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2014., Adult, Farrar, Straus and Giroux Call No: 951.06 O834a Edition: 1st ed. Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Summary Note: "A vibrant, colorful, and revelatory inner history of China during a moment of profound transformation From abroad, we often see China as a caricature: a nation of pragmatic plutocrats and ruthlessly dedicated students destined to rule the global economy--or an addled Goliath, riddled with corruption and on the edge of stagnation. What we don't see is how both powerful and ordinary people are remaking their lives as their country dramatically changes. As the Beijing correspondent for The New Yorker, Evan Osnos was on the ground in China for years, witness to profound political, economic, and cultural upheaval. In Age of Ambition, he describes the greatest collision taking place in that country: the clash between the rise of the individual and the Communist Party's struggle to retain control. He asks probing questions: Why does a government with more success lifting people from poverty than any civilization in history choose to put strict restraints on freedom of expression? Why do millions of young Chinese professionals--fluent in English and devoted to Western pop culture--consider themselves "angry youth," dedicated to resisting the West's influence? How are Chinese from all strata finding meaning after two decades of the relentless pursuit of wealth? Writing with great narrative verve and a keen sense of irony, Osnos follows the moving stories of everyday people and reveals life in the new China to be a battleground between aspiration and authoritarianism, in which only one can prevail"--From publisher.
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By Gayle, Mike2022., Adult, Hodder & Stoughton Call No: NEW BLK Fic Gay Edition: First Grand Central Publishing Trade edition. Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Summary Note: Life is waiting to happen to Hubert Bird.But first he has to open his front door and let it in. In weekly phone calls to his daughter in Australia, widower Hubert Bird paints a picture of the perfect retirement, packed with fun, friendship and fulfilment. But Hubert Bird is lying. The truth is day after day drags by without him seeing a single soul. Until, that is, he receives some good news - good news that in one way turns out to be the worst news ever, news that will force him out again, into a world he has long since turned his back on. Now Hubert faces a seemingly impossible task: to make his real life resemble his fake life before the truth comes out. Along the way Hubert stumbles across a second chance at love, renews a cherished friendship and finds himself roped into an audacious community scheme that seeks to end loneliness once and for all.
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-- Abrykosy Donbasu :2021., Lost Horse Press Call No: 891.791 Y15a Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Series Title: Lost Horse Press contemporary Ukrainian poetry series Volume: 7Summary Note: Apricots of Donbass is a bilingual collection by award-winning contemporary Ukrainian poet Lyuba Yakimchuk. Born and raised in a small coal-mining town in Ukraine's industrial east, Yakimchuk lost her family home in 2014 when the region was occupied by Russian-backed militants and her parents and sister were forced to flee as refugees. Reflecting her complex emotional experiences, Yakimchuk's poetry is versatile, ranging from sumptuous verses about the urgency of erotic desire in a war-torn city to imitations of childlike babbling about the tools and toys of military combat. Playfulness in the face of catastrophe is a distinctive feature of Yakimchuk's voice, evoking the legacy of the Ukrainian Futurists of the 1920s. The poems' artfulness go hand in hand with their authenticity, offering intimate glimpses into the story of a woman affected by a life-altering situation beyond her control.
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2014., Adult, HarperCollins Canada Call No: 910.91 R136c Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Summary Note: "Over the course of three years, James Raffan circumnavigated the globe at 66.6 degrees latitude: the Arctic Circle. Armed with his passion for the north, his interest in diverse cultures and his unquenchable sense of adventure, he set out to put a human face on climate change. What he discovered was by turns shocking, frustrating, entertaining and enlightening. In Circling the Midnight Sun, Raffan presents a warm-hearted, engaging portrait of the circumpolar world, but also a deeply affecting story of societies and landscapes in the throes of enormous change. Compelling and utterly original, this is both an adventure story and a book that will change your view of the north forever. James Raffan is the past executive director of the Canadian Canoe Museum in Peterborough, Ontario. He is the author of Emperor of the North: Sir George Simpson and the remarkable story of the Hudson's Bay Company"--Provided by publisher.
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2011., University of Ottawa Press Edition: eBook ed. Summary Note: Every day brings new headlines about climate change as politicians debate how to respond, scientists offer new data, and skeptics critique the validity of the research. To step outside these scientific and political debates, Timothy Leduc engages with various Inuit understandings of northern climate change. What he learns is that today's climate changes are not only affecting our environments, but also our cultures. By focusing on the changes currently occurring in the north, he highlights the challenges being posed to Western climate research, Canadian politics and traditional Inuit knowledge."Climate, Culture, Change "sheds light on the cultural challenges posed by northern warming and proposes an intercultural response that is demonstrated by the blending of Inuit and Western perspectives.
![Climate, Culture, Change [eBook]](/Library/images/~imageCT81180.JPG "Climate, Culture, Change [eBook]")
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By Keen, Andrewc2007., Doubleday/Currency Call No: 303.4833 K26c Edition: 1st ed. Availability:1 of 1 At Your LibraryTable of contents only Summary Note: Silicon Valley insider and pundit Andrew Keen claims that today's new participatory Web 2.0 threatens our values, economy, and ultimately the very innovation and creativity that forms the fabric of American achievement. In today's self-broadcasting culture, where amateurism is celebrated and anyone with an opinion, however ill-informed, can publish a blog, post a video on YouTube, or change an entry on Wikipedia, the distinction between trained expert and uninformed amateur becomes blurred. When bloggers and videographers, unconstrained by professional standards or editorial filters, can manipulate public opinion, truth becomes a commodity to be bought, sold, packaged, and reinvented. The anonymity that Web 2.0 offers calls into question the reliability of the information we receive and creates an environment in which sexual predators and identity thieves can roam free. Keen urges us to consider the consequences of supporting a culture that endorses plagiarism and piracy and weakens traditional media and creative institutions.--From publisher description.
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2019., Adult, Simon & Schuster Call No: Fic Wal Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Summary Note: "Charles and Lily, James and Nan. They meet in Greenwich Village in 1963 when Charles and James are jointly hired to steward the historic Third Presbyterian Church through turbulent times. Their personal differences however, threaten to tear them apart. Charles is destined to succeed his father as an esteemed professor of history at Harvard, until an unorthodox lecture about faith leads him to ministry. How then, can he fall in love with Lily--fiercely intellectual, elegantly stern--after she tells him with certainty that she will never believe in God? And yet, how can he not? James, the youngest son in a hardscrabble Chicago family, spent much of his youth angry at his alcoholic father and avoiding his anxious mother. Nan grew up in Mississippi, the devout and beloved daughter of a minister and a debutante. James's escape from his desperate circumstances leads him to Nan and, despite his skepticism of hope in all its forms, her gentle, constant faith changes the course of his life. Against the backdrop of turbulent changes facing the city and the church's congregation, these four forge improbable paths through their evolving relationships, each struggling with uncertainty, heartbreak, and joy. A poignant meditation on faith and reason, marriage and children, and the ways we find meaning in our lives, Cara Wall's The Dearly Beloved is a gorgeous, wise, and provocative novel that is destined to become a classic."--Publisher.
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-- Shock of global population decline.2019., Signal Call No: 304.6 B849e Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Summary Note: For half a century, statisticians, pundits, and politicians have warned that a burgeoning planetary population will soon overwhelm the earth's resources. But a growing number of experts are sounding a different kind of alarm. Rather than growing exponentially, they argue, the global population is headed for a steep decline. Throughout history, depopulation was the product of catastrophe: ice ages, plagues, the collapse of civilizations. This time, however, we're thinning ourselves deliberately, by choosing to have fewer babies than we need to replace ourselves. In much of the developed and developing world, that decline is already underway, as urbanization, women's empowerment, and waning religiosity lead to smaller and smaller families. In Empty Planet, Ibbitson and Bricker travel from South Florida to Sao Paulo, Seoul to Nairobi, Brussels to Delhi to Beijing, drawing on a wealth of research and firsthand reporting to illustrate the dramatic consequences of this population decline--and to show us why the rest of the developing world will soon join in. They find that a smaller global population will bring with it a number of benefits: fewer workers will command higher wages; good jobs will prompt innovation; the environment will improve; the risk of famine will wa≠ and falling birthrates in the developing world will bring greater affluence and autonomy for women. But enormous disruption lies ahead, too. We can already see the effects in Europe and parts of Asia, as aging populations and worker shortages weaken the economy and impose crippling demands on healthcare and social security. The United States is well-positioned to successfully navigate these coming demographic shifts--that is, unless growing isolationism and anti-immigrant backlash lead us to close ourselves off just as openness becomes more critical to our survival than ever before. Rigorously researched and deeply compelling, Empty Planet offers a vision of a future that we can no longer prevent--but one that we can shape, if we choose.
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2018., General, Viking Call No: 303.44 P655e Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Summary Note: The follow-up to Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature presents the big picture of human progress: people are living longer, healthier, freer, and happier lives, and while our problems are formidable, the solutions lie in the Enlightenment ideal of using reason and science. Far from being a naive hope, the Enlightenment, we now know, has worked. But more than ever, it needs a vigorous defense. It swims against currents of human nature - tribalism, authoritarianism, demonization, magical thinking - which demagogues are all too willing to exploit. Many commentators, committed to political, religious, or romantic ideologies, fight a rearguard action against it. The result is a corrosive fatalism and a willingness to wreck the precious institutions of liberal democracy and global cooperation. Steven Pinker is a professor of Psychology at Harvard University.
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-- How America went haywire :2017., General, Random House Call No: 306.09 A544f Edition: First edition. Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Summary Note: "In this sweeping, eloquent history of America, Kurt Andersen shows that what's happening in our country today - this post-factual, "fake news" moment we're all living through - is not something new, but rather the ultimate expression of our national character. America was founded by wishful dreamers, magical thinkers, and true believers, by hucksters and their suckers. Over the course of five centuries - from the Salem witch trials to Scientology to the Satanic Panic of the 1980s, from P. T. Barnum to Hollywood and the anything-goes, wild-and-crazy sixties, from conspiracy theories to our fetish for guns and obsession with extraterrestrials - our love of the fantastic has made America exceptional in a way that we've never fully acknowledged. From the start, our ultra-individualism was attached to epic dreams and epic fantasies - every citizen was free to believe absolutely anything, or to pretend to be absolutely anybody. Andersen explores whether the great American experiment in liberty has gone off the rails. If you want to understand Donald Trump and the culture of twenty-first-century America, if you want to know how the lines between reality and illusion have become dangerously blurred, read this book. Kurt Andersen is the author of the novels Heyday, Turn of the Century, and True Believers. He contributes to Vanity Fair and The New York Times, and is host and co-creator of Studio 360, the public radio show and podcast. He lives in Brooklyn"--Provided by publisher.
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2002., Farrar, Straus and Giroux Call No: 303.4 S857f Edition: 1st ed. Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library
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c2013., General, Random House Call No: 303.4 G666f Edition: 1st ed. Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Summary Note: "The consequential age we are living in will be remembered as one of the great turning points in civilization. Once we turn, though, where will we be? That is the compelling question Al Gore sets out to answer by examining the drivers of global change, connecting the dots among the social, economic, and political forces shaping our present and future. A rising global consciousness is forcing people around the world, but especially Americans, to rethink their basic assumptions about how the world works, and, even more fundamentally, how it should and can work. Borders matter less than ever. Technology is constantly reordering the way we live, think, work, learn, love, pray, and play"-- Provided by publisher.
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2017., Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt and Company Call No: 320.973 C548g Edition: First edition. Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Series Title: The American empire projectSummary Note: In wide-ranging interviews with David Barsamian, his longtime interlocutor, Noam Chomsky asks us to consider a world imperiled by climate change and the growing potential for nuclear war. These twelve interviews, conducted from 2013 to 2016, examine the latest developments around the globe: the devastation of Syria, the reach of state surveillance, growing anger over economic inequality, the place of religion in American political culture, and the bitterly contested 2016 U.S. presidential election. In accompanying personal reflections on his Philadelphia childhood and his eighty-seventh birthday, Chomsky also describes his own intellectual journey.
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By Reva, Maria2020., Adult, Alfred A. Knopf Canada Call No: Fic Rev Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Summary Note: "A bureaucratic glitch omits an entire building, along with its residents, from municipal records. So begins Reva's ingeniously intertwined narratives that span the chaotic years leading up to and immediately following the fall of the Soviet Union. But even as the benighted denizens of 1933 Ivansk Street weather the official neglect of the authorities, they devise ingenious ways to survive. In "Bone Music," an agoraphobic woman survives by selling contraband LPs, mapping the vinyl grooves of illegal Western records into stolen x-ray film. A delusional secret service agent in "Letter of Apology" becomes convinced he's being covertly recruited to guard Lenin's tomb, if only he can convince a contrarian poet to officially apologize for reciting a forbidden joke. Weaving the narratives together is an unforgettable, chameleon-like girl named Zaya: a disfigured orphan in "Little Rabbit," a beauty-pageant crasher in "Miss USSR," and, when she reaches adulthood, a sadist-for-hire to the Eastern bloc's newly minted oligarchs in "Homecoming." Good Citizens Need Not Fear takes us from moments of intense paranoia to surprising tenderness and back again, exploring what it means to be an individual amidst the roiling forces of history. Inspired by her and her family's own experiences in Ukraine, Reva brings the black absurdism of early Shteyngart and the sly interconnectedness of Anthony Marra's The Tsar of Love and Techno to a fictional world that is as clever as it is heartfelt."--
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2008., Farrar, Straus and Giroux Call No: 363.7 F911h Edition: 1st ed. Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Summary Note: Friedman's bestseller "The World Is Flat" has helped millions of readers to see globalization in a new way. Now the author brings a fresh outlook to the crises of destabilizing climate change and rising competition for energy.
