her older sister, who disappeared a year previously, a victim of the scourge of missing Native Woman in Indian Country. Lolo hopes that having Longmire involved might draw some public attention to the girl’s plight, but with this maneuver she also inadvertently places the good sheriff in a one-on-one with the deadliest adversary he has ever faced in both this world and the next.”
Walt Longmire #16: Next to Last Stand
“One of the most viewed paintings in American history, Custer’s Last Fight, copied and distributed by Anheuser-Busch at a rate of over two million copies a year, was destroyed in a fire at the 7th Cavalry Headquarters in Fort Bliss, Texas, in 1946. Or was it? When Charley Lee Stillwater dies of an apparent heart attack at the Wyoming Home for Soldiers & Sailors, Walt Longmire is called in to try and make sense of a piece of a painting and a Florsheim shoebox containing a million dollars, sending the good sheriff on the trail of a dangerous art heist.”
Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism
“Perhaps we were too distracted by the pandemic, or the endless financial crises, or the rise of TikTok. But under cover of them all, a new and more exploitative system has been taking hold. Insane sums of money that were supposed to re-float our economies after the crash of 2008 went to big tech instead. With it they funded the construction of their private cloud fiefdoms and privatized the internet.”
War and Punishment: Putin, Zelensky, and the Path to Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine
“As soon as the Russian invasion of Ukraine began, prominent independent Russian journalist Mikhail Zygar circulated a Facebook petition signed first by hundreds of his cultural and journalistic contacts and then by thousands of others. That act led to a new law in Russia criminalizing criticism of the war, and Zygar fled Russia. In his time as a journalist, Zygar has interviewed President Zelensky and had access to many of the major players—from politicians to oligarchs. As an expert on Putin’s moods and behavior, he has spent years studying the Kremlin’s plan regarding Ukraine, and here, in clear, chronological order he explains how we got here.”
Commanding Hope: The Power We Have to Renew a World in Peril
“Frightening pandemics, terrible inequality, racism and poverty, rising political authoritarianism, the inescapable climate crisis, and the resuscitated danger of nuclear war. We know the story. Some choose not to see it. Each of these crises seems so much larger than any one of us can understand or handle. Calling on history, cutting-edge research, complexity science and even The Lord of the Rings, Thomas Homer-Dixon lays out the tools we can command to rescue a world on the brink.”
Walt Longmire #15: Land of Wolves
“Attempting to recover from his harrowing experiences in Mexico, in Land of Wolves Wyoming Sheriff Walt Longmire is neck deep in the investigation of what could or could not be the suicidal hanging of a shepherd. With unsettling connections to a Basque family with a reputation for removing the legs of Absaroka County sheriffs, matters become even more complicated with the appearance of an oversize wolf in the Big Horn Mountains to which Walt finds himself feeling more and more empathetic.”
A Tactical Guide to Science Journalism: Lessons From the Front Lines
“A Tactical Guide to Science Journalism brings together award-winning journalists from around the world to share fascinating tales of science and how it works and to provide guidance into reporting specialties like infectious disease, climate change, astronomy, public health, physics, and statistics. From practical advice on finding sources and distilling complex research subjects for a general audience, to tips on how to cover science in authoritarian regimes, the book serves as an essential survey of the best in science reporting today—and a testament to the importance of independent journalistic inquiry in understanding research and building trust with audiences.”
The Showman: Inside the Invasion That Shook the World and Made a Leader of Volodymyr Zelensky
“Time correspondent Simon Shuster delivers the definitive account of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, written and reported from inside the presidential compound in Kyiv, based on Shuster’s unparalleled access to President Zelensky and his top aides.”
Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech
“The most urgent story in modern tech begins not in Silicon Valley but two hundred years ago in rural England, when workers known as the Luddites rose up rather than starve at the hands of factory owners who were using automated machines to erase their livelihoods. The Luddites organized guerrilla raids to smash those machines—on punishment of death—and won the support of Lord Byron, enraged the Prince Regent, and inspired the birth of science fiction. This all-but-forgotten class struggle brought nineteenth-century England to its knees. Today, technology imperils millions of jobs, robots are crowding factory floors, and artificial intelligence will soon pervade every aspect of our economy. How will this change the way we live? And what can we do about it?”
Walt Longmire #14: Depth of Winter
“Walt journeys into the northern Mexican desert alone to save his daughter Cady, who has been kidnapped by the cartel. Welcome to Walt Longmire’s worst nightmare. Winter is creeping closer, but for Sheriff Longmire this one is looking to be harsh in a way to which he is wholly unaccustomed. He has found himself in the remotest parts of the northern Mexican desert, a lawless place where no horse or car can travel, where no one speaks his language or trusts an outsider, far from his friends and his home turf back in Wyoming.”
The Last Fire Season: A Personal and Pyronatural History
“Told in luminous, perceptive prose, The Last Fire Season is a deeply incisive inquiry into what it really means—now—to live in relationship to the elements of the natural world. When Manjula Martin moved from the city to the woods of Northern California, she wanted to be closer to the wilderness that she had loved as a child. She was also seeking refuge from a health crisis that left her with chronic pain, and found a sense of healing through tending her garden beneath the redwoods of Sonoma County. But the landscape that Martin treasured was an ecosystem already in crisis.”
Our Enemies Will Vanish: The Russian Invasion and Ukraine’s War of Independence
“Since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, Yaroslav Trofimov has spent months on end at the heart of the conflict, very often on its front lines. In this authoritative account, he traces the war’s decisive moments—from the battle for Kyiv to more recently the gruelling and bloody arm wrestle involving the Wagner group over Bakhmut—to show how Ukraine and its allies have turned the tide against Russia, one of the world’s great military powers, in a modern-day battle of David and Goliath.”
Walt Longmire #13: The Western Star
“Sheriff Walt Longmire is enjoying a celebratory beer after a weapons certification at the Wyoming Law Enforcement Academy when a younger sheriff confronts him with a photograph of twenty-five armed men standing in front of a Challenger steam locomotive. It takes him back to when, fresh from the battlefields of Vietnam, then-deputy Walt accompanied his mentor Lucian to the annual Wyoming Sheriff’s Association junket held on the excursion train known as the Western Star, which ran the length of Wyoming from Cheyenne to Evanston and back. Armed with his trusty Colt .45 and a paperback of Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express, the young Walt was ill-prepared for the machinations of twenty-four veteran sheriffs, let alone the cavalcade of curious characters that accompanied them.”
Eleventy by Example
“11ty is the dark horse of the Jamstack world, offering unparalleled flexibility and performance that gives it an edge against other static site generators such as Jekyll and Hugo. With it, developers can leverage the complete Node ecosystem and create blazing-fast, static-first websites that can be deployed from a content delivery network or a simple server. This book will teach you how to set up, customize, and make the most of 11ty in no time.”
Man’s Search for Meaning
“Psychiatrist Viktor Frankl’s memoir has riveted generations of readers with its descriptions of life in Nazi death camps and its lessons for spiritual survival. Based on his own experience and the stories of his patients, Frankl argues that we cannot avoid suffering but we can choose how to cope with it, find meaning in it, and move forward with renewed purpose. At the heart of his theory, known as logotherapy, is a conviction that the primary human drive is not pleasure but the pursuit of what we find meaningful. Man’s Search for Meaning has become one of the most influential books in America; it continues to inspire us all to find significance in the very act of living.”
From Here to There: The Art and Science of Finding and Losing Our Way
“Navigation skills are deeply embedded in our biology. The ability to find our way over large distances in prehistoric times gave Homo sapiens an advantage, allowing us to explore the farthest regions of the planet. Wayfinding also shaped vital cognitive functions outside the realm of navigation, including abstract thinking, imagination, and memory. Bond brings a reporter’s curiosity and nose for narrative to the latest research from psychologists, neuroscientists, animal behaviorists, and anthropologists. He also turns to the people who design and expertly maneuver the world we navigate: search-and-rescue volunteers, cartographers, ordnance mappers, urban planners, and more. The result is a global expedition that furthers our understanding of human orienting in the natural and built environments.”
Walt Longmire #12: An Obvious Fact
“In the midst of the largest motorcycle rally in the world, a young biker is run off the road and ends up in critical condition. When Sheriff Walt Longmire and his good friend Henry Standing Bear are called to Hulett, Wyoming—the nearest town to America’s first national monument, Devils Tower—to investigate, things start getting complicated. As competing biker gangs; the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms; a military-grade vehicle donated to the tiny local police force by a wealthy entrepreneur; and Lola, the real-life femme fatale and namesake for Henry’s ‘59 Thunderbird (and, by extension, Walt’s granddaughter) come into play, it rapidly becomes clear that there is more to get to the bottom of at this year’s Sturgis Motorcycle Rally than a bike accident.”
Hugo in Action: Static sites and dynamic JAMstack apps
“Hugo in Action teaches you to build and host your own fully customizable static website with the Hugo engine. This friendly tutorial teaches you step-by-step how to use Hugo as a Content Management System and web development environment. Working with a complete company example website and source code, you’ll get to grips with using Markup for content tagging, moving off-template to build your own Hugo themes, and creating custom pages. Next, you’ll push further than you thought was possible with a static site, using JavaScript and the JAM Stack (JavaScript, APIs, and Markup) to add functionality like eCommerce and your own APIs. When you’re done, you’ll have the skills to build a stable but feature-rich website without relying on third-party server code.”
Walt Longmire #11.5: The Highwayman: A Longmire Story
“When Wyoming highway patrolman Rosey Wayman is transferred to the beautiful and imposing landscape of the Wind River Canyon, an area the troopers refer to as no-man’s-land because of the lack of radio communication, she starts receiving ‘officer needs assistance’ calls. The problem? They’re coming from Bobby Womack, a legendary Arapaho patrolman who met a fiery death in the canyon almost a half-century ago. With an investigation that spans this world and the next, Sheriff Walt Longmire and Henry Standing Bear take on a case that pits them against a The Highwayman.”
Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code
“From everyday apps to complex algorithms, Ruha Benjamin cuts through tech-industry hype to understand how emerging technologies can reinforce White supremacy and deepen social inequity. Benjamin argues that automation, far from being a sinister story of racist programmers scheming on the dark web, has the potential to hide, speed up, and deepen discrimination while appearing neutral and even benevolent when compared to the racism of a previous era. Presenting the concept of the ‘New Jim Code,’ she shows how a range of discriminatory designs encode inequity by explicitly amplifying racial hierarchies; by ignoring but thereby replicating social divisions; or by aiming to fix racial bias but ultimately doing quite the opposite. Moreover, she makes a compelling case for race itself as a kind of technology, designed to stratify and sanctify social injustice in the architecture of everyday life.”
Ours Was the Shining Future: The Story of the American Dream
“Two decades into the twenty-first century, the stagnation of living standards has become the defining trend of American life. Life expectancy has declined, economic inequality has soared, and, after some progress, the Black-white wage gap is once again as large as it was in the 1950s. How did this happen in the world’s most powerful country? And what happened to the “American dream”—the promise of a happier, healthier, more prosperous future—which was once such an inextricable part of our national identity? Drawing on decades of writing about the economy for The New York Times, Pulitzer Prize–winning writer David Leonhardt examines the past century of American history, from the Great Depression to today’s Great Stagnation, in search of an answer.”
Wayfinding: The Science and Mystery of How Humans Navigate the World
“In this compelling narrative, O’Connor seeks out neuroscientists, anthropologists, and master navigators to understand how navigation ultimately gave us our humanity. Biologists have been trying to solve the mystery of how organisms have the ability to migrate and orient with such precision—especially since our own adventurous ancestors spread across the world without maps or instruments. O’Connor goes to the Arctic, the Australian bush, and the South Pacific to talk to masters of their environment who seek to preserve their traditions at a time when anyone can use a GPS to navigate.”
2023
81 books-
Walt Longmire #11: Dry Bones
“When the largest, most complete fossil of a Tyrannosaurus rex is discovered in Absaroka County, it would appear to have nothing to do with Walt. That is, until the Cheyenne rancher on whose land she’s found is himself found face down in a turtle pond. As a number of parties vie for ownership of the priceless remains, including rancher Danny Lone Elk’s family, the Cheyenne tribe, the Deputy Attorney General, and a cadre of FBI men, Walt must recruit undersheriff Victoria Moretti, Henry Standing Bear, and Dog to investigate a sixty-six million year-old cold case that’s starting to heat up fast.”
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Walt Longmire #10.1: Wait for Signs: Twelve Longmire Stories
“Twelve Longmire short stories available for the first time in a single volume—featuring an introduction by Lou Diamond Phillips of A&E’s Longmire.”
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Wild Girls: How the Outdoors Shaped the Women Who Challenged a Nation
“This beautiful, meditative work of history puts girls of all races—and the landscapes they loved—at center stage and reveals the impact of the outdoors on women’s independence, resourcefulness, and vision. For these trailblazing women of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, navigating the woods, following the stars, playing sports, and taking to the streets in peaceful protest were not only joyful pursuits, but also techniques to resist assimilation, racism, and sexism.”
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Walt Longmire #10: Any Other Name
“In Any Other Name, Walt is sinking into high-plains winter discontent when his former boss, Lucian Conally, asks him to take on a mercy case in an adjacent county. Detective Gerald Holman is dead and Lucian wants to know what drove his old friend to take his own life. With the clock ticking on the birth of his first grandchild, Walt learns that the by-the-book detective might have suppressed evidence concerning three missing women. Digging deeper, Walt uncovers an incriminating secret so dark that it threatens to claim other lives even before the sheriff can serve justice—Wyoming style.”
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Walt Longmire #9: A Serpent’s Tooth
“It’s homecoming in Absaroka County, but the football and festivities are interrupted when a homeless boy wanders into town. A Mormon “lost boy,” Cord Lynear is searching for his missing mother but clues are scarce. Longmire and his companions, feisty deputy Victoria Moretti and longtime friend Henry Standing Bear, embark on a high plains scavenger hunt in hopes of reuniting mother and son. The trail leads them to an interstate polygamy group that’s presiding over a stockpile of weapons and harboring a vicious vendetta.”
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The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism
“Evangelical Christians are perhaps the most polarizing—and least understood—people living in America today. In his seminal new book, The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory, journalist Tim Alberta, himself a practicing Christian and the son of an evangelical pastor, paints an expansive and profoundly troubling portrait of the American evangelical movement. Through the eyes of televangelists and small-town preachers, celebrity revivalists and everyday churchgoers, Alberta tells the story of a faith cheapened by ephemeral fear, a promise corrupted by partisan subterfuge, and a reputation stained by perpetual scandal.”
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Walt Longmire #8: As The Crow Flies
“Embarking on his eighth adventure, Wyoming Sheriff Walt Longmire doesn’t have time for cowboys and criminals. His daughter, Cady, is getting married in two weeks, and the wedding locale arrangements have just gone up in smoke signals. Fearing Cady’s wrath, Walt and his old friend Henry Standing Bear set out for the Cheyenne Reservation to find a new site for the nuptials. But their expedition ends in horror as they witness a young Crow woman plummeting from Painted Warrior’s majestic cliffs. Is it a suicide, or something more sinister? It’s not Walt’s turf, but he’s coerced into the investigation by Lolo Long, the beautiful new tribal police chief.”
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The Future of the Responsible Company: What We’ve Learned from Patagonia’s First 50 Years
“Patagonia has been recognized as much for its ground-breaking environmental, social practices as for the quality of its clothes. In 2022, the Chouinard family gave their company away, converting ownership to a simple structure of trusts and nonprofits, so that all the profits from the company can be used to protect our home planet and work to reverse climate chaos. Stanley and Chouinard recount how the company and its culture gained confidence, especially through missteps, to make its work progressively more responsible, and to ultimately challenge other companies, as big as Wal-Mart and as small as the corner store, to do the same.”
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Walt Longmire #7: Hell Is Empty
“Well-read and world-weary, Sheriff Walt Longmire has been maintaing order in Wyoming’s Absaroka County for more than thirty years, but in this riveting seventh outing, he is pushed to his limits. Raynaud Shade, an adopted Crow Indian, has just confessed to murdering a boy ten years ago and burying him deep within the Big Horn Mountains. After transporting Shade and a group of other convicted murderers through a snowstorm, Walt is informed by the FBI that the body is buried in his jurisdiction-and the victim’s name is White Buffalo. Guided only by Indian mysticism and a battered paperback of Dante’s Inferno, Walt pursues Shade and his fellow escapees into the icy hell of the Cloud Peak Wilderness Area, cheating death to ensure that justice-both civil and spiritual-is served.”
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Walt Longmire #6: Junkyard Dogs
“It’s a volatile new economy in Durant, Wyoming, where the owners of a multi-million dollar development of ranchettes want to get rid of the adjacent junk-yard. When a severed thumb is discovered in the yard, conflicts erupt, and Walt Longmire, his trusty companion Dog, life-long friend Henry Standing Bear, and deputies Santiago Saizarbitoria and Victoria Moretti find themselves in a small town that feels more and more like a high plains pressure cooker.”
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Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism
“Rachel Maddow traces the fight to preserve American democracy back to World War II, when a handful of committed public servants and brave private citizens thwarted far-right plotters trying to steer our nation toward an alliance with the Nazis.”
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Trail of the Lost: The Relentless Search to Bring Home the Missing Hikers of the Pacific Crest Trail
“From an award-winning former law enforcement park ranger and investigator, this female-driven true crime adventure follows the author’s quest to find missing hikers along the Pacific Crest Trail by pairing up with an eclectic group of unlikely allies.”
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Mad World: The Politics of Mental Health
“Mental health is a political issue, but we often discuss it as a personal one. How is the current mental health crisis connected to capitalism, racism and other social issues? In a different world, how might we transform the ways that we think about mental health, diagnosis and treatment? These are some of the big questions Micha Frazer-Carroll asks as she reveals mental health to be an urgent political concern that needs deeper understanding beyond today’s ‘awareness-raising’ campaigns.”
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Feeding Dangerously: On the Ground with José Andrés and World Central Kitchen
“Fires. Hurricanes. Volcanoes. Floods. Earthquakes. Food is hope. Join Chef José Andrés and World Central Kitchen for the incredible story of how their mission began and expanded across the globe, serving millions of meals in the most dangerous conditions to bring comfort and hope, one plate at a time.”
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Walt Longmire #5: The Dark Horse
“Wade Barsad, a man with a dubious past and a gift for making enemies, burned his wife Mary’s horses in their barn; in retribution, she shot him in the head six times, or so the story goes. But Sheriff Walt Longmire doesn’t believe Mary’s confession and is determined to dig deeper. Unpinning his star to pose as an insurance investigator, Walt visits the Barsad ranch and discovers that everyone in town–including a beautiful Guetemalan bartender and a rancher with a taste for liquor–had a reason for wanting Wade dead.”
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Walt Longmire #4: Another Man’s Moccasins
“When the body of a young Vietnamese woman is found alongside the interstate in Absaroka County, Wyoming, Sherriff Walt Longmire is determined to discover the identity of the victim and is forced to confront the horrible similarities of this murder to that of his first homicide investigation as a marine in Vietnam.”
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Strategic Content Design: Tools and Research Techniques for Better UX
“In Strategic Content Design, you’ll learn how content research can transform your content team—bringing new energy and enthusiasm for their work and gaining attention and respect from teams of all types across your company (product management, product design, user research, operations, and engineering). You’ll also get a toolbox with hard-won methods, best practices, and proven tips for conducting quantitative and qualitative content-focused research and testing.”
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Walt Longmire #3: Kindness Goes Unpunished
“Walt Longmire has been sheriff of Wyoming’s Absaroka County for almost a quarter of a century and has meted out justice with charm and a high-powered sense of humor, but when Walt tags along with good friend Henry Standing Bear on a trip to Philadelphia, he’s in for a shock. When a vicious attack on his daughter Cady leaves her near death, Walt discovers that she has unwittingly become embroiled in a deadly political cover-up.”
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Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer
“With a new introduction, acclaimed director and screenwriter Paul Schrader revisits and updates his contemplation of slow cinema over the past fifty years. Unlike the style of psychological realism, which dominates film, the transcendental style expresses a spiritual state by means of austere camerawork, acting devoid of self-consciousness, and editing that avoids editorial comment. This seminal text analyzes the film style of three great directors—Yasujiro Ozu, Robert Bresson, and Carl Dreyer—and posits a common dramatic language used by these artists from divergent cultures. The new edition updates Schrader’s theoretical framework and extends his theory to the works of Andrei Tarkovsky (Russia), Béla Tarr (Hungary), Theo Angelopoulos (Greece), and Nuri Bilge Ceylan (Turkey), among others.”
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Douglas Fir: The Story of the West’s Most Remarkable Tree
“Westerners familiar with their forests may think they know the Douglas fir–but how well do they? Douglas firs are found in the continental northwest from British Columbia to as far south as Oaxaca, Mexico. They flourish in the Cascades, Rocky Mountains, Sierra, and other mountain ranges, as well as in desert valleys.”
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Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution
“The real origin of our species: a myth-busting, eye-opening landmark account of how humans evolved, offering a paradigm shift in our thinking about what the female body is, how it came to be, and how this evolution still shapes all our lives today”
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American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer
“American Prometheus is the first full-scale biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer, “father of the atomic bomb,” the brilliant, charismatic physicist who led the effort to capture the awesome fire of the sun for his country in time of war. Immediately after Hiroshima, he became the most famous scientist of his generation-one of the iconic figures of the twentieth century, the embodiment of modern man confronting the consequences of scientific progress.”
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In Patagonia
“An exhilarating look at a place that still retains the exotic mystery of a far-off, unseen land, Bruce Chatwin’s exquisite account of his journey through Patagonia teems with evocative descriptions, remarkable bits of history, and unforgettable anecdotes. Fueled by an unmistakable lust for life and adventure and a singular gift for storytelling, Chatwin treks through “the uttermost part of the earth”— that stretch of land at the southern tip of South America, where bandits were once made welcome—in search of almost forgotten legends, the descendants of Welsh immigrants, and the log cabin built by Butch Cassidy. An instant classic upon its publication in 1977, In Patagonia is a masterpiece that has cast a long shadow upon the literary world.”
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Silent Spring Revolution: John F. Kennedy, Rachel Carson, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, and the Great Environmental Awakening
“New York Times bestselling author and acclaimed historian Douglas Brinkley chronicles the rise of environmental activism during the Long Sixties, telling a highly charged story of an indomitable generation that quite literally saved the natural world under the leadership of John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and Richard Nixon.”
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Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World
“Doppelganger is a guidebook for our unsettling age, inviting all of us to view our reflections in the looking glass. It’s for anyone who has lost hours down an internet rabbit hole, who wonders why our politics has become so fatally warped, and who wants a way out of our collective vertigo and back to fighting for what really matters. Braiding together elements of tragicomic memoir, chilling political reportage, and cobweb-clearing cultural analysis, Naomi Klein dives deep into what she calls the Mirror World—our destabilized present rife with doubles and confusion, where far right movements playact solidarity with the working class, AI-generated content blurs the line between genuine and spurious, New Age wellness entrepreneurs turned anti-vaxxers further scramble our familiar political allegiances, and so many of us project our own carefully curated digital doubles out into the social media sphere.”
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The Climate Book
“Around the world, geophysicists and mathematicians, oceanographers and meteorologists, engineers, economists, psychologists and philosophers have been using their expertise to develop a deep understanding of the crises we face. Greta Thunberg has created The Climate Book in partnership with over one hundred of these experts in order to equip us all with this knowledge. Alongside them, Greta shares her own stories of learning, demonstrating, and uncovering greenwashing around the world, revealing the extent to which we have been kept in the dark. This is one of our biggest problems, she shows, but also our greatest source of hope. Once we are given the full picture, we will be able to act–and if a schoolchild’s strike could ignite a global protest, what could we do collectively if we tried?”
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Capitalism in the Anthropocene: Ecological Ruin or Ecological Revolution
“In this comprehensive study, John Bellamy Foster tells us that a globalized system of capital accumulation has induced humanity to foul its own nest. The result is a planetary emergency that threatens all present and future generations, throwing into question the continuation of civilization and ultimately the very survival of humanity itself. Only by addressing the social aspects of the current planetary emergency, exploring the theoretical, historical, and practical dimensions of the capitalism’s alteration of the planetary environment, is it possible to develop the ecological and social resources for a new journey of hope.”
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The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival
“It’s December 1997, and a man-eating tiger is on the prowl outside a remote village in Russia’s Far East. The tiger isn’t just killing people, it’s annihilating them, and a team of men and their dogs must hunt it on foot through the forest in the brutal cold. As the trackers sift through the gruesome remains of the victims, they discover that these attacks aren’t random: the tiger is apparently engaged in a vendetta. Injured, starving, and extremely dangerous, the tiger must be found before it strikes again.”
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Hold the Line: The Insurrection and One Cop’s Battle for America’s Soul
“An urgent warning about the growing threat to our democracy from a twenty-year police veteran and former Trump supporter who nearly lost his life during the insurrection of January 6th. When Michael Fanone self-deployed to the Capitol on January 6, 2021, he had no idea his life was about to change. When he got to the front of the line, he urged his fellow officers to hold it against the growing crowd of insurrectionists—until he found himself pulled into the mob, tased until he had a heart attack, and viciously beaten with a Blue Lives Matter flag as shouts to kill him rang out.”
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The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet
“The Heat Will Kill You First is about the extreme ways in which our planet is already changing. It is about why spring is coming a few weeks earlier and fall is coming a few weeks later and the impact that will have on everything from our food supply to disease outbreaks. It is about what will happen to our lives and our communities when typical summer days in Chicago or Boston go from 90°F to 110°F. A heatwave, Goodell explains, is a predatory event— one that culls out the most vulnerable people. But that is changing. As heatwaves become more intense and more common, they will become more democratic.”
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Walt Longmire #2: Death Without Company
“When Mari Baroja is found poisoned at the Durant Home for Assisted Living, Sheriff Walt Longmire is drawn into an investigation of her death that proves to be as dramatic as her life. Her connections to the Basque community, the lucrative coal-bed methane industry, and the personal life of the previous sheriff, Lucian Connally, lead to a complex web of half truths and assumed allegiances.”
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Design by Definition
“Elizabeth McGuane offers a fresh, empowering framework for design. Drawing from her experience on the forefront of web, mobile, and product design, she shows us how to harness the potency of words and language to uplift and illuminate rather than encumber. Learn how to effectively apply semantic concepts, use language to frame design problems clearly, and integrate elements of style such as metaphor and nomenclature, to strengthen your design process.”
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Walt Longmire #1: The Cold Dish
“Walt Longmire, sheriff of Wyoming’s Absaroka County, knows he’s got trouble when Cody Pritchard is found dead. Two years earlier, Cody and three accomplices had been given suspended sentences for raping a Northern Cheyenne girl. Is someone seeking vengeance? Longmire faces one of the more volatile and challenging cases in his twenty-four years as sheriff and means to see that revenge, a dish that is best served cold, is never served at all.”
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Wyoming Stories #2: Bad Dirt
“Through Proulx’s knowledge of the history of Wyoming and the west, her interest in landscape and place, and her sympathy for the sheer will it takes to survive, we see the seared heart of the tough people who live in the emptiest state. Proulx, winner of the Pulitzer, the National Book Award, and many other prizes, has written a collection of spectacularly satisfying stories.”
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The Ends of Freedom: Reclaiming America’s Lost Promise of Economic Rights
“Replete with discussions of some of today’s most influential policy ideas—from Medicare for All to a federal job guarantee to the Green New Deal—The Ends of Freedom is a timely and urgent call to reclaim the idea of freedom from its captors on the political right—to ground America’s next era in the country’s progressive history and carve a path toward a more economically dynamic and equitable nation.”
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The Rooster House: My Ukrainian Family Story, A Memoir
“In 2014, the landmarks of Victoria Belim’s personal geography were plunged into tumult at the hands of Russia. Her hometown Kyiv was gripped by protests and violent suppression. Crimea, where she’d once been sent to school to avoid radiation from the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl, was invaded. Kharkiv, where her grandmother Valentina studied economics and fell in love; Donetsk, where her father once worked; and Mariupol, where she and her mother bought a cherry tree for Valentina’s garden all became battlegrounds.”
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The Golden Spruce: A True Story of Myth, Madness, and Greed
“When a shattered kayak and camping gear are found on an uninhabited island in the Pacific Northwest, they reignite a mystery surrounding a shocking act of protest. Five months earlier, logger-turned-activist Grant Hadwin had plunged naked into a river in British Columbia’s Queen Charlotte Islands, towing a chainsaw. When his night’s work was done, a unique Sitka spruce, 165 feet tall and covered with luminous golden needles, teetered on its stump. Two days later it fell. As vividly as John Krakauer puts readers on Everest, John Vaillant takes us into the heart of North America’s last great forest.”
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The Immortal King Rao
“The Immortal King Rao, written by a former Wall Street Journal technology reporter, is a resonant debut novel obliterating the boundaries between literary and speculative fiction, the historic and the dystopian, confronting how we arrived at the age of technological capitalism and where our actions might take us next.”
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Henry at Work: Thoreau on Making a Living
“Henry at Work invites readers to rethink how we work today by exploring an aspect of Henry David Thoreau that has often been Thoreau the worker. John Kaag and Jonathan van Belle overturn the popular misconception of Thoreau as a navel-gazing recluse who was scornful of work and other mundanities. In fact, Thoreau worked hard―surveying land, running his family’s pencil-making business, writing, lecturing, and building his cabin at Walden Pond―and thought intensely about work in its many dimensions. And his ideas about work have much to teach us in an age of remote work and automation, when many people are reconsidering what kind of working lives they want to have.”
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Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World
“In May 2016, Fort McMurray, the hub of Canada’s oil industry and America’s biggest foreign supplier, was overrun by wildfire. The multi-billion-dollar disaster melted vehicles, turned entire neighborhoods into firebombs, and drove 88,000 people from their homes in a single afternoon. Through the lens of this apocalyptic conflagration—the wildfire equivalent of Hurricane Katrina—John Vaillant warns that this was not a unique event, but a shocking preview of what we must prepare for in a hotter, more flammable world.”
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Recoding America: Why Government Is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better
“Just when we most need our government to work—to decarbonize our infrastructure and economy, to help the vulnerable through a pandemic, to defend ourselves against global threats—it is faltering. Government at all levels has limped into the digital age, offering online services that can feel even more cumbersome than the paperwork that preceded them and widening the gap between the policy outcomes we intend and what we get.”
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Silo #3: Dust
“In a time when secrets and lies were the foundations of life, someone has discovered the truth. And they are going to tell. Jules knows what her predecessors created. She knows they are the reason life has to be lived in this way. And she won’t stand for it. But Jules no longer has supporters. And there is far more to fear than the toxic world beyond her walls.”
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Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures
“Neither plant nor animal, it is found throughout the earth, the air and our bodies. It can be microscopic, yet also accounts for the largest organisms ever recorded, living for millennia and weighing tens of thousands of tonnes. Its ability to digest rock enabled the first life on land, it can survive unprotected in space, and thrives amidst nuclear radiation.”
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A Worthy Expedition: The History of NOLS
“A Worthy Expedition: The History of NOLS begins with the story of Paul Petzoldt, from his early years growing up with his farming family in Creston, Iowa, to his founding of NOLS in a small log cabin in 1965 in Sinks Canyon, Wyoming at the age of 57, and finally, to his death in 1999, at the age of 91. The current-day school includes NOLS Wilderness Medicine, which was purchased in 1999, and NOLS Custom Education, which became part of the school in 1999.”
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Silo #2: Shift
“In 2007, the Center for Automation in Nanobiotech (CAN) outlined the hardware and software platform that would one day allow robots smaller than human cells to make medical diagnoses, conduct repairs, and even self-propagate. In the same year, the CBS network re-aired a program about the effects of propranolol on sufferers of extreme trauma. A simple pill, it had been discovered, could wipe out the memory of any traumatic event. At almost the same moment in humanity’s broad history, mankind had discovered the means for bringing about its utter downfall. And the ability to forget it ever happened. This is the sequel to the New York Times bestselling WOOL series.”
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The Weeds
“Lush, intoxicating, and teeming with mischief, Katy Simpson Smith’s The Weeds is a tense, mesmerizing page-turner about science and survival, the roles women are given and have taken from them, and the lives they make for themselves.”
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Wild and Precious: A Celebration of Mary Oliver
“A celebration of the beloved, award-winning poet Mary Oliver, narrated by actress and activist Sophia Bush featuring selections from the late poet’s work, in her own voice, plus a tapestry of complementary voices reflecting on Oliver’s legacy.”
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Wool: Book One of the Silo Series
“The first book in the acclaimed, New York Times best-selling trilogy, Wool is the story of mankind clawing for survival. The world outside has grown toxic, the view of it limited, talk of it forbidden. The remnants of humanity live underground in a single silo. But there are always those who hope, who dream. These are the dangerous people, the residents who infect others with their optimism. Their punishment is simple. They are given the very thing they want: They are allowed to go outside.”
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Repair Revolution: How Fixers Are Transforming Our Throwaway Culture
“Every year, millions of people throw away countless items because they don’t know how to fix them. Some products are manufactured in a way that makes it hard, if not impossible, for people to repair them themselves. This throwaway lifestyle depletes Earth’s resources and adds to overflowing landfills. Now there’s a better way. Repair Revolution chronicles the rise of Repair Cafes, Fixit Clinics, and other volunteer-run organizations devoted to helping consumers repair their beloved but broken items for free. Repair Revolution explores the philosophy and wisdom of repairing, as well as the Right to Repair movement.”
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The Devil Never Sleeps: Learning to Live in an Age of Disasters
“In The Devil Never Sleeps, Juliette Kayyem lays the groundwork for a new approach to dealing with disasters. Presenting the basic themes of crisis management, Kayyem amends the principles we rely on far too easily. Instead, she offers us a new framework to anticipate the “devil’s” inevitable return, highlighting the leadership deficiencies we need to overcome and the forward thinking we need to harness. It’s no longer about preventing a disaster from occurring, but learning how to use the tools at our disposal to minimize the consequences when it does.”
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Fieldwork: A Forager’s Memoir
“From National Book Award–nominee Iliana Regan, a new memoir of her life and heritage as a forager, spanning her ancestry in Eastern Europe, her childhood in rural Indiana, and her new life set in the remote forests of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Fieldwork explores how Regan’s complex gender identity informs her acclaimed work as a chef and her profound experience of the natural world.”
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The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder
“From the author of Killers of the Flower Moon, a page-turning story of shipwreck, survival, and savagery, culminating in a court martial that reveals a shocking truth. The powerful narrative reveals the deeper meaning of the events on The Wager, showing that it was not only the captain and crew who ended up on trial, but the very idea of empire.”
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God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning
“For most of human history the world was a magical and enchanted place ruled by forces beyond our understanding. The rise of science and Descartes’s division of mind from world made materialism our ruling paradigm, in the process asking whether our own consciousness—i.e., souls—might be illusions. Now the inexorable rise of technology, with artificial intelligences that surpass our comprehension and control, and the spread of digital metaphors for self-understanding, the core questions of existence—identity, knowledge, the very nature and purpose of life itself—urgently require rethinking.”
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Birnam Wood
“Five years ago, Mira Bunting founded a guerrilla gardening group: Birnam Wood. An undeclared, unregulated, sometimes-criminal, sometimes-philanthropic gathering of friends, this activist collective plants crops wherever no one will notice: on the sides of roads, in forgotten parks, and neglected backyards. For years, the group has struggled to break even. Then Mira stumbles on an answer, a way to finally set the group up for the long term: a landslide has closed the Korowai Pass, cutting off the town of Thorndike. Natural disaster has created an opportunity, a sizable farm seemingly abandoned.”
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Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility
“An energizing case for hope about the climate comes from Rebecca Solnit, called the voice of the resistance by the New York Times, and climate activist Thelma Young Lutunatabua, along with a chorus of voices calling on us to rise to the moment. Not Too Late is the book for anyone who is despondent, defeatist, or unsure about climate change and seeking answers.”
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The World for Sale: Money, Power and the Traders Who Barter the Earth’s Resources
“The modern world is built on commodities - from the oil that fuels our cars to the metals that power our smartphones. We rarely stop to consider where they come from. But we should. In The World for Sale, two leading journalists lift the lid on one of the least scrutinised corners of the economy: the workings of the billionaire commodity traders who buy, hoard and sell the earth’s resources.”
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Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology
“Economic historian Chris Miller explains how the semiconductor came to play a critical role in modern life and how the US became dominant in chip design and manufacturing and applied this technology to military systems. America’s victory in the Cold War and its global military dominance stems from its ability to harness computing power more effectively than any other power. Until recently, China had been catching up, aligning its chip-building ambitions with military modernization.”
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Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World
“In Artificial Unintelligence, Meredith Broussard argues that our collective enthusiasm for applying computer technology to every aspect of life has resulted in a tremendous amount of poorly designed systems. We are so eager to do everything digitally—hiring, driving, paying bills, even choosing romantic partners—that we have stopped demanding that our technology actually work. Broussard, a software developer and journalist, reminds us that there are fundamental limits to what we can (and should) do with technology.”
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Walking & Wayfinding in the Westfjords Compendium
“Wayfinding in the Westfjords and its companions—Notes on Ecology, Notes on Walking and the map: Walking Routes of the Westfjords of Iceland, document old walking and herding routes between Ísafjörður and Látrabjarg. The collection also features information on local ecology, culture and history paired with creative practices that invite a deeper relationship to nature.”
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The Power
“In The Power, the world is a recognizable place: there’s a rich Nigerian boy who lounges around the family pool; a foster kid whose religious parents hide their true nature; an ambitious American politician; a tough London girl from a tricky family. But then a vital new force takes root and flourishes, causing their lives to converge with devastating effect. Teenage girls now have immense physical power—they can cause agonizing pain and even death. And, with this small twist of nature, the world drastically resets.”
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The Big Con: How the Consulting Industry Weakens Our Businesses, Infantilizes Our Governments, and Warps Our Economies
“There is an entrenched relationship between the consulting industry and the way business and government are managed today that must change. Mariana Mazzucato and Rosie Collington show that our economies’ reliance on companies such as McKinsey & Company, Boston Consulting Group, Bain & Company, PwC, Deloitte, KPMG, and EY stunts innovation, obfuscates corporate and political accountability, and impedes our collective mission of halting climate breakdown.”
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Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do about It
“Of Boys and Men is a groundbreaking analysis of how the social and economic world of men has been turned upside down, leaving them adrift and underpowered. Previous attempts to treat this condition, from all political angles, have made the same fatal mistake – of viewing the problems of men as a problem with men. This book shows how the basic social structures defining masculine maturity and success have been shattered, and how they can—and must—be reinvented.”
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Waterlog: A Swimmer’s Journey Through Britain
“In 1996 Roger Deakin, the late, great nature writer, set out to swim through the British Isles. From the sea, from rock pools, from rivers and streams, tarns, lakes, lochs, ponds, lidos, swimming pools and spas, from fens, dykes, moats, aqueducts, waterfalls, flooded quarries, even canals, Deakin gains a fascinating perspective on modern Britain.”
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Overreach
“Drawing on over 25 years’ experience as a correspondent in Moscow, as well as his own family ties to Russia and Ukraine, journalist Owen Matthews takes us through the poisoned historical roots of the conflict, into the Covid bubble where Putin conceived his invasion plans in a fog of paranoia about Western threats, and finally into the inner circle around Ukrainian president and unexpected war hero Volodimir Zelensky.”
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Invasion: The Inside Story of Russia’s Bloody War and Ukraine’s Fight for Survival
“In a damning, inspiring, and breathtaking narrative of what is likely to be a turning point for Europe—and the world—Guardian correspondent and New York Times bestselling author Luke Harding reports firsthand on the first year of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.”
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It’s OK to Be Angry About Capitalism
“A progressive takedown of the uber-capitalist status quo that has enriched millionaires and billionaires at the expense of the working class, and a blueprint for what transformational change would actually look like. It’s OK to be angry about capitalism. Reflecting on our turbulent times, Senator Bernie Sanders takes on the billionaire class and speaks blunt truths about our country’s failure to address the destructive nature of a system that is fueled by uncontrolled greed and rigidly committed to prioritizing corporate profits over the needs of ordinary Americans.”
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Clanlands: Whisky, Warfare, and a Scottish Adventure Like No Other
“Two Men. One Country. And a lot of whisky. As stars of ‘Outlander’, Sam and Graham eat, sleep and breathe the Highlands on this epic road trip around their homeland. They discover that the real thing is even greater than fiction. ‘Clanlands’ is the story of their journey. Armed with their trusty campervan and a sturdy friendship, these two Scotsmen are on the adventure of a lifetime to explore the majesty of Scotland. A wild ride by boat, kayak, bicycle and motorbike, they travel from coast to loch and peak to valley and delve into Scotland’s history and culture, from timeless poetry to bloody warfare.”
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Adam Smith’s America: How a Scottish Philosopher Became an Icon of American Capitalism
“Originally published in 1776, Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations was lauded by America’s founders as a landmark work of Enlightenment thinking about national wealth, statecraft, and moral virtue. Today, Smith is one of the most influential icons of economic thought in America. Glory Liu traces how generations of Americans have read, reinterpreted, and weaponized Smith’s ideas, revealing how his popular image as a champion of American-style capitalism and free markets is a historical invention.”
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Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia
“Pirates have long lived in the realm of romance and fantasy, symbolizing risk, lawlessness, and radical visions of freedom. But at the root of this mythology is a rich history of pirate societies—vibrant, imaginative experiments in self-governance and alternative social formations at the edges of European empire.”
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Dear Data
The book explores the role that data plays in our lives and originates from a correspondence between the two authors — both data visualisation artists who met at a data conference and chose to keep in touch by sending weekly postcards composed of data visualisations in place of words. The result is described as “a thought-provoking visual feast”.
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How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence
“When LSD was first discovered in the 1940s, it seemed to researchers, scientists and doctors as if the world might be on the cusp of psychological revolution. It promised to shed light on the deep mysteries of consciousness, as well as offer relief to addicts and the mentally ill. But in the 1960s, with the vicious backlash against the counter-culture, all further research was banned. In recent years, however, work has quietly begun again on the amazing potential of LSD, psilocybin and DMT. Could these drugs in fact improve the lives of many people?”
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A Natural History of the Future: What the Laws of Biology Tell Us about the Destiny of the Human Species
“Our species has amassed unprecedented knowledge of nature, which we have tried to use to seize control of life and bend the planet to our will. In A Natural History of the Future, biologist Rob Dunn argues that such efforts are futile. We may see ourselves as life’s overlords, but we are instead at its mercy. In the evolution of antibiotic resistance, the power of natural selection to create biodiversity, and even the surprising life of the London Underground, Dunn finds laws of life that no human activity can annul. When we create artificial islands of crops, dump toxic waste, or build communities, we provide new materials for old laws to shape. Life’s future flourishing is not in question. Ours is.”
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On Photography
“First published in 1973, this is a study of the force of photographic images which are continually inserted between experience and reality. Sontag develops further the concept of ‘transparency’. When anything can be photographed and photography has destroyed the boundaries and definitions of art, a viewer can approach a photograph freely with no expectations of discovering what it means. This collection of six lucid and invigorating essays, the most famous being ‘In Plato’s Cave’, make up a deep exploration of how the image has affected society.”
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Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI
“In the 1920s, the richest people per capita in the world were members of the Osage Indian Nation in Oklahoma. After oil was discovered beneath their land, the Osage rode in chauffeured automobiles, built mansions, and sent their children to study in Europe. Then, one by one, they began to be killed off. One Osage woman, Mollie Burkhart, watched as her family was murdered. Her older sister was shot. Her mother was then slowly poisoned. And it was just the beginning, as more Osage began to die under mysterious circumstances.”
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Hungry: Eating, Road-Tripping, and Risking It All with the Greatest Chef in the World
“Hungry is a book about not only the hunger for food, but for risk, for reinvention, for creative breakthroughs, and for connection. Feeling stuck in his work and home life, writer Jeff Gordinier happened into a fateful meeting with Danish chef René Redzepi, whose restaurant, Noma, has been called the best in the world. A restless perfectionist, Redzepi was at the top of his game but was looking to tear it all down, to shutter his restaurant and set out for new places, flavors, and recipes.”
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Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It
“After a stint policing the rough streets of Kansas City, Missouri, Chris Voss joined the FBI, where his career as a kidnapping negotiator brought him face-to-face with bank robbers, gang leaders and terrorists. Never Split the Difference takes you inside his world of high-stakes negotiations, revealing the nine key principles that helped Voss and his colleagues succeed when it mattered the most – when people’s lives were at stake.”
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The Code of Capital: How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality
“Capital is the defining feature of modern economies, yet most people have no idea where it actually comes from. What is it, exactly, that transforms mere wealth into an asset that automatically creates more wealth? The Code of Capital explains how capital is created behind closed doors in the offices of private attorneys, and why this little-known fact is one of the biggest reasons for the widening wealth gap between the holders of capital and everybody else.”
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Believers: Making a Life at the End of the World
“In search of answers and action, the award-winning poet and essayist Lisa Wells brings us Believers, introducing trailblazers and outliers from across the globe who have found radically new ways to live and reconnect to the Earth in the face of climate change.”
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Cinema Speculation
“The filmmaker shares his love of cinema with special attention given to key American films of the 1970s.”
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The Philosophy of Modern Song
“In a collection of more than 60 essays, the musician and winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature explores the nature of popular music.”
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Babel, Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution
“1828. Robin Swift, orphaned by cholera in Canton, is brought to London by the mysterious Professor Lovell. There, he trains for years in Latin, Ancient Greek, and Chinese, all in preparation for the day he’ll enroll in Oxford University’s prestigious Royal Institute of Translation — also known as Babel. Babel is the world’s center of translation and, more importantly, of silver-working: the art of manifesting the meaning lost in translation through enchanted silver bars, to magical effect. Silver-working has made the British Empire unparalleled in power, and Babel’s research in foreign languages serves the Empire’s quest to colonize everything it encounters.”
2022
64 books-
White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity
“Drawing on history, public opinion surveys, and personal experience, Robert P. Jones delivers a provocative examination of the unholy relationship between American Christianity and white supremacy, and issues an urgent call for white Christians to reckon with this legacy for the sake of themselves and the nation.”
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I Am Dynamite! A Life of Nietzsche
“Nietzsche wrote that all philosophy is autobiographical, and in this vividly compelling, myth-shattering biography, Sue Prideaux brings readers into the world of this brilliant, eccentric, and deeply troubled man, illuminating the events and people that shaped his life and work. From his placid, devoutly Christian upbringing—overshadowed by the mysterious death of his father—through his teaching career, lonely philosophizing on high mountains, and heart-breaking descent into madness, Prideaux documents Nietzsche’s intellectual and emotional life with a novelist’s insight and sensitivity.”
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Lumberjills: Britain’s Forgotten Army
“During the two world wars, it is well known that women all over the country entered factories, armed services and farms, filling gaps left by the exodus of men. What is less well known is that one of the vital services women filled during these tumultuous times was in forestry, forming the Women’s Timber Corps. Timber was a vital resource, imported into the UK in vast quantities, but wartime meant the country had to be self-sufficient - and without the men that usually took on the work. Without it, mining, shipbuilding and a whole host of other industries would grind to a halt. In stepped the Lumberjills: the government reluctantly recruited thousands of women to carry out this ‘man’s job’; they were responsible for felling and crosscutting trees by hand, operating sawmills, driving tractors and hauling timber trucks.”
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Orwell’s Roses
“‘In the year 1936 a writer planted roses.’ So begins Rebecca Solnit’s new book, a reflection on George Orwell’s passionate gardening and the way that his involvement with plants, particularly flowers, and the natural world illuminates his other commitments as a writer and antifascist, and the intertwined politics of nature and power.”
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Demon Copperhead
“Demon Copperhead is set in the mountains of southern Appalachia. It’s the story of a boy born to a teenaged single mother in a single-wide trailer, with no assets beyond his dead father’s good looks and copper-colored hair, a caustic wit, and a fierce talent for survival. In a plot that never pauses for breath, relayed in his own unsparing voice, he braves the modern perils of foster care, child labor, derelict schools, athletic success, addiction, disastrous loves, and crushing losses. Through all of it, he reckons with his own invisibility in a popular culture where even the superheroes have abandoned rural people in favor of cities.”
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Hack Your Bureaucracy: Get Things Done No Matter What Your Role on Any Team
“Change doesn’t happen just because the person in charge declares it should, even if that person is the CEO of your company or the President of the United States. Regardless of your industry, role, or team, Hack Your Bureaucracy shows how to get started, take initiative on your own, and transform your ideas into impact.”
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Karl Marx and the Birth of Modern Society: The Life of Marx and the Development of His Work (Volume I: 1818-1841)
“For over a century, Karl Marx’s critique of capitalism has been a crucial resource for social movements. Now, recent economic crises have made it imperative for us to comprehend and actualize Marx’s ideas. But without a knowledge of Karl Marx’s life as he lived it, neither Marx nor his works can be fully understood. There are more than twenty-five comprehensive biographies of Marx, but none of them consider his life and work in equal, corresponding measure. This biography, planned for three volumes, aims to include what most biographies have reduced to mere background: the contemporary conflicts, struggles, and disputes that engaged Marx at the time of his writings, alongside his complex relationships with a varied assortment of friends and opponents.”
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Two Years on a Bike: From Vancouver to Patagonia
YouTube recently listed in my feed this author’s series on buying and refurbishing an Italian mountain farm and consequently I found this book about his two-year bike tour. The book is expensive, but stunning in illustrations, photographs, and prose.
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Pastoral Song: A Farmer’s Journey
“Pastoral Song is the story of an inheritance: one that affects us all. It tells of how rural landscapes around the world were brought close to collapse, and the age-old rhythms of work, weather, community and wild things were lost. And yet this elegy from the northern fells is also a song of hope: of how, guided by the past, one farmer began to salvage a tiny corner of England that was now his, doing his best to restore the life that had vanished and to leave a legacy for the future.”
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
“Hitler boasted that The Third Reich would last a thousand years. It lasted only 12. But those 12 years contained some of the most catastrophic events Western civilization has ever known. No other powerful empire ever bequeathed such mountains of evidence about its birth and destruction as the Third Reich. When the bitter war was over, and before the Nazis could destroy their files, the Allied demand for unconditional surrender produced an almost hour-by-hour record of the nightmare empire built by Adolph Hitler.”
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Buchanan-Smith’s Handbook to the Axe
“From the basics and fundamentals of handling and owning an axe to the details on how to find the right axe to everything a reader must know about use and maintenance, this stylish, informative axe guide is ideal for anyone interested in the outdoors.”
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The Destructionists: The Twenty-Five Year Crack-Up of the Republican Party
“Dana Milbank sees a clear line from the Contract with America to the coup attempt. In the quarter century in between, Americans have witnessed the crackup of the party of Lincoln and Reagan, to its current iteration as a haven for white supremacists, political violence, conspiracy theories and authoritarianism.”
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Unfinished Tales of Númenor and Middle-earth
I’m continuing to revisit Tolkien’s work before The Rings of Power premiere.
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The Silmarillion
I’m continuing to revisit Tolkien’s work before The Rings of Power premiere.
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Fifteen Dogs
“Over drinks at Toronto’s Wheat Sheaf Tavern, Hermes and Apollo get into a debate about whether animals could live happily if they had the same cognitive and speech abilities as humans. They decide to wager a year of servitude on the outcome of granting the gifts of human reasoning and language to a group of dogs in a nearby clinic.”
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The Return of the King
I’m revisiting Middle-earth once again thanks to this new, unabridged audiobook, narrated by Andy Serkis.
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Amusing Ourselves to Death
“The essential premise of the book, which Postman extends to the rest of his argument(s), is that ‘form excludes the content’, that is, a particular medium can only sustain a particular level of ideas. Thus rational argument, integral to print typography, is militated against by the medium of television for this reason. Owing to this shortcoming, politics and religion are diluted, and ‘news of the day’ becomes a packaged commodity. Television de-emphasizes the quality of information in favor of satisfying the far-reaching needs of entertainment, by which information is encumbered and to which it is subordinate.”
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Just Ride: A Radically Practical Guide to Riding Your Bike
“Just Ride is a revelation. Forget the ultralight, uncomfortable bikes, flashy jerseys, clunky shoes that clip onto tiny pedals, the grinding out of endless miles. Instead, ride like you did when you were a kid—just get on your bike and discover the pure joy of riding it.”
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The Two Towers
I’m revisiting Middle-earth once again thanks to this new, unabridged audiobook, narrated by Andy Serkis.
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Good Strategy Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters
“Developing and implementing a strategy is the central task of a leader, whether the CEO at a Fortune 100 company, an entrepreneur, a church pastor, the head of a school, or a government official. Richard Rumelt shows that there has been a growing and unfortunate tendency to equate Mom-and-apple-pie values, fluffy packages of buzzwords, motivational slogans, and financial goals with ‘strategy.’ He debunks these elements of ‘bad strategy’ and awakens an understanding of the power of a ‘good strategy.’”
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Sea of Tranquility
“The award-winning, best-selling author of Station Eleven and The Glass Hotel returns with a novel of art, time, love, and plague that takes the reader from Vancouver Island in 1912 to a dark colony on the moon three hundred years later, unfurling a story of humanity across centuries and space.”
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Generation Dread: Finding Purpose in an Age of Climate Crisis
“Climate and environment-related fears and anxieties are on the rise everywhere. As with any type of stress, eco-anxiety can lead to lead to burnout, avoidance, or a disturbance of daily functioning. In Generation Dread, Britt Wray seamlessly merges scientific knowledge with emotional insight to show how these intense feelings are a healthy response to the troubled state of the world.”
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An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us
“The Earth teems with sights and textures, sounds and vibrations, smells and tastes, electric and magnetic fields. But every animal is enclosed within its own unique sensory bubble, perceiving but a tiny sliver of an immense world. This book welcomes us into a previously unfathomable dimension–the world as it is truly perceived by other animals.”
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The Twilight World
“The great filmmaker Werner Herzog, in his first novel, tells the incredible story of Hiroo Onoda, a Japanese soldier who defended a small island in the Philippines for twenty-nine years after the end of World War II.”
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The Songs of Trees: Stories from Nature’s Great Connectors
“Haskell repeatedly visits a dozen trees around the world, exploring the trees connections with webs of fungi, bacterial communities, cooperative and destructive animals, and other plants. An Amazonian ceibo tree reveals the rich ecological turmoil of the tropical forest, along with threats from expanding oil fields. Thousands of miles away, the roots of a balsam fir in Canada survive in poor soil only with the help of fungal partners.”
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The Atlas of Middle-earth
“Karen Wynn Fonstad’s The Atlas of Middle-earth is an essential volume that will enchant all Tolkien fans. Here is the definitive guide to the geography of Middle-earth, from its founding in the Elder Days through the Third Age, including the journeys of Bilbo, Frodo, and the Fellowship of the Ring.”
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Two Wheels Good: The History and Mystery of the Bicycle
“The bicycle is a vestige of the Victorian era, seemingly out of pace with our age of smartphones and ridesharing apps and driverless cars. Yet we live on a bicycle planet. Across the world, more people travel by bicycle than by any other form of transportation. Almost anyone can learn to ride a bike–and nearly everyone does.”
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Atlas of Yellowstone, Second Edition
Following the gorgeous and carefully researched Wild Migrations Atlas of Wyoming’s Ungulates, this is another stunning product of the collaboration between my home state (Wyoming) and my alma mater (University of Oregon).
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Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life
“For a quarter century, more than a million readers—scribes and scribblers of all ages and abilities—have been inspired by Anne Lamott’s hilarious, big-hearted, homespun advice. An essential volume for generations of writers young and old, Bird by Bird is a modern classic. This twenty-fifth anniversary edition will continue to spark creative minds for years to come.”
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Liberalism and Its Discontents
“As the renowned political philosopher Francis Fukuyama shows in Liberalism and Its Discontents, the principles of liberalism have also, in recent decades, been pushed to new extremes by both the right and the left: neoliberals made a cult of economic freedom, and progressives focused on identity over human universality as central to their political vision. The result, Fukuyama argues, has been a fracturing of our civil society and an increasing peril to our democracy.”
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Draft No. 4: On the Writing Process
“Draft No. 4 is an elucidation of the writer’s craft by a master practitioner. In a series of playful but expertly wrought essays, John McPhee shares insights he’s gathered over his career and refined during his long-running course at Princeton University, where he has launched some of the most esteemed writers of several generations.”
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Leading Content Design
“Content design teams need the right conditions to thrive—but when they’re hampered by bottlenecks or putting out fires, it’s hard for them to do their best work, secure support, and grow strategically. Enter content operations. With smart, operational approaches, Rachel McConnell helps you identify and remove the barriers to strong, effective content work.”
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Legends of the North Cascades
“Dave Cartwright has had enough. After three tours in Iraq he has come home to Vigilante Falls in Washington State only to find that he feels incapable of connecting to the people and the place that once defined him. Most days, his love for his seven-year-old daughter, Bella, is the only thing keeping him going. When tragedy strikes, Dave makes a dramatic decision: he will take Bella to live in a cave in the wilderness of the North Cascades.”
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A People’s Guide to Capitalism: An Introduction to Marxist Economics
“Economists regularly promote Capitalism as the greatest system ever to grace the planet. With the same breath, they implore us to leave the job of understanding the magical powers of the market to the ‘experts.’ Despite the efforts of these mainstream commentators to convince us otherwise, many of us have begun to question why this system has produced such vast inequality and wanton disregard for its own environmental destruction. This book offers answers to exactly these questions on their own terms: in the form of a radical economic theory.”
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Breaking Things at Work: The Luddites Are Right About Why You Hate Your Job
“In the nineteenth century, English textile workers responded to the introduction of new technologies on the factory floor by smashing them to bits. For years the Luddites roamed the English countryside, practicing drills and manoeuvres that they would later deploy on unsuspecting machines. The movement has been derided by scholars as a backwards-looking and ultimately ineffectual effort to stem the march of history; for Gavin Mueller, the movement gets at the heart of the antagonistic relationship between all workers, including us today, and the so-called progressive gains secured by new technologies.”
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A Brief History of Equality
“In this 288-page book targeting an audience of citizens not economists, Piketty summarizes his two previous books, his 2014 696-page Capital in the Twenty-First Century and his 2019 1150-page book Capital and Ideology. In Capital, Piketty said that a possible remedy for inequality lay in a “global tax on wealth”. In A Brief History, he developed the concept of a progressive increase in the tax on the wealthy.”
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Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole
“With Quiet, Susan Cain urged our society to cultivate space for the undervalued, indispensable introverts among us, thereby revealing an untapped power hidden in plain sight. Now she employs the same mix of research, storytelling, and memoir to explore why we experience sorrow and longing, and the surprising lessons these states of mind teach us about creativity, compassion, leadership, spirituality, mortality, and love.”
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Pandemic, Inc.: Chasing the Capitalists and Thieves Who Got Rich While We Got Sick
“In this brilliant nonfiction thriller, award-winning investigative reporter J. David McSwane takes us behind the scenes to reveal how traders, contractors, and healthcare companies used one of the darkest moments in American history to fill their pockets. Determined to uncover how this was possible, he spent over a year on private jets and in secret warehouses, traveling from California to Chicago to Washington DC, to interview both the most treacherous of profiteers and the victims of their crimes.”
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The Cartographers
“Nell Young’s whole life and greatest passion is cartography. Her father, Dr. Daniel Young, is a legend in the field and Nell’s personal hero. But she hasn’t seen or spoken to him ever since he cruelly fired her and destroyed her reputation after an argument over an old, cheap gas station highway map. But when Dr. Young is found dead in his office at the New York Public Library, with the very same seemingly worthless map hidden in his desk, Nell can’t resist investigating.”
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People We Meet on Vacation
“Poppy and Alex. Alex and Poppy. They have nothing in common. She’s a wild child; he wears khakis. She has insatiable wanderlust; he prefers to stay home with a book. And somehow, ever since a fateful car share home from college many years ago, they are the very best of friends. For most of the year they live far apart—she’s in New York City, and he’s in their small hometown—but every summer, for a decade, they have taken one glorious week of vacation together.”
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The Council of Animals
After The Calamity, the animals thought the humans had managed to do themselves in. But, it turns out, a few are cowering in makeshift villages. So the animals—among them a cat, a dog, a crow, a baboon, a horse, and a bear—have convened to debate whether to help the last human stragglers…or to eat them.
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The Fellowship of the Ring
I’m revisiting Middle-earth thanks to this new, unabridged audiobook, narrated by Andy Serkis.
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A Brief History of Earth: Four Billion Years in Eight Chapters
“The story of our home planet and the organisms spread across its surface is far more spectacular than any Hollywood blockbuster, filled with enough plot twists to rival a bestselling thriller. But only recently have we begun to piece together the whole mystery into a coherent narrative. Drawing on his decades of field research and up-to-the-minute understanding of the latest science, renowned geologist Andrew H. Knoll delivers a rigorous yet accessible biography of Earth, charting our home planet’s epic 4.6 billion-year story.”
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Image Performance
“To solve the most critical performance problems with the biggest impact, start with images. Responsive Issues Community Group (RICG) chair Mat Marquis helps us make smart decisions about images and shows us the swiftest way to improve a website’s performance: from understanding compression methods used by common image formats, to responsive image markup patterns and their usage, to handling content delivery for the best user experience. Get up to speed—and speed up your site.”
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The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America
“With the end of the Cold War, the victory of liberal democracy was thought to be absolute. Observers declared the end of history, confident in a peaceful, globalized future. But we now know this to be premature. Authoritarianism first returned in Russia, as Putin developed a political system dedicated solely to the consolidation and exercise of power.”
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It’s What I Do: A Photographer’s Life of Love and War
“War photographer Lynsey Addario’s memoir It’s What I Do is the story of how the relentless pursuit of truth, in virtually every major theater of war in the twenty-first century, has shaped her life. What she does, with clarity, beauty, and candor, is to document, often in their most extreme moments, the complex lives of others. It’s her work, but it’s much more than that: it’s her singular calling.”
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The Treeline: The Last Forest and the Future of Life on Earth
“For the last fifty years, the trees of the boreal forest have been moving north. Ben Rawlence’s The Treeline takes us along this critical frontier of our warming planet from Norway to Siberia, Alaska to Greenland, to meet the scientists, residents and trees confronting huge geological changes.”
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Blood, Sweat & Chrome: The Wild and True Story of Mad Max: Fury Road
“A full-speed-ahead oral history of the nearly two-decade making of the cultural phenomenon Mad Max: Fury Road—with more than 130 new interviews with key members of the cast and crew, including Charlize Theron, Tom Hardy, and director George Miller, from the pop culture reporter for The New York Times, Kyle Buchanan.”
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Wayward
“Wayward is a collection of striking photographs and the revealing personal stories behind them by one of the leading surf, nature, and adventure photographers of our time. At remote beaches and locales in places like Russia, Norway, Iceland, and the Aleutian Islands, Chris Burkard suffered from hypothermia, destroyed thousands of dollars’ worth of camera gear, and spent a few nights in jail. But in the process, he captured amazing and iconic images that have defined his life’s work.”
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Origin: A Genetic History of the Americas
“Origin is the story of who the first peoples in the Americas were, how and why they made the crossing, how they dispersed south, and how they lived based on a new and powerful kind of evidence: their complete genomes.”
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The Maid
“Devotees of cozy mysteries, rejoice: Nita Prose’s debut, The Maid, satisfies on every level — from place to plot to protagonist.”
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It Ends with Us
“In this ‘brave and heartbreaking novel that digs its claws into you and doesn’t let go, long after you’ve finished it’ (Anna Todd, New York Times bestselling author) from the #1 New York Times bestselling author of All Your Perfects, a workaholic with a too-good-to-be-true romance can’t stop thinking about her first love.”
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Reckless Girls
“From Rachel Hawkins, the New York Times bestselling author of The Wife Upstairs, comes Reckless Girls, a deliciously wicked gothic suspense, set on an isolated Pacific island with a dark history, for fans of Lucy Foley and Ruth Ware.”
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Grinnell: America’s Environmental Pioneer and His Restless Drive to Save the West
“George Bird Grinnell, the son of a New York merchant, saw a different future for a nation in the thrall of the Industrial Age. With railroads scarring virgin lands and the formerly vast buffalo herds decimated, the country faced a crossroads: Could it pursue Manifest Destiny without destroying its natural bounty and beauty? The alarm that Grinnell sounded would spark America’s conservation movement.”
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Davos Man: How the Billionaires Devoured the World
“From the New York Times’s Global Economics Correspondent, a masterwork of explanatory journalism that exposes how billionaires’ systematic plunder of the world—brazenly accelerated during the pandemic—has transformed 21st-century life and dangerously destabilized democracy. ”
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Was It Worth It?
“In a collection of gripping stories of adventure, Doug Peacock, loner, iconoclast, environmentalist, and contemporary of Edward Abbey, reflects on a life lived in the wild, asking the question many ask in their twilight years: ‘Was It Worth It?’”
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It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump
“Stuart Stevens spent decades electing Republicans at every level, from presidents to senators to local officials. He knows the GOP as intimately as anyone in America, and in this new book he offers a devastating portrait of a party that has lost its moral and political compass.”
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Wildland: The Making of America’s Fury
“After a decade abroad, the National Book Award– and Pulitzer Prize–winning writer Evan Osnos returns to three places he has lived in the United States—Greenwich, CT; Clarksburg, WV; and Chicago, IL—to illuminate the origins of America’s political fury.”
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Radical Sacrifice
“The modern conception of sacrifice is at once cast as a victory of self-discipline over desire and condescended to as destructive and archaic abnegation. But even in the Old Testament, the dual natures of sacrifice, embodying both ritual slaughter and moral rectitude, were at odds. In this analysis, Terry Eagleton makes a compelling argument that the idea of sacrifice has long been misunderstood.”
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Beasts of a Little Land
“An epic story of love, war, and redemption set against the backdrop of the Korean independence movement, following the intertwined fates of a young girl sold to a courtesan school and the penniless son of a hunter.”
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North Shore Rescue: If You Get Lost Today, Will Anyone Know?
“The North Shore Rescue Team has existed since 1965 and has performed thousands of search and rescue operations on the North Shore Mountains and other locations throughout British Columbia and Washington State. Team activities have assisted at least 4,500 lost or injured individuals in mountain and wilderness settings.”
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Saving Us: A Climate Scientist’s Case for Hope and Healing in a Divided World
“Called ‘one of the nation’s most effective communicators on climate change’ by The New York Times, Katharine Hayhoe knows how to navigate all sides of the conversation on our changing planet. A Canadian climate scientist living in Texas, she negotiates distrust of data, indifference to imminent threats, and resistance to proposed solutions with ease. Over the past fifteen years Hayhoe has found that the most important thing we can do to address climate change is talk about it—and she wants to teach you how.”
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Pastoralia
“George Saunders takes us even further into the shocking, uproarious and oddly familiar landscape of his imagination. The stories in Pastoralia are set in a slightly skewed version of America, where elements of contemporary life have been merged, twisted, and amplified, casting their absurdity-and our humanity-in a startling new light.”
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Himalaya: A Human History
“This is the first major history of the Himalaya: an epic story of peoples, cultures and adventures among the world’s highest mountains. Spanning millennia, from its earliest inhabitants to the present conflicts over Tibet and Everest, Himalaya is a soaring account of resilience and conquest, discovery and plunder, oppression and enlightenment at the ‘roof of the world’.”
2021
87 books-
Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging
“There are ancient tribal human behaviors-loyalty, inter-reliance, cooperation-that flare up in communities during times of turmoil and suffering. These are the very same behaviors that typify good soldiering and foster a sense of belonging among troops, whether they’re fighting on the front lines or engaged in non-combat activities away from the action. Drawing from history, psychology, and anthropology, bestselling author Sebastian Junger shows us just how at odds the structure of modern society is with our tribal instincts, arguing that the difficulties many veterans face upon returning home from war do not stem entirely from the trauma they’ve suffered, but also from the individualist societies they must reintegrate into.”
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Wild Rescues: A Paramedic’s Extreme Adventures in Yosemite, Yellowstone, and Grand Teton
“Wild Rescues is a fast-paced, firsthand glimpse into the exciting lives of paramedics who work with the National Park Service: a unique brand of park rangers who respond to medical and traumatic emergencies in some of the most isolated and rugged parts of America.”
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In the Eye of the Wild
“In the Eye of the Wild begins with an account of the French anthropologist Nastassja Martin’s near fatal run-in with a Kamchatka bear in the mountains of Siberia. Martin’s professional interest is animism; she addresses philosophical questions about the relation of humankind to nature, and in her work she seeks to partake as fully as she can in the lives of the indigenous peoples she studies. Her violent encounter with the bear, however, brings her face-to-face with something entirely beyond her ken—the untamed, the nonhuman, the animal, the wild. In the course of that encounter something in the balance of her world shifts. A change takes place that she must somehow reckon with.”
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Cloud Cuckoo Land
“Set in Constantinople in the fifteenth century, in a small town in present-day Idaho, and on an interstellar ship decades from now, Anthony Doerr’s gorgeous third novel is a triumph of imagination and compassion, a soaring story about children on the cusp of adulthood in worlds in peril, who find resilience, hope—and a book.”
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The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914–1991
“Hobsbawm calls the period from the start of World War I to the fall of the so-called Soviet bloc ‘the short twentieth century’, to follow on ‘the long 19th century’, the period from the start of the French Revolution in 1789 to the start of World War I in 1914, which he covered in an earlier trilogy of histories (The Age of Revolution: Europe, 1789-1848, The Age of Capital: 1848–1875, The Age of Empire: 1875–1914).”
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The Summit of the Gods
“The Summit of the Gods (Japanese: 神々の山嶺, Hepburn: Kamigami no Itadaki) is a manga series written and illustrated by Jiro Taniguchi. Based on a 1998 novel by Baku Yumemakura, it follows Fukamachi, a photographer who finds a camera supposedly belonging to George Mallory, a mountaineer who went missing on Mount Everest, and goes on a mountain-climbing adventure along with his friend Habu Joji.”
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Humankind: A Hopeful History
“By providing a new historical perspective of the last 200,000 years of human history, Bregman sets out to prove that we are in fact evolutionarily wired for cooperation rather than competition, and that our instinct to trust each other has a firm evolutionary basis going back to the beginning of Homo sapiens.”
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Damnation Spring
“Told in prose as clear as a spring-fed creek, Damnation Spring is an intimate, compassionate portrait of a family whose bonds are tested and a community clinging to a vanishing way of life. An extraordinary story of the transcendent, enduring power of love—between husband and wife, mother and child, and longtime neighbors. An essential novel for our times.”
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The Solace of Open Spaces
I’m re-reading this classic after several years. “A stunning collection of personal observations that uses images of the American West to probe larger concerns in lyrical, evocative prose that is a true celebration of the region.”
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The Story of Christianity: A History of 2000 Years of the Christian Faith
“In this book, David Bentley Hart, a widely revered Christian scholar, gives a scholarly but readable portrait of the Christian Church from its origins in Judaism to the “house churches” in contemporary China. This is a great overview of the history of the church that is perfect for study before delving into the more difficult church historians such as Josephus and Eusebius.”
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Paddle Your Own Canoe: One Man’s Fundamentals for Delicious Living
“A mix of amusing anecdotes, opinionated lessons and rants, sprinkled with offbeat gaiety, Paddle Your Own Canoe will not only tickle readers pink but may also rouse them to put down their smart phones, study a few sycamore leaves, and maybe even hand craft (and paddle) their own canoes.”
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The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity
“A dramatically new understanding of human history, challenging our most fundamental assumptions about social evolution—from the development of agriculture and cities to the origins of the state, democracy, and inequality—and revealing new possibilities for human emancipation.”
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Matrix
“Cast out of the royal court by Eleanor of Aquitaine, deemed too coarse and rough-hewn for marriage or courtly life, 17-year-old Marie de France is sent to England to be the new prioress of an impoverished abbey, its nuns on the brink of starvation and beset by disease.”
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Bushcraft Illustrated: A Visual Guide
“Before you venture into the wilderness, learn exactly what you need to bring and what you need to know with this ultimate outdoor reference guide, by survivalist expert Dave Canterbury.”
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Where the Deer and the Antelope Play: The Pastoral Observations of One Ignorant American Who Loves to Walk Outside
“A humorous and rousing set of literal and figurative sojourns as well as a mission statement about comprehending, protecting, and truly experiencing the outdoors, fueled by three journeys undertaken by actor, humorist, and New York Times bestselling author Nick Offerman.”
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Tastes Like War
“Grace M. Cho grew up as the daughter of a white American merchant marine and the Korean bar hostess he met abroad. They were one of few immigrants in a xenophobic small town during the Cold War, where identity was politicized by everyday details—language, cultural references, memories, and food. Part food memoir, part sociological investigation, Tastes Like War is a hybrid text about a daughter’s search through intimate and global history for the roots of her mother’s schizophrenia.”
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Drinking Dry Clouds: Stories From Wyoming
“Drinking Dry Clouds is Gretel Ehrlich’s storytelling in full swing. This inspired collection opens during World War II with the stories of cowboys, waitresses, and bartenders along with Japanese Americans interned at Wyoming’s Heart Mountain. Many of these characters were introduced in Ehrlich’s novel Heart Mountain. As she explains, ‘When I returned to my characters, five years after their initial appearance in my life, they seemed to want to report to me, so I let them speak in the first person.’”
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Freedom
“Throughout history, humans have been driven by the quest for two cherished ideals: community and freedom. The two don’t coexist easily. We value individuality and self-reliance, yet are utterly dependent on community for our most basic needs. In this intricately crafted and thought-provoking book, Sebastian Junger examines the tension that lies at the heart of what it means to be human.”
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Cockeyed Happy: Ernest Hemingway’s Wyoming Summers with Pauline
Turns out I can’t read enough about Ernest Hemingway visting the same Wyoming roads and trails that I, many years later, frequented while growing up in northern Wyoming. “The story of Ernest Hemingway and Pauline Pfeiffer during six summers from 1928 through 1939—each showing Hemingway at a different place in his writing as well as a different stage of their marriage.”
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Deep River
“From the New York Times-bestselling author of Matterhorn and What It Is Like to Go to War, a rich family saga about Finnish immigrants who settle and tame the Pacific Northwest, set against the early labor movements, World War I, and the upheaval of early twentieth-century America.”
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Wanderlust: A History of Walking
“Drawing together many histories—of anatomical evolution and city design, of treadmills and labyrinths, of walking clubs and sexual mores—Rebecca Solnit creates a fascinating portrait of the range of possibilities presented by walking.”
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The Camera
I read Adams’s The Negative a few weeks ago. Now I’m making my way through the first book in the series, The Camera.
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Bewilderment
“With its soaring descriptions of the natural world, its tantalizing vision of life beyond, and its account of a father and son’s ferocious love, Bewilderment marks Richard Powers’s most intimate and moving novel. At its heart lies the question: How can we tell our children the truth about this beautiful, imperiled planet?”
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Turn Around Time: A Walking Poem for the Pacific Northwest
“Most outdoor enthusiasts understand the phrase ‘turn around time’ as that point in an adventure when you must cease heading out in order to have enough time to safely return to camp or home–regardless of whether you have reached your destination. For award-winning novelist David Guterson, it is also a metaphor for where we find ourselves in the middle of our lives, and his new narrative poem explores this idea through a lyrical journey along a trail, much like those in Washington’s mountain ranges he hiked while growing up.”
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One Man’s Meat
“Too personal for an almanac, too sophisticated for a domestic history, and too funny and self-doubting for a literary journal, One Man’s Meat can best be described as a primer of a countryman’s lessons a timeless recounting of experience that will never go out of style.”
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Roland in Moonlight
“As everyone knows, the bond between homo sapiens sapiens and canis lupus familiaris has traversed the ages. But few could have anticipated the remarkable exchange here recounted between David Bentley Hart and a noble beast named Roland. Roland in Moonlight breaks new ground within Hart’s already astonishingly wide-ranging body of work.”
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The Negative
“This classic handbook distills the knowledge gained through a lifetime in photography and remains as vital today as when it was first published. Anchored by a detailed discussion of Adams’ Zone System and his seminal concept of visualization, The Negative covers artificial and natural light, film and exposure, and darkroom equipment and techniques.”
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The Age of Empire: 1875–1914
“The Age of Empire: 1875–1914 is a book by the British historian Eric Hobsbawm, published in 1987. It is the third in a trilogy of books about ‘the long 19th century’ (coined by Hobsbawm), preceded by The Age of Revolution: Europe 1789–1848 and The Age of Capital: 1848–1875. A fourth book, The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914–1991, acts as a sequel to the trilogy. ”
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The Power of the Dog
“First published in 1967, Thomas Savage’s western novel about two brothers now includes an afterword by Annie Proulx. Phil and George are brothers, more than partners, joint owners of the biggest ranch in their Montana valley. Phil is the bright one, George the plodder. Phil is tall and angular; George is stocky and silent. Phil is a brilliant chess player, a voracious reader, an eloquent storyteller; George learns slowly, and devotes himself to the business.”
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Surviving the Wild: Essential Bushcraft and First Aid Skills for Surviving the Great Outdoors
I came across this author’s YouTube channel researching gear and methods for search and rescue, and I appreciated it enough to buy the book.
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The Cruelty Is the Point: The Past, Present, and Future of Trump’s America
“From an award-winning journalist at The Atlantic, these searing essays make a damning case that cruelty is not merely an unfortunate byproduct of the Trump administration but its main objective and the central theme of the American project.”
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The Scout Mindset: Why Some People See Things Clearly and Others Don’t
“A better way to combat knee-jerk biases and make smarter decisions, from Julia Galef, the acclaimed expert on rational decision-making.”
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The Age of Capital: 1848–1875
“The Age of Capital: 1848–1875 is a book by Eric Hobsbawm, first published in 1975. It is the second in a trilogy of books about ‘the long 19th century’ (coined by Hobsbawm), preceded by The Age of Revolution: Europe 1789–1848 and followed by The Age of Empire: 1875–1914. A fourth book, The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914–1991, acts as a sequel to the trilogy.”
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Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, and Sir Orfeo
“Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Pearl are two poems by an unknown author written in about 1400. Sir Gawain is a romance, a fairy-tale for adults, full of life and colour; but it is also much more than this, being at the same time a powerful moral tale which examines religious and social values.”
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Mind is the Ride
“Mind is the Ride takes the reader on a physical and intellectual adventure from West to East using the components of a bike as a metaphor for philosophy, which is woven into the cyclist’s experience. Each chapter is based around a single component, and as Jet travels he adds new parts and new philosophies until the bike is ‘built’; the ride to India is completed; and the relationship between mind, body and bicycle made apparent.”
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This Isn’t Happening: Radiohead’s Kid A and the Beginning of the 21st Century
I don’t read many books about music or musicians (unless the subject is Bob Dylan), but when a coworker recommended this one, I found the premise compelling. This is one of my favorite albums of all time, released during my first year in college. “In this brilliant book, Steven Hyden goes deep into why Kid A matters—it’s the fascinating saga of how the music turned into the symbol of a new cultural era.” — Rolling Stone
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Dune
I’m revisiting this classic once again (I last read it in 2019), starting it on the day the new film trailer dropped!
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The Age of Revolution: Europe 1789–1848
“The Age of Revolution: Europe: 1789–1848 is a book by Eric Hobsbawm, first published in 1962. It is the first in a trilogy of books about ‘the long 19th century’ (coined by Hobsbawm), followed by The Age of Capital: 1848–1875, and The Age of Empire: 1875–1914. A fourth book, The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914–1991, acts as a sequel to the trilogy.”
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Writing Is Designing: Words and the User Experience
“Without words, apps would be an unusable jumble of shapes and icons, while voice interfaces and chatbots wouldn’t even exist. Words make software human-centered, and require just as much thought as the branding and code. This book will show you how to give your users clarity, test your words, and collaborate with your team. You’ll see that writing is designing.”
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Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest
“In her first book, Simard brings us into her world, the intimate world of the trees, in which she brilliantly illuminates the fascinating and vital truths – that trees are not simply the source of timber or pulp, but are a complex, interdependent circle of life; that forests are social, cooperative creatures connected through underground networks by which trees communicate their vitality and vulnerabilities with communal lives not that different from our own.”
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Power to the Public: The Promise of Public Interest Technology
“A powerful new blueprint for how governments and nonprofits can harness the power of digital technology to help solve the most serious problems of the twenty-first century”
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Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries
“We think of English as a fortress to be defended, but a better analogy is to think of English as a child. We love and nurture it into being, and once it gains gross motor skills, it starts going exactly where we don’t want it to go: it heads right for the goddamned electrical sockets.”
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Klara and the Sun
“A masterpiece of great beauty, meticulous control and, as ever, clear, simple prose.” - Sunday Times
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Being a Dog: Following the Dog Into a World of Smell
“In her ‘fascinating book…Horowitz combines the expertise of a scientist with an easy, lively writing style’ (The New York Times Book Review) as she imagines what it is like to be a dog. Guided by her own dogs, Finnegan and Upton, Horowitz sets off on a quest through the cutting-edge science behind the olfactory abilities of the dog.”
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The Premonition: A Pandemic Story
“For those who could read between the lines, the censored news out of China was terrifying. But the president insisted there was nothing to worry about. Fortunately, we are still a nation of skeptics. Fortunately, there are those among us who study pandemics and are willing to look unflinchingly at worst-case scenarios. Michael Lewis’s taut and brilliant nonfiction thriller pits a band of medical visionaries against the wall of ignorance that was the official response of the Trump administration to the outbreak of COVID-19.”
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Rightful Heritage: Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Land of America
I purchased this book’s predecessor, The Wilderness Warrior, at the FDR National Historic Site in Hyde Park, New York, back in 2013. I purchased and read this book when it was released in 2016, but I wanted to revisit it, knowing that we’ll need something like the Green New Deal to have a chance at a collective future.
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Spain in Our Hearts
“Spain in Our Hearts: Americans in the Spanish Civil War is an account of the American volunteers who participated in the Spanish Civil War from 1936 to 1939. The story centers around several American volunteer fighters and journalists, tracing their motivations for joining the war and their experiences during the war which left many disillusioned. The book explains the involvement of foreign leaders including Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini and Joseph Stalin, and explains why the Republican faction ultimately lost.”
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The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet
“John Green’s gift for storytelling shines throughout this masterful collection. The Anthropocene Reviewed is a open-hearted exploration of the paths we forge and an unironic celebration of falling in love with the world.”
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Down the River
I’ve read Abbey’s major works, but for some reason, this collection escaped me until now. All the Wild That Remains prompted me to get to it.
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The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue
“France, 1714: in a moment of desperation, a young woman makes a Faustian bargain to live forever—and is cursed to be forgotten by everyone she meets. Thus begins the extraordinary life of Addie LaRue, and a dazzling adventure that will play out across centuries and continents, across history and art, as a young woman learns how far she will go to leave her mark on the world. But everything changes when, after nearly 300 years, Addie stumbles across a young man in a hidden bookstore and he remembers her name.”
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Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America
“Belew’s disturbing and timely history reminds us that war cannot be contained in time and space: grievances intensify and violence becomes a logical course of action. Based on years of deep immersion in previously classified FBI files and on extensive interviews, Bring the War Home tells the story of American paramilitarism and the birth of the alt-right.”
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Cultivating Content Design
“Great content doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It gets bogged down in teams, organizations, silos, and process. Beth Dunn helps you break the vacuum seal and bring unity and joy back to content. Cultivating Content Design gives you the power to fundamentally change your organization’s approach to great content—with the tools and team you already have.”
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The Four Winds
“The Four Winds seems eerily prescient in 2021 . . . Its message is galvanizing and hopeful: We are a nation of scrappy survivors. We’ve been in dire straits before; we will be again. Hold your people close.”—The New York Times
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Mission Economy: A moonshot guide to changing capitalism
“A timely and optimistic vision. Rethinking the role of government nationally and in the international economy—to put public purpose first and solve the problems that matter to people—are now the central questions for humanity.”–Nature magazine
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Nomadland
After the critical success of the film, I decided to get the story behind the story.
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Future Histories: What Ada Lovelace, Tom Paine, and the Paris Commune Can Teach Us About Digital Technology
“There has never been a better time to pull the politics of platform capitalism into the foreground where it belongs. Lizzie O’Shea brings a hacker’s curiosity, a historian’s reach and a lawyer’s precision to bear on our digitally saturated present, emerging with a compelling argument that a better world is there for the taking.”—Scott Ludlam
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Roads to nowhere: Kelly Reichardt’s broken American dreams
“Roads to nowhere offers the first in-depth, 360-degree look at Reichardt’s process through interviews with Reichardt herself and her collaborators on First Cow, many of whom have been working with her for years including cinematographer Christopher Blauvelt (who has worked with her on every film since Meek’s Cutoff), author Jon Raymond (who co-wrote almost all the Oregon films), and costume designer April Napier (Certain Women, First Cow).”
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Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses
“Living at the limits of our ordinary perception, mosses are a common but largely unnoticed element of the natural world. Gathering Moss is a beautifully written mix of science and personal reflection that invites readers to explore and learn from the elegantly simple lives of mosses.”
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Overheated: How Capitalism Broke the Planet—And How We Fight Back
“This damning account of the forces that have hijacked progress on climate change shares a bold vision of what it will take, politically and economically, to face the existential threat of global warming head-on. It has become impossible to deny that the planet is warming, and that governments must act. But a new denialism is taking root in the halls of power, shaped by decades of neoliberal policies and centuries of anti-democratic thinking.”
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Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future
“In Under a White Sky, Elizabeth Kolbert takes a hard look at the new world we are creating. Along the way, she meets biologists who are trying to preserve the world’s rarest fish, which lives in a single tiny pool in the middle of the Mojave; engineers who are turning carbon emissions to stone in Iceland; Australian researchers who are trying to develop a “super coral” that can survive on a hotter globe; and physicists who are contemplating shooting tiny diamonds into the stratosphere to cool the earth.”
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The Film Photography Handbook, 2nd Edition
My recent experiments developing film with instant coffee have renewed (once again) my love of film and photographic methods.
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The Nation of Plants
“In The Nation of Plants, the most important, widespread, and powerful nation on Earth finally gets to speak. Like attentive parents, plants, after making it possible for us to live, have come to our aid once again, giving us their rules: the first Universal Declaration of Rights of Living Beings written by the plants. A short charter based on the general principles that regulate the common life of plants, it establishes norms applicable to all living beings. Compared to our constitutions, which place humans at the center of the entire juridical reality, in conformity with an anthropocentricism that reduces to things all that is not human, plants offer us a revolution.”
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All The Wild That Remains: Edward Abbey, Wallace Stegner, and the American West
“An homage to the West and to two great writers who set the standard for all who celebrate and defend it. Archetypal wild man Edward Abbey and proper, dedicated Wallace Stegner left their footprints all over the western landscape. Now, award-winning nature writer David Gessner follows the ghosts of these two remarkable writer-environmentalists from Stegner’s birthplace in Saskatchewan to the site of Abbey’s pilgrimages to Arches National Park in Utah, braiding their stories and asking how they speak to the lives of all those who care about the West.”
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A Moveable Feast
I’m waiting on some library holds, so yet another Hemingway book in the meantime.
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All Marketers
are LiarsTell StoriesI wouldn’t choose to read this book on my own, but it’s required reading for a class I’m taking. I understand the power of a compelling story. I just don’t want to spend my days intentionally manipulating people for a living. And now that I completed this book, I can give you my take: I hated it.
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A Farewell to Arms
I’m continuing to revisit Hemingway’s classics after watching the new PBS documentary about Hemingway.
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The Walker’s Guide to Outdoor Clues and Signs
“The ultimate guide to what the land, sun, moon, stars, trees, plants, animals, sky and clouds can reveal – when you know what to look for.”
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Mad at the World: A Life of John Steinbeck
“Angered by the plight of the Dust Bowl migrants who were starving even as they toiled to harvest California’s limitless bounty, fascinated by the guileless decency of the downtrodden denizens of Cannery Row, and appalled by the country’s refusal to recognize the humanity common to all of its citizens, Steinbeck took a stand against social injustice—paradoxically given his inherent misanthropy—setting him apart from the writers of the so-called ‘lost generation.’”
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The Midnight Library
“Somewhere out beyond the edge of the universe there is a library that contains an infinite number of books, each one the story of another reality. One tells the story of your life as it is, along with another book for the other life you could have lived if you had made a different choice at any point in your life. While we all wonder how our lives might have been, what if you had the chance to go to the library and see for yourself? Would any of these other lives truly be better?”
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The Wander Society
“Within these pages, you’ll find the results of Smith’s research: A guide to the Wander Society, a secretive group that holds up the act of wandering, or unplanned exploring, as a way of life. You’ll learn about the group’s mysterious origins, meet fellow wanderers through time, discover how wandering feeds the creative mind, and learn how to best practice the art of wandering, should you choose to accept the mission.”
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The Hemingway Stories
More Hemingway…reading now his short stories, most of which I haven’t read before. This collection is a companion to the new PBS series.
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Ernest Hemingway in the Yellowstone High Country
Another Hemingway book, this time biographical, ahead of a new PBS documentary about Hemingway. I grew up not far from the places featured in this book. In fact, my Wyoming hometown is mentioned, as the Hemingways attend church service there on at least one occasion.
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For Whom the Bell Tolls
I’m revisiting this classic ahead of a new PBS documentary about Hemingway.
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The Name of the Wind
I started re-reading this fantasy novel by headlamp when our power was out, and the second reading is at least as pleasant as the first (especially now that our power is restored!).
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The City We Became
The New York Times review stated, ”In the face of current events, The City We Became takes a broad-shouldered stand on the side of sanctuary, family and love. It’s a joyful shout, a reclamation and a call to arms.”
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Debt: The First 5000 Years
“Here anthropologist David Graeber presents a stunning reversal of conventional wisdom. He shows that for more than 5,000 years, since the beginnings of the first agrarian empires, humans have used elaborate credit systems to buy and sell goods—that is, long before the invention of coins or cash. It is in this era, Graeber argues, that we also first encounter a society divided into debtors and creditors.”
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A Children’s Bible
“A Children’s Bible follows a group of twelve eerily mature children on a forced vacation with their families at a sprawling lakeside mansion. Contemptuous of their parents, the children decide to run away when a destructive storm descends on the summer estate, embarking on a dangerous foray into the apocalyptic chaos outside. Lydia Millet’s prophetic and heartbreaking story of generational divide offers a haunting vision of what awaits us on the far side of Revelation.”
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Welcome to the Goddamn Ice Cube: Chasing Fear and Finding Home in the Great White North
“A rich and revelatory memoir of a young woman confronting her fears and finding home in the North.Blair Braverman fell in love with the North at an early age: By the time she was nineteen, she had left her home in California, moved to Norway to learn how to drive sled dogs, and worked as a tour guide on a glacier in Alaska.”
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How I Became A Socialist
“What I mean by Socialism is a condition of society in which there should be neither rich nor poor, neither master nor master’s man, neither idle nor overworked, neither brain-sick brain workers, nor heart-sick hand workers, in a word, in which all men would be living in equality of condition, and would manage their affairs unwastefully, and with the full consciousness that harm to one would mean harm to all.”
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How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States
“We are familiar with maps that outline all fifty states. And we are also familiar with the idea that the United States is an ‘empire,’ exercising power around the world. But what about the actual territories—the islands, atolls, and archipelagos—this country has governed and inhabited?.”
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Parable of the Sower: A Graphic Novel Adaptation
Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents topped my list of my favorite books I read in 2019. Recently, my love for these books was rekindled by the amazing Octavia’s Parables podcast, through which I found out about this graphic novel adaptation.
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The Book: A Cover-to-Cover Exploration of the Most Powerful Object of Our Time
“Everybody who has ever read a book will benefit from the way Keith Houston explores the most powerful object of our time. And everybody who has read it will agree that reports of the book’s death have been greatly exaggerated.”—Erik Spiekermann, typographer.
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Shady Characters: The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols, and Other Typographical Marks
“A charming and indispensable tour of two thousand years of the written word, Shady Characters weaves a fascinating trail across the parallel histories of language and typography. Whether investigating the asterisk (*) and dagger (†)—which alternately illuminated and skewered heretical verses of the early Bible—or the at sign (@), which languished in obscurity for centuries until rescued by the Internet, Keith Houston draws on myriad sources to chart the life and times of these enigmatic squiggles, both exotic (¶) and everyday (&).”
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IF THEN: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future
“The Simulmatics Corporation, founded in 1959, mined data, targeted voters, accelerated news, manipulated consumers, destabilized politics, and disordered knowledge—decades before Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Cambridge Analytica. Silicon Valley likes to imagine it has no past but the scientists of Simulmatics are the long-dead grandfathers of Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk.”
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Data Action: Using Data for Public Good
“Big data can be used for good—from tracking disease to exposing human rights violations—and for bad: implementing surveillance and control. Data inevitably represents the ideologies of those who control its use; data analytics and algorithms too often exclude women, the poor, and ethnic groups. In Data Action, Sarah Williams provides a guide for working with data in more ethical and responsible ways.”
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Shuggie Bain
“He’s lovely, Douglas Stuart, fierce and loving and lovely. He shows us lots of monstrous behavior, but not a single monster — only damage. If he has a sharp eye for brokenness, he is even keener on the inextinguishable flicker of love that remains. The book is long, more than 400 pages, but its length seems crucial to its overall effect.”—Leah Hager Cohen, The New York Times
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Grand Hotel Abyss: The Lives of the Frankfurt School
“In 1923, a group of young radical German thinkers and intellectuals came together to at Victoria Alle 7, Frankfurt, determined to explain the workings of the modern world. Among the most prominent members of what became the Frankfurt School were the philosophers Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Herbert Marcuse. Not only would they change the way we think, but also the subjects we deem worthy of intellectual investigation.”
2020
77 books-
Materialism
“In this eye-opening, intellectually stimulating appreciation of a fascinating school of philosophy, Terry Eagleton makes a powerful argument that materialism is at the center of today’s important scientific and cultural as well as philosophical debates. The author reveals entirely fresh ways of considering the values and beliefs of three very different materialists—Marx, Nietzsche, and Wittgenstein—drawing striking comparisons between their philosophies while reflecting on a wide array of topics, from ideology and history to language, ethics, and the aesthetic.”
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Greek to Me: Adventures of the Comma Queen
Following Mary Norris’s excellent Between You & Me, I snuck in this latest effort from the Comma Queen just before the end of the year. I encourage you to listen to the audiobook. Mary Norris narrating her own books is necessary, given her style of writing, and an absolute joy to listen to.
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Bob Dylan: A Spiritual Life
“Tracking an American original—from his Jewish roots to his controversial embrace of Jesus to his enduring legacy as the composer of the Tempest album—Bob Dylan: A Spiritual Life delivers the story of a man in dogged pursuit of redemption.”
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The Conquest of Bread
I’m not sure why it took me so long to read this classic, but I finally got around to it this year.
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Why Marx Was Right
“In this combative, controversial book, Terry Eagleton takes issue with the prejudice that Marxism is dead and done with. Taking ten of the most common objections to Marxism—that it leads to political tyranny, that it reduces everything to the economic, that it is a form of historical determinism, and so on—he demonstrates in each case what a woeful travesty of Marx’s own thought these assumptions are.”
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Why We Swim
“Bonnie Tsui captures the joy, peril and utility of swimming, within her family and across civilizations…The breadth of her reporting and grace of her writing make the elements of Why We Swim move harmoniously as one.”—The San Francisco Chronicle
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For Who the Bell Tolls: One Man’s Quest for Grammatical Perfection
“This is a book that explains the grammar that people really need to know, such as the fact that an apostrophe is the difference between a company that knows its shit and a company that knows it’s shit, or the importance of capital letters to avoid ambiguity in such sentences as ‘I helped my Uncle Jack off his horse.’”
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Anarchy & Beauty: William Morris and His Legacy, 1860–1960
“Anarchy and Beauty takes the reader through Morris’s fascinating career, from the establishment of his decorative arts shop (later Morris & Co.), to his radical sexual politics and libertarianism, and the publication in 1890 of his novel News from Nowhere, which envisions a utopian socialist society.”
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Entitled: How Male Privilege Hurts Women
“Kate Manne continues to be a thrilling and provocative feminist thinker, who helps readers make sense of how power and privilege is distributed along gendered lines. Her work is indispensable.” –Rebecca Traister, author of Good & Mad
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The Enchantments of Mammon: How Capitalism Became the Religion of Modernity
“Far from displacing religions, as has been supposed, capitalism became one, with money as its deity. Eugene McCarraher reveals how mammon ensnared us and how we can find a more humane, sacramental way of being in the world.”
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Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen
Mary Norris has spent more than three decades working in The New Yorker’s renowned copy department, helping to maintain its celebrated high standards. In Between You & Me, she brings her vast experience with grammar and usage, her good cheer and irreverence, and her finely sharpened pencils to help the rest of us in a boisterous language book as full of life as it is of practical advice.
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Mismatch: How Inclusion Shapes Design
“Kat Holmes shows us how to make inclusion a source of innovation. An important read for anyone who aspires to build great products for the greatest number of people.” –Satya Nadella, CEO, Microsoft
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Writing for Dollars, Writing to Please: The Case for Plain Language in Business, Government, and Law
I joined several sessions of this year’s Plain Language Summit, and none was better than Mr. Kimble’s Flimsy Claims for Legalese and False Criticisms of Plain Language: A 30-Year Collection. I bought his book before his presentation ended.
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Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-First Century
“One in five people in the United States lives with a disability. Some disabilities are visible, others less apparent—but all are underrepresented in media and popular culture. Now, just in time for the thirtieth anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act, activist Alice Wong brings together this urgent, galvanizing collection of contemporary essays by disabled people.”
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Henry David Thoreau: A Life
“Drawing on Thoreau’s copious writings, published and unpublished, Walls presents a Thoreau vigorously alive in all his quirks and contradictions: the young man shattered by the sudden death of his brother; the ambitious Harvard College student; the ecstatic visionary who closed Walden with an account of the regenerative power of the Cosmos. We meet the man whose belief in human freedom and the value of labor made him an uncompromising abolitionist; the solitary walker who found society in nature, but also found his own nature in the society of which he was a deeply interwoven part. And, running through it all, Thoreau the passionate naturalist, who, long before the age of environmentalism, saw tragedy for future generations in the human heedlessness around him.”
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Why You Should Be a Socialist
Obviously.
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Design Engineering Handbook
“Learn how design engineering, an essential discipline to creating great products, brings together form and function while accelerating innovation. Written by industry leaders from Indeed, Mailchimp, The New York Times, and Minted, this book will help you connect design and engineering and work more efficiently as a team.”
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The Scorpio Races
I’m revisiting this fantasy fiction work with my wife as we travel for a short vacation in the forest.
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The Essays of Henry D. Thoreau
I’m soon taking a short vacation in the forest, so it seems like a good time to revisit some of my favorite Thoreau essays.
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The Way Home: Tales from a life without technology
“No running water, no car, no electricity or any of the things it powers: the internet, phone, washing machine, radio or light bulb. Just a wooden cabin, on a smallholding, by the edge of a stand of spruce. In this honest and lyrical account of a remarkable life without modern technology, Mark Boyle explores the hard won joys of building a home with his bare hands, learning to make fire, collecting water from the spring, foraging and fishing.”
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A Civic Technologist’s Practice Guide
“This friendly guide is for technology people who work, or want to work, in the public sector. In it, Cyd Harrell outlines the types of projects, partnerships, and people that civic technologists encounter, and the methods they can use to make lasting change. She focuses on principles and sets of questions to help technologists find the right way to do the most good, starting with finding the people already doing the work.”
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The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins
I’m rereading this fantastic book, which acknowledges the precarity of our moment, but infuses it with hope via a study of anthropological and natural resilience…all by way of fungus.
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A Planet to Win: Why We Need a Green New Deal
“A Planet to Win explores the political potential and concrete first steps of a Green New Deal. It calls for dismantling the fossil fuel industry, building beautiful landscapes of renewable energy, and guaranteeing climate-friendly work, no-carbon housing, and free public transit. And it shows how a Green New Deal in the United States can strengthen climate justice movements worldwide.”
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How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them
“A vital read for a nation under Trump.”—The Guardian
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Nature’s New Deal: The Civilian Conservation Corps and the Roots of the American Enviromental Movement
“Neil Maher has done us a great service by recalling the forgotten history of the New Deal’s conservation programs. His research is impressive, and he writes with clarity and grace. His study offers us valuable insights for understanding the environment controversies of our time.”—Howard Zinn
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Hitler’s First Hundred Days: When Germans Embraced the Third Reich
I’ve read before about the rise of Nazism, but not in the context of an aggressive fascist movement in the United States. The parallels are staggering, and it’s unlikely to end regardless of what happens in the next election.
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Unfuck Your Anger: Using Science to Understand Frustration, Rage, and Forgiveness
A friend of mine suggested I read this book (which says something in itself), but it does feel timely. I’m skeptical of anyone who isn’t constantly angry right now, but perpetual anger isn’t sustainable for anybody. As the author writes, “When we lose our fucking minds on a regular basis, we are wiring our brains into a constantly heightened state that eventually fries our circuits (and pushes away everyone we love in the process).”
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The Wizard and the Prophet
“In forty years, Earth’s population will reach ten billion. Can our world support that? What kind of world will it be? Those answering these questions generally fall into two deeply divided groups—Wizards and Prophets, as Charles Mann calls them in this balanced, authoritative, nonpolemical new book.”
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Design for Cognitive Bias
“We humans are messy, illogical creatures who like to imagine we’re in control—but we blithely let our biases lead us astray. In Design for Cognitive Bias, David Dylan Thomas lays bare the irrational forces that shape our everyday decisions and, inevitably, inform the experiences we craft. Once we grasp the logic powering these forces, we stand a fighting chance of confronting them, tempering them, and even harnessing them for good.”
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World Wide Waste
“Digital is physical. Digital is not green. Digital costs the Earth. Every time I download an email I contribute to global warming. Every time I tweet, do a search, check a webpage, I create pollution. Digital is physical. Those data centers are not in the Cloud. They’re on land in massive physical buildings packed full of computers hungry for energy. It seems invisible. It seems cheap and free. It’s not. Digital costs the Earth.”
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America: The Farewell Tour
“Chris Hedges’s profound and unsettling examination of America in crisis is ‘an exceedingly…provocative book, certain to arouse controversy, but offering a point of view that needs to be heard’ (Booklist), about how bitter hopelessness and malaise have resulted in a culture of sadism and hate.”
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The Overstory
“The Overstory, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, is a sweeping, impassioned work of activism and resistance that is also a stunning evocation of—and paean to—the natural world. From the roots to the crown and back to the seeds, Richard Powers’s twelfth novel unfolds in concentric rings of interlocking fables that range from antebellum New York to the late twentieth-century Timber Wars of the Pacific Northwest and beyond.”
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Ava Helen Pauling: Partner, Activist, Visionary
By way of a side project I’ve been working on (Beavercreek Portrait Library), I’ve been researching the rural community in which I live. Among its most impressive former residents is Ava Helen Pauling, whose story has been overshadowed by that of her husband, Linus Pauling. I sought out the only book about Ava I could find, with the hope of eventually adding another side project to promote her legacy.
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Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope
“Across the country communities are struggling to stay afloat as blue-collar jobs disappear and an American dies of a drug overdose every seven minutes. Stagnant wages, weak education, bad decisions, and a lack of health care force millions of Americans into a precarious balancing act that many of them fail to master. With stark poignancy, Tightrope draws us deep into this ‘other America,’ and shows that if America is to remain a superpower, it must empower all its people.”
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Native: Identity, Belonging, and Rediscovering God
“Native is about identity, soul-searching, and being on the never-ending journey of finding ourselves and finding God. As both a member of the Potawatomi Nation and a Christian, Kaitlin Curtice offers a unique perspective on these topics. In this book, she shows how reconnecting with her Native American roots both informs and challenges her Christian faith.”
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Palaces for the People: How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization, and the Decline of Civic Life
“In Palaces for the People, Eric Klinenberg suggests a way forward. He believes that the future of democratic societies rests not simply on shared values but on shared spaces: the libraries, childcare centers, churches, and parks where crucial connections are formed. Interweaving his own research with examples from around the globe, Klinenberg shows how ‘social infrastructure’ is helping to solve some of our most pressing societal challenges. Richly reported and ultimately uplifting, Palaces for the People offers a blueprint for bridging our seemingly unbridgeable divides.”
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William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary
“This biographical study is a window into 19th-century British society and the life of William Morris—the great craftsman, architect, designer, poet, and writer—who remains a monumental and influential figure to this day. This account chronicles how his concern with artistic and human values led him to cross what he called the ‘river of fire’ and become a committed socialist—committed not only to the theory of socialism but also to the practice of it in the day-to-day struggle of working women and men in Victorian England.”
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The Return of Nature: Socialism and Ecology
I read John Bellamy Foster’s Marx’s Ecology shortly after it was published in 2000, and it was among the most revelatory and influential books in my intellectual formation and worldview. It turns out the environmental catastrophe is the perfect lens through which to study the insatiably destructive capacity of capital.
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Nineteen Eighty-Four
After reading Orwell’s biography, and especially after learning that Orwell wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four from a remote farmhouse on the Scottish island of Jura, it was time to revisit this classic.
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Walden
I revisit Walden every few years and decided it was time to crack it open once again.
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Orwell: The Authorized Biography
“Authorized by the George Orwell estate, Shelden’s biography of Orwell was published in 1991 and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Biography. Among other things, the book included the first detailed account of Orwell’s controversial list of people whom he considered politically dishonest and unreliable in British society.”–Wikipedia
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The Anatomy of Fascism
“From the first violent uniformed bands beating up ‘enemies of the state,’ through Mussolini’s rise to power, to Germany’s fascist radicalization in World War II, Paxton shows clearly why fascists came to power in some countries and not others, and explores whether fascism could exist outside the early-twentieth-century European setting in which it emerged.”
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Theological Territories: A David Bentley Hart Digest
“In Theological Territories, David Bentley Hart, one of America’s most eminent contemporary writers on religion, reflects on the state of theology “at the borders” of other fields of discourse—metaphysics, philosophy of mind, science, the arts, ethics, and biblical hermeneutics in particular. The book advances many of Hart’s larger theological projects, developing and deepening numerous dimensions of his previous work. Theological Territories constitutes something of a manifesto regarding the manner in which theology should engage other fields of concern and scholarship.”
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Data Science from Scratch
Another data science book for class. This one is a relatively trim, nicely structured introduction.
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The Worlds of J. R. R. Tolkien: The Places That Inspired Middle-earth
When I need a break from the madness surrounding us, I often turn to Middle-earth. “Fascinating, gorgeously illustrated and thought-provoking…[A] masterful book.”—Elizabeth Hand, Washington Post
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Python for Data Science: A Crash Course for Data Science and Analysis, Python Machine Learning and Big Data
Another in my data science graduate certificate curriculum.
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Disrupting White Supremacy From Within: White People on What WE Need to Do
“The co-production of oppression and our whiteness is one reason that, early in this chapter, I described as vexing the question of who we are as white selves. If you were to ask a group of white people to make a list of five characteristics unique to our racial identity that do not result from power and privilege, we, unlike our sisters and brothers of colors, will have little or nothing to offer.”
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Python for Data Science: The Ultimate Beginners’ Guide to Learning Python Data Science Step by Step
I’ve started a graduate certificate program in data science, and this book is among the recommended reading. Several similar to come.
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How to Tame a Fox (and Build a Dog): Visionary Scientists and a Siberian Tale of Jump-Started Evolution
“Tucked away in Siberia, there are furry, four-legged creatures with wagging tails and floppy ears that are as docile and friendly as any lapdog. But, despite appearances, these are not dogs—they are foxes. They are the result of the most astonishing experiment in breeding ever undertaken—imagine speeding up thousands of years of evolution into a few decades. In 1959, biologists Dmitri Belyaev and Lyudmila Trut set out to do just that, by starting with a few dozen silver foxes from fox farms in the USSR and attempting to recreate the evolution of wolves into dogs in real time in order to witness the process of domestication. This is the extraordinary, untold story of this remarkable undertaking.”
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The Triumph of Injustice: How the Rich Dodge Taxes and How to Make Them Pay
“In the United States, the income of the working class, half of the population, is $18,500 a year per adult in 2019. That’s at a time when America spends 20% of its national income on health care, or $15,000 per adult.” Sit with that. We’re here for a reason.
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The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes
This Hunger Games prequel hasn’t received the greatest reviews so far, but I’m a sucker for anything from this dystopian series, having read all three books in just two days when the last in the trilogy was released.
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Where the Crawdads Sing
It turns out my strategy to read fiction as an escape from reality is flawed, as the author of this book has a suspiciously complex backstory, perhaps leading to a major plot point in this novel.
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The Fifth Risk
“Michael Lewis’s brilliant narrative of the Trump administration’s botched presidential transition takes us into the engine rooms of a government under attack by its leaders through willful ignorance and greed. The government manages a vast array of critical services that keep us safe and underpin our lives from ensuring the safety of our food and drugs and predicting extreme weather events to tracking and locating black market uranium before the terrorists do. The Fifth Risk masterfully and vividly unspools the consequences if the people given control over our government have no idea how it works.”
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The Library Book
“‘A book lover’s dream…an ambitiously researched, elegantly written book that serves as a portal into a place of history, drama, culture, and stories’ (Star Tribune, Minneapolis), Susan Orlean’s thrilling journey through the stacks reveals how these beloved institutions provide much more than just books—and why they remain an essential part of the heart, mind, and soul of our country.”
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Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants
“Robin Wall Kimmerer is writer of rare grace. She writes about the natural world from a place of such abundant passion that one can never quite see the world the same way after having seen it through Kimmerer’s eyes. In Braiding Sweetgrass, she takes us on a journey that is every bit as mythic as it is scientific, as sacred as it is historical, as clever as it is wise. She is a great teacher, and her words are a hymn of love to the world.”–Elizabeth Gilbert
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Lessons from Walden: Thoreau and the Crisis of American Democracy
“In Lessons from Walden, Taylor lets all sides have their say, even as he persistently steers the discussion back to a nuanced reading of Thoreau’s actual position. With its tone of friendly urgency, this interdisciplinary tour de force will interest students and scholars of American literature, environmental ethics, and political theory. It deserves to be read by a more general readership, including environmental activists, concerned citizens, and anyone troubled with the future of democracy.”–Notre Dame Press
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Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
“The book surveys the history of humankind from the evolution of archaic human species in the Stone Age up to the twenty-first century, focusing on Homo sapiens. The account is situated within a framework provided by the natural sciences, particularly evolutionary biology. The reception of the book has been mixed. Whereas the general public’s reaction to the book has been positive, scholars with relevant subject matter expertise have been very critical of the book.”—Wikipedia
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That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation
“In this momentous book, David Bentley Hart makes the case that nearly two millennia of dogmatic tradition have misled readers on the crucial matter of universal salvation. On the basis of the earliest Christian writings, theological tradition, scripture, and logic, Hart argues that if God is the good creator of all, he is the savior of all, without fail.”—Yale University Press
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Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth
I borrowed this audiobook after reading Smarsh’s compelling piece in The New York Times. (Stuck at home, I’m increasingly thankful for our local library’s ebooks and audiobooks.) Heartland offers an underrepresented perspective on our political moment.
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Dog Songs
I read this while my dog, Henry, rested his head on my thigh. We knew at that point it would be his last day with us, as his battle with lymphoma came to an end. We’ve lost two dogs in 5 months, and they were everything to us. This collection of poems had me weeping and smiling through tears over and over again. It is nearly perfect. I plan to read it again when my life hasn’t been turned upside down by loss.
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Good Services: How to design services that work
“Lou Downe has been designing good services for quite a while. And they’re good at it! I can’t tell you how many times I got stuck trying to solve something and thought: ‘Well, let’s go see how GOV.UK solved it.’ If you’re looking for help in doing the right thing I have good news for you. This book is going to help. It’s brilliant!”— Mike Montiero
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Capital and Ideology
The sequel to the most important book I’ve read in a long time (Capital in the Twenty-First Century), this prodigious volume (1,093 pages) will occupy me for some time and may limit the number of books I read this year, but I’m certain I won’t regret it.
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Station Eleven
This book is excellent, but I wouldn’t recommend reading it during a pandemic. Oops. “Deeply melancholy, but beautifully written, and wonderfully elegiac…A book that I will long remember, and return to.”— George R. R. Martin
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Burn the Place: A Memoir
“Burn the Place is a galvanizing memoir that chronicles Iliana Regan’s journey from foraging on the family farm to running her Michelin-starred restaurant, Elizabeth. Her story is raw like that first bite of wild onion, alive with startling imagery, and told with uncommon emotional power.”
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Learn to Program (Second Edition)
I’m revisiting this 2009 book on programming with Ruby. Many of the sites I’ve been working on lately are Jekyll-based, with custom Ruby plugins. I’m fairly proficient in Jekyll and Liquid, but I need to freshen up on Ruby itself.
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Marx, Capital, and the Madness of Economic Reason
“In Marx, Capital, and the Madness of Economic Reason, David Harvey not only provides a concise distillation of his famous course on Capital, but also makes the text relevant to the twenty-first century’s continuing processes of globalization.” This is an excellent distillation of Marx’s work.
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Does Your Content Work?: Why Evaluate Your Content and How to Start
I’ve developed content evaluation metrics in the past, but I’d like to expand my toolkit (especially while I’m starting a new job). The title of this book is awkward, in my view, but I read and value Jones’s earlier work Clout: The Art and Science of Influential Web Content. This book is largely focused on content marketing, which isn’t a discipline I particularly like, nor one I practice. But some of it is useful.
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The Chapo Guide to Revolution: A Manifesto Against Logic, Facts, and Reason
To be honest, I’ve been conflicted about Chapo. I find them cynical, often unnecessarily and unproductively ironic, and occasionally cruel. On the other hand, I don’t blame them for being angry. Things keep getting worse for almost everyone, almost everyday. Their analysis on the first page of this book is precise: “If you’re reading these words, you’re likely living in despair and hopelessness.” There are moments of earnestness, truth, authenticity, and desperation throughout this book. It’s worth a read.
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American Oligarchs: The Kushners, the Trumps, and the Marriage of Money and Power
“Anyone concerned about American democracy should read Andrea Bernstein’s devastating exposé of the Trump and Kushner families. With meticulous precision, she documents the pernicious effects of dynastic wealth and power, now threatening to turn the highest rungs of the US government into a corrupt oligarchy.”—Jane Mayer, The New Yorker staff writer and New York Times best-selling author of Dark Money.
“We live in a nightmare.”—me -
In Praise of Shadows
I’m rereading this trim book, recommended by a friend, which contrasts Western and Japanese cultural aesthetics, particularly those centered around light and dark.
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Exhalation
The author of the source material for the film Arrival? I’m in! Plus, I could use a break from the politics of it all. I don’t know how to describe this book, other than the stories vaguely remind me of the Netflix series Black Mirror, in which our lived reality is altered just enough for its essence to be conspicuously revealed. The effect, as in Black Mirror, is to expose the underlying truths and ambiguity of our existence.
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A Very Stable Genius: Donald J. Trump’s Testing of America
“This taut and terrifying book is among the most closely observed accounts of Donald J. Trump’s shambolic tenure in office to date.” - Dwight Garner, The New York Times
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It’s OK That You’re Not OK: Meeting Grief and Loss in a Culture That Doesn’t Understand
It doesn’t bring me pleasure that I need this book right now, but that is, after all, the point of the book.
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The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels
I don’t feel remotely hopeful about our political and social posture these days, so I’ll take a chance on a book that claims to “[help] us understand the present moment in American politics and life by looking back at critical times in our history when hope overcame division and fear.”
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The Anthropology of Turquoise: Reflections on Desert, Sea, Stone, and Sky
“Exquisitely rendered….Meloy’s gem-studded collection calls us to be mindful of the physical world, to see it—really see it—with fresh eyes.” —Los Angeles Times
This book is exquisite, indeed, so far. The revelations include, for instance, an account of how the color purple was once only accessible to humans via “milking” mollusks. Perhaps writing with vivid imagery runs in the family, as the author‘s nephew has built a musical career doing so. A line near the end of the book captures much of the book’s ambivalent essence…“I write a book about a river and cannot tell if it is a love story or an obituary or both.” -
This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate
“A book of such ambition and consequence that it is almost unreviewable … the most momentous and contentious environmental book since ‘Silent Spring.’” — New York Times Book Review
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Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy
“O’Neil’s book offers a frightening look at how algorithms are increasingly regulating people…Her knowledge of the power and risks of mathematical models, coupled with a gift for analogy, makes her one of the most valuable observers of the continuing weaponization of big data… [She] does a masterly job explaining the pervasiveness and risks of the algorithms that regulate our lives.” —New York Times Book Review
2019
44 books-
Some Stories: Lessons from the Edge of Business and Sport
A gift from a friend who works at Patagonia, this hardcover book came autographed by Yvon Chouinard. I’ve rarely been more excited about a gift. My enthusiasm about the signature was quickly accompanied by adoration of the stories. In an early story, he writes, “All winter I forged gear. For the rest of the year, I continued to lead a counter-culture life on the fringes of society—living on fifty cents a day on a diet of oatmeal, potatoes, and canned cat food; camping all summer in an old incinerator in the abandoned CCC (Civilian Conservation Corps) camp in the Tetons of Wyoming.”
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The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate – Discoveries from A Secret World
“You will never look at a tree the same way after reading Peter Wohlleben’s The Hidden Life of Trees, which reveals the mindboggling properties and behavior of these terrestrial giants. Read this electrifying book, then go out and hug a tree — with admiration and gratitude.” —Dr. David Suzuki
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Parable of the Talents
The second volume in Butler’s terrifying and astonishingly prescient dystopian vision. This disturbingly prophetic book, along with its predecessor, topped my list of the 10 best books I read in 2019.
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How Charts Lie: Getting Smarter about Visual Information
“[Alberto Cairo’s] book reminds readers not to infer too much from a chart, especially when it shows them what they already wanted to see. Mr Cairo has sent a copy to the White House.” — The Economist
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Parable of the Sower
Originally published in 1993 and 1998 respectively, this book and its sequel, Parable of the Talents, have proven to be disturbingly prescient. Climate change, crippling inequality, mass privatization, and widespread arson form the backdrop of the series, while a right-wing fanatic promises to “make America great again.” Prescient, indeed.
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Homage to Catalonia
Homage to Catalonia is Orwell’s personal account of his experience fighting against fascists during the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s. It’s difficult to imagine a contemporary author of Orwell’s stature joining the front lines of such a war, but perhaps that’s why Orwell is so unique among western authors. Following the war, Orwell wrote, “Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for Democratic Socialism, as I understand it.”
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Let My People Go Surfing (Including 10 More Years of Business Unusual)
A friend of mine just landed a job with Patagonia, so I’m revisiting this book after several years, with this new(ish) edition. Patagonia isn’t perfect, but its business model allows the company to pursue values beyond profit to shareholders. For Patagonia’s size, it’s a rare model, making Patagonia about as revolutionary as they come these days.
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Words into Type
An indispensable classic for writers, editors, and publishers.
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Dune
I’m revisiting this classic after many years, ahead of the new film adaptation.
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Catch and Kill
“He didn’t let it go, though there were plenty of people who tried to pry him loose. In addition to the ‘all white, all male’ chain of command at NBC, there was Weinstein himself, waging a war on all fronts.” - Jennifer Szalai, New York Times
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The Tyranny of Words
This book begins with a question: “Is it possible to explain words with words?” It’s an excellent question. Is it possible to explain with words why one would read a book attempting to explain words with words? Probably not. Even so, I found myself referencing line after line from this book, organizing quotes in my notes app. Even when focused on events from the 1930s (the decade in which this book was written), the ideas and framing feel more relevant than ever. The book’s author, Stuart Chase, combined a few words that were later adopted for a transformative socioeconomic policy: “A New Deal.” Of course, the phrase is making a comeback, accompanied by a new hue.
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Assholes: A Theory
We’re going to need a bigger boat. Since they’re everywhere, and in our highest offices, time to dig in. “According to Karl Marx, capitalism is unstable but inevitably gives way to something better. The proliferation of assholes suggests that Marx was wrong: capitalism is unstable but can give way to something worse.”
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Brave New World
I haven’t read this classic in about 20 years, so it was time to revisit it…even if it means, once again, confronting the fading line between fiction and non-fiction.
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Design Systems Handbook
Each attendee of the excellent 2019 Clarity Conference received a print version of this resourceful handbook about creating, managing, and deploying design systems.
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Propaganda
“Propaganda explored the psychology behind manipulating masses and the ability to use symbolic action and propaganda to influence politics, effect social change, and lobby for gender and racial equality.” The principles described and advocated for in this book are ubiquitous and largely conspicuous in our society. I found them distasteful, as was the experience reading this book.
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Applied Text Analysis with Python
I’m not going to lie: I’m concerned about the rise of machine learning and artificial intelligence. Nevertheless, these fields are quickly asserting themselves as the next evolution of several existing fields, including content strategy and design. After months of trying to decide where to start exploring machine learning, I’ve landed on Natural Language Processing as the most obvious introduction. This book continues that exploration.
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Ruined by Design: How Designers Destroyed the World, and What We Can Do to Fix It
“The world is working exactly as designed. And it’s not working very well. Which means we need to do a better job of designing it. Design is a craft with an amazing amount of power. The power to choose. The power to influence. As designers, we need to see ourselves as gatekeepers of what we are bringing into the world, and what we choose not to bring into the world. Design is a craft with responsibility. The responsibility to help create a better world for all.”
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The Real World of Technology
“Franklin argues that technology is more than the sum of its wheels, gears, and transmitters. It is a system that involves organization, procedures, symbols, new words, equations, and, most of all, a mindset.” This book is prescient, profound, and deeply human. Everyone working in technology should read it.
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Educated: A Memoir
The buzz about this memoir has been unavoidable for several months, and it’s finally climbed to the top of my queue. I grew up in a rural town in Wyoming, with Mormon grandparents and some radically conservative family members, among them my own parents. My journey to education wasn’t nearly as dramatic, but the cultural landscape was not far from the author’s. “Breathtaking, heart-wrenching, inspirational—I’ve never read anything like this.” –Amy Chua
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Natural Language Processing: A Quick Introduction to NLP with Python and NLTK
I’m a word nerd. While this text isn’t particularly well-written, it is a competent introduction to Natural Language Processing, a branch of machine learning focused on the statistical analysis of language.
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This Land: How Cowboys, Capitalism, and Corruption are Ruining the American West
Outside magazine calls this book “the Desert Solitaire of Our Time,” and we need another Abbey right now. We’re witnessing a renewed and virulent hostility toward our public lands from elected officials, at a time when those lands are already under threat from climate change. This land is your land. This is a record of the status of your property, and it doesn’t look good.
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Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World
I’ve always been a generalist, and I often feel insecure about my lack of mastery over a particular discipline. And, of course, capitalism rewards specialization, making it difficult to cultivate wide-ranging skills and knowledge. “The challenge we all face is how to maintain the benefits of breadth, diverse experience, interdisciplinary thinking, and delayed concentration in a world that increasingly incentivizes, even demands, hyperspecialization.”
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All Art is Propaganda: Critical Essays
After reading Politics and the English Language, I was craving more prose from Orwell, so I’m reading an essay here and there from this diverse collection.
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Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy
Published back in 2012, this book has been showing up in my Twitter feed a lot lately for its prescient political commentary. “…we approach a terrifying prospect: a society that may no longer be capable of reaching the kind of basic agreement necessary for social progress. And this is happening at just the moment when we face the threat of catastrophic climate change, what is likely the single largest governing challenge that human beings have ever faced in the history of life on the planet.”
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Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny
My favorite episode of one of my favorite podcasts, The Ezra Klein Show, featured a lengthy discussion with author Kate Manne. Hearing Professor Manne describe structural misogyny feels at once revelatory and obvious, a contradiction characteristic of our time. “You will understand our current moment far better and more easily after having read Down Girl,” writes Rebecca Traister.
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Politics and the English Language
I’m ashamed it’s taken me this long to read this trim rant. It is a gem, from a legendary writer. “What is above all needed is to let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way about.” Its compendium — Review of Mein Kampf — is staggering and terrifying, because it’s relevant.
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Conversational Design
Erika Hall delivers another outstanding book about human- and conversation-driven content design, and offers up useful techniques and resources for content designers.
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Thinking, Fast and Slow
I’d been hearing about and seeing this book around so much lately, I figured it was time to finally crack it open. “…Daniel Kahneman, the renowned psychologist and winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, takes us on a groundbreaking tour of the mind and explains the two systems that drive the way we think. System 1 is fast, intuitive, and emotional; System 2 is slower, more deliberative, and more logical.” This book is a revelatory mindfuck that I highly recommend.
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The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming
This books begins with a sobering reality, even though all thinking people understand it’s very, very bad already: “It is worse, much worse, than you think.” This is the urgency we need, even while it’s too late to prevent the onset of climate change. Despite the catastrophic future we’ve created for ourselves, perhaps we can muster the will to prevent the worst of the devastating impacts coming our way?
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Becoming
I can’t do better than this: “Warm, wise, and revelatory, Becoming is the deeply personal reckoning of a woman of soul and substance who has steadily defied expectations—and whose story inspires us to do the same.”
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The Best Interface is No Interface
By page 5, I knew this was a book we need right now: “Forget that 780 million people in the world, give or take, don’t have access to clean drinking water, or that more than half a million people are homeless in the wealthy United States. We moved way past ‘mundane’ social issues and collectively propelled the technology field—where disruption and innovation has a proven track record of changing everyday lives—to giving the world what it really needs: more mobile apps.”
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The Plants of Middle-earth: Botany and sub-creation
Yes, I am exactly this nerdy about plants and Tolkien’s work.
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Everyday Information Architecture
Chapter one begins with this often ignored truth: “When we organize information, we change it. The order in which it appears, the content that precedes or follows it, the ways we expand or condense it—everything we do to arrange information will alter its meaning.”
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Utopia for Realists
Author Rutger Bregman first came on my radar by lobbing truth bombs at Davos, and he followed that up by further exposing Tucker Carlson’s shallow, disgusting, and hateful perspective on just about everything in an unaired interview. Both convinced me to read this book.
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Let’s Go (So We Can Get Back): A Memoir of Recording and Discording with Wilco, Etc.
I’ve been a Wilco fan for many years. I saw Wilco live in Eugene, Oregon, in 2003. I saw Jeff Tweedy solo in 2006 (with a demonstrably shitty audience in Portland, captured on the Sunken Treasure DVD). I took a few years off from listening to Wilco, but I’ve been rediscovering the catalog, just in time for this book.
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The New Testament
The translator said in a podcast (regarding Christianity in the U.S.), and I’m certain he’s correct, “America is a great gnostic adventure at the end of the day. I’m not sure Christianity will ever reach these shores, but if it does, it’s going to find a very intractable people here…very hard to convert.”
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American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America
“The American fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public information. With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power…They claim to be super-patriots, but they would destroy every liberty guaranteed by the Constitution. They demand free enterprise, but are the spokesmen for monopoly and vested interest.” - Henry A. Wallace, Vice President of the U.S.
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Hiking with Nietzsche: On Becoming Who You Are
Capturing two distinct phases in his life, the author traces Nietzsche’s footsteps through the Swiss Alps. He grapples with the tension between order and chaos in his life, and its corollaries in Nietzsche’s work.
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Dreyer’s English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style
Benjamin Dreyer, copy chief at Random House, delivers a surprisingly humorous book on grammar and style. I couldn’t put this book down, partly because I’m a grammar nerd and share many of the author’s “peeves and crotchets,” but mostly because nearly every line of this book is exceptionally intelligent and funny.
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Red Rising
I’m a sucker for dystopian scifi revolution narratives intended for teens, so I’m here for this one.
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Python Data Science Handbook
I’m re-learning Python in the context of data science and machine learning. Which is kind of weird and gross, to be honest. That said, the book is well-structured, well-written, and informative, and it surveys a discipline conspicuously on the rise.
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Wild Migrations: Atlas of Wyoming’s Ungulates
I’m enamored with this intricate atlas of ungulate (hoofed mammals) migration in Wyoming. Not only is it a project that involved my two alma maters (University of Oregon for data visualization, Oregon State University Press printed the book), but it also features my home state and research from its university (University of Wyoming). The book’s photographs and data visualizations are beautiful. This book has all my favorites: photography, data visualization, GIS, and wildlife.
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The Slow Regard of Silent Things
An intimate journey through the Underthing with my favorite character from Rothfuss’s excellent Kingkiller series (I read The Name of the Wind and The Wise Man’s Fear in December, 2018).
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The Value of Everything
A scathing and deserved endictment of how our modern capitalist economy (mis)assigns value.