Daniel: The Age of Discovery


Book Description

Daniel French is the twelve-year old son of one of the world’s wealthiest men. Daniel may be rich in resources, but he is definitely poor in emotional ties with people and practically bankrupt in social skills. Ignored by his parents and mistreated by those employed to take care of him, Daniel has become manipulative and skilled in verbal self-defense. Never allowed to associate with people his own age, and never allowed to attend school, he found his friends within the books and fine art of the three-story library tower located on his family’s estate. There he became entirely self-educated, and there he developed his passion for learning. When he is sent off to Cornwall Academy, a boarding school, he is so inept with people that he immediately becomes the outcast with everyone except his roommate. Small in body, great in knowledge and intellect, Daniel begins to learn quickly, and to adapt. His school community helps him to grow, but Daniel has lessons for both his fellow students and teachers. It is an important day in the life of a school when any new student enters that school. That student has the opportunity to be an influence for good or an influence for evil. Daniel has made his choices. Certainly, his four months spent at Cornwall Academy, are for Daniel The Age of Discovery.




Daniel: The Age of Epimetheus


Book Description

To fight a war you know you cannot win; to accept only the few, small victories along the way, because that is all you can get; to advance boldly into a future, when you have already seen what that devastated future will be; to put one more foot in front of the other, when you feel that you can't go on, and you do it because you believe you can save just one more person—then, my friend, you are a hero. So it is with our young protagonist, Daniel French, and his friends. It is the spring of 1929. The stock market hasn't crashed yet, but in the agrarian South a severe depression has been running rampant since the end of the Great War. In order to view this misery first-hand, Daniel and his friends visit with legendary financier and presidential advisor Bernard Baruch in South Carolina. In this Southern state alone, 647 banks have failed, farms have been foreclosed on, families have been evicted and displaced, and hope has vanished. After this revelatory visit, Daniel is prepared to describe to any audience what the future portends when the economy collapses. People listen to the twelve-year-old Daniel, but they don't want to hear the message. Why should they? The experts say the economy is sound. But Daniel persists, believing that if he convinces only one person every time he speaks, he is at least saving someone from potential financial disaster. Some mock him because of his age and stature. Others attack him verbally and even physically. He makes long-term enemies, and he’s over-extended to the point of exhaustion. But when Harvard University invites him to speak, Daniel doesn’t feel he can decline...though in addressing some of the greatest minds in America...he’ll face his greatest challenges yet.




The Discoverers


Book Description

An original history of man's greatest adventure: his search to discover the world around him. In the compendious history, Boorstin not only traces man's insatiable need to know, but also the obstacles to discovery and the illusion that knowledge can also put in our way. Covering time, the earth and the seas, nature and society, he gathers and analyzes stories of the man's profound quest to understand his world and the cosmos.




Daniel: The Age of Anxiety


Book Description

Daniel: The Age of Anxiety is the sequel to Daniel: The Age of Discovery. All Daniel's friends and enemies have returned. Daniel continues to struggle to overcome the prejudices against him because of his age, his wealth, and his intelligence. It is hard to be different. Daniel's fear of and certainty about the coming stock market crash followed by a long depression finally drive him to act. All the experts say the economy is good, but Daniel believes they are wrong. He decides to hold public forums to discuss the coming collapse with the hope that he will be able to convince even a few people to get out of the market and to prepare for the crash and depression. Adults not only don't believe him, but they also mock him because of his youth and inexperience. In his quest to warn people that the crash is coming, he sets himself up as a target and acquires more enemies. People believe what they want to believe, and in 1929, people believed that the economy was good and that the bull market would go on forever. It is dangerous to kick other people's sacred cows.




Age of Discovery


Book Description

The present is a contest between the bright and dark sides of discovery. To avoid being torn apart by its stresses, we need to recognize the fact—and gain courage and wisdom from the past. Age of Discovery shows how. Now is the best moment in history to be alive, but we have never felt more anxious or divided. Human health, aggregate wealth and education are flourishing. Scientific discovery is racing forward. But the same global flows of trade, capital, people and ideas that make gains possible for some people deliver big losses to others—and make us all more vulnerable to one another. Business and science are working giant revolutions upon our societies, but our politics and institutions evolve at a much slower pace. That’s why, in a moment when everyone ought to be celebrating giant global gains, many of us are righteously angry at being left out and stressed about where we’re headed. To make sense of present shocks, we need to step back and recognize: we’ve been here before. The first Renaissance, the time of Columbus, Copernicus, Gutenberg and others, likewise redrew all maps of the world, democratized communication and sparked a flourishing of creative achievement. But their world also grappled with the same dark side of rapid change: social division, political extremism, insecurity, pandemics and other unintended consequences of discovery. Now is the second Renaissance. We can still flourish—if we learn from the first.




Complete Poems of C. P. Cavafy


Book Description

An extraordinary literary event: Daniel Mendelsohn’s acclaimed two-volume translation of the complete poems of C. P. Cavafy—including the first English translation of the poet’s final Unfinished Poems—now published in one handsome edition and featuring the fullest literary commentaries available in English, by the renowned critic, scholar, and international best-selling author of The Lost. No modern poet so vividly brought to life the history and culture of Mediterranean antiquity; no writer dared break, with such taut energy, the early-twentieth-century taboos surrounding homoerotic desire; no poet before or since has so gracefully melded elegy and irony as the Alexandrian Greek poet Constantine Cavafy (1863–1933). Whether advising Odysseus on his return to Ithaca or confronting the poet with the ghosts of his youth, these verses brilliantly make the historical personal—and vice versa. To his profound exploration of longing and loneliness, fate and loss, memory and identity, Cavafy brings the historian’s assessing eye along with the poet’s compassionate heart. After more than a decade of work and study, Mendelsohn—a classicist who alone among Cavafy’s translators shares the poet’s deep intimacy with the ancient world—gives readers full access to the genius of Cavafy’s verse: the sensuous rhymes, rich assonances, and strong rhythms of the original Greek that have eluded previous translators. Complete with the Unfinished Poems that Cavafy left in drafts when he died—a remarkable, hitherto unknown discovery that remained in the Cavafy Archive in Athens for decades—and with an in-depth introduction and a helpful commentary that situates each work in a rich historical, literary, and biographical context, this revelatory translation is a cause for celebration: the definitive presentation of Cavafy in English.




Everything Sad Is Untrue


Book Description

A National Indie Bestseller An NPR Best Book of the Year A New York Times Best Book of the Year An Amazon Best Book of the Year A Booklist Editors' Choice A BookPage Best Book of the Year A NECBA Windows & Mirrors Selection A Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year A Wall Street Journal Best Book of the Year A Today.com Best of the Year PRAISE "A modern masterpiece." —The New York Times Book Review "Supple, sparkling and original." —The Wall Street Journal "Mesmerizing." —TODAY.com "This book could change the world." —BookPage "Like nothing else you've read or ever will read." —Linda Sue Park "It hooks you right from the opening line." —NPR SEVEN STARRED REVIEWS ★ "A modern epic." —Kirkus Reviews, starred review ★ "A rare treasure of a book." —Publishers Weekly, starred review ★ "A story that soars." —The Bulletin, starred review ★ "At once beautiful and painful." —School Library Journal, starred review ★ "Raises the literary bar in children's lit." —Booklist, starred review ★ "Poignant and powerful." —Foreword Reviews, starred review ★ "One of the most extraordinary books of the year." —BookPage, starred review A sprawling, evocative, and groundbreaking autobiographical novel told in the unforgettable and hilarious voice of a young Iranian refugee. It is a powerfully layered novel that poses the questions: Who owns the truth? Who speaks it? Who believes it? "A patchwork story is the shame of the refugee," Nayeri writes early in the novel. In an Oklahoman middle school, Khosrou (whom everyone calls Daniel) stands in front of a skeptical audience of classmates, telling the tales of his family's history, stretching back years, decades, and centuries. At the core is Daniel's story of how they became refugees—starting with his mother's vocal embrace of Christianity in a country that made such a thing a capital offense, and continuing through their midnight flight from the secret police, bribing their way onto a plane-to-anywhere. Anywhere becomes the sad, cement refugee camps of Italy, and then finally asylum in the U.S. Implementing a distinct literary style and challenging western narrative structures, Nayeri deftly weaves through stories of the long and beautiful history of his family in Iran, adding a richness of ancient tales and Persian folklore. Like Scheherazade of One Thousand and One Nights in a hostile classroom, Daniel spins a tale to save his own life: to stake his claim to the truth. EVERYTHING SAD IS UNTRUE (a true story) is a tale of heartbreak and resilience and urges readers to speak their truth and be heard.




Against the Flow


Book Description

Daniel's story is one of extraordinary faith in God lived out at the pinnacle of executive power. It tells of four teenage friends, born in the tiny state of Judah about twenty-six centuries ago, but captured by Nebuchadnezzar, emperor of Babylon. Daniel describes how they eventually rose to the top echelons of administration. Daniel and his friends did not simply maintain their private devotion to God; they maintained a high-profile witness in a pluralistic society antagonistic to their faith. That is why their story has such a powerful message for us. Society tolerates the practice of Christianity in private and in church services, but it increasingly deprecates public witness. If Daniel and his compatriots were with us today they would be in the vanguard of the public debate. What was it that gave that ancient foursome, Daniel and his three friends, the strength and conviction to be prepared, often at great risk, to swim against the flow?




Daniel: Picking Up the Pieces


Book Description

The 1929 stock market crash has come and gone, and Daniel, much criticized and mocked for his predictions of that event, has been vindicated. Now he wants to go back to the carefree days of being a boy, but it's impossible. When his bank hires a black man as a guard, Daniel stands up against discrimination and bigoted opponents. He rescues and becomes the guardian of three homeless, abused teenagers. This is a story of human struggles at the onset of the Great Depression that will touch your emotions and challenge you to reconsider your perceptions of those conditions that still persist a century later.




We Have No Idea


Book Description

Prepare to learn everything we still don’t know about our strange and mysterious universe Humanity's understanding of the physical world is full of gaps. Not tiny little gaps you can safely ignore —there are huge yawning voids in our basic notions of how the world works. PHD Comics creator Jorge Cham and particle physicist Daniel Whiteson have teamed up to explore everything we don't know about the universe: the enormous holes in our knowledge of the cosmos. Armed with their popular infographics, cartoons, and unusually entertaining and lucid explanations of science, they give us the best answers currently available for a lot of questions that are still perplexing scientists, including: * Why does the universe have a speed limit? * Why aren't we all made of antimatter? * What (or who) is attacking Earth with tiny, superfast particles? * What is dark matter, and why does it keep ignoring us? It turns out the universe is full of weird things that don't make any sense. But Cham and Whiteson make a compelling case that the questions we can't answer are as interesting as the ones we can. This fully illustrated introduction to the biggest mysteries in physics also helpfully demystifies many complicated things we do know about, from quarks and neutrinos to gravitational waves and exploding black holes. With equal doses of humor and delight, Cham and Whiteson invite us to see the universe as a possibly boundless expanse of uncharted territory that's still ours to explore.