Author : Elliot Perlman
Publisher : Penguin
Page : 337 pages
File Size : 35,26 MB
Release : 2006-12-05
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 1440629226
The stories in this collection explore the complex worlds of lovers, poets, lawyers, immigrants, students, and murderers. They tell of corporate betrayals and lost opportunities, and of the obsessions, hopes, fears, and vagaries of desire.
Author : Daniel Star
Publisher : OUP Oxford
Page : 168 pages
File Size : 32,30 MB
Release : 2015-06-18
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 0191061743
Knowing Better presents a novel solution to the problem of reconciling the seemingly conflicting perspectives of ordinary virtue and normative ethics. These two perspectives appear to tell us incompatible things about the practical reasons that guide our deliberation and justify our actions. Normative ethics is a sophisticated, open-ended philosophical enterprise that attempts to articulate and defend highly general ethical principles. Such principles aspire to specify our reasons, and tell us what it is right to do. However, it is not attractive to suppose that virtuous people generally follow such principles, or that the reasons that they specify are familiar to them. These principles are difficult to articulate and assess, and we do not (or should not) think that advanced philosophical expertise is a necessary requirement for virtue. At the same time, the virtuous do not only accidentally get things right; rather, they act well in a reliable fashion, and they do so by responding appropriately to genuine reasons. How is it possible for there to be genuine reasons that the virtuous are able to rely on to determine what they should do, given that they are, generally speaking, ignorant of fundamental ethical principles and the reasons that they specify? Daniel Star argues that the solution to this problem requires a new approach to understanding the relation between ethical theory and ordinary deliberation, a new way of thinking about the nature of practical authority and normative reasons, a new account of the nature of virtue, and a rethinking of how best to understand the role that knowledge plays in deliberation and action.
Author : Jason Reynolds
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
Page : 333 pages
File Size : 26,34 MB
Release : 2017-10-24
Category : Young Adult Fiction
ISBN : 1481438271
“An intense snapshot of the chain reaction caused by pulling a trigger.” —Booklist (starred review) “Astonishing.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review) “A tour de force.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review) A Newbery Honor Book A Coretta Scott King Honor Book A Printz Honor Book A Time Best YA Book of All Time (2021) A Los Angeles Times Book Prize Winner for Young Adult Literature Longlisted for the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature Winner of the Walter Dean Myers Award An Edgar Award Winner for Best Young Adult Fiction Parents’ Choice Gold Award Winner An Entertainment Weekly Best YA Book of 2017 A Vulture Best YA Book of 2017 A Buzzfeed Best YA Book of 2017 An ode to Put the Damn Guns Down, this is New York Times bestselling author Jason Reynolds’s electrifying novel that takes place in sixty potent seconds—the time it takes a kid to decide whether or not he’s going to murder the guy who killed his brother. A cannon. A strap. A piece. A biscuit. A burner. A heater. A chopper. A gat. A hammer A tool for RULE Or, you can call it a gun. That’s what fifteen-year-old Will has shoved in the back waistband of his jeans. See, his brother Shawn was just murdered. And Will knows the rules. No crying. No snitching. Revenge. That’s where Will’s now heading, with that gun shoved in the back waistband of his jeans, the gun that was his brother’s gun. He gets on the elevator, seventh floor, stoked. He knows who he’s after. Or does he? As the elevator stops on the sixth floor, on comes Buck. Buck, Will finds out, is who gave Shawn the gun before Will took the gun. Buck tells Will to check that the gun is even loaded. And that’s when Will sees that one bullet is missing. And the only one who could have fired Shawn’s gun was Shawn. Huh. Will didn’t know that Shawn had ever actually USED his gun. Bigger huh. BUCK IS DEAD. But Buck’s in the elevator? Just as Will’s trying to think this through, the door to the next floor opens. A teenage girl gets on, waves away the smoke from Dead Buck’s cigarette. Will doesn’t know her, but she knew him. Knew. When they were eight. And stray bullets had cut through the playground, and Will had tried to cover her, but she was hit anyway, and so what she wants to know, on that fifth floor elevator stop, is, what if Will, Will with the gun shoved in the back waistband of his jeans, MISSES. And so it goes, the whole long way down, as the elevator stops on each floor, and at each stop someone connected to his brother gets on to give Will a piece to a bigger story than the one he thinks he knows. A story that might never know an END…if Will gets off that elevator. Told in short, fierce staccato narrative verse, Long Way Down is a fast and furious, dazzlingly brilliant look at teenage gun violence, as could only be told by Jason Reynolds.
Author : Miljenko Jergović
Publisher : Yale University Press
Page : 450 pages
File Size : 27,23 MB
Release : 2015-01-01
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 0300179278
An epic novel of twentieth-century Balkan life, from the decline of the Ottoman Empire through the bloodshed of the Bosnian War This grand novel encompasses nearly all of Yugoslavia's tumultuous twentieth century, from the decline of the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires through two world wars, the rise and fall of communism, the breakup of the nation, and the terror of the shelling of Dubrovnik. Tackling universal themes on a human scale, master storyteller Miljenko Jergovic traces one Yugoslavian family's tale as history irresistibly casts the fates of five generations. What is it to live a life whose circumstances are driven by history? Jergovic investigates the experiences of a compelling heroine, Regina Delavale, and her many family members and neighbors. Telling Regina's story in reverse chronology, the author proceeds from her final days in 2002 to her birth in 1905, encountering along the way such traumas as atrocities committed by Nazi Ustashe Croats and the death of Tito. Lyrically written and unhesitatingly told, The Walnut Mansion may be read as an allegory of the tragedy of Yugoslavia's tormented twentieth century.
Author : Hans Rosling
Publisher : Flatiron Books
Page : 353 pages
File Size : 16,68 MB
Release : 2018-04-03
Category : Science
ISBN : 125012381X
INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER “One of the most important books I’ve ever read—an indispensable guide to thinking clearly about the world.” – Bill Gates “Hans Rosling tells the story of ‘the secret silent miracle of human progress’ as only he can. But Factfulness does much more than that. It also explains why progress is so often secret and silent and teaches readers how to see it clearly.” —Melinda Gates "Factfulness by Hans Rosling, an outstanding international public health expert, is a hopeful book about the potential for human progress when we work off facts rather than our inherent biases." - Former U.S. President Barack Obama Factfulness: The stress-reducing habit of only carrying opinions for which you have strong supporting facts. When asked simple questions about global trends—what percentage of the world’s population live in poverty; why the world’s population is increasing; how many girls finish school—we systematically get the answers wrong. So wrong that a chimpanzee choosing answers at random will consistently outguess teachers, journalists, Nobel laureates, and investment bankers. In Factfulness, Professor of International Health and global TED phenomenon Hans Rosling, together with his two long-time collaborators, Anna and Ola, offers a radical new explanation of why this happens. They reveal the ten instincts that distort our perspective—from our tendency to divide the world into two camps (usually some version of us and them) to the way we consume media (where fear rules) to how we perceive progress (believing that most things are getting worse). Our problem is that we don’t know what we don’t know, and even our guesses are informed by unconscious and predictable biases. It turns out that the world, for all its imperfections, is in a much better state than we might think. That doesn’t mean there aren’t real concerns. But when we worry about everything all the time instead of embracing a worldview based on facts, we can lose our ability to focus on the things that threaten us most. Inspiring and revelatory, filled with lively anecdotes and moving stories, Factfulness is an urgent and essential book that will change the way you see the world and empower you to respond to the crises and opportunities of the future. --- “This book is my last battle in my life-long mission to fight devastating ignorance...Previously I armed myself with huge data sets, eye-opening software, an energetic learning style and a Swedish bayonet for sword-swallowing. It wasn’t enough. But I hope this book will be.” Hans Rosling, February 2017.
Author : Catherine Lloyd
Publisher : Kensington Books
Page : 272 pages
File Size : 17,16 MB
Release : 2014-11-26
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 0758287364
Murder makes a debut on the London social scene in this Regency-era mystery by the author of Death Comes to the Village. With the reluctant blessings of their father, the rector of Kurland St. Mary, Lucy Harrington and her sister Anna leave home for a social season in London. At the same time, Lucy’s special friend Major Robert Kurland is summoned to the city to accept a baronetcy for his wartime heroism. Amidst the dizzying whirl of balls and formal dinners, the focus shifts from mixing and matchmaking to murder when the dowager Countess of Broughton, the mother of an old army friend of Robert, drops dead. When it's revealed she's been poisoned, Robert’s former betrothed, Miss Chingford, is accused, and she in turn points a finger at Anna. To protect her sister, Lucy enlists Robert's aid in drawing out the true culprit. But with suspects ranging from resentful rivals and embittered family members to the toast of the ton, it will take all their sleuthing skills to unmask the poisoner before more trouble is stirred up… Praise for Death Comes to London “Lucy’s second case…is a pleasant combination of Regency romance and mystery that evokes fond memories of Georgette Heyer.”—Kirkus Reviews “Fans of mysteries and intelligent Regencies will like this book, and should read the first one, too.”—Historical Novel Society
Author : Dawn Blair
Publisher : Morning Sky Studios
Page : 211 pages
File Size : 47,84 MB
Release : 2021-10-15
Category : Fiction
ISBN :
Born a champion. Destined for even more. Moonhunter’s dragon mother gifted him the last of her magic when she died giving birth to him and left him in the hands of his dragon brother, Balthier, to train. But when a botched recovery mission leaves Moonhunter and Balthier hiding information from each other, it jeopardizes the next assignment, one that Balthier himself already failed once. Now Balthier faces the demons of his past and the prospect of Moonhunter leaving him, while Moonhunter no longer has Balthier’s tough protection keeping him from those who want to use Moonhunter’s special powers. Separated, they must both draw deep down on their individual strength reserves to survive this operation. Even dragon born can die. Welcome to the Wells of the Onesong, where not even sanctuaries are safe and lies held silent can tear even the tightest of dragon brothers apart.
Author : Robert Lopez
Publisher : Bellevue Literary Press
Page : 101 pages
File Size : 28,40 MB
Release : 2015-12-21
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 1942658036
“Lopez has the ability to give the reader whiplash with his unconventional and bewitching stories.” —Los Angeles Times “Robert Lopez is the master of deadpan dread, of the elliptical koan, of the sudden turn of language that reveals life to be so wonderfully absurd. Always with Lopez, the voice is all his—enchanting, surprising, at times devastating.” —JESS WALTER, author of Beautiful Ruins “Robert Lopez’s strange, incantatory, visionary stories reveal the mysteries behind the ordinary world. You lift your head from this book and it’s as if a third eye has been opened.” —DAN CHAON, author of Await Your Reply and Stay Awake “Nothing is funnier than unhappiness,” claims Samuel Beckett. To this, we add: nothing is funnier than unhappiness with a heavy dose of amorality, as we learn from Robert Lopez’s unforgettable Good People. In these twenty stories, a motley cast of obsessive, self-deluded outsiders narrate their darker moments, which include kidnapping, voyeurism, and psychic masochism. As their struggles give way to the black humor of life’s unreason, the bleak merges with the oddly poetic, in a style as lean and resolute as Carver or Hemingway. Treading the fine line between confession and self-justification, the absurd violence of threatened masculinity, and the perverse joy of neurosis, Lopez’s stories reveal the compulsive suffering at the precarious core of our universal humanity. Robert Lopez is the author of two novels, Part of the World and Kamby Bolongo Mean River, and the story collection Asunder. He lives in Brooklyn.
Author : Errol Lord
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 278 pages
File Size : 43,83 MB
Release : 2018-05-24
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 0192546740
The Importance of Being Rational systematically defends a novel reasons-based account of rationality. The book's central thesis is that what it is for one to be rational is to correctly respond to the normative reasons one possesses. Errol Lord defends novel views about what it is to possess reasons and what it is to correctly respond to reasons. He shows that these views not only help to support the book's main thesis, they also help to resolve several important problems that are independent of rationality. The account of possession provides novel contributions to debates about what determines what we ought to do, and the account of correctly responding to reasons provides novel contributions to debates about causal theories of reacting for reasons. After defending views about possession and correctly responding, Lord shows that the account of rationality can solve two difficult problems about rationality. The first is the New Evil Demon problem. The book argues that the account has the resources to show that internal duplicates necessarily have the same rational status. The second problem concerns the deontic significance of rationality. Recently it has been doubted whether we ought to be rational. The ultimate conclusion of the book is that the requirements of rationality are the requirements that we ultimately ought to comply with. If this is right, then rationality is of fundamental importance to our deliberative lives.
Author : Nanabanyin Dadson
Publisher : Graphic Communications Group
Page : 24 pages
File Size : 15,81 MB
Release : 2014-04-24
Category :
ISBN :
