Andrew Garman
Author
Language
English
Description
Through tracing paper's evolution, Mark Kurlansky challenges common assumptions about technology's influence, affirming that paper is here to stay.
Paper is one of the simplest and most essential pieces of human technology. For the past two millennia, the ability to produce it in ever more efficient ways has supported the proliferation of literacy, media, religion, education, commerce, and art; it has formed the foundation of civilizations, promoting...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
In Pictures at a Revolution, Mark Harris turned the story of the five movies nominated for Best Picture in 1967 into a landmark work of cultural history, a book about the transformation of an art form and the larger social shift it signified. In Five Came Back, he achieves something larger and even more remarkable, giving us the untold story of how Hollywood changed World War II, and how World War II changed Hollywood, through the prism of five film...
Author
Language
English
Description
A sweeping new history of how climate change and disease helped bring down the Roman Empire. Here is the monumental retelling of one of the most consequential chapters of human history: the fall of the Roman Empire. The Fate of Rome is the first book to examine the catastrophic role that climate change and infectious diseases played in the collapse of Rome's power--a story of nature's triumph over human ambition. Interweaving a grand historical narrative...
5) Arcadia
Author
Language
English
Appears on list
Description
In the fields of western New York State in the 1970s, a few dozen idealists set out to live off the land, founding a commune on the grounds of a decaying mansion called Arcadia House. They include Abe, a master carpenter; Hannah, a baker and historian; and Abe and Hannah's only child, Bit, born soon after the commune. Through Bit, Arcadia follows this romantic, rollicking, and tragic utopian dream from its hopeful start through its heyday and beyond....
6) Martin Eden
Author
Language
English
Description
Martin Eden (1909) is a novel by American writer Jack London. The book follows the tradition of the Künstlerroman, a narrative that traces the life and development of an artist, to tell the story of a young man not unlike London himself. Part fiction, part autobiography, Martin Eden examines the consequences of dreams and achievements, successes and failures, for a young artist struggling with fame. The novel is heavily influenced by London's socialist...
Author
Series
Language
English
Formats
Description
On a dismal evening in the previous century, an unnamed writer in Venice, California, answers a furious pounding at his beachfront bungalow door and again admits Constance Rattigan into his life. An aging, once-glamorous Hollywood star, Constance is running in fear from something she dares not acknowledge -- and vanishes as suddenly as she appeared, leaving the narrator two macabre books: twin listings of the Tinseltown dead and soon to be dead, with...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
From the award-winning and New York Times best-selling author of Seward and Stanton, here is the critically acclaimed and definitive biography of John Jay: a major Founding Father, a true national hero, and a leading architect of America's future. John Jay was a central figure in the early history of the American Republic. A New York lawyer, born in 1745, Jay served his country with the greatest distinction, and was one of the most influential of...
10) Love is a canoe
Author
Language
English
Description
Peter Herman is something of a folk hero. Marriage Is a Canoe, his decades-old book on love and relationships, has won the hearts of hopeful romantics and desperate cynics alike. Peter and his wife lived a peaceful life until her death in 2010. Now he passes time with a woman he admires but doesn't love - and he begins to question the advice he's famously doled out for decades. Then he receives a call from Stella Petrovic, an ambitious young editor...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
The widening gap between rich and poor means dealing with one big, uncomfortable truth: If you're not at the top, you're at the bottom. The global labor market is changing radically thanks to growth at the high end-- and the low. About three quarters of the jobs created in the United States since the great recession pay only a bit more than minimum wage. Still, the United States has more millionaires and billionaires than any country ever, and we...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
"The New York Times bestselling author of Turn Right at Machu Picchu sets out to uncover the truth behind the legendary lost city of Atlantis. A few years ago, Mark Adams made a strange discovery: Everything we know about the lost city of Atlantis comes from the work of one man, the Greek philosopher Plato. Then he made a second, stranger discovery: Amateur explorers are still actively searching for this sunken city all around the world, based entirely...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
National Bestseller
National Book Critics Circle Award Nominee
From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Overstory and the forthcoming Bewilderment, a magnificent double love story of two young couples separated by a distance of twenty-five years.
“The most lavishly ambitious American novel since Gravity’s Rainbow . . . An outright marvel.” —Washington Post
Stuart Ressler, a brilliant young molecular biologist, sets out in 1957 to...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
In this book, the author, a Pulitzer Prize winning historian tells the story of a war that redefined North America. During the early nineteenth century, Britons and Americans renewed their struggle over the legacy of the American Revolution. Soldiers, immigrants, settlers, and Indians fought in a northern borderland to determine the fate of a continent. Would revolutionary republicanism sweep the British from Canada? Or would the British empire contain,...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
In this biography, the author portrays Aaron Burr, the third vice president, and would be secession leader, as a daring and perhaps deluded figure who shook the nation's foundations in its earliest, most vulnerable decade. It traces his career discussing his acrimonious relationship with Thomas Jefferson; his ambitious vision of expansion; and his historical, self-defended trial for treason. This account of Burr's tumultuous life also offers a rare...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
Lennon and McCartney, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, Pierre and Marie Curie. Throughout history, partners have buoyed each other to better work - though often one member is little known to the general public. (See Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger, or Vincent and Theo van Gogh.) In Powers of Two, Joshua Wolf Shenk draws on neuroscience, social psychology, and cultural history to present the social foundations of creativity, with the pair as its primary...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
New York, in the 1970s: rents were cheap, love was free, and the explosion of theater venues off and off-off Broadway afforded aspiring actors the opportunity to work for nothing. After Edward Day joins his fellow actors for a summer weekend on the Jersey shore, his life is never the same.
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
"What happened to the idealism of the 1960s? This question has haunted a generation. Outside the Gates of Eden follows two men from their first meeting in high school to their final destination in the twenty-first century. Alex is torn between his father's business empire and his own artistic yearnings. Cole finds his calling at a Bob Dylan concert in 1965. From the Summer of Love in San Francisco to Woodstock, from campus protests to the SoHo loft...